Interview with Howard Greenberg
Gordon Parks and Howard Greenberg
ANDREA BLANCH: First, let’s talk about your current show — Gordon Parks. I am interested to know why you have chosen to highlight his cinematic vision as a theme, more than his iconic images?
HOWARD GREENBERG: I don’t see it that way. This show is really about work he did in Black communities, work he did at home for the most part. This idea that Gordon had that he wrote a book about, A Choice of Weapons, is really at the heart of Gordon Parks’ photography. He had unique access because he was Black, African American, back in the late 40s when he started working for Life Magazine, and then in the 60s with civil rights and all the Black liberation movements. He had unique access to that world which other photographers might not have had, certainly not those working for Life Magazine. I consider, and I think other people also consider, this among his most important work. He was able to photograph in these situations that would have been very difficult for other photographers. That’s what the show is really about. That’s why we called it Choice of Weapons, after the book.
ANDREA: What’s your choice of weapon?
HOWARD: My choice of weapon is photography. Just like his was, and I mean that, too. To prove it, I can tell you that when I founded the photography center in Woodstock in 1977 and we applied for our first grant to the New York State Council for the Arts, I wrote in writing what the photography center was supposed to be about. The first sentence I wrote was, “Photography is a positive and powerful force,” and I still feel the same way. I think you can easily jump from that to it’s my choice of weapon.
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
ANDREA: I love that. It is absolutely such a perfect thing. Considering everything about where photography is today, you’ve created a niche for yourself, certainly, that I don’t think anybody else has. Is that what keeps your competitive edge, in a sense? Because nobody does what you do, really, at this point.
HOWARD: It’s interesting really, competitive edge. It's hard for me to think of what I do as a competitive edge, because the photography market has changed quite a bit from when I started. You know, for a long time now, let's say the vintage photography market has kind of floundered. The market is still there, but it has really changed a lot, and it certainly hasn’t grown as it did for the first 30 or so years. There is much more attention being paid to contemporary work, and more attention being paid to women, African Americans, Indigenous cultures, that sort of thing. I can’t say that what I do has that much of a competitive edge at the moment.
ANDREA: Well, you’re still in business. You have 40,000 prints.
HOWARD: I’m still in business, give or take, yeah. They’re not all masterpieces, but it is certainly a museum-worthy inventory. And truth be told, our business is still so strong because it’s international. I’ve really done a lot of work in Europe over the years, and we have a very strong following there. It is still good in this country, but without the international reputation of the gallery and a lot of clients who live in Europe, we would not be as strong as we are. Europeans have a slightly different mindset as to what they are collecting in photography as opposed to Americans.
ANDREA: I remember that I used to work with Avedon, and he would always say to me, “If you ever really want respect as a photographer,” of course this was back in the 70s, “just go to Europe,” because that’s where they really respect photography.
HOWARD: He was right in a certain way. I don’t think photography is respected everywhere, there is much doubt of that, certainly in this day and age. But Europeans never have a problem celebrating traditional photography, particularly documentary photography or photojournalism, as worthy of the same respect as “fine art photography.” That’s a little bit different here. Here, it has been more of an uphill battle to have photojournalism and documentary photography on the same level of acceptability as art, meaning collected, valued, etc.
I have to compliment the Gordon Parks Foundation for marketing his work as well as they have. When I was working with Gordon when he was alive and I was his only gallery, we were selling vintage prints by Gordon, prints for certainly under $10,000. And now, posthumous prints of certain images are selling for over 20 and 30 thousand dollars. That is a real credit to how they’ve built his reputation and how they’ve channeled his work through many different kinds of galleries, including art galleries. Gordon’s become a real icon. He always was, but now much more so in the art market. He is a real exception. There are very few other photographers who you could call documentary photographers who’ve reached the level of into five figures, it just doesn’t happen.
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1952 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
ANDREA: Do you think that also has to do with Swizz Beatz? They’ve done so much work promoting his collection.
HOWARD: They have, and certainly in the African American world, they’ve had a great influence in the attention that’s been paid to Gordon. But that’s only a slice of it. It goes way beyond Swizz Beatz’s influence. It certainly contributes, but it’s not the whole story.
ANDREA: What is the story?
