It is a dubious honor to write about Fred—dubious because I don’t want him to be gone. I’d rather write about the work he would still be doing now if he were around, covering his territory, which is to say Manhattan, specifically downtown New York, which, if you squint, you can still see through his eyes. But you have to squint hard. Fred’s downtown had nothing to do with chain stores and corporate raiders and their kind. His pictures showed a maze of streets and ideas snaking their way down to the Hudson River, or the East River, streets filled with so many stories that I see in black and white, still, because of Fred’s pictures, which also show stretches of unaccounted-for space, like some movie version of the West. But that was long ago, before Fred’s Manhattan started to heave at its center as it struggled to contain many people and institutions that would have disturbed Fred, that wanderer who loved New York, but a New York based on creativity and freedom rather than commerce.
Fred was an urban cowboy. He wore beautifully shaped and well-cared-for cowboy boots. The boots were part of his habitual outfit: blue jeans and meticulously cared-for denim shirt—the neat and efficient costume of the dedicated working man. In the winter, sometimes, Fred wore a leather jacket or a denim jacket to complete this look, but mostly when I think of Fred it’s him taking his jacket off and rolling up his sleeves to get to work as The Village Voice’s first-ever picture editor and staff photographer. (I succeeded Fred in the picture editor job, a transition that was not as difficult as you might think. That I was ever his “boss” is a ridiculous notion. No one is ever the boss of history, the living history you want to learn from.)
Fred covered everything, but he first became known for capturing the Beat scene at its New York start. It was a new world, then filled with that era’s youth, all those cigarettes and tough attitudes that were out of step but somehow OK with the immigrant families who raised their kids in the tenements near the Café Wha? and what not. Those immigrant families cooled themselves on stoops in the summer as those Beat youths, resplendent in jeans and circle shirts, rushed the avenues in pursuit of another hootenanny, intent on getting everywhere fast, following sounds. Fred saw the artists who helped define the time—Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan—poets scratching lyrics and stories out of the New York air.
What always struck me about Fred’s early black-and-white pictures, too, is how verbal they feel to me, not in the corny sense that every picture tells a story; no, what we see in so many of the pictures from that time are people talking and telling stories, a fusillade of words caught in space, ideas and jokes that may come to nothing, or everything. The point is, one of the great things Fred captured in his historic early work is an exchange of ideas among those who were shaped by thinking, and by art, the belief that if not all of the world’s problems could be solved in conversation, then they could be exhumed and examined.
Fred was born in a hard place. His father, a depressive, was barely able to function, and so the care of the family fell to Fred and his brother early on. Whenever he talked about his youth, or his father in particular, a shadow crossed his face; it’s the only time I ever saw Fred remotely unhappy. He never elaborated on where he was raised, and you knew not to ask: the pain in his eyes was real and deep and fresh.
Part of Fred’s drive—isn’t it everyone’s?—was to provide for his children; work meant family and safety, and the other thing I found interesting in many of Fred’s pictures before and after he started a family with his wife, Gloria, is how interested the photographer was in New York’s improvised families, how we Manhattanites take up with one another and forge living and uncomfortable bonds that last for a night, or forever. I think those alliances are at the heart of Fred’s pictures of gay life in our city’s pre- and post-Stonewall days, when things were on the verge of change, and they did change. And of course Fred was there, at the very start of a movement that became a movement when queer people were pushed to the wall that historic night on Christopher Street at the Stonewall. Fred saw it all and recorded it all: the young queer people who were tired of being told that their way of being was obscene, that the families they’d made were twisted, all those folks who had been told year after year and all their lives that they were wrong.
The Stonewall—the safety of a gay bar—was a small thing to ask after having come up with no safety at all, and I wonder if Fred—because of his upbringing—understood that. He must have, because he was always drawn to people who didn’t have a lot, but made a lot with what they had. His portrait of Candy Darling, the trans performer, is one of the greatest comments we have not only on transformation but on stillness—a moment of reflection during an era when stillness was not the point but change was. I think I first saw Fred’s pictures of Manhattan’s gay denizens, the protestors fighting for change, fighting to be themselves, at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, on Christopher Street. That store is gone now, but it stood for so much during its time: another place of safety, filled with information about who we were, and who we would be. As inclusive as New York can be, it is also a segregated city, but I never felt like a divided self at the Oscar Wilde; I felt lucky to enter its doors and see the latest Tennessee Williams, or books by writers like David Leavitt, writers who trafficked in memory and the present (both of whom Fred had photographed, of course). This would have been in the early nineteen-eighties, when I was barely a self, but anxious to join all those bodies, glitter, voices, agents of change that Fred, an agent of change himself, recorded with nothing less than love and respect, the same love and respect many of us had for Fred who, lifting his camera, saw the person before he saw anything else.
January 2019
New York City