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[cheering crowds]

[camera shutter clicks]

[cheering crowds]

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Zimbel: November 21st, 2000.

Dear Barbara and Maggie, I currently have a retrospective

at Sala Millares in Madrid and on the swing back,

stopped at Paris Photo,

where several of my dealers had booths.

My wife saw your booth and suggested

that I might have some prints in that collection.

Although I have freelanced for the New York Times

for over forty years,

I said no because I always sell one-time rights,

and the Times does not own any of my work.

Surprise! Number 122, George S. Zimbel,

Jacqueline and John Kennedy, New York City, 1960,

eight by ten print described as vintage,

price, U.S. four thousand dollars.

I have not authorized the sale of any of my work

through the New York Times

and would like that print and any others that you may have

of mine returned safely to me at the address below.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Yours truly, George S. Zimbel.

November 28, 2000.

Dear Mr. Zimbel, I am counsel for the New York Times Company.

Your November 21, 2000 email to Barbara Cox

has been referred to me for a response.

You assert in your letter that all physical photographs

taken by you and submitted to the Times

for one-time reproduction are not owned by the Times.

We disagree.

Our understanding has always been that title

to the physical prints passed to us upon payment

to you for the right to reproduce the photo.

This understanding is reflected both in our practice

of retaining or disposing of prints

without the involvement of photographers

and in the fact that in the many years

since we first acquired the photographs,

you have never before seen fit to request their return

or otherwise challenge our ownership.

Indeed to accept your position,

one must believe that for all these years

the Times has been providing free storage for your property.

In sum, it is our position that we own the prints

you refer to in your letter.

Therefore, we decline to comply with your request

that we first comb our extensive archives

for photographs from you and then return them.

Please feel free to contact me in the event

that you have further questions.

Very truly yours, Maggie R. Drucker.

**

Zimbel: Be present.

You have to be present.

You have to be in the middle of it.

It's like chaos.

Chaos is interesting.

I have all these little terms.

Chaos is interesting, fighting is interesting,

reality is interesting, much more so than creating something,

creating, whatever that means,

but reality is really the most interesting thing.

**

George is human in the true sense of what humans should be.

The work that he's done is very important.

He's part of that group of people that actually gave birth

to what today we call humanist photography, or reportage,

or storytelling.

He's the founder of the genre.

* [jazz]

**

Zimbel: The more you look at that picture,

the more it gives you the willies,

because you could never do that picture again.

You could never get that close unimpeded

to a political candidate, be it in Canada or the United States.

You had access; they weren't worried.

They weren't worried.

They didn't need all this control.

That's a very modern thing and I hate it.

I really hate it.

There is a big question about whether a photographer

can do his or her work now in an honest way

where there's cameras in the subway,

there's cameras everywhere recording everything you do,

and they're telling you you can't take pictures

and record what people do.

It's insane.

It's a power thing, and it means that

"we can do it, we can photograph you,

but you can't photograph the world".

[traffic sounds]

Nobody was threatened by the thirty-five-millimetre camera.

I suspect they didn't even think the pictures would come out.

You could move and you could move in close to people,

and the worst that could happen is you'd get a smile,

"What are you doing?"

"You know, I'm taking your picture",

"Oh, that's nice".

[school bell rings]

George Zimbel came into the world of photography

at a time in which the world,

looking back now, seems innocent.

Magazines were in their heyday,

news magazines like Life, and Look, and Post,

and what they published isn't what we publish today.

They didn't tend to go after people,

and documentary photography was largely at its core sympathetic.

It was a liberal position.

Klein: The important thing that George learned very early on

was that you really had to not only understand

the meaning of photography,

but more important your relationship to it.

And the regard for every single image that George has ever taken

is so authentic that you really, um...

feel that he's a part of another period.

That was a period in America when we were quite hopeful.

People knew they could get jobs, which is not so true today,

and they believed that they would earn more

as they went along,

and that their children would do better than they would.

The G.I. Bill was giving education,

and that time I think shows up in his pictures.

Bardaji: You don't feel misery;

you don't feel that it's the end of the world;

you don't feel that there's no reason to live anymore;

it's the opposite.

* [lively flute]

And the picture of the Irish Dancehall, it's only about that.

**

Zimbel: The Irish Dancehall in the Bronx was taken at the bar.

It's the longest bar in New York City,

two hundred and ten feet long.

It was part of a story on second generation Americans,

and the Irish were the first group that I photographed,

and it was like being in Ireland,

as far as I was concerned.

Everybody had a brogue accent,

and there was this young man sort of looking around.

It's hard to describe exactly and I don't want to, actually.

See the picture.

You just look at the photograph and you just feel good.

It's like piece of music, you know.

I feel like I wish I was there.

That was your first one in MoMA, right?

Amazing.

When I opened the letter from MoMA,

I felt, "Wow, this is absolutely incredible".

The fact that they acquired it unanimously and...

Well, it was just a wonderful moment.

Actually, I have a copy of the cheque pinned to my wall,

not because it's a cheque, but because it's from MoMA.

Oh yeah, here we are.

Now I have the negatives; I have the light box,

and I have a marking crayon.

Now, what are we doing here?

My mind is not great.

We're doing... oh, Schwartz's.

You know, I normally don't think in advance

of what I'm going to do,

how I'm going to photograph something.

