New York Before Cellphones : The Exclusive Story of Mason Resnick’s Photographic Rediscovery.
Ever been curious about that weird feeling you get when you hear a specific piece of music from your past, or view a particular photograph that transports you back in time? Personal history confronts poignant reminders of experience, and produces a snapshot of who we once were, and how we once lived our lives (individually and collectively).
If music is the soundtrack to life, photographs are the visual references of existence.
Street photographer Mason Resnick reversed time when he found some long forgotten work hidden in the dusty hinterlands of his workspace.
“During a transitional period, I did a massive clean out of my office and I found a couple of boxes,” Mason explained. “Opened them up and ‘OH MY GOD’ there they are.
“It was all of my negatives that I have ever shot, thousands and thousand of negatives, and right on top was an unceremoniously labelled ‘MW’… 76, which I immediately knew meant master workshop 1976 . I realised, I should take another look at these.”
The find was edged with early street photography memories for the photographer, but the shots also held within them a valuable slice of street photography history.
The photographs tell the exciting tale of an enthusiastic 19 year old Mason Resnick enrolled on a workshop, and learning from one of the masters of street photography : Garry Winogrand.
This wasn’t just any workshop.
“I was at Queens College, which is in New York City,” Mason told me. “I had a photography professor named Herb Goro and he saw something in what I was capturing. He said…we are running a workshop this summer and you should really take it. It is with a guy called Garry Winogrand, he’s going to turn you around 180 degrees.”
Resnick was not, at first, familiar with the name, and soon discovered Winogrand was not a ‘teacher’ in the conventional sense. He recalls starting out on the programme, and spending two days in class just looking at Garry Winogrand photographs.
“First of all I am looking at the pictures,” He remembered. “It’s like, oh my gosh, he is seeing what I am seeing but he’s capturing it with a camera! I am thinking : ‘You can do that? This is amazing.'”
But soon Resnick, and the other students, were out on the streets of New York city, being taught street photography from an acknowledged master.
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
“First of all I learned his moves,” Mason told me. “You really have to have… these fake out moves, and a certain way of presenting yourself on the street in order to not be noticed. I have read Garry said… ‘I wish I didn’t exist’. He is not meaning that in a suicidal way…(but)…if he was invisible, it would be much better for getting the photograph. So, the next best thing is, you do things to throw people off, and to think : ‘Well there’s a guy there with a camera, but you don’t really know what’s going on.’ You are not really aware your picture is being taken, and that is by design, he doesn’t want to disrupt the flow.”
Resnick gathered his thoughts, we waited, his mind rifling through that precious workshop from over 40 years before.
“I learned how to hold the camera,” he started up again. “How to manipulate the camera in a way that it doesn’t look like you are being a photographer. So, for example, what amazed me about Winogrand, he would walk right up to people, and stand there and maybe engage them in conversation, and all the while he is taking pictures and they have no idea. He’s fiddling with his camera… it looks like…he’s twirling the knobs sort of adjusting this and that, and he brings the camera up to his eye for the shortest split second and moves it away – and he’s not taking a picture in that time, but he is. So, that’s what I picked up from him it is learning how to do those moves.”
Tidying up his office proved lucky for Mason Resnick, who now works commercially as a professional photographer. He had found an archive of photographs taken under the tutelage of Garry Winogrand.
“A lot of the pictures that I found are pictures that Garry Winogrand had approved,” He informed me. “He would just put them in a good pile and bad pile. ‘Garry why does this work?’ ‘Oh just take a look at it.’ He wouldn’t tell you, you had to figure it out for yourself. He was a terrible teacher in that sense, but he was a great teacher. I learned so much from him.”
Some of the original photographs had been dropped from Resnick’s collection because they were flawed. But, with technological advance in the intervening 40 years, these shots could now be saved.
“I found pictures that I had discarded because there was a technical problem,” He admitted. “There were five rolls where I didn’t put enough developer in the tank… and so the bar of underdeveloped film, and it was a little dark. I didn’t use those. In Adobe Lightroom I was able to fix the issues. You don’t see the bar anymore, you don’t see the technical problem, so suddenly I have a whole bunch of new pictures that I can reconsider.”
The find excited Mason and he was suddenly taken back to a different era not only in his own existential trajectory, but in the history of New York.
“It was an amazing journey of rediscovery,” He said enthusiastically. “I am looking at New York through my 19 year old eyes! So, all of the experience since then added another layer. They are 40 year old images, it’s photographs of a city that really doesn’t exist in the same form as it used to. The way people dress, their cars, the buildings. Things have changed… you know people were wearing polyester shirts, leisure suits and you know stuff like that. Suddenly, they’ve taken on a value that they didn’t have before, they are historic documents. I may actually do a book called ‘New York Before Cellphones’ because it is now seen as very novel, and that’s the way it was.”
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
The arc of Mason Resnick’s life since his encounter with Garry Winogrand has been steeped in photography.
“I spent most of the last 35 years writing about photography for print magazines and online,” The New York-born street photographer informed me. “I was the associate editor of Modern Photography magazine, and I was also, after that folded, the managing editor of Popular Photography magazine. I did that for a number of years, all of which allowed me to do street photography because I was in New York and lunch hours I would go out and shoot”
Though Resnick feels he learned so much from the Winogrand workshop in 1976, his own street photography has evolved over time.
“I like photographing people,” He says thoughtfully. “I like watching people, and, I found it fascinating to watch people interact or try to avoid interacting with each other in public spaces…protecting their personal space that sort of thing”
Beyond this, he is now working on new projects and keeping his own street photography fresh.
“I have started dabbling with colour,” Mason revealed. “I did a project back in March when I was in Israel for three weeks and spent a lot of time in the open air markets doing street photography. So much going on, and there are so many colours and I thought well this a new level of challenge. How can I work colour into my work and still keep it graphical and interesting without getting distracting? The editing process was very different. But it was interesting. In New York I am getting to spend the day doing street photography, (though) I have to clear the schedule for it, otherwise never get to it, because I have a business to run”
But, for Mason Resnick, Garry Winogrand, who suffered an untimely death at the age of 56 in Tijuana, Mexico, (where he had gone to seek treatment for his gallbladder cancer), had a profound effect on his photographic life.
“I would say that my technique hasn’t really changed much,” Mason thinks out loud. “I don’t think it needed to. The idea of just going out without any preconceptions of what you are going to photograph is the most valuable thing that I learned from Garry, and that’s the way I approach the streets.”
The exclusive find of these photographs from 40 plus years ago has proved a significant and historic find for Mason Resnick and street photography.
My hope is that this collection of vintage New York street photos becomes a book that can be shared with the street photography community and the art world in general.
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
Copyright ⓒ Mason Resnick
To know or Read more:
Visit Mason Resnick’s Street Photography Blog Site, Or
Visit Mason Resnick’s Commercial Photography site
Our Gratitude to Mason for this Exclusive interview.
Leave a comment