Alfred Gescheidt-1926-2012

Photograph by Harvey Wang

Alfred Gescheidt died this past Sunday, peacefully in his apartment on Lexington Ave. I had the honor of interviewing Alfred last year for my documentary film about transition in photography from a chemical process to a digital one. Alfred began his career as documentary photographer in New York in the late 1940s. He was most known as a photo satirist and photographic montage artist, creating images that were outrageous, experimental, funny and erotic. His work seemed photoshopped, long before Photoshop was invented.






His erotic photomontages were exhibited at Higher Pictures in 2009.

Flophouse: Life on the Bowery (Random House, 2000) is featured in a recent post on Joe Bonomo's blog No Such Thing as Was.   Joe is an author, essayist, cultural historian and professor in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.

"While reading East of Bowery I was put in mind of Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, published in 2000, a terrific collection of Harvey Wang's photos of soon-to-be-gone Bowery transient hotels, David Isay's and Stacy Abramson's historical commentary, and edited monologues of folks barely if stubbornly hanging on in those residences. After Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker essays and James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and predating the boomlet of blogs such as Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, EV Grieve, It's All The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, and many others—Flophouse documents the city in vivid and precise nonfiction, telling true stories as those stories leaned and dissolved in dire times. I've long been fascinated by the Bowery and its place in popular culture, careful to leaven what could become dangerous and irresponsible nostalgic romance with the painful reality of the street's history and its untold broken denizens."

Photo Essay in UK's Life Force Photography Magazine

An early photo essay of mine about Madison County, North Carolina has been published in Life Force the acclaimed magazine of the photo-essay. The magazine's goal is to "show the work of the best photographers in the world." Life Force Magazine is designed to tell stories in pictures and to explore the unique power of the photo-essay. The only writing in the magazine is by the photographers themselves and is there to add context, color and understanding. The BBC's Culture Show have described Life Force Magazine as the Picture Post of the 21st Century'