I know you're supposed to do that,

but I like the surprise of getting somewhere,

and then seeing the possibilities,

and just doing it.

When did you take those shots? During the winter?

No, last week.

After they announced that a venture capital company

was interested in Schwartz's,

I noticed that the crowds outside there

were so extraordinarily large that I went home,

and I don't carry my camera every day now,

so I went back and got my camera,

and started working the line.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Oh my goodness, look at the crowds.

There.

Woo, no, no, no.

Who is this?

Oh, beautiful figure.

Oh, somebody's kissing somebody

right in the middle of the frame.

That's really nice.

Good luck to you both.

George invited me up to his apartment to see his etchings.

I mean, like that's what I heard in my head,

because that was a standard joke at that time.

When somebody invites you up to see their etchings, you know,

you don't go if you're a nice girl, but I thought, well,

he wanted me to see some of his photographs, so I went.

It was really a first for me that someone would say,

"This is what I want to show you; this is a terrific picture;

look at this terrific picture",

and I wouldn't think, "Oh, he's a...you know, he's very vain".

I didn't think that, and so we started dating,

but his friend Sig was going back to Texas,

and George was going along because he had some assignments.

George: And by that time I was madly in love with Elaine

and writing her letters all the time, and she was sort of...

Then I got even worse and I was calling her collect.

Calling me from Texas, and Louisiana,

and wherever he was on the road, he would call me collect.

Well, calling her collect with the promise that I'd pay her

when I get paid for my photographs.

There were lots of phone calls and lots of letters

going back and forth,

and finally George proposed marriage to me and I accepted.

I proposed from El Paso

and then went all the way back across to New Orleans.

That's a long, long way.

Sixty-eight miles an hour in a Volkswagen;

that was the fastest you could go.

Put your foot on the gas, drive all day long,

sixty-eight miles an hour.

* [baritone sax and hand claps] *

**

When I arrived in New Orleans, my editors had been fired.

No work on the table.

Then I get a phone call from George, collect of course,

and he said, "Hold everything.

My editors just got fired; I just got a call from my agent.

The assignments are cancelled.

Do you still want to come?"

I was like "Yeah".

Elaine thought...She thought I had changed my mind,

[chuckling]

and while I'm waiting, my agent Lynn said,

"You know, there's a new magazine starting up.

They would like you to do something on Bourbon Street

in New Orleans".

I said, "Oh yeah, that would be great".

Aha. OK, now hold it for a second. I'm just going to go in.

I never thought I'd live to the 21st century, but I did.

OK, here.

Yeah, OK.

Europe...personalities.

**

Bourbon Street, where are you?

Oh, Bourbon Street, OK.

Bourbon Street.

Yes.

**

The photograph of the woman at the bar,

it's an important picture in the sense of just getting the feel

of a bar at that time.

There's so many different elements to that picture:

the woman singer, the woman alone,

the audience when you see them in the background.

There's so much happening in that picture,

and it's such a quiet picture, but it's not quiet at all.

**

I didn't spend too long on it.

I was maybe three days total on that project.

I'd shoot, and then I'd lock myself in and develop the film,

and what happened was soon after they got all the contact sheets,

Lynn sent me a telegram or something.

She says, "They don't like it; they don't want it.

They're giving you a hundred-dollar kill fee

for the story.

That's that.

Sorry".

And now it's in a museum.

Yeah. Yeah, now it's in a museum.

And you'd have to shift gears.

I got that disappointment, but Elaine was arriving.

We got married. You carry on; you do your life.

[Elaine sighs]

When I got my telephone bill for a hundred twenty-six dollars,

by that time we were already married,

so that's the life of a freelance artist.

George: November 29th, 2000.

Dear Maggie, you get paid when you write letters and I don't,

but sometimes I have to come out of the darkroom

and tend to business and ethical issues.

First I will deal with the philosophical aspects

of this situation.

You always had a wonderful photography staff,

so your true New York Times archive is rich in content

and available for whatever commercial exploitation

the Times feels is profitable.

You have paid these people a salary.

Their negatives are undoubtedly in a file somewhere

at the Times.

The freelance people traditionally have worked

for the Times on a one-time reproduction rights basis.

To quote a letter which New York Times publisher

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. wrote to me last year, quote,

"times have changed", unquote,

but they have not changed so much

that you can take my property to sell for your profit.

If I rent a car from you, I am just renting a car.

It doesn't give me the right to sell the car

once I am finished with the rental.

I don't know how many freelance photographers

have contacted you, but if the letter I received

is the response they get,

I am very sad that you have seen fit to treat us in this matter.

I hope you give this serious attention

because it is a serious matter.

Yours truly, George Zimbel.

Female voice: December 6th, 2000.

Dear Mr. Zimbel, I am in receipt of your November 29 letter.

I have conferred with my clients and have determined

that there are no plans to sell any photographs taken by you

and printed in the New York Times.

I am hopeful that the foregoing will satisfy your concerns.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Very truly yours, Maggie R. Drucker.

* [eerie theme]

**

George: Yesterday, I talked to friends about the seamier side

of the publishing business,

about signed contracts that don't mean anything,

about agreements that are flexible,

about bankruptcy and resurrection.

We agreed that power is the key to stealing

what is called intellectual property.

It is the word "intellectual" that makes it OK to steal.

It is not, after all, like stealing from a bank or a house.

