These two prints, photographed  and printed by me will be offered at Yann Le Mouel auction in Paris on 3 May 2010.

1. ” Incident on Rue Roy, Montreal  1996 “  Lot # 133

2. “Black Boy  & Great Dane, Bronx  N.Y.  1964″   Lot # 197

One night , long ago as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard my father talking to my mother. (In the kitchen of course,)  He was saying how sad he was that I was not coming  into the business.  I was  about  17 and already had my sights set on university and then a career in photography…no store for me.
Once he  accepted  this, he was really supportive and I thank him for that.

Well, he would be happy now. As of last week I have a store.   Go  to my website, click on “Store”   and find four Marilyn images digitally  printed by my  young friend  Jose Cortes. He worked very hard to get the feel I have in my silver gelatin prints which are  sold at the galleries that represent me.

Take a look, see the price & order.

george

George’s View Feb 3, 2010

In  January 1955, I was in Paso Texas  working on a story about a young couple . He was in the army and they lived modestly off base. She was pregnant and in the post WWII world an army career semed secure and stable. I don’t know how I found them, but they were amenable to my tagging along and photographing their life. I was working for a revived SEE  Magazine under two excellent editors, Norman Lobsenz and Marvin Albert. The idea was to give LOOK some competition and LIFE a nudge with some excellent photographic essays. I was staying with my  friends, Ralph & Bronia Lowenstein. Ralph later became the dean of Journalsm at Florida State Univ.

Anyway, I  had difficulty concentrating on the shoot because I was thinking about Elaine Sernovitz, an amazing woman writer who was then working  at the United Nations.  Just before leaving  New York she told me not to bother calling her when I got back.  As she has learned subsequently, I don’t listen, and with Ralph’s permission made a long distance call to New York and asked her to marry me.  I was surprised and very happy when she said “yes.”

We decided to rendezvous in New Orleans and  have a simple ceremony. Visits to the families in Milwaukee and Boston would come later. To compress the following events, I drove my Volkswagon all the way across Texas, at a steady speed of 58mph (the maximum), picked up my watch at a hock shop in Corpus Christi and arrived in New Orleans where I stayed with my cousin Henry Freidman who was a  tourist guide in the  Old Quarter.

I had a message waiting for me from Lynn Marret, my agent in New York.  Marvin  and Norman had been fired, she had rushed over to their office with a bottle of  Scotch and managed to get a check cut for money owed. (The good old days!) Then, to modify the pain she told me that she had gotten me an assignment  to photograph Bourbon Street New Orleans, for a  high end startup men’s magazine that was going to compete with Esquire.

I called Elaine with the bad news/good news and I think she saw me wobbling on the marriage idea. I assured her that I wasn’t. When the money arrived from Lynn in New York, I bought  the wedding rings, and film for the Bourbon Street shoot. With  the help of my cousin Henry. ”Sure you can shoot the strippers; shoot whatever you want. I know everybody on the street.”  I shot for three days and developed the film in the bathroom of the motel where I had moved. Each morning I would  cut the negs and put them in a  proof printing  frame on my doorstep using POP (Printing out paper.) No developer necessary..they were like the red proofs you got from portrait studios in the 1950’s. I captioned, quickly got them out of the light and into and evelope and mailed them to New York. Shortly after the last batch arrived in New York, Lynn sent me a telegram saying the shoot was rejected and they were giving me a $100 kill fee.  What news!!– just before our wedding!

Years later  “Woman at the Bar “  was taken into the collection of MOMA and ICP.  Chelo was included in Bill Ewing’s book “The Body.” (Thames & Hudson 1994)  The entire essay was the subject of  my  book  “Bourbon Street New Orleans 1955 “  published by Les Editions du Passage, Montreal 2006. Of course that didn’t  help us  then.  Freelance people are survivors. We survived and after 55years have four children and  nine grandchildren.

Take a look:  http://www.georgezimbel.com/collection/bourbon_street/

george

In order to save money ( a good thing) to get needed frames for a show of my Bourbon Street work for the Montreal Jazz Festival , I removed a series of five Marilyns from their frames. I was surprised to see that they had rested comfortably since 1994 when I showed my first exhibition of “Still Movies” at Galerie Art 45 in Montreal. So, I have a series of five 16/20 prints of Marilyn, printed in 1994, 50 years after I made the photographs. (Log # 876). They are glossy matt dried, printed on Ilford Bartya paper. There are some slight bumps on the surface which is common with glossy/matt. I would say the condition is excellent. All signed and in passe partouts, hinged at top. They are listed in my log at $12,000.

