I. Let me backtrack for a second. What kind of photographs were in the Modern publication that Castro picked up on?

H: There were three pictures. There was a picture of the moon over a circus with an elephant silhouetted in a circus tent. There were pictures of migratory farm workers and some pictures of a doctor, a hospital, all from stories that I had done. And I think it was the migrant farm worker stuff, because at that time, in the 50's, that problem was just coming to national attention, the exploitation that was going on. Some reporter out in Long Island got shot, so I posed as a delivery boy and snuck pictures in the camps in South Jersey and got a few. And I think that's what attracted him, that they thought I'd be sympathetic to a revolution.

I: What year did you wind up going to Cuba?

H: January 1959 and it was really exciting because that whole society was up for grabs and people not all that much older than me were figuring out what to do. They'd be sitting around arguing to all hours of the morning figuring it out. And in many ways, that's what they did.

I: Two things strike me here: one echoes back to the epilogue to Travelog you wrote where you talk about writing being an external act. You can write removed from a situation which is somewhat what you said now. And how with photography one has to be in the middle of it. And the other side of it seems to me, may be more political side of life, in terms of your studying with Russ Lee for instance and then being asked to go down with Castro's underground to photograph in Cuba. I was wondering if there was any relationship between the two there.

H: I think until I was about 35, 1 didn't think a picture was a good picture unless it was engaged in social problems in society. I mean I don't feel that way anymore but I was very interested in economics, politics, all that kind of stuff and still am.

I: When I talked to you over the phone about Travelog, you said you expanded a bit since that time in terms of what you wrote at the end of the book, about how you saw a photograph say in 1959, 1960 and how you see it now.

H: I think what really struck me during the time I was writing Travelog was how that little, simple act of pushing a shutter and aiming a camera at something, how difficult it is to have the resulting picture really be about what was in front of the camera. The question of objectivity for a journalist, why you shoot, what you shoot, when you shoot it, even if an editor has told you what you're supposed to think, it still is a physical act. The head bone has to connect to the knee bone and all that stuff to the shutter finger and it reflects oneself. And having worked in journalism since I was 13 years old or something, by the time I was 35, or thereabouts, a little younger actually, in the late 20's, that started to interest me. I hadn't thought I was doing that. I thought I was covering the world. But when I started to put this book together I realized that in some ways I was covering myself in the world, I was showing the world me instead of getting the world into a picture, period. And I think for a while after that, I tried to go with that -- open myself to more whimsical reasons for shooting a picture than politics. I set myself up so that it was my experience that we're dealing in, direct experience before it gets accessed by politicians, you know, economists and journalists and all that kind of stuff, maybe even before you yourself know what you're experiencing. That's the point at which I want to work. It's like the incoming stuff which dreams are made of. Later on in the process you make a dream out of that stuff you've experienced and I'm working right at the incoming point when it's charged enough it might become a dream later, but it's charged enough to make me want to push the shutter. No reference to anything else. I think I wrote in Travelog that the memory that stuck when I covered the Israeli war was bullets glistening in cartridge cases and how very quiet, how quiet a dead body is, how quiet a street is when war has passed by. Yet my pictures were about action, shoot-em-up action. I might have shot those things but nobody would run them because I also shot a picture of a guy throwing a grenade or whatever and yet my memory, a disagreement between my visual memory and the pictures that I took or that got published, bothered me and so I tried to work more on things that might end up in my visual memory for awhile.

I: I think though that that still ties in to what you said originally about photographing and trying to get at the core of your experience, to have to be in a certain place and if you're going to be there, trying to be most sensitive to what's effecting you at the time so that instead of prethinking the photographs to an ideology or social out-look or whatever, that you experience it first sensually and' from that perhaps make the generalizations later on.

H: It's a little different. I think as I've gotten older, I've become a lot less impressed with what the mind comes up with in terms of analyzing reality. And much more interested in my experience of it. Not even what I make of it, just the experience of it itself. What happened in the photographs in Travelog was that they became for some reason pretty good at reflecting me and at the time my life was going through a lot of changes so they were problematic, dubious space, stuff like that and now, you asked about evolution, a couple of years ago, in Mexico, I took a picture where a problematic aspect of it was a very tiny part of the overall picture space. The rest of the picture was really very there. That's all it was, ok. So I guess I've been turned on again to very real pictures, less reflective of myself in terms of picture space. There's still things going on there, me for sure and I guess I've come to feel that"s ok. I mean I'm really interested if the camera shows up. I mean if you look at one of my pictures and say, "That's a photograph, it's not a painting," ok, that I like. And I'm very happy when it's about me. I think those tend to be the pictures that even unknowing, I tend to select. Now I may not find out it was about me for 10 years but having been around awhile that process has happened. And now I'm really much more interested in the thereness of things just what things look like as seen by the camera.