"Get real", they say, "this is business.

We're only dealing with words and pictures,

the stuff you love to produce.

You are an artist!"

**

Friends tell me that I am naïve,

but I do know that rape is against the law.

Elaine: He was always doing work on his own.

It was like being a writer, in fact,

that you write a story that you want to tell,

and you hope that somebody will say,

"Oh yeah, we'll publish that."

And he was good at finding things

like the Kennedy parades and the Marilyn shoot, of course.

* Marilyn singing: I couldn't aspire *

* to anything higher

* than to fill the desire to make you my own *

* ba dum ba dum toot ba dum

George: The photography community

was a hell of a lot more collegial then than it is now.

I think there's a lot of competition.

There's not as much work around, maybe, but anyway,

so there I was at PIX as a stringer, and George Karger,

who was a very influential New York photographer,

he did a lot of Broadway shows, George asked me if I wanted to

go photograph one of the most famous movie stars in the world,

and I thought he was kidding me so I said Mae West,

and he said, "No, Marilyn Monroe".

I said, "Oh, yeah, that would be great".

He says, "Here. Here's my credentials".

Now, that's fantastic.

No assignment, nobody telling me what to do, no deadline;

just go and take photographs.

**

I ended up shooting right into the Klieg lights,

which are a wonderful part of the photographs.

The quality of those negatives was amazing, beautiful.

And so I was there, I did the shoot, I developed the film,

I lived on 35th Street and Second Avenue,

got home I guess four o'clock in the morning,

got it all developed, hung up the film.

Next day I cut the film, put it in envelopes,

and there it sat for...till 1976.

So we're talking about 1954

and I was working on another assignment

so I just put the negatives away,

and I didn't try to get them published.

I don't know.

I'm not sure why, but I didn't.

Well, there were lots of other photographers there.

George: It wasn't really what I do.

I don't do celebrity.

And a lot of the younger kids think I do celebrity pictures,

but I don't.

But now I look at this shoot,

and I think, yeah, I'm very proud of it.

I think it was well done and it was a story, too.

So like, one of my favourites is Billy Wilder and her,

and Joe DiMaggio was there, Walter Winchell,

the "Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America,

this is Walter Winchell".

So I have the story.

It's so typical that George also photographed

not just Marilyn the icon, but Marilyn the person.

And in the picture that he calls "The Serious Marilyn",

where the Marilyn who was so desperate to be accepted

as a serious actress and as somebody who had a craft

and knew what her craft was,

he gets a contemplative moment of her.

There aren't many pictures of her like that.

There are a few, but that's consistent with his approach:

find that humanity in his subject and then make it visible

in such a way that the rest of us would connect with it.

**

The first time they were exhibited,

that's when I really started to feel what was there.

And now those pictures from that shoot, I think they're in,

I don't know, nine or ten museum collections.

So somebody loved them.

It's amazing how they did that.

The fan just took the dress very gently and...

made it into a flower.

When you get to be my age, a lot of people are gone,

and you think...

No, at first it's very bad, and then you say,

"Oh, we come and we go.

That's the nature of things".

Just try not to go too fast.

**

**

**

This is the first day of the rest of my life.

I'm eighty-three and slept a little later this morning

just for fun.

Tomorrow I'll get serious about the many prints I have to make.

After all, it'll be second day of the rest of my life.

Elaine: He was afraid to leave New York

because he was afraid he would be out of touch;

he wouldn't be available; he wouldn't be seen.

You had to be there, just when they had an assignment ready,

you know.

He had this kind of urgency about it,

but somehow or other I convinced him that, you know,

there are trains, you can get into New York every day

if you need to, and you know, we need to have some space.

We were getting further and further from New York.

We were called ex-urbanites.

And the last place we had before we moved to Canada

actually was almost twenty-some odd acres.

That was terrific.

Elaine: Being from a large family, I always thought,

"Oh, I'm going to have six kids".

You know how teenagers talk about stuff like that,

and after I had my third son...

George: We decided it would be better to adopt a child

than to have another child,

but it was really a very difficult process

because I was on the road a lot during that process

working on assignments,

and she's waiting at home for a call from immigration.

Elaine: I always say it was my most difficult pregnancy.

George: When our daughter arrived

after a long plane flight from Korea to New York,

she's the last child we had, and the child of choice,

and she was greeted by her brothers and by us.

Well, the father was taking pictures.

I wasn't up close to give her a hug right then and there.

Matt Zimbel: It must have been so strange for her

to be on a flight that long,

and arrive, and then be surrounded by all this love.

I remember we drove from New York to back to where we lived

in Continental Village, and I think she screamed the entire

hour-and-ten-minute trip and bit my mother.

Things have improved.

**

George: I feel like I never spent enough time

with my family.

Then they say, "Well, what do you mean?

We would come by the lab after we came home from school,

and you would talk to us, and we'd all be there",

and I always felt, "No, it wasn't enough".

Elaine: But when he was there, he was there.

Matt: Absolutely present, yes. He was very present.

You know, I don't recall George shooting all the time.

I mean, it's not like we always felt like we were on

or we had to be on as a family because he was always shooting.

It never felt in any way invasive, to my memory,

but to have those pictures now, to go back and to...

It's almost like you go back in those moments

and you can almost smell it, or feel it, or...

