#SceneSeen -2
If Only…
It was early June, 1964, and I already was a full year behind the academic curve. Me being me, I had not surprisingly wasted the academic year buried in Pete Seeger's "How to Play the Five String Banjo." I had taught myself to frail a passable "Shady Grove," and I could impress the easily impressible with a very pedestrian rendition of "Cripple Creek;" but I had not managed to pass either Algebra II or Latin III. So it seemed I was headed for high school in New York City. But enter my Ivy League educated parents, who could not abide the idea of their offspring stumbling down such a plebeian path – and truth be told the prospect of a Public High School in NYC scared the shit out of me, convinced I’d be knifed within a week or two of Labor Day. What to do? Ah, the solution would be simple: My parents would pack me off to summer school, where I’d take math and Latin, pass both, and return in September to South Kent School, my tiny boarding school in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut for my senior year. A wonderful plan.
So off the the parents packed me. But where did they send me? Ohdeargod, had they lost their collective Ivy/Seven Sisters refined minds? They did what? They sent me where? Why to St. George's School, a fine collection of Tudor stone and gargoyles ensconced buildings perched on a stupendous piece of property overlooking – Second Beach, in Newport, Rhode Island. And Newport was the home of the America's Cup sailing races, and the Newport Folk Festival. (Oh Dad, poor Dad, what the hell were you thinking?!?) But off to Newport I went with my Honeywell Pentax, a 50 1.8, a Schneider 135 3.5, a Luna Pro hand-held light meter, and my portable typewriter.
I loved the setting in which I found myself, and quickly discovered ways to ignore school work. To begin with, I had of course brought my battered banjo with me – bad move. Second, I began writing poetry, short stories, and all sorts of teenage angsty offerings. I have long remembered, in fact, a story I wrote that had something to do with the boring nature of my teen life, the repetition of the days, and my endlessly going up and down a spiral staircase in and out of my dorm – honest to God. And in addition to that drivel, I wrote long – interminable really, five, 10, single-spaced page letters to the temporary love of my young life, with whom I was scheduled to spend July 4th weekend on Block Island. Meanwhile, I spent afternoons sailing in St. George's skiffs, and going down into Newport proper, then still a seedy Navy town, to wander around and hang out. While in Newport, I discovered a craftsman who made large boat models as signs and weathervanes, interviewed him, took some photos, wrote a story about the craftsman and his work, and sold the story to the Newport Daily News, continuing my fledgling journalism career. So all was not really lost.
I still was bored and lonely, however, but then I remembered: the Newport Folk Festival was coming up! How to do something with that? Well, never afraid to put myself out there, I pulled out my trusty Olympia portable and wrote a letter to John Thorne, a senior editor at LIFE Magazine. John was the father of one Angela Thorne, a student at Kent Girls’ School – three miles up the road from South Kent School, whom I had met at a school dance, and whom I had taken to a movie, the definition of "dated." So why not reach out to him, right? I wrote to Thorne and told him that I was in Newport for the summer, and would be happy to shoot the upcoming Newport Folk Festival for LIFE – wasn't that kind of me? - if John would just send me some film. Lo and behold, John Thorne sent me two "bricks" - two 20-roll packages – of Kodax Tri-X, my favorite film. Thorne told me that when I had shot the film, I should send it to him, LIFE would process it, and if there was any interest, LIFE might use some of my photos! So I was on my way. But what good are a camera and film without a press pass? So, remembering that I had sold a photo of the historic March on Washington to “Seventeen Magazine,” I wrote to an editor at Seventeen and asked for press credentials – and I got them.
Armed with an all access press pass, good for everything and anything at Newport, on stage, back stage, workshops, etc., and my trusty Pentax and 40 rolls of Tri-X, I cut classes and headed for the Newport Folk Festival, where I quickly hooked up with some teenage folky friends from New Haven, Connecticut, and proceeded to have the experience of my young life. There was no one in the folk field who I didn’t photograph – on stage, and in completely candid settings: Bob Dylan; Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary; Mississippi John Hurt; Dave Van Ronk; Jose Feliciano; the Kewskin Jug Band with Maria Muldar; John Baez, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina; Tom Paxton; Jimmy Driftwood; Jean Ritchie; The Freedom Singers; Len Chandler; Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee… And dozens, and dozens more. And mixed in with the inevitable dross, there were any number of truly iconic images of Dylan, Baez, and others.
Finally the weekend ended, and I shipped my film to the famous LIFE darkroom in the Time Life building in Manhattan, where the film was processed, the editors looked at it – and didn't take a thing. Okay, so what did they know? But they did send me all 40 contact sheets, all forty sleeves of perfectly processed negatives. I loved those photos, and over the next year or two I printed some, and had some printed, including a wonderful one of Mary Travers, standing by herself in profile, and a stunner of young Dylan, in a peacoat, surrounded by acolytes. The summer came to an end, as all summers do, I flunked math and Latin yet again, was sent by my parents to a tutoring school in New York for 10 days, went back to South Kent, where I managed to somehow just pass the math exam, but flunked Latin and was once again a junior.
Over the coming years I hung onto those treasured contacts and negatives, convinced that someday their time – and mine, would come. And then, around 1989, I realized it was the 25th anniversary of thea 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and now 40-something-years-old, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Newsday, on Long Island, I thought –‘I have a photo book.’ I figured that as long as those images were at least “average” – and a good number were far better than average, given who the subjects were I would probably be able to get a contract for a photobook. This is my ‘main chance, I thought. ' But where were the negatives? I searched literally from the basement to the attic, and out in the garage, but no luck. And then I remembered: A year or two earlier I had taken them into Newsday to show to friends – why I took the negatives along with the contact sheets I will never know. They had to be in my Newsday desk. But of course, they weren't. Someone had stolen them. Every damn one. All the contacts. All the negatives. My entire photographic record of Newport, 1964, gone. Vanished.
If you are waiting for a happy ending to this story, you will be waiting a long, long, long time.
But there is an addendum in the way of a far more tragic tale of negative glory lost. Sometime in the late 1940s, or early 1950s, a young French photographer named Jacques Lowe caught the eye of old Joseph P. Kennedy and became a sort of unofficial Kennedy family chronicler. He was on hand for birthday parties, sailing adventures, weddings, the works. He photographed young Jack and Jackie courting. He photographed Teddy and Joan’s wedding. He photographed young Senator John F. Kennedy and Jackie in Georgetown. He photographed all the Kennedy’s right up to the tragic end of Camelot. And Jacque Lowe was a very good photographer.
Young Jacque, and as he aged, older Jacque, understood the historical and financial value of the Kennedy images. Quite simply, they were priceless. And when he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic on the Concord – remember the Concord? -Lowe’s negatives would be right next to him – in their own seat.
Jacque Lowe knew that his negatives needed to be guarded like gold bars. As did his daughter, who became the keeper of his photographic flame when he died. She didn’t store them in a studio or someplace similar; she did an incredibly smart thing: She put them in an oversized safe deposit box in the basement vault of one of New York’s premier banks; Chase Manhattan. And there they were, safely tucked away on a sunny September morning, in 2001, in a Chase Manhattan Bank vault deep beneath World Trade Tower number 1 when it collapsed in flames during the terrorist attacks of September 11. And all Jacque Lowe’s negatives – Every. Single. One. – were reduced to ash.
So years after I had lost my Newport Folk Festival negatives, I found myself in very good photographic company. The tragedy of the loss of Jacque Lowe’s trove of Kennedy negatives made it just a little bit easier for me to laugh about my own misfortune. But it also made it just a little bit easier to cry.
B.D. Colen