I: When you started in '59 the early 60's, were you primarily interested in an objective view of what was in front of the camera or did you see yourself photographing yourself with your view?

H: Not at all myself. My view? Well, I photographed what I was interested in. I was interested in the peace movement. I covered the peace movement from 1965, from the transition from SNCC to the Northern Student Movement until May 1, New Haven, 1971, Cambodia, the same day as the Kent State massacre. And that just about ended it for me.

I: Why?

H: Well, because the photographs were worthless. There were so many undercover operators and agent provocateurs from so many different agencies that the idea of cops, I realized that I really wasn't interested. Now some of the cops might have been wearing long hair but unless they wear tee shirts saying, "I'm a cop," you wouldn't know. So that photographs could not engage with what was actually happening in front of the camera in a way to communicate that with their viewers.

I: You felt that reality was being manipulated.

H: Oh sure, and I didn't want to engage in that. I didn't want to be a vehicle by which the government could lie to the people. Also, right around that time I was getting interested in doing Travelog, and had a chance to do some teaching. So I quit photojournalism for a fair number of years.

I: Something about the composition of the photographs, not all the photographs but a number of them in Travelog, that opens up space for me in the photographs that very often there's a figure that's maybe dwarfed by the composition and a lot of wide open space around it whether modern space, buildings and I think a lot of times in photojournalism people for many years were concentrating on getting that subject up close to the photographer and in fact one of the more famous statements that Robert Capa said was, "If they're not good photographs, get closer. You're not close enough."

H: But what kind of closeness is he talking about? Knowing Capa, he's probably talking physically, but the statement itself has all kind of possibilities.

I: Sure, you could get close to something without being physically four inches away. And if your task is to photograph the universe, you're always close. But there's something in those photographs that appeal to me, the ones with a lot. of space in being able to recognize a moment when something entered you and not saying, "Oh, that's interesting," and then trying to walk towards it to photograph.

H: Well, you see, I think you only see a picture from where you are and if you make that step, you probably are doing it for reasons that had nothing to do with the value of the photograph. Better design, it will sell better, or the art director will like it better or it will end up in a museum or something like that. But I think that when you see something and you raise your camera, you pretty much, that's it. I mean, you might use a different lens and you might move, but it's much, I think you're a little better off just shooting it. I think the vitality of it will be there, even if it's awkward. You know, things sticking into it, or not perfect. I mean everybody loves snapshots. Snapshot people don't do any of that stuff and their pictures are much more vital. So I'd rather just shoot. You know, I make my living shooting pictures where you walk a few steps. But I like photography. I like to take pictures, almost any kind of pictures, any kind of camera. When I'm working for myself, I don't want to think about all that stuff. I just want to shoot pictures. I want to stay where I was when I first shot pictures.

I: Is there a conflict, or was there a conflict for you between say the kind of photography you did for living or photojournalism and then the photographs you might describe just for yourself?

H: In the beginning, there was a conflict because I tried to equate those two and rather than realizing that photo journalism or whatever you do, even photographing for museums, is photography for a given set of visual values. And you're trying to please a client. And I think, what happened was I became adept at that and ended up not pleasing myself. So I pleased myself and just realized that when I please myself I'm pleasing myself and when I please a client, I'm pleasing a client. The net result is that I get money for pleasing a client and amusement out of pleasing myself.

I: Does one ever get in the way of the other?

H: No. I think they feed one another. I think that I am able to keep my equipment repaired because I'm earning money from the other kind of stuff and sometimes just simply having to solve problems, graphic problems or technical problems makes me grow for myself for my own shooting. And I think my own shooting being more playful helps me not go stale professionally.

I: When you left photojournalism for a little while - I don't know if you've done that periodically, up to the early 70's whey you were working on Travelog,-was that the first big separation for you?