You have a whole resurgence of the emotions that you had

when you took them and it's like...It's a cumulative thing.

It's a great feeling.

I don't think you can ever separate the photographer

from the photographs.

That's very much a personal statement

that they're coming forward with.

And I think when you look at all these photographs

that George has made,

then you're looking at George.

Tucker: Whether they were contemplative, or joking around,

or working hard, or just crossing the street,

George has a great eye for revealing gestures.

Goldberg: I tend to think he is more like

some of the French street photographers of his time.

and he'd been in Europe.

I once said something about his being an optimistic

photographer, and he said, "I'm not a jolly person".

Well, maybe not, but he's got a jolly eye.

Bulger: And that happiness really permeates into the work

that he's showing and what's interesting

is what he's choosing to photograph

and what he's choosing not to photograph.

Tucker: Photographers self-edit.

They self-edit on the street when they're photographing;

they self-edit off the contact sheet;

they self-edit after they've made prints and live with them.

And within George's work, there are threads that you can enjoy.

Humour is a big one.

There's the men who are joking around and goosing each other.

Or there's the humour of the big dog and the little boy.

It just makes you laugh.

Every time you see those pictures they make you laugh.

I think he has always looked for that human spark in people.

**

Even the children playing on the street,

when George photographed it,

some of them were quite scruffy and dirty,

but they were still playing like children.

That wonderful sequence with the box, for instance.

Tucker: I can almost see him shaking his head

at these young people,

and it really feels to me like an

adult-looking-at-kids picture.

Goldberg: [laughs]

His photographs of children are quite remarkable,

including children who have not had the best of lives

and may not have the best of lives.

**

**

OK.

Qu'est-ce que c'est ça?

Wow.

Wow.

I found the picture.

Nothing to do with Schwartz's, nothing to do with anything

except it's a picture.

Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six.

If you are looking at a negative and you see something

that really jumps out at you that's going to work,

it's very exciting.

I don't care how long you've been photographing;

it's exciting.

And I found one among all these that I'm doing now

that I think would answer that, and one is fine.

I don't need ten, and this is it.

It's right here if you want to see it.

My shadow's in the foreground, so I'm in the picture

with these two guys and I don't know who they are,

and I am really curious to see their expressions.

That, I can't see with the glass.

But I'll see it soon enough when I scan it.

George: The moment is so important,

and the moment is what makes photographic art

different from other arts.

There's nothing else like that.

One frame.

I must say that I call the digital approach

"digital diarrhea".

What are you going to do when you've been doing it

for twenty years and you have twenty thousand, fifty thousand,

a hundred thousand images?

Are you going to find the image?

Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

Maybe your head will break open.

This is very primitive, but it seems like it works,

and I'm primitive, so that's a good combination.

OK, so this looks good.

Now, I'm going to do a little bit of messing around.

Now, I didn't hurt those two guys.

I think it's a lovely picture of them,

and I think if they saw it they'd probably be happy.

* [baritone sax and hand claps] *

**

**

**

George has remained true to that personal position in life,

has for six decades now.

Stayed with that mission of the watcher,

but from a position of delight.

**

Did you see that?

It says Ellenville, New York there.

I don't think I'm going to shoot that.

You can't shoot everything.

Hi, can I take a picture of the dog?

You can come inside if you want to take a picture.

Oh, OK.

I saw you.

I was here about four months ago and I saw you guys.

There, there, that's a baby. I miss my dog.

Knock it off.

He's OK.

So, what are you doing a barber shop and Internet service,

trying to survive, right?

Yeah, I'm just chilling.

I know a lot of people, so...

Yeah, well you've got to do that.

That's what you've got to do these days.

Yes, so let's do it.

Wait a minute now.

OK, four, five feet.

Oh, that's going to be excellent.

Now look at me, sir.

[shutter click]

Oh, OK.

I got it.

I'm a visually... visually upbeat person.

I am a visually upbeat person

because I see things that are sort of up

and it gets me interested,

and I love to see those things.

But in my mind I'm not an upbeat person.

I'm sort of disappointed in mankind,

and I'm disappointed in politicians,

and I'm disappointed in architecture,

and all those things.

And yet my visual thing is not disappointed;

it's celebratory.

There. That looks nice. That really looks nice.

[baby squawks]

I know how to do that. Ah.

You look like you want to say something.

Talk.

It's your time.

I think that you're born with an instinct to do things.

It could be anything; it could be construction,

it could be photography, it could be music.

I really feel that something - it's not an intellectual thing -

connects and makes you do it,

keeps you interested in doing it.

Look, I'm over eighty now, and I've been doing, what,

sixty years?

I still find it extremely interesting.

Oh, this is your storage room. Look at this, Jean-Francois!

That's what I...I had one when I was around thirteen or fourteen.

It was a very nice camera. Wow.

I must say that the whole idea of photography was sort of there

all the time, because we did get the New York Times.

My father had it every Sunday.

And that goes from when I was little,

I would go up and get the paper,

and so you'd see the Times magazine;

you'd see Life and Look.

They're all very present and it was all very romantic.

And then I read about the

American Society of Magazine Photographers.

Oh my God, it sounded so exciting.

I said, you know, this is what I would like to do.

And when I was fourteen, I convinced my father,

and I really think he was being very generous

now that I look back at it,

that I should get a Speed Graphic camera four by five,

a real professional camera.

And I arranged with the local newspaper to get me a priority

because the war was on so you needed a priority.

And there it was, this beautiful four by five speed graphic

war time model, all black.

And I didn't know what the hell I was doing,

but I started doing it anyway.

**

I was interested in sports

and so I travelled with the football team

and would shoot the games.

And it was like a game of my own

to see how many touchdown plays I could get on film.

I only had eight shots.

That was it.

But anyway, I'd get back from the game,

I rode on the bus with the team, developed the film at night

because I didn't have a darkroom,

and dried the film somehow or other and print it.

And Sunday morning, I would have brought the prints

up to the paper store

so that when people were coming to get the paper on Sunday,

there would be pictures of the football game.

It was like my first exhibition.

[car horns honking]

The first day that I was at Columbia,

this guy knocked on my door and he said,

"I understand that you're interested in journalism".

I said, "How did you know that?"

He said, "Well, it was on your application

and I'm on the managing board of The Spectator.

It's a daily newspaper.

Would you like to work?"

And that was a revolution.

That changed my whole life.

Grossman: Working on the Spectator was great fun

and very interesting.

It was also a very lively time.

McCarthy era was upon us.

There was a lot of discussion about communism

and about subversives,

and about whether communists should be allowed

to teach on campus.

Wow, look at this, Elaine.

I was a small town kid in absolute awe

of all my student colleagues, a lot of them from New York.

They were so smart and they knew politics,

and they knew art, and they knew everything!

And I felt like a rube,

but I did know photography, and that was very important.

Grossman: Columbia had a couple of very good photographers,

but George was the prince of them all.

He would cover anything and everything.

George: In 1949, I gave up my cushy summer job at a camp

as a photographer

just to see how it would be to be a freelancer in New York.

And when I decided to stay,

there was a camera salesman at Peerless Camera,

his name was Lou Bernstein, and Lou was an animator.

You would love to have him in your organization, because Lou,

he had his finger on everything that was happening

photographically in New York.

So when he heard that I was going to stay, he said,

"Well, you have to go to the Photo League and take a course".

**

That course was amazing to me.

That course gave me a feeling of the value of a beautiful print,

which is still with me now.

**

In my book--

I'm going to call it Two Guys, Montreal, 2012.--

I'm using Ilford Art 300 paper, warm tone developer.

I'm going to set the lens at 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, f8,

and I'm going to guess twenty-two seconds

with no filter and I'll do a test.

John Ebstel was a tough teacher.

He not only helped me technically,

but one of the main things he did was to clarify my mind.

When I brought in a double print

of my current girlfriend and the ocean overprinted onto it,

and he said, "What is that?"

And I said, "It's a picture of my girlfriend", and he says,

"Well, is there something wrong with her?"

And I said, "No, there's nothing wrong with her.

I think she's beautiful".

He said, "Wouldn't it be more interesting

just to show what she looks like?"

So now we go to the soup.

And that was like...that was a marker on my career.

You don't have to mess around with reality

to get an interesting picture.

[buzzer]

OK. Now...reach up there.

It's way too light. Way too light.

December 11, 2000.

Dear Maggie Drucker, when I first read your letter,

I had a feeling that it didn't say anything

that would address the issues I raised with you.

So here I am again when I should be in the darkroom.

First is the question of the Jacqueline and John Kennedy

New York City 1960 print.

It is my property and I would like to have it safely returned.

In regard to whatever prints of mine may be in your archives,

I would like them returned to me.

And in any event, I do not give permission for them to be sold.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

My best regards, George Zimbel.

[traffic noise]

Female voice: December 20, 2000.

Dear Mr. Zimbel.

Let me explain why, in addition to the fact

that there is no legal basis for returning photos,

which we have discussed,

we can't comply.

That photo through the years has become a historical document

by virtue of the Times' possession of it.

The back of it has become as important as the front

because it is a passport to its life at our newspaper.

In fact, it is this very documentation

that gives value to the scuffed print.

As a photographer who has shot extensively throughout his life,

I know you understand the worth that the Times

brings to history.

And now your photograph has become part of ours.

I hope you can understand our position

and that we have satisfied your concerns.

Very truly yours, Maggie R. Drucker.

I really believe that I am a documentary photographer

by nature in the sense that I want to tell stories,

and then I would choose the ones that I wanted in print,

whereas a photojournalist, by nature,

they have to get the stuff out and get it into circulation

because there's a demand.

That's amazing, isn't it?

'54, that's sixty years ago!

And these negatives are beautiful.

These are beautiful.

Harry Truman always fascinated me.

When I was in the army, he was the president

and he wanted a few changes made,

like integrating the armed forces,

the black and white guys.

He wrote a presidential order.

It wasn't a big thing going to Congress

and lots of fights from people;

he just did it and it worked.

I had the utmost respect for that man

and I decided that I wanted to do a thing on what happens

when a president retires from office.

So I started in 1954 shooting photographs of Harry Truman

every time he came into New York. And he was accessible.

He was friendly and he was accessible.

And so the cab drivers of course, knew he would be there.

And the ones that wanted to talk to him

would come and talk to him.

And it was very casual,

but it was very important for these guys.

And then one time I said, "Could we get one more, Mr. Truman?"

and he says, "Hell, son, I'm the president of the

'one more, Mr. President club".

And later on, I read that.

I read that in a biography of Truman.

Actually, they called it the One More, Mr. President Club.

**

**

It ended in 1964.

I happened to be on assignment out in Missouri at that time

and I realized that it was his eightieth birthday...

so I phoned up his library and identified myself.

They said, "Oh yes, please come".

I really believe that people like Truman,

they had their heart in the right place

and that they wanted to make life better for people.

OK, here goes the light.

Let us all pray.

It's still too contrasty.

Columbia Camera Club had a darkroom.

If you went around six, seven o'clock at night,

it was always crowded.

So the solution was to go over there around midnight

and work until daylight.

Garry Winogrand was bouncing around at the time

and he would work and I would work and then in the morning,

we usually would go over to the Chock full o'Nuts

and have a coffee, and he'd go home and go to sleep,

and I'd have to go to class.

Goldberg: I just think Winogrand and Zimbel

had very different eyes.

They were both remarkable photographers.

They both had remarkable eyes

and it would be very odd if they looked the same.

Tucker: George was trying to connect with people

and connect people through his photographs.

Gary was pulling back literally

'cause of the wide angle that he used and also physically.

I guess George is laughing with us and Gary is laughing at us.

Zimbel: We really fought all the time about images,

and it's a great learning thing.

You know, you realize that if you can fight and defend

what you've done, then you're grounded.

And we'd really give it to each other.

[squawking geese]

Winogrand, and Feingersh and I would go out for a walk,

and we used to look for a telephone pole or anything

that was upright, and we'd shoot a picture with the pole

in the middle to see what was going on on both sides,

which could be very, very interesting.

And I kept doing that. And we used to have fights, of course.

You know, "Which side do you like better?"

or "Why did you do that?"

I'm trying to block the sun.

There.

There.

I think that if you're overconfident

or even self-confident, you're not dealing with reality

in this business because it has to do with things

you have no control over.

You're the one that's going out

to look at them to record them,

but you're not running them.

When I was photographing the Northfolk & Western Rail Road,

climbing up on coal piles to get a better angle

or staying next to the tracks as a train whizzed by

because you wanted to get a particular feel.

All that stuff is something you're doing

to get the photograph you want,

but you have no control over it.

And I have never felt technically competent,

to be very honest with you.

Evidently I am, but I don't feel that way.

This I talked about, parce-que Elaine, we were just married,

OK, and she said,

"You know, there is a bunch of guys there, right?"

Yes, yes, right, right, right.

And this is the picture. Aren't they beautiful?

Yes, yes, yes. It's a nice girl.

This is famous. I want to see it.

And it's interesting.

Look, this wonderful man,

he just happened to come out his door.

I mean, they're bad boys, like playing...

I love construction work.

I did a lot of work.

I did high steel.

Did you give them a photo?

Yeah.

Le dernier soir, I said, "Oh my God, what am I going to bring?"

Charbonneau: It's all good, yeah.

So basically, I think I had seen these two.

This I hadn't seen, this...

When Elaine and I moved to Putnam County, New York,

which is sixty miles out of New York City,

we were doing a lot of things for the New York Times

travel section with the kids;

everybody would go together and we'd have an adventure

and I'd photograph it and she would write about it.

**

Elaine: Many times, the stories that we ended up doing

were just a result of a Sunday drive.

We would get in the car not even thinking about

writing a story or photographing a story or making a living.

**

Storm King Mountain was a Sunday drive.

We loved adventures like that and we saw all these remains

of homes that were burned to the ground or something.

And it was strange because the forestry wasn't burned;

it was just the houses and we were so puzzled.

What happened? What happened?

It looked like a tragedy and we found out that Con Edison,

the electric company was going to build a pump storage

hydroelectric plant on that historic, beautiful site.

It took a long time.

The battle went on for many, many years.

I wasn't the only one who decided to write about that.

I mean, there were groups in New York then

that got on the bandwagon and were very, very vocal.

And this is the first time that such an approval

had ever, ever, ever, ever been reversed, and that was historic.

I don't want to start crying.

Matt: My parents were always for justice.

They were always fighters for what they believed was right,

so when my father found out that one of his pictures was being

sold without authorization by the New York Times,

it became a very pitched and intellectual battle of rights

with an institution that my father has had a long

and adoring relationship with.

So for him there was a huge stake in the whole matter,

but notwithstanding, he wasn't going to allow them

to take property that they did not own.

**

January 3rd, 2001.

Dear Maggie.

What an eloquent letter.

Please fax or email me the front and back of my Kennedy picture,

which was offered for sale in Paris.

I know it was not made for the New York Times,

and I want to know its provenance.

My best regards, George S. Zimbel.

January 12, 2001. Dear Mr. Zimbel.

Pursuant to your January 3, 2001 request,

I have enclosed a copy of the front and back

of the Kennedy photograph.

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions

or concerns.

Very truly yours, Maggie R. Drucker.

George: OK, here we go.

January 16, 2001.

Dear Maggie.

The provenance has now become clear.

The print was requested by your photo editor.

It evidently was used by your women's page and was not

returned to me after use, as is the normal procedure.

It was not shot for the New York Times.

It was done for my ongoing personal documentary project

on American politics.

I am getting very upset as I write this.

Dear Mr. Zimbel.

I was pleased to hear that the issue of your Kennedy photograph

has been resolved and that the print is being returned to you.

As I think Jim Monas, director of the New York Times

photo archive has made clear to you,

our return of the photograph does not suggest

that we do not stand by our legal position.

We continue to believe in our ownership of the print,

but in the spirit of compromise,

we have agreed to make an exception in this case.

Dear Maggie Drucker.

Jim Monas used terms such as "valued contributor"

and "long-time relationship" and then added the proviso

that I would have to pay fifty percent to the New York Times

if I sold it.

I used several expletives to let him know that the photograph

belonged to me and I expected it returned properly packed.

He urged me not to get excited

and said he would call me the following day.

He did, stating that the photograph would be returned

with no proviso.

So after thirty-nine years,

the print was where it was supposed to be.

It is and always has been, my property.

I am not an exception.

I am one of those freelance people who you seem intent

on denigrating in the name of increased profits

for the New York Times company.

It is not acceptable.

You used your muscle and words

in a court of law because you're lawyers.

I will use my muscle and words in the court of public opinion

because I am a communicator.

Yours truly, George S. Zimbel.

Mason: I just have always admired this intensity

and humility that...and respect for what he does.

George, thank you for coming out on a day like today.

Normally I would stay home.

George buys film, buys developer and fixers,

and he shoots practically on a daily basis.

See you soon, George.

And he's making photographs as important today

as those photographs that he made fifty years ago.

**

**

Elaine: One summer night,

the barn where he had his photography was on fire.

Somebody lit it.

And when we got home, the fire was out

but the building was gone.

It's a tragedy because first of all, my friends,

I was a volunteer fireman.

That was my public service thing,

and so the guys knew where my negatives were

and I had told them if anything ever happens here,

save the negatives, save the negatives.

And some of them risked their lives to go into the fire

and get out what they could, so they did save some stuff.

But the loss, I'm the kind of person if I have a bad happening

like that, I'll go right back to work and just get into it.

And I shouldn't have done that because it was terrible.

Over the years I keep saying, "Oh, where is that?

Where is that?"

And then I realize it went up in flames.

**

**

Bulger: When you look at the work that he was doing

in New York York in the late sixties and early seventies,

I think at one point George had almost given up

on American society...

mean streets of New York that had become very dark places.

**

Within a very short couple of years

of taking those photographs,

he left the United States to find a better place

for him and his family in Prince Edward Island.

And when I see those photographs I think that, you know,

that must have been reflecting his state of mind at the time,

that he was trying really hard to concentrate on the good and,

you know, what's possible, and what's achievable.

But I think by the late sixties,

he had realized that it was just not going to happen

the way that he was hoping.

**

Well, my wife and I, we have four children...

and we saw the direction

that the world was getting more and more commercialized.

I was really pissed off about the Vietnam war.

Remember, I'm an ex-soldier; I was in the US Army,

so I was politically very upset.

How we ended up with the farm, I mean, we had the land

and we loved the ocean which was right nearby.

It was quite beautiful.

But I think we were in tune with that.

It was crazy. Everybody said we were crazy.

"You're going to start a farm?

You don't even know how to farm".

Yes, that was true, but people helped us and we farmed.

Elaine: It was a big change of lifestyle for everyone.

[cow moos]

That's where the fun began, because everybody said,

"you came from New York and you moved to Prince Edward Island?

Are you crazy?"

New York, Prince Edward.

What's the difference?

They're both islands.

George: And then the word started to get around.

"Well, maybe he was a drunkard or something.

Maybe he had troubles back in the States

and he had to get out" or all those little stories, you know.

We had ten good years there.

I learned how to drive a tractor and milk a cow,

which I said I never would do.

I milked a cow for nine and half years.

That's a lot of milk and then just in the last two years

I was at a museum in Florida and the curator said to me,

"Do you mean to say you left the United States in 1971,

just as the art market for photography was ballooning?"

and I said, "Yeah, that's sort of stupid, isn't it?"

and he says, "Yeah".

* [baritone sax and hand claps] *

When we decided to move back to an urban environment,

we could have gone anywhere.

And there was only one place we wanted to go

and that was Montreal.

I remember in '67 when they had the World Fair, I met a woman,

she was an architect, and she said,

"Montreal is the artistic soul of Canada",

and I never forgot that.

When we moved here and I started to show work,

people got excited about it; they were interested in it.

It was a buzz happening.

And the connection I made with Gallery Art45

and Serge Vaisman was incredible.

**

I learned about exhibitions, and how to show,

and how to prepare work and I said,

"This is what I want to do".

My wife keeps telling me, "You never had a job".

I've always been freelance, and I like it that way.

All this is choisi.OK.

I value the freelance life, and as long as I have music,

and my studio and my darkroom, that's OK,

as far as I'm concerned.

**

[laugh]

All right, so there we go.

Yeah, I rather like that.

That's the dancing hands.

That wall didn't want to come in, you know.

It did not want to come in.

C'est beau, George!

The key is dancing hands.

When you're in the darkroom in front of an enlarger,

your hands have to dance, because you have to know

how to get the texture - texture, texture, texture

is so important out of everything in your photograph.

OK, we're almost ready to say hallelujah.

Ready?

Hallelujah.

Well, hallelujah!

OK, so there you go and then into the developer she goes.

OK.

Oh, man.

