Harry Redl

Harry Redl, Michael McClure
Harry Redl, Michael McClure, Vancouver January 20, 2006
Photo by Brian Nation


I haven’t seen Redl in a while. I haven’t seen McClure since . . . well . . . never. Never before tonight, that is. McClure performed with “minimalist” Terry Riley at the Chan Centre. Redl was in the audience. I don’t know when Redl last saw McClure. I’ll ask next time I see him. Photographing them was a thrill, I’m telling you. I suppose it was an historical moment. Also there’s a photo here of their spouses. It was a fantastic evening, I thought. I never heard Riley before. His improvisations, in concert with McClure’s poetry, was to my mind perfect and inspiring. I think someone said, “poetry is knowing as many people as possible”. As for “minimalism”, I like it, but not a lot.

Everything’s connected to everything else. Okay . . . not a cutting-edge observation, perhaps, but it’s the deepest thing I know.

I’m thirteen – up late into the night listening to Mort Fega‘s jazz show coming in faint and crackly from radio station WEVD in New York City. Later I find issue number two (1957) of the Evergreen Review at Classic Bookshop on Ste. Catherine Street. It contains a portfolio of full-page portraits of eight San Francisco poets. I study these images. They represent so much that inspires me in this period of my life. Eventually I tear out the photo of Allen Ginsberg and tack it to my wall. There are also portraits of Brother Antoninus, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, James Broughton, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure. All become personal icons. Six years later Ferlinghetti lends me five bucks. One month after that Philip Whalen and I take a walk around the Nitobe Gardens. Forty-nine years later I take a picture of Michael McClure with the photographer of the eight San Francisco poets, Harry Redl.

In April 1998 Mort Fega’s name comes up in an Internet jazz discussion. Someone wants to know about the announcer on the Miles Davis Carnegie Hall recordings. By then I’d exchanged several letters with Fega but it’s been a couple of years. I have his Delray Beach phone number and call him up. His wife answers and then he gets on the phone . . . there’s that voice! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

“Mort, what a thrill to hear your voice.”

“You must lead a very boring life.”

We chat a bit and I mention the internet thing. He sends comments which I post on his behalf. Towards the end of our conversation he tells me he’s got a friend in West Vancouver that I have to meet. He sends me Harry Redl’s email address. The name rings a bell but live long enough and every name rings a bell. I drop Harry a note, tell him a little about myself. Harry replies, tells me a little about himself. Then lightning strikes. Harry took those Evergreen Review photographs! Within the week he drops by and we go for coffee.

I must have seen his name ten thousand times in my life without it ever sticking in my mind. Every book, magazine article, CD box set, museum exhibit, web site, or anything else celebrating the Beat saga has been illuminated with Harry’s photos. Before long we’re pals more or less, hangin’ out etc., . . . he shows me his archive, barely scratching the surface, really . . . it’s an absolutely staggering collection of about a hundred thousand images. Apart from the famed beat portraits are pictures of seemingly all the great figures of 20th century culture, politics, revolution, history . . . perhaps one tenth of one percent of which have ever been seen by anyone.

“Harry, you had the foresight to photograph all these poets and artists when no one had ever heard of any of them. Now they’re all famous. When are you going to photograph me so I can become famous, too?”

“Never!”

Funny how things happen. An hour later I’m sitting across from him in his living room, jotting something in my notebook when he looks at me and freezes.

“Don’t move!”

He leaves the room and returns with his Rollieflex, and takes this picture:


Brian Nation
Photo by Harry Redl

One day Harry and I were walking down Homer Street, down by the new Hydro Building, near the Del Mar Hotel, when a young couple, obviously tourists, asked if one of us would take their picture, proffering a cheap camera in our direction. I extended my hand towards Harry, inviting him to do the honours. He was his usual gracious self as he directed the pair to stand in such a way that – the background and lighting just so – the photo would reveal everything there was to know about them, where they were, and why they were there. Within twenty seconds he’d taken what I’m sure was yet another work of art. They, of course, would never know, when months later they pasted the print into a cheap album, that they possessed the work of a master. I’m always amazed by the things we don’t know.


