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| DW Young’s Uncropped star, renowned photojournalist James Hamilton with Anne-Katrin Titze on his Diane Keaton connection: “Her cat is named Buster, as is mine. Named for the same Keaton.” |
During the 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival, renowned photojournalist James Hamilton sent music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman two stunning portraits. One from 1981 of Sun Ra for our conversation with Stanley Nelson, executive producer of Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (a highlight of this year’s Tribeca Festival) and one of Ron Delsener on the stage of The Palladium from 1976 in New York for the feature with Jake Sumner (Sting and Trudie Styler’s son) on his stellar documentary Ron Delsener Presents (a highlight of the 2023 edition of the Tribeca Festival).
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| Jack Nicholson holding up Frances Taylor’s review of Mike Nichols’s The Fortune (May 1975) Photo: James Hamilton |
James also recommended Toby Perl Freilich’s Maintenance Artist (on Mierle Laderman Ukeles) and sent us the contact for her producer Judith Mizrachy (DW Young’s Uncropped). Thurston Moore edited the impressive collection of images of James Hamilton: You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen: The Music Photography (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2010).
In the second instalment on Uncropped (centerpiece selection of the 14th edition of DOC NYC) we discuss more on his long and illustrious career, the star-studded parties he covered for Harper’s Bazaar, the sheer endless array of famous people (Diane Keaton with her cat Buster, Arthur Miller in contemplation) he shot in hotel rooms and elsewhere, his large collection of photo books, including August Sander, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and Richard Avedon, James’s work for the Village Voice, covering war zones, the horrors encountered in Ethiopia, and a recommendation to see the powerful and poignant Käthe Kollwitz exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
From New York City, James Hamilton joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Uncropped.
Anne-Katrin Titze: I love your Arthur Miller photo.
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| James Hamilton on Diane Keaton with Buster: “That was a sweet picture.” Photo: James Hamilton |
James Hamilton: Thank you! That was caught. A bunch of writers were together. It was a Forbidden Writers session or meeting with a bunch of writers talking about censorship and that sort of thing. They were all gathered there and I photographed a number of writers at that event. And that was just a caught picture.
AKT: I just saw a cat coming by behind you. There’s a great photo you took of Diane Keaton head-butting a cat on top of a refrigerator.
JH: Yeah, her cat is named Buster, as is mine. Named for the same Keaton. That was a sweet picture. Actually there’s a bunch of pictures from that session where the cat chimed in.
AKT: That’s lovely. In the documentary we see your bookshelves. It might be by chance, but we catch a glimpse of an August Sander book and a few Lartigues.
JH: Let me see if I can show you! [James turns his computer so I can see the shelves]. That’s a sample of my enormous collection. These are all photo books. I could never collect photographs but I have an enormous number of photo books. I love looking at photographers.
AKT: You said you’re not a fashion person per se, but August Sander’s images of clothing are fantastic in what they reveal to us.
JH: Oh yeah, he was wonderfully descriptive and I’m a huge fan. I love his work. I got a lot of August Sander books actually.
AKT: And Lartigue?
JH: Well, I envied Lartigue because he started when I would have liked to have started. When I was five years old. He had an incredible career, as you know. He was just a wonderful, wonderful photographer. I was introduced to him by Bea Feitler, who was the art director at Harper’s Bazaar. She and Avedon actually did a book called Diary of a Century about Lartigue. She designed it, Avedon edited it and wrote in it.
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| Nico by the East River, NYC Photo: James Hamilton |
AKT: I have his Côte d’Azur book right here. He has some of the most wonderful beach and suntan photos I have ever seen.
JH: They are gorgeous.
AKT: Now I wonder if we should talk about your water and in the waves photography or something more serious. Maybe first the more serious part. You mention in the film that you’ve been reporting from Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Beijing with incredible timing! And Ethiopia. Do you still have nightmares from what you have seen?
JH: The only place I ever kept a diary was when I was in Ethiopia because I wanted to show it to Kathy (Dobie), my partner, when I got back. I don’t think I ever showed it to her. [He looks over and from the off we hear “I have it.”] You do? She has it! I didn’t know she has it! That was the most harrowing thing I ever did, really. Tiananmen Square was bad enough, but this came on the heels of that.
The London Sunday Times saw the work from Beijing and asked me if I would cover the war and famine in Ethiopia. I was traveling with a rebel convoy, so we were under fire throughout, really. It was a terrifying experience. We drove by night but all along the way we would see trucks that had hit landmines and were blown to bits.
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| La Côte d'Azur de Jacques-Henri Lartigue, collection Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
So you could barely sleep in the truck at night, and then we would sort of bed down and sleep by day and had to cover up the trucks with branches or however we could conceal the trucks because they were probably sensibly carrying food supplies but also certainly guns.
So we were targets all along the way. I was with a woman named Mary Anne Fitzgerald, a British journalist, and we met up with a pair that she knew from TV, a sound guy and an on-camera guy, so we joined with them. That enabled us to get even deeper into the war zone than anyone had gotten really. It was exciting but terrifying at the same time.
AKT: At MoMA, there is a terrific exhibition of work by Käthe Kollwitz, the German artist (in 2024).
JH: I didn’t know about it! I’ll go!
AKT: It’s very powerful and touching, a lot of her work is about war. She was born in 1867 and died in 1945 and I was thinking about her during the part in your documentary about Ethiopia. You should see it!
JH: I definitely will! Thank you!
Read what James Hamilton had to say with Ed Bahlman on Uncropped.