HOWARD: Gordon was a seminal figure in the culture of African American life in the last half of the 20th century, and it’s not just because of his photography. It’s his movies, it’s his books, it’s more than that. It's music and then some. I can tell you when Gordon was alive, I traveled with him a bit during this tour of his show that Brookman curated. It went to several museums around the country, a couple of them here on the East Coast. I went with Gordon, I accompanied him from New York to the opening, and I was there when he would sit and the people who came would line up. Fifty to a hundred people would line up waiting to have an audience with Gordon, and I would hear story after story from people. They were worshipping him because of his influence on their son, their daughter, themselves. Through his writing, photography, all of it. He was already quite an incredibly important and established figure in that universe. What the foundation has done is really expanded the universe to include way more than just the world of African American history and culture. He is now considered one of the great influential photographers of our time. This does coincide with the incredible attention in trying to balance out the order of things and attention being paid to African American artists and art in general. Gordon is to some extent riding that wave. The interest in his work especially goes beyond the Harlem or hip hop community. It has gone hand in hand.
ANDREA: I am very interested in that kind of a career trajectory, and there isn’t anybody I can recall right now that has done as many things as he did where he can have that kind of influence.
HOWARD: He was certainly a multi-talented guy. He was an intuitive artist. He was never trained in any way. He just was talented, courageous, and the fact that he could work for Life Magazine gave him a boost that lasted his entire life. But he did that. Nobody else did that, he did that.
ANDREA: You were his only gallery at the time?
HOWARD: I was the only gallery that ever represented him. He never had a gallery. He would sell prints himself. The lab would print for him and he would sell prints here and there. It took me a while, a few years with several mutual friends trying to convince him to get him to trust me and work with me. He had a bad experience with a painting gallery on Madison Avenue. He never told me the name of the gallery. He had a show, and he felt that they ripped him off, and he really didn’t want to be with any gallery.
Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
ANDREA: So how did he come to you?
HOWARD: Through mutual friends. A lot of people were telling him you have to work with Howard Greenberg. He entertained me, and a couple of visits we talked and talked, and he got to know me a little bit. Finally he opened up and said, “Okay, this is what I’m doing now.” He showed me the Areas in Silence, work from when he was in his bedroom setting up small tabletops. It included a painting of sorts that he did and some kind of an organic object, a shell, a feather, stuff like that, and he would photograph it and then write a poem with it. His book wasn’t out yet, but it was coming out, called Areas in Silence. He said, “This is what I would like to show.” I had a gulp because it wasn’t what I wanted to show, but I said, “Sure, whatever you want, I would do it.”; It was still sort of a trial, and then I showed him what we could do with printing those slides, they were on slides at that point. And this was a fortunate turn of events. This was right at the very beginning of iris prints. It was the first form of digital printing. Subsequently we all learned that iris prints faded away very quickly, but when they were first made they were quite beautiful and they had this incredible warm color and quality. Gordon really loved it. He said, “Okay, this is great, let’s have a show.” And then we did, and we worked together, I think it was 12 years, and we had a couple other shows. He eventually opened up his closet, where he had all these boxes and cases of prints. It was really great. In the process it was so rewarding that we became really good friends, good enough that I was invited to be a pallbearer at his funeral. Good enough that at the end of the day, I was instrumental in making sure that the foundation was up and everything was signed on before it was too late. I was committed to him in every way I could possibly be, and he responded. I was very proud of the fact that we did become good friends, and I feel fortunate to have had that experience with him. He was a special guy, there are no two Gordon Parks out there, I assure you. That’s what it was. Of course, since the foundation has taken over, they’ve spread it to dozens of galleries all over the place. I don’t have that kind of special relationship anymore, but it’s okay because they’ve done so well and they’ve earned a lot of money, and they use the money well. I think Gordon would be happy about that.
ANDREA: I bet, that was quite an accomplishment. That is the kind of relationship that you cherish. It doesn’t happen every day. With all the artists that you know, it just doesn’t happen all the time.
HOWARD: That’s true, but you know, it’s happened to me more than once. With a few others, we have gotten extremely close. I am a people person. I used to be a psychologist, not an art dealer. It’s really been the most rewarding part of the 40 years I’ve been doing it, the relationships I’ve made. And it’s not just the artists, I mean the artists are super important, but I’ve also become very close friends with many of my clients. I have been really lucky to work with some of the most interesting people that I can imagine, and I never would have if I hadn’t opened a photo gallery. Looking backwards, I find it pretty amazing.