You can contact me direct  at 514 525 3773 or through   any of my fine dealers…george

Note: At Christie’s Constantiner Auction 17 Dec 2008
..there were 4 of my Marilyn prints offered as one item
Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch (1954)
Photography, Gelatin silver prints, Printed 1986/96
Sold USD 11,000
Estimate USD 7,000 – 9,000

When I was invited to Washington in 1995 for the American Politicians Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery (MOMA-Susan Kismaric Curator)  I used my time to hunt for new scenes for my  “Still Movies” project.  I have always believed that intuition is a big part of being a documentary photographer and that is why  I started shooting this bicycle messenger (?) and  professional looking woman who were chatting near the White house.  The last time I had been in Washington was to protest the Vietnam war in 1971.  It was a racially  challenged city  and I think that scene would not have  happened. When they kissed goodbye, I knew it couldn’t have happened.

I was  shooting with a 100mm lens so I was not far from my subjects and I never hide.  When she walked up to me and asked what I would do with those photographs I said “Probably put them in a museum.”   She said “Good” and walked on.  I thought about these two people  yesterday and smiled.

p.s. They are not yet in a museum.

george

Sometimes the meaning of a photograph transforms from what the taker felt when he/she took it to a new meaning dictated by events. So it is with “ The Old Ferguson Place 1980 “  Prince  Edward Island Canada.

I took this scene after vowing I would not. I didn’t want to show how beauty could be demeaned by circumstances and neglect.

Finally one day in 1980 I said to myself: “ Soon this house won’t be there. It will collapse and there will be only be rubble to mark the spot”.  That made me very sad.

So I did photograph it and  the print was well  received .  Daile Kaplan at Swann auctions asked me to send it along with one of my  Marilyns  which was  scheduled for auction. Imagine my perverse joy when Daile  later told me that the Marilyn did not sell, but that The Old Ferguson  Place did!

The reason I took the photograph was emotional and the initial response was generally emotional, but when someone looks at it today, Sept. 25, 2008, the reaction has to do with the financial meltdown in  the U.S. housing market. In a way it  is a symbol of  the dispossessed .  I feel like I would like to post it next to an ad for a 15 million dollar condo in the New York Times real estate section. Of course, that would be considered political.

george

For those of you who don’t recognise these  titans of Canadian politics, they are (L) Rene Levesque, founder of the Parti Quebecois, a believer in Quebec as a separate nation with close ties to Canada, a humanist and social activist.  Next to him  (R), his nemesis, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, head of a modernised Liberal party of Canada who believed in a united  bilingual country. They fought monumental battles, but I think they would  have come together at this time in Canadian politics.  They are both deceased, but I believe this  is what they would have to say: (en Francais, certainment)

Rene: ” Well, Mr. Harper called an  election even though he  had pushed through a bill for fixed elections..he must have heard opportunity knocking on his door and couldn’t wait.”

Pierre  “What he heard  was a  chorus of anti Bush talk below the border  and he is a Bush clone, so it must have made him nervous.  So he seized the moment, even if it’s against his own law. Stephane Dion and the Liberals are weak right now, but they will come back..the Liberals  know how to come back.”

Rene:   ” I thought Harper  was a smart politician and maybe I am out of date, but for him to savage the arts community with all those cuts will have a  negative effect for years, not mention his Rambo posture on the Canadian military. I’m no lover of the military, but at least we did a lot of peacekeeping and were respected for it.”

Pierre: ” Well, let’s be clear.  I don’t like his right wing agenda and you don’t either.  If we were alive, it is possible that we could have finally agreed on something ….keeping this country as a moderate welcoming society. Then again, maybe we’d still be sparring.”

Rene: ” He is clever  and has a possibility of forming  a majority government. Then watch all our work dissolve in right wing acid.”

Pierre:  ” Well, I have had a lot of time to think about this and there is hope.   The solution is mathematic.

Rene  “  Merde, alors!!”

Pierre: ” Here is how I see the situation:  There are 308 seats in the House of Commons (For the USA’ers, equivalent to  the House of Representatives). Today the polls gave the conservatives 38%, the Liberals 28%, the NDP  (i.e., social democrats) 19%., the Bloc Quebecois 8% and the Green Party 7%. If the future of the Canada is at stake, and I believe it is, after the vote is in the Liberals and the NDP and  the  smaller parties  can form a coalition of the center left, certainly better for everybody than Stephen Harper’s right wing vision. As of today that would give the Liberals and NDP 145 seats. If the other parties went along, it would be a strong coalition for the next four years. The numbers are there, they just have to work out a sharing formula. I don’t think that is too much to ask. Sorry we’re not there.”

NOT  the end of this story….

george

ps: Meanwhile south of the border………

Sometimes a photograph of a non momentous moment  says more than a blockbuster moment.  I offer this photograph of Harry S. Truman as evidence.

If you want to see more of my political images, please go to collections and tap “ The Politicians.” It’s the season…george z.