It seems like it's coming up beautifully,

but you will have to tell me.

The world will have to tell me if it is really beautiful.

I don't know. We'll see.

[buzzer]

I think that works.

OK.

Bulger: With printers like George, they'll go through,

you know, a day or two days working on a new negative

until it achieves what they previsualize.

So to finally get a print to that stage

is a real labour of love, and it's something that is

necessary for the photographer to do

because someone else might see something else

as being the centre area of interest

and that way, then, as the viewer, you're not sure

what the interpretation is you're looking at.

Like, is this what the photographer intended,

or is this what the printer did?

And is it a good printer or is it a bad printer?

George: So the early ones will be glossy-matte-dried

and the later ones would be uh, matte.

The picture is the print and to get more sophisticated about it,

one of my photo dealers said to me,

"What I do is I sell prints.

I don't sell your photographs; I sell prints".

This is my favourite.

Yeah.

We talked about this one before.

Bulger: Photography used to be like a classic trade

where you would work with the materials,

learn how to use them,

and just spend the rest of your life

getting better and better and better at it.

Whereas, photographers certainly in the last twenty years,

you're probably on camera number fifteen right now

if you're a professional.

Whereas, if you had a Leica in the fifties,

as long as it's been maintained,

you're still using that same Leica and the same lenses.

George: Oh, isn't that beautiful!

Oh, well, I didn't look.

It's easier when you use the viewfinder.

And then when it starts to do red...

Everything that is...

When it starts to do red, you know you're there,

so you can shoot right away, even if you can't see what the

Hell you're doing.

Exactly.

It's very handy when something is far away.

It's like...It's sort of like a toy.

It's not a toy, but it feels...

In a way I feel sorry for the photographers now.

There's so much choice in terms of

how they're going to do things.

There are so many decisions that they have to make

about their look.

The look is hyper realistic.

You don't see that way; you see more like the Leica lenses

and the earlier lenses.

You see roundness in people, you see,

I don't know...I guess they call it plasticity.

Now, you see detail, detail, detail and you know what?

The detail gets to be...get in the way.

**

**

Tucker: Young people who enter the world through...

electronically, digital cameras, digital printers,

digital transmission,

it's rarely about subtlety.

It's about a kind of personal vision that is very alien

to the universal ties that George was trying to get at...

this presumption that there are things about all of us

that can connect us by appealing to our sameness.

**

George: You know what? You have to have a great eye.

That's what you're born with or maybe you develop it,

but if you don't have a great eye,

I don't give a damn what camera you use

or what anything you use; you have to have a great eye.

**

**

As a documentary photographer in the age of cyber Hell,

I face the problem of going forward or backwards,

of being with it or out of it.

I have good negatives from the past,

and may go into the darkroom to make prints,

or I can sit at a desk and scan them into a computer,

thereby entering the era of digital romanticization

that transforms what is into what isn't.

It's a choice.

I think I'd rather stay in the dark.

**

**

Why are you shooting the pictures in the first place?

If you really think about it, as far as I'm concerned,

I'm shooting because I want people to share the experience.

I'm not bragging about it; I want them to see what I've seen

and to soak it in.

For me, that's what art photography is about.

Here in Montreal, I was in a coffee shop and this guy came up

to me and said, "I hear you're a photographer" and I said,

"Yeah" and he said, "So am I".

So I showed him some stuff, and he said,

"You know, I live in Spain and I think there's a museum there

that would be really interested in your work".

Naïve I am, I started getting photocopies made,

and I wrote a note saying, "I was told you might be interested

in this work and here it is".

And a while after that I got a note saying that they were very

interested in the work and they were considering

doing a retrospective exhibition.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it.

And it was signed by a fellow named Josep Monzo

and he said he was coming over to Montreal.

**

I think it took three years to put it all together,

and I'm very pleased.

It was a night to remember.

**

Bulger: I think that George has in some way allowed himself

to arrive at an equilibrium and yet it's so wonderful

to think that within the last ten years

he's been internationally recognized.

Who deserves it more?

[applause]

Bulger: As much as his photographs celebrate life,

they also celebrate photography.

And I think that if you are embracing photography

as a medium,

it's impossible not to embrace George's photographs

because they're very much about the medium itself.

**

You can take a photo at a hundredth of a second,

but it takes longer to read it.

Then the fun begins.

Reading a photograph is more like taking a trip;

you see things that kindle all kinds of memories, good and bad.

Your life is the reference.

Move down, move down some more, some more, some more.

And I can tell you since I've been shooting since I was

fourteen years old, it really is about memory.

Everybody's looking at me?

You all look: "Ah! Wonderful!"

OK, here we go again.

He's been all his life focused on photography, on his work.

That has always been a very primary things in his life.

George: Street photography.

Now somebody could call the police on you

if you're taking a picture.

If they say they're going to put me in jail

because I'm taking somebody's pictures with no evil intent,

then let them put me in jail.

I'm not going to stop, because it's history.

It's very important to be able to record daily life.

That's the most interesting thing, not celebrities.

Every week I come home and say, "Oh, guess what I saw?

Guess what I saw?"

I don't need a camera to shoot photographs.

I shoot photographs whether I have a camera

or I don't have a camera.

They're just as enriching to me, 'cause they're in my mind.

Is it hard for you to shut it off?

Impossible.

* [baritone sax and hand claps] *