 Well, thank you everyone for being here. I really am so grateful, Sean. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you, Corey. Thank you, Mary Ann. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you, Lisa. And for everyone who's here live, it's really a gift to have you here. You're welcome to show your faces if you'd like or you can not. And I would really love for this to just be an opportunity for us to look at the exhibit together and have a kind of Q&A and open-ended conversation about some of the themes that cite us. So I'm wondering if any of our kind of team members who worked on this and, you know, just in general are feeling really compelled. I mean, initially just looking at the cover photo. I would love to hear any of your thoughts about it because I've been thinking of it so much as a really profound centerpiece of what this exhibit represents. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a very moving, moving photo. Yeah, especially being early 60s, it's probably 1965. So yeah, what was going on in the world, you know, whole representation of the, you know, police in minority communities. I think that's one thing my father's photography. It always somehow gets like a, it's like a meditative, like you can see the introspection in the subject. And it's almost like one of the most consistent aspects, I think of his photos is that you can almost see the wheels turning and somebody, they're thinking they're feeling something. It's not just, you know, I think that's the juxtaposition in this. And there's a lot of thought going on in the boy's head, you know. You know, and obviously, yeah, this is, it's interesting also with my father, the photographs that were printed in his lifetime and then what we've expanded is the body work to be since then. And this was always one that he had printed, you know. So he was particularly fond of this one too. It's not. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, I'm also wondering maybe as we're getting some thoughts from everyone, would you also just say a word, a few words about yourself and introduce yourself and yeah, just a bit about you. That would be so great too. Yeah, so I got involved. I guess about, oh, I studied fine art, did a little bit of photography. And about 20 years ago we moved out of the house I grew up in. It's only four blocks away, but it was enormous. So we had to downsize and also we've been there since 1967. So, like, you know, start fluffing up all the stuff from the backs of the closets and in the basement and when we moved in here I realized we'd so much more material than I was ever aware of. And also we moved into a smaller space so we had to become organized. And it started off and I said it's been 20 years now. I think it's one of the things I give out of known the scale of the task back then. I might not have ever jumped in but you just kind of get started and I'd say probably the last 10 years. It's almost full time I get pulled away a lot but it's almost a full time task. And initially I started we really started getting into it. I started using interns from NYFA. And that's how we met Catherine. Yeah, now it's up in almost 10 years. And it's, I think, well this month is my nine year. Nine years. Yeah. So I went to, I went to RIT to study photography and yeah, nine years ago started as an intern, mostly just archiving the vintage prints that we had and then just never left. Just expanded everything. I would love, I'm so curious because I don't think I've asked you before Catherine, like what did, what was your first encounter with the archive and what was it like to start to delve into it? Because I just can't imagine. Like where, where, what, where were you? Yeah. I mean I will say I remember on when I interviewed I believe we just started talking and then eventually at one point I realized that we've been sitting here talking and we weren't talking about our anymore. We were just chit chatting. But yeah, I mean, I don't think I understood the full scope of it until I was here maybe a year or so. And it was just saw more and more. And I'm like, oh, all of these things, all this other stuff, I was focused so much just on the one thing I was starting with that I was sort of tunnel visioned on that. I didn't see the full scale. And then I was like, oh, God, there's so much more. And I feel like we're still constantly finding new pieces, new aspects, things like that. So it's never ending. Yeah. Oh my goodness. I feel so grateful that I was connected to Jan's work when I was in grad school. That just felt like such a wellspring of, of not just art, but knowledge about the world and ways of engaging with the world and especially being a student of anthropology. I just felt such a resonance with his. It felt like field work and not just his, I mean, of course, the many mediums that he worked in, but not just being a photographer, but actually being an ethnographer. It really felt to me. So I don't know, it sort of seems like a bridge actually to ask you, Jason, if maybe you can share a bit about yourself and then also about your encounter with Jan's work and then of course, when I thought of you to get involved in this, I just saw this link between your work and his. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I'd be happy to talk about that. But Dara, could I ask you just to retell a little bit about your own story with this archive? And I know you've been engaged with it for a long time, but, but how did you get it? How did you find it? Yeah, thank you for asking. So I was, it was my first semester in graduate school. I was doing a master's in anthropology at Columbia. And I was in a museum anthropology course taught by Aaron Hassanoff, who is a friend of Corey's. And I believe that they had just coordinated somehow to make it possible for us to curate an exhibit of Jan's work as part of our course. And so we just started and that was our whole semester was meeting with Corey, going to the archive, figuring out how we're going to curate this exhibit. And then we had an opening at the end. And that was really my first museum experience, which was transformative for me because of course I've been working in museum since then and now doing my PhD anthropology. So yeah, that, I mean, I was just blown away by it. And then