Bill Jay & the Infinity Awards
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
[photograph of Bill on his porch in San Diego, August, 2007 by the author]
Tonight are the Infinity Awards. I’ve never been, but I’m going tonight. I’m excited because it is the first time I’ve gone, but I’m primarily excited because Bill Jay is being honored with an award in the category of writing. Bill Jay came to the US–to Albuquerque, NM to be exact–from England in 1972, where he studied photography with Beaumont Newhall and VanDeren Coke. He then found a teaching position at Arizona State University, where he taught the history of photography for 25 years (including to this writer back in the late 80s).
Tonight he will receive a well-deserved award at a magnificent dinner event held in Manhattan at the Chelsea Piers. He will be toasted and honored and surrounded by the cognoscenti of the photography world.
But last night, we simply ate burgers at GoodBurger (on 45th between 5th and 6th Ave) and chatted about his upcoming move and retirement to Costa Rica, where he will “awake before dawn and listen to the chorus of the jungle” before sidling down to the local cantina and practicing his Spanish with Marie over a rice and beans breakfast.
Mary Virginia Swanson, Denise Wolff and Bill and I shared a burger, some fries and black cow milkshakes and chatted about our collective history at ASU–Swanee received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from ASU and I got my BFA in Photography back in 1993 (and Denise happened to be in town and simply joined us for the evening).
[below are a few random things plucked out of a long, rambling conversation]
Bill Jay on Beaumont, grad school and contemporary photographers: “When we were in grad school, Beaumont lectured on Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and Paul Strand. At one point, I asked him, “What about Les Krims and Jerry Uelsmann and Duane Michals?” who were all our contemporaries. Beaumont answered, “They’re your problem. I end in 1950.” Now, I feel the same. I end in about 1990 with Robert Heinecken. At one point in the early 1990s I read the New Yorker regularly and each time the number of people having shows in New York that I recognized decreased and I knew my time was up.
Some of Bill’s former students: Chris Pichler (of Nazraeli Press), Mary Virginia Swanson, Douglas Prior, Rich Rollins, Lisa Sette (Gallery), Marilyn Hayes, Marsha Benzel, Barbara Lucero Sand, Krista Elrich, Margaret Moore, Krista Cloutier, Sherry Duncan (please add any known names in the comments field).
Some of Bill’s contemporaries during the UNM days: Joe Deal, James Hajicek, Steven Yates, Nicholas Nixon, “Gig” Berendse, Susan Harder, Robert Stuart, Ed West, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Terry Houghsby (who Van kicked out and then went to the Alaskan pipeline project, where he made a fortune making baseball hats for the workers), Diana Schoenfeld, Jim Alinder, James Enyeart, Meridel Rubinstein.
Bill attended David Jacob’s graduate courses. Jacob would have the students read criticism of Strand. One time, after class, I said, “Why not just have us read Strand?” who wrote very clearly about his own work. “Critics,” Jacobs replied, “are performing a creative act for other critics. They are not elucidating anything.”
I asked Bill about the book 61 Pimlico, which was published by Nazraeli back in 1998. “I wrote that book,” Bill answered, “over 3 separate weeks up at my cabin.” The book purports to be the “found journal” of one Henry Haylor, who really did exist. In the newspapers of the time, he was touted as the biggest pornographer of Victorian times.
“At the same time”, Bill added, “he was being defended by upstanding photographers in all the photographic journals of his day. I knew there was a story, but since I couldn’t find it, I decided to write it myself.” Bill even went so far as to send it to a well-known antiquarian dealer, asking if the journal he “had found” was possibly authentic. The reply was a whole-hearted “Yes.” Bill said he left lots of hints scattered throughout the book, which no one picked up on. “Did you know that I left an opening for the sequel?” Anyone know what hint that was?? (I know, but I’m not telling). The book was actually picked up as a script by Coppel Films out in Hollywood, with Shrek script-writer Roger S. H. Schulman on board and (purportedly) Johnny Depp interested in it.
Here’s a few pics from the 2008 Infinity Awards:
Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney