“The difference between a photograph and a snapshot is point of view” Michael Kennedy by Batsceba Hardy
19 July 2017
I recently found this old article and thought I would share it with you now, reflecting on the time when Michael only shot in black and white, before we met.
This mini-article was originally prepared for another Facebook group, which Michael and I left due to differing viewpoints. That disagreement is what brought us together as friends and inspired us to start our own Gang. Together, I transformed the Progressive Street group, which had been an offshoot of DeviantArt, and we founded a new version of Progressive Street.
Michael Kennedy (born November 19, 1951) is an American who lives in the Far East.
He is a photographer, journalist, memoirist, novelist, and prolific letter writer, noted for being sardonic. He is currently working on his memoir. The classic photojournalists and street photographers of the post-World War Il era have directly influenced Kennedy's photography. Chief among them are Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Bruce Davidson, Don McCullin, William Klein, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Will McBride. Other photographers who have shaped Kennedy include Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, David Bailey, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Annie Leibovitz, Linda McCartney and Nobuyoshi Araki.
Kennedy's trenchant style of writing is often compared to both Terry Southern and William Burroughs. Roberto Bolaño, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Christopher Hitchens, Somerset Maugham, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mark Twain are other notable writers who have influenced him.
Early Life
Born in St. Louis to Irish immigrant parents, Kennedy grew up in the Dogtown neighbourhood of the Central West End. At age 10, his parents divorced and his father moved on to Mexico to take up with a woman of low reputation. Kennedy didn't hear from him for another 30 years. His mother went to Zelda and drifted in and out of mental institutions for the rest of her life. Kennedy became a photographer and a writer to impose order on the chaos of his world.
The 1970s
As a student, Kennedy showed little academic promise and graduated in the lower third of his class from a prestigious high school near Washington University. During the early 1970s, he successfully avoided the Vietnam War and ultimately prolonged his adolescence for almost a decade.
Kennedy attended three colleges before managing to finally graduate from Webster University with an English Literature degree. His intent was to proceed from the University of Missouri with a journalism degree and investigate political corruption, but he was expelled after forging a professor's signature on a drop-slip when he couldn't pass a basic science class that was irrelevant, anyway.
The disenchantment with acquiring a proper curriculum vita gave way briefly to certain alarming enthusiasms and contradictions, and Kennedy became a blackbelt sinner. He met Bobby McDaris, a talented graduate school student and cunning part-time St. Louis drug dealer. The two became unlikely partners in an inconspicuous marijuana farm in the corn-belt region of nearby Illinois.
Kennedy became fascinated by how McDaris was the most arrogant, bad-tempered fool to ever waltz through the broken beer bottles of the Central West End of St. Louis. Of course Kennedy's occasional business partner rarely inspired confidence, and the last time he saw McDaris before the graduate student left for prison on a felony charge, he was alone in his small, filthy apartment, his eyes two different sizes after a 36-hour coke and liquor jag, white crust accumulated at the corners of his mouth, a two-day growth of whiskers - standing in a shirt and no pants among the porno mags and the empty Chinese takeout containers, as Steve McQueen's The Getaway flickered silently on the TV. McDaris died two years after serving a three-on-10 sentence at the Marion State Pen for trafficking four pounds of marijuana. He was 28-years-old at the time of death.
This was the wake-up call Kennedy desperately needed, and he tried to put his spectacularly misspent youth in the rearview mirror.
Since Kennedy lacked both teaching credentials and the discipline to write a serious novel, he initially supported himself as a copywriter for the in-house advertising department of a distinguished St. Louis retail store.
After the daily regimen of writing meaningless ads for men's cologne, ladies' lingerie and overpriced umbrellas, he assuaged his frivolous ambitions with liberal quantities of cheap scotch. He also socialized after-hours with colleagues, many of whom were straight-A degenerates: lushes, pill-poppers, stoners, cokeheads, and young married couples who enjoyed serial infidelity.
At the risk of becoming a confirmed sybarite, Kennedy followed in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens and went West to try a brief stint as a journalist. He moved to a small town in the Badlands of Montana in 1978 for the austerity of life on the Northern Plains. Kennedy never lived in St. Louis again.
The Photojournalism Years
Like many aspiring photographers and writers, it made sense that Kennedy worked for newspapers. The biggest allure was the free film and someone to pay him a regular salary while he made mistakes.
Kennedy was also drawn to newspapers because he had a lively interest in the morbid and the abnormal. He also had an appetite for the extreme and the sensational, for the slimy and the unwholesome. Kennedy felt at ease among people who were liars, sluts, crooks, morons, cretins, perverts and obsessives.
Over a 20-year period, Kennedy worked as a photojournalist for small town newspapers in Montana, New Mexico and Oklahoma - primarily owned by publishers who were either alcoholics or sex addicts. He was fired from both the Livingston Enterprise (1979) and The Evening Times (1999) for a bad attitude. Kennedy never argued the point because he didn't care.
One aspect Kennedy doesn't miss is the annual Christmas party for the staff of The Evening News. Held at a pretentious country club, it is still hosted by the publisher, William Mugford, a man who resembles a small pink condom full of walnuts. He is one of the great bores of all time.
Each year, at the start of the party, every guest passes through a mock receiving line with Mugford.
Colleagues in the newsroom frequently talked about that awful "smell," of the local chemical company, but that was nothing compared to the concentrated essence of his unwashed prick.
During his primary years as a photojournalist, Kennedy approached his work as a social anthropologist, ingratiating himself with different sub-groups of people to observe and document their customs and traditions. To this end, Kennedy spent a lot of time with rodeo cowboys in the Northern Rockies,
Native American tribes during summer pow-wows on the
Southern Plains, the bad boy Harley-Davidson biker rallies in rural Oklahoma, the fall ritual of high school football — known from Canada-to-Mexico as Friday Night Lights, and the appropriately sanctioned high school warm-up for the mating ritual - known quaintly as the Junior-Senior Prom.
Lately, Kennedy has pursued a portfolio on Pang, a ladyboy model in Bangkok.
Personal Life
Kennedy married a woman eight years his junior in 1982, after only five months of dating. The couple spent the first 18-years of their marriage living in Oklahoma, where they experienced a banal Norman Rockwell version of life. The couple left the United States shortly after the Supreme Court illegally sanctioned National Guard Deserter George W. Bush as President in 2000.
While married, the Kennedy's lived in the Middle East, Europe and the Far East. Their seemingly peripatetic lifestyle took them to Amman, Athens, Bali, Bangkok, Barcelona, Cairo, Cusco, Doha, Dubai, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Lima, London, Macau, Manama, Mexico City, Milan, Munich, Paris, Petra, Prague, Quito, Rome, Salzburg, Sanya, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Venice and Veracruz.
Critics
Considered a cult artist, Kennedy's work has won little critical regard, which has never diminished his motivation to explore the human condition in riveting visual images and lushly impeccable language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main motif of his work.
Myles Larkin, Northwestern University Professor of Photojournalism, Emeritus, says, "Viewing Kennedy's photography is like drinking from a fire hose."
Juliet Jacques of Write On says, "Kennedy is like a man who is mainlining the Irish hardships of centuries."
Arthur Doyle, critic for New Wave Review, describes Kennedy as a horse who won't finish the race.
Xavier Madrid, longtime host of NPR's Transitory Enchantment, asks, "What's the big deal about Kennedy?"
Literary blogger (Another Nasty Car Accident) and bon vivant Chloe Sergeant writes,
"Kennedy's photojournalism registers in an exquisite dryness of manner, like Scotch evaporating on the tongue."
Major Works Fiction
Our Lady of Dogtown (1980), You Don't Push the River (1982), A Creative Approach to the Truth (1985), From the Mouth of Madness (1995), Ruined People (1999), Not Quite Ordinary (1992), An Incident of Flynn's (2000), Running the Risk of Seeming Ludicrous (2002), My Impartial Sentiments (2005), Beyond Here is Nothing (2009), News from Nowhere: The Correspondence of Michael Kennedy: 2000-2016 (2016), Memories (a work-in-progress)
"The bulk of these submissions have been generated over the past year. It's true that I was a photojournalist for 20-years, but more recently | was a high school English and U.S.
History teacher for 15-years on overseas U.S. military bases of the American Empire. This accounts for my peripatetic lifestyle since 2002 - which has allowed me to live in Bahrain, Germany, England, Japan and now Korea. I am not afflicted with the American con job of the Puritan work ethic: be a dutiful wage-slave and collect on a life of deferred gratification upon joining that imaginary friend in the sky for a heavenly reward. I have buried too many of my family members to know that if there was a grand party for eating a mile of shit every day for decades, one of them would have contacted me by now via WhatsApp with the directive of: Shut it down, and join us for the good times. But this is not the case.
I have been retired for a year now, and I finally answer to no one. It's marvelous. As for how to reinvent myself while waiting for the clock to run down, the easy answer is photography. And, it's like becoming reacquainted with that first grand love of your life. The camera is still there waiting for me, and the love affair feels as fresh and inspiring as the first go-round.
I am wired to write, and I've known this since the first days of school. To have a visual eye, especially for the effort of combining social message to the geometry of the frozen moment, played out in the subtitles of a classic Weston gray scale has been a very slow process.
I could offer that I'm a purest, and black & white photography rules because it is an abstraction of reality that is not easily mastered. Or I could admit that I'm slightly color blind and don't trust my ability with the nuisances of the genre.
Art classes in high school were an exercise in pure tedium and constant fantasies of jumping from a first-floor window for an escape from Cellblock 13.. The teachers all had bad breath and the ghost of Willy Loman at their sides.
I did not pick up a camera until / was 22-years-old, and it was only as an excuse to play the "sensitive artist" routine so I could seduce women.
My efforts were quite lame, and met with zero success. I abandoned my clown behavior within a week - yet realized the camera held an unexpected allure, and I started to photograph family and friends and girlfriend candidates. My initial interest in freezing the moment for posterity was to keep people I cared about close to me.