of course over the many years that I was based in Poland, I felt even more deeply connected to Jan's work because of being East Central Europe and traveling around the region. And it just continued to feel so relevant to what I was learning there. So I'm so grateful to be connected to the yours archive still. And Jason, you're one of the people who I've been really inspired by in Poland. And it's so nice to bring these worlds together for me of like my pre, you know, immersion in Poland. And then you are a big part of my Poland immersion. Yeah. Well, thanks. I, I'm a photographer or sometimes I say I'm an artist who photographs. I guess I'm both of those things. I, I'm also a writer. And yeah, Darren and I met, I guess several years ago now in Poland. And I only ever saw you in Poland. I don't think I've even met you in the US anytime. Every time I see you were in Poland. But, but a lot of my, my concerns deal with. I guess what I could call a certain corner of the world of documentary or documentary art that has to do with historical memory and the. Complication of, I guess what many people now are calling difficult history. And, and my work is takes a number of different forms. Some, some of it is purely, purely a majestic collections of photographs or sequences of photographs. Some of it are kind of experimental texts that combine photographs and, and writings and writing in different modalities. And then I sometimes write essays that don't really use photographs at all. And, and so I'm a, I kind of operate along that continuum. And I'm really happy to have had the chance to spend time with you and yours as archive. And, which is, you know, in a way on the opposite end of the migratory experience, at least this part of the archive mostly is. And, and I'm also, I quite interested in, in questions about archival relevance and, and how it is that artists. Make their work new again for generations after them. What it means to inherit the work of an artist and how it is that an artist's accomplishment can blossom in time rather than wither in time. I, this is something I thought quite a lot about in relationship, especially to another photographer who I don't know, Corey, whether you might have known him. His name is Lawrence Saltzman. He's, he lives in Philadelphia. And he's a photographer very much in sort of a kindred spirit to, to your dad. And, and I mentioned yours to, to Lawrence, I don't know, a few months ago. And I think they, I think Lawrence did know him at least a little bit. Lawrence is now almost 80 and he's been working in photography for probably 50 years. And a couple of years ago now, Penn, Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania acquired Lawrence's complete archive. And, and then asked me if I would write a critical introduction to, to that. Acquisition, which I did. And I, in doing that, it really brought forward a lot of really very interesting questions about how work changes. It's meaning in time, especially with regard to historical developments that it, you know, obviously cannot predict. And, and I think that, that some of the photographs in this, just in this exhibition are really great examples of that. They're, they're examples of photographs that, that seem to acquire new levels of meaning and insight. Because of what happens after them. You know, this particular photograph we're looking at now that, you know, that this of the child of the police barrier. This is a photograph of intense beauty and relevance in this moment. You know, in the aftermath of. 2020. It, it couldn't be more beautiful and relevant, I think. I can't imagine an era in which it could appear as clearly relevant as it does now. And there are elements of this in other parts of the archive that I can see also. And as a sort of just a little anecdotal confirmation of this point that, that I'm making. After I wrote the introduction to your exhibition. I sent a link to, to the yours archive to a colleague of mine at Emory, who is a, she's a filmmaker. Whose work concentrates mostly on black girlhood. And she didn't know the work of young yours. She never heard his name before. And I sent her these, you know, a link to these pictures. And her email was almost wet with tears. When, when she replied, she said, these are so incredible, these photographs. How did I not know of them? In her case, it was especially the photograph. Of the child at the window still with the bird. Yeah. Can we look at that? Catherine. What section is that in? And it's the. Oh, here. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. This is Ruthie Ann. Yeah. And also, Jason, I'm so glad you mentioned this one. Cause if I'm not mistaken, Corey and Catherine, Mary Ann, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Personally. Or there's some. Yeah. There's a. Yeah. I don't know how it could, how could read on the. Oh, let's see. Yeah. This is two years ago. Wow. And there she is. Yeah. Wow. So pretty much. All these different communities. Yeah. So I think that was a little bit of, so he's not just. I got, I got tourists going through. He's, he's kind of embedded with a family in, you know, and the other one was a name who I'd always known. So a lot of photographs in Spanish Harlem was with a family. Who's last name was the Maristani's. And my mother told me a story that. John had given. Or told the oldest son who used to walk around the neighborhood with them. You should really be documenting this. This is your community. This is your neighborhood. Wow. And then I think they said the last time they visited, he walked them to the subway with the chain and he said, you really can't come back here anymore. I'm so sorry. I love the stories and then his sister died. We just coincidentally ran into her on the street. And so he kept in touch with her and then she passed away. So we got invited to the memorial service. And I met Hiram who's the oldest son or the, of the family. And he confirmed the story. And he was just in a PS MoMA one show. Black Panthers. So it's kind of nice. And he said for him, he said to have been a teenager, or being a teenager. And he said here's this adult taking seriously and engaging with him. And he said it was the right encouragement at the right time, you know, wow, that's so beautiful. And I wonder just as we're looking