Evidence:


“In the mid-fifties it was something special to have a brilliant photographer coming around to photograph the outlaw and outcast art scene. We didn’t know yet that we were “Beats” or the “San Francisco Renaissance” but Harry Redl’s photographs helped to delineate those movements, and helped us define ourselves. Harry came by my apartment to photograph us — and also to photo Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia — or whoever else was visiting. Harry did studies of our maudite style of living. One time Harry had two free air tickets to Reno and we took the flight together to look at the desert city of black jack and chrome; other times we’d sit up drinking coffee and smoking black Spanish cigarettes. Harry was the image shaper of a scene that stretched from outspoken poets to Assemblage artists. Thanks to Harry we have the black and gray and white shapes of it in all their stark romantic clarity.”
-Michael McClure


Evergreen Review Vol. 1 No.2


Michael McClure photo by Harry Redl
From
Evergreen Review Vol. 1 No.2

Harry Redl
My photo of Redl, the day we met.

4 comments »

4 Responses to “Harry Redl”

  1. Adrienne Webb Brown

    My parents knew Harry Redl in Vancouver in the 50’s. He rented a beach cottage in Ambleside Park which we lived in several years later (1959). I was born in 1957 -at about the time this edition of the Evergreen Review was published, and I remember Kenneth Patchen visiting us when he came into town to record his poetry with Al Neil’s trio at the Cellar. My parents were both artists (Harry & Jessie Webb), and I know my mother was in touch with Harry (and Violet) within the last ten years. I’m currently working on a book on my fathers graphic art, and would like to contact Harry Redl. Do you know if he is still in Vancouver? I would like to contact him. Your blog is very interesting – thanks for writing all of this down.

  2. DR FRANCIS PALMOS

    Tracking Harry Redl with whom I worked during the civil war in Indonesia 1965. See my ID Wikipedia or Google. Phoned HR but got a fax signal.

  3. Frank (Francis) Palmos

    Harry Redl worked closely with me during the 1965 civil war in Indonesia when I was reporting for the Washington Post and the Herald-Sun group in Australia and he was on assignment for Black Star, and Life. Harry arrived in a tense time when the Communist Party had their cadres follow his movements, making difficulties for him to get unposed shots. Harry was the only foreign press photographer in the Merdeka Palace grounds in September 1965 when Sukarno called a press conference to parry reports he was dangerously ill. As Dean of the Press Foreign Corps I was given the job of choosing a photographer, so I immediately nominated Harry. For years I looked for those historic photographs, but never did locate them. Black Star informed me Harry had taken his file, and his son later replied in an email to me that he had never seen them. A few week after that Palace session, Sukarno was toppled, the Communist Party banned and the world’s fifth largest nation had a new leader in Suharto.

  4. Clive Appleby

    Harry was a great friend. We met at Jack Rowands place in Burnaby in 1997 when he asked if I could come to his place in West Van. Upon arrival at Harry’s place. I met Violet and introduced my self before Harry could. We then went to his office and he presented some chocolate bars for me. Being my favorite AERO chocolate. It pleased me that he was so generous. Next he handed an orange shirt asking if I minded the colour, “of course not” Then he showed me his new Mac and his Kodak 36bit slide scanner. I was not happy with the slow performance and mediocre image quality due to the fact that at Jack’s I was running a robotized Linotype-Hell 48 bit extremely fast high quality fully automatic scanner. So it was a step down and that made me show him my design skills and he was entertained that I could just do it but I’d been at it since 1981. I’ll certainly miss his amazing sense of humour and his amazing personality and of course his amazing eye for photography.

    For an HR photo of me type my name “clive appleby” and it should come up… “note I’m wearing the orange shirt he gave me. I of course replaced the background of stacks of chocolate bars and his window blinds with my own photoshop texture of stormy clouds.


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