What began on a superficial note quickly evolved into perhaps the most meaningful odyssey of my life.
For the next 20 years, I aligned myself with small town newspapers in the American west.
While I was wired to write ... and considered Mark Twain, Henry Miller and Hunter S.
Thompson as my Holy Trinity, I also knew my temperament as a journalist was better suited behind a camera and using film to establish a visual narrative rather than allow certain edgy literary influences to alarm God-fearing hypocrites in the Republican heartland. This decision provided all the access to Tri-X film I could imagine - plus a salary as I made mistakes on the way to developing my style of photojournalism.
During this period, my equipment of choice was a Canon AE-1 with 35mm, 50mm and 135mm lenses ... and a Sunpak unit for fill-flash. I developed Tri-X film in D-76 at 68- degrees for eight minutes.
For the occasional studio photography, I used a mid-1970s Yashica TLR with a 80mm lens on a tripod with both key and fill light - as needed.
By 1999, my world of 35mm Tri-X gave way to the digital age and Adobe Photoshop, and I walked away from the whole scene and didn't touch a camera for another 10-years. I wasn't in the mood to abdicate my 20-years of darkroom experience for artificial intelligence. Besides, it was time to re-invent myself anyway. If you wake up too many mornings thinking of how you can get away from yourself, it's time to pursue something else. I became a high school teacher for the next 15-years.
I left the United States at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, and I don't expect to return any time soon - except for the nominal visit. During my 10-year hiatus from photography, I didn't miss it. I had grown tired of being a socially acceptable voyeur and thought perhaps I should lose myself in the crowd and collect experiences instead of being the passive observer.
My attitude changed when I made plans for a trip to both the Galapagos and Machu Picchu during July, 2010. I grabbed a Nikon D5000 and two basic lenses on my way out the door. Retirement from photography ended before I reached Quito."
These days I work with two Nikon D5300 bodies - one as a back-up, plus I still have the D5000 just in case. My lens of choice is a 18mm-300mm zoom. It's a little heavy compared to the basic street wide-angle zoom that covers the 18mm-to-55 mm range. Yet it's a feather compared to the telephoto zooms from 20-years-ago.
I've learned to embrace the reality of digital photo post-production and use a cocktail approach of Lightroom, Photoshop 14 and Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2 for final tweaking.
"The difference between a photograph and a snapshot is point of view. The same holds true of writing. Without a point of view - and, in this context, I mean insight and not the voice of the narrator: first or third person. There must be a compelling reason for regarding a visual image ... for reading a poem, shot story, novel, play, essay ... for listening to music ... on and on, and on.
Does this experience provide at least a step toward understanding the human condition, or is this just a snapshot ... just an exercise in typing .. just unconnected vocal or instrumental sounds?"
During our first day I told Pang of my intent to display the better material to both appropriate Facebook pages and Instagram. She expressed no hesitancy, discomfort or prohibitions.
I have two Instagram accounts, one under my real name (Michael Kennedy), and another one under a pseudonym. This allows me to adhere to my common persona for family, friends, colleagues and former students who have graduated high school. The other account allows me the freedom to observe other photographers who speak to the less-known sides of my personality. Like Araki and Kinbaku rope rituals. For a day or two, I posted some of the more revealing photos of Pang to my alternate Instagram account, replete with those damn stupid dots to cover offending female nipples.
Pang contacted me rather quickly and seemed agitated by the public display of these photos, even though she was not identified by name. She didn't want anyone to see her nipples. I deleted them at Pang's request, because I respect her. I'd also like to work with her in the near future - but respect was the most important facto-r.Pang may still feel this way ... or she may have a more relaxed attitude by now. But I'd want to have her blessing, her cooperation.
P:
“Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been.”
- Truckin’ (1970) – The Grateful Dead (songwriters: Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Jerry Garcia)
It is understatement that so much has happened since the start of both our friendship and Progressive-Street seven-year-ago. The photo that accompanies the original feature is cause for amusement, delight, dread, embarrassment and yet a certain pride for having survived so many blunders, fuckups and missteps to this point.
If I could dispatch a letter to the slightly over-confident 22-year-old standing along the desert highway between Tucson and the Mexican border, I could perhaps save him from himself. That was 50-years-ago, and he was not prepared at all for the slings and arrows that are too much a part of this farce called life.
Little did he know that within months, the woman who helped raise him, his grandmother, would be dead at age 67; that Richard Nixon would resign the Presidency and go into exile in Southern California as a pariah over the Watergate burglary - a Nothing Burger compared to how the Head of the Trump Crime Family is getting ready to fuck-over America one more time with his posse of Sewer Clowns; that two months later his live-in Wendy tired of his stale Peter Pan routine, and left him for a more ambitious candidate who was a law school student and self-evident dirt bag ... just like her.
And yet if forewarned of an odyssey that would take him light years beyond St. Louis and onto Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Old Mexico, Bahrain, Germany, England, Japan and Korea – and profound relationships with Serena, Shelly and Sookyung, the protagonist of this narrative might not be the suave and charming bon vivant he is today.
[Old Delhi, Varanasi and Kolkata]