through these sections, are there other people like Corey, as you saw photos that if you go to one right below that is Johnny who's drinking from the yeah. Oh, that's Johnny too. Same one. Yeah, cool. And then below that is his sister. Wow. Just go straight down. It's his sister. Which one? Sitting on the bench. Oh, really? Yeah. That is I love this one. Yeah. I love her face. So with a lot of with both these families, we made digital files, you know, kind of an edit of their family photos, you know, I thought also, back then, not everybody had cameras. Yeah. So I said, we have a lot of photos, you know, how well they also said that they had an accident and they lost a lot of pictures that they did have too. So yeah, being able to give them pictures from their childhood was really emotional for them. Wow, that's so beautiful. I just pulled up the other one that I know is Johnny. Yeah. Wow, that's so I love that I'm learning new things from this. And oh, go ahead, go ahead. I just heard something. There's Charlie, she's saying with the or John. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And then same with my father was somehow friends with the director of the Chinese school on Mott Street. So he had us taking Chinese lessons on Saturdays. And so that's kind of again, how and we had I think his first friend here in New York was this couple, Jeannie and way. Oh, Jeannie Lou, Jeannie Lou, Jeannie and way. What was your last name? Right. So I think my father helped her move in in 1950. And a few years ago, she said that I still have boxes that I've never unpacked when we're father helped me move in. Wow. She she did calligraphy and she did all the text for the Maury Sundack books. So she was a yeah, she did calligraphy for for you know, for publishing for. So you know, they kind of brought us into Chinatown, same kind of a thing as not so much as tourists, but as friends, family, friends, you know. So amazing. It's I mean, I yeah, I'm so touched by it. I'm as I'm I was trying to find some of the ones you're referring to. And I wonder, Catherine, if you would maybe feel comfortable speaking a bit about like how we got to this organization, because you know, it just was a really fun process to do together over the past year or more. And it's unique. So I love for others to hear about how we came to this. Yeah, well, we kind of mean, we first we kind of did a big group of pulling of pictures of children and childhood in New York City in this time. And then we kind of picked a couple that really stood out to us. And we kind of made a group feeling based on those key pictures and found others that we felt fit with it. And so like attention, we it was a lot of different attention, but like of children looking at the first one, we liked how much the child is not so much more interested in something else going on than what the adults are all focused on. Because that's not it's not their priority or world really. And then some the one below where the little girls kind of very much posing or mimicking the pose of the other adults hanging out on the railing trying to be one of the one of the big kids hanging out. So and then the one of the mother with the two children at the top. Like her focus clearly probably trying to just get home and wrangle two boys who are clearly distracted by many other things. So it's all really about kind of the childhood attention and where they really more paid focus and whatnot. I wonder, did you have a favorite or does anyone have a favorite one from this section that really speaks to you? Yeah, I like to go back to the top right the one that you just were looking at there. One of the things that really amazes me about many of the photographs here is the symbolic reach of these pictures. And the way that they're they have symbolic reach without trying too hard to have symbolic reach they're not mannered. In a sense it's it's it's it's like the photographer was simply so alert so remarkably alert that even in the midst of pictures that are all about the street, the everyday, the mundane, the pedestrian, there's this some kind of timing and insight into the way things are working that ends up yielding a very resonant kind of photograph. So for example, this picture, I showed this photograph to a friend of mine, who a friend of mine who said to me, you know what this is a photograph of? I said, he said, besides what it looks like, it's a photograph of I said, no, what is it a photograph of? He said, it's a photograph of a Ghanaian religious concept called sancofa. And sancofa is this it's this basically it translates to, I think, literally, it's to turn and go back. And it symbolized, I think, mythically by the image of a bird whose feet are facing forward, but whose head and beak are turned backward. And it's a practice of taking stock of one's passage through time and keeping one's attention moving in two directions at the same time, one moves through time in a, you know, let's say a forward direction, but one's attention isn't merely forward. And so you you sort of have forward and backward consciousness as you move through time. That's sancofa, as I understand it. Wow. And so my friend said, this is sancofa, except that what's really fascinating about this image of sancofa, is that it's the children who look back. And it's it's the children who are reaching in the backward direction for in the act of taking stock and retrieving and it's the adults whose eyes are set forward, not the reverse. Oh, that sounds like another essay. Let's do that. Let's do that, too. Thank you. That is amazing. I just and that was an image that I was not familiar with until this project. Oh, so cool. Which is great, you know, wow. Well, I also love Jan's humor. And I think this is a photo that just is like, so, you know, like, this is just so brilliant to me, like the, you know, kid peeing the businessman, and also this inner, I don't know if you can see my cursor. But, you know, the relationship between this gaze, it's like Jan, catching this whole thing. And then these people observing this little one is like, where is this person's parents? And, you know, just so many questions. And then you see a truck, and they're somewhere in a busy area. So there's, I just really appreciate the levity to but the intent there's just such a