H: I think I was working full-tilt photojournalism until 1972, whenever Kent State was, I don't remember. And then I stopped full-tilt, pop, until, I stopped working commercially basically except for minimum survival things. I was earning my living as a teacher. And selling prints, and little things, you know, stock photos, and so forth. And it was enough, but then my children got of an age where they went off to college and I couldn't be a dilettante anymore. I had to go back and earn money which I've done, by what ever means is available to me, which includes journalism, includes annual reports too, not advertising, I don't do advertising. And I still sell a few prints, and I still shoot for myself. It's worked out that I can pay most of my bills with about six to eight months effort and the rest is for me. I'm currently in my for me period more or less.

I: It seems that early on, you were turning your photojournalism as a way into the moment to experience. And going to Cuba, or photographing migrant workers was a way inside an experience again counter to being able to write or doing some other kind of art form removed from it. But then you get to a point around Kent State where you're in the middle of an experience yet it feels you're not getting at the heart of something.

H: Well, I realized there wasn't a heart to get at there. It was a show. It was not real. I don't see the function for a photographer to pretend,' you know that something you know is not true to photograph it where the photograph is like vulnerable. It can't sort them out. And there was a specific set-up in New Haven where there was an effort to make the Black Panthers look like they were counterrevolutionary by having supposed hippies attack the cops. And the Black Panthers stopped it. Well, the Black Panthers knew that they didn't want to provoke shooting. I mean, you're standing there and there's cops and tanks and everything else and these kids are running up with popsicles to throw at the cops. If you want to be serious, you don't do it that way. And that's what the Black Panthers were saying. But the photograph shows you the Black Panthers stopping the kids. And the cops stopping the kids backing up the Black Panthers. That's not an image you want to put out.

I: It seems that at that point something like writing which could be done at some removal from the situation can tell the story.

H: It can tell a story. You have no reason to believe it though. I could have told you a nice fairy tale just then.

I: But then again can't you do the same thing with photographs?

H: You have the option in photography not to do that. That option is not available to you in words or in any other media. In photography you can take a picture where light bouncing off the real world drew the lines so there's an intimate inherent in the medium relationship between the image and object. That relationship doesn't exist in any other medium except tape because there's an intermediary. This is mechanical. Those are my words.

I: I thought of that before with the parallel between photography and radio, that both art forms exist as the subject exists, simultaneously. And I guess for me there's an appeal in that basically because I do both. But I was wondering, sometimes I feel the need to go back into writing to sort of be able to get a handle, a different kind of handle on experience to describe in a way that perhaps radio, unless you're reading something you wrote, or photography can't. I was wondering at that time at Kent State did you find yourself thinking about writing again?

H: Not really. I think I just thought about taking photographs of what I could posit what I knew to be or felt to be true rather than getting myself in the position where I was going to be the mechanism by which something that I didn't think was true, would get through because there was nothing I could do about it in my medium. I wasn't being hired as a writer. I like to write. I was trained as a writer; I went to school, earned my living at it and all that kind of stuff. And I still write but it's not my primary medium because you know that I said what I said but whether what I said had any relationship to reality whatever that is, you don't know. You test it against yourself. In a photograph, there are things, just immediate, clear, experiential tests that you have no question. That's why people are so good at spotting fake photos. That's why you can say photographs can fake it.

I: I've been to demonstrations where say there was only a hundred or two hundred people, but you could photograph a hundred or two hundred people and make it look like the place is jammed and it would be very difficult to tell whether or not there was, and you could also photograph a demonstration where there were, for instance, like last Saturday where there were maybe fifty or eighty thousand people in Washington D.C. and the N.Y. Times says twenty-thousand. And if they wanted to, they could send a photographer down there and take a picture of a few people in an open street and it makes them look alone. I think I went through the same thing or a similar thing with photography that perhaps the reader or the viewer of a photograph or the reader of a piece of writing, in the final analysis can't tell whether or not it's real or it was the way you say it was but you can. I could differentiate in my own head. It was clear to me that when I was out taking your picture, this was real and I was letting it happen and I was seeing something that had some direct relationship with me as a photographer whereas when I was writing about something, I wasn't as certain about the relationship about me and the real so-called world.

H: The options to distort are there in any medium. You could run this tape faster and then replay it back at a different speed and my voice would change. You could re-edit. You could put a word in. The possibility to distort is there but the possibility not to distort is there only in those two medias. Otherwise you couldn't have abstract painting, or fiction in writing.

I: Well, you can have abstract photographs.

H: No, there's no such thing as an abstract photograph. You can't do it. It has to be a picture of something. That thing has to be in front of the camera.

I: But you can do it in the darkroom.

H: Well, that's a photograph. We're talking about camera pictures. I'm talking about camera pictures.

I: O.K., so say from the early seventies, you publish a book called Travelog through M.I.T. Where are you then in terms of your work?

H: Well, I'm shooting the pictures that come from where I got to at the end of Travelog which is like the last picture. The one's that I told you were more an expression of myself, more of a mirror. And then as I said, about 1976 or so this picture turned up. You see, I just walk around and shoot pictures, none of this stuff goes on in my mind. But a picture turned up on my contact sheet that I liked but where as I said the area that I identified with, the way most things had been coming out was very small in the picture and the thereness of the rest of the picture was very strong and I wanted to see if I could push it. And I also wanted to experiment a lot with, in my terms, using time as a compositional device as opposed to frame.

I: How so?

H: Well, you know, just shooting spontaneously, not always to the eye, who cares? The point is that I carry the camera to an interesting place and allow it to work and if I like them I like them. Some of them I do. Some of them are remarkably well formed but in other words trying to enlarge my range. Sure, we all know we can shoot something that's dead still and frame it very carefully. I wanted-to explore the opposite - shoot real quick, just add it to my grammar, or vocabulary or whatever it is. And try to get more pictures that for me, that thereness, the presence of reality had a greater role. I think what happened is I got real involved in photography and in myself and reality was getting smaller and smaller. So, I think it's the relationship between the three that makes it interesting to do photography. So I wanted to crawl back in the real world a bit or get to it, get closer and maybe I do.

I:I think I went through something with photographing demonstrations, and then not photographing demonstrations but not feeling that excited about photographing when I was at a demonstration that something you said triggered me into thinking about this in terms of a demonstration being too much of a conscious act to be deeply real in some way. Not that we can't go, that we have to walk around unconscious all the time, but that it seemed life as it normally is or as is every day was more closer to the truth of what I felt my experience was. So I wound up photographing with more passion, Street and Bayside, when nothing spectacular was going on. But in a way something spectacular is going on, but it's not planned, organized, orchestrated and I wonder if that ties in again for you with the demonstration beyond just the fact that you could be manipulated by the C.I.A. or F.B.I., creating experience, but just the fact that people were demonstrating, making a conscious effort at making reality look a certain way.

H: Right, I think it's theater. And therefore it's that part, I would photograph it because it's that part of life that's there but if that was all I was doing, then what about all the rest of life? A very famous documentary photographer, Jacob Riis, he's called a documentary photographer, said that he, I don't remember the exact quote, said that he wanted to photograph what was wrong with the world in order to change it and what was right with the world in order to appreciate it.

I: That was Lewis Hine.

H: Lewis Hine, I want to show what must be corrected and what must be appreciated, more or less. And I set out to photograph the rest.

I: How do you do that?

H: Well, avoid demonstrations, avoid the mind. You've already put in a moral judgement on the world and if you get back from morality, if you can photograph at a point before you've made up your mind, you just experience it - Wow, pretty good, so you shoot a picture. Later on, you contend with your sexism or whatever it is, you know. But it's not formulated, it's not processed thinking that you're passing on. It's discovery,! and the thing is that I understand the process. The world just sits there. And the thing is that, I understand the process. The world just is. It truly just sits there and you sit there and we put the labels on it, good or bad. So then you're judging the labels. I mean you like Jacob Riis because he's vaguely left. You don't like Hitler's personal photographer because he's not at all vaguely right. I mean he thought he was a social documentary concerned photographer. I mean he had a vision of how life should be, the area envisioned and he proclaimed it very well. What's the difference between, Riis, Hitler's photographer, and an advertising photographer who has the vision that X-brand is how you have a good life. So he gives you the vision of a good life as seen by Madison Avenue, terrific. They're all putting out moral judgement or a kind of judgement on reality and I just kind of let them do that. They're saying it's good if you smoke Salem, it's successful, or whatever. I wonder about the difference between let's say a Riis photograph and an advertising photograph that's trying to persuade you. Perhaps, an important difference is, of course, what they're trying to persuade you toward. In terms of the image, when I look at Riis or Hine's work, a lot of contemporary photojournalism bores me because I know that the photographer has certain preconceived notions, but not just politically, photographically. When they approach the frame, they knew they were getting a long-shot here, a wide-shot here, that they were going to get a cross section by doing this and that they are using photographic cliches that were probably developed in the thirties, the forties, and the early days of Magnum. And when I look at many of Riis's photographs, or Hine's I don't get the same photographic lack of imagination when I look at the photograph. I mean, I've seen a lot of Hine's work and some of the work that's been published maybe should not be published except for people that have studied Hine but in Hine's great photographs, I feel there is discovery even though he has a philosophical or political bent behind everything, he's really discovering something about the nature of the human being in front of the camera.

H: It's good to the extent that it wasn't concerned.

I: O.K.

H: That he was a photographer and he showed you what was there. That's how they all get good.

I: I guess the conscious part or the political aspect or the sociological analysis that the photographer has ahead of time, I think is best served when it goes into the decision of where am I going to put my body in with the camera to photograph? In the case of Hine, if you go out and photograph children under 14 who are working that might be a political decision. But then to respond to that child and to know when that kid is giving you something, I think is another process.

H: Yeah, I mean honestly what I hear when I'm taking pictures is, "left, now," that kind of really deep indication, but it doesn't have much content other than instructions and my body is doing half of it already anyway. And in my personal work, that's all that's ever on my mind. In my other work, what's on my mind is also what I've been asked to do.

I: O.K., you've been photographing in Mexico, you've gone down there a couple of times, and one photograph around 1976 marked something for you that put you on a new period in your life as a photographer or reawakened something new in you. What goes into the decision to photograph in Mexico?

H: Magic. It happened there so let's go back and maybe it will happen again down there. Also I like Mexican food. I like the place itself, it's not like mainland Mexico, it's the Yucatan so it's a different tribe of Indians and once when I was giving a class out in North Dakota, I went out to shoot on the street and it was like 25 degrees below and there was no one else in the street and when I advanced the film, the film ripped and I realized I wasn't going to be able to street shoot that day, so I went to the library and I had been in Mexico, so I started to read about the Mayans, and the Mayans were obsessed with time, just obsessed. I mean they figured out how long a year is, which was before the west did and they came up with a calendar that told them there culture would stop at a certain year. So that's intriguing and I love to walk that earth, I mean it reverberates for me. So, the contemporary don't speak Mayan. I don't know what they really think, but the earth reverberates there with that stuff for me.

I: I'm trying to get more of a sense of how that's different then let's say the photojournalism you did in Havana in 1959 or the photographs that were more personal and less event oriented that are in Travelog. How does this differ or diverge from those two?

H: Well, the kind of information that I'm trying to communicate, well, first of all, I'm not setting out to communicate any information, that's the difference from Havana. It's a way, in a way, it's a difference with Travelog. I'm not trying to tell anybody anything with those pictures, the ones in Mexico. I don't have a whisper about what I'm trying to do. I'll know when I sit down and say these three pictures do it, or these twenty or eighty, however many I finally say, "Well, that's what it is." And then I'll try to fiddle around with them and they will tell me what it's about.

I: In a way maybe it's you know the title of the epilogue in Travelog is I don't take pictures, pictures take me. In a way maybe the experience in Mexico is a deeper realization.

H: Hopefully, maybe it will be any kind of realization of it, although I don't feel so how can I say it, reflexive or responsive as I did when I wrote that. I acknowledge my presence more, not in terms of eye contact or anything like that although that happens too, but I'm much more energetically involved in the Mexican stuff. I take the pictures. I work my camera. I choose to go there very differently. I just submerge myself in writing about it. I mean in reading and writing about it. I'm very much trying to be there in all the ways I know how for it. It's a little more energetic kind of feeling. When I was doing Travelog, I was really very conscious when I wandered down the street and got a feeling almost over my shoulder that there was a picture there and respond to that feeling, just following my nose. I'm a little bit more energetic than that now. I feel myself being interested in something and going towards it. I want that. It's a different mode of myself that's operating right now.

I: I've seen some of the photographs from Mexico, I went down to Archive and looked through a portfolio. It seems to me that some of the, there's definitely continuity from the work that's in Travelog to the work in Mexico, but sometimes I think that in Travelog there are a couple of photographs I felt were a little bit more self-conscious in a way then the photographs in Mexico. And I feel that maybe the frame work, the image itself is a little bit more opened up in the Mexican photographs, maybe what you're saying is that you feel more presence, so the photographs will convey that deeper sense of presence.

H: Maybe, I hope so. That sounds good.

I: And you've just heard an interview with photographer Charles Harbutt. Charles Harbutt. is a member who helped found the organization, Archive. He was formally a member of Magnum. His book of photographs is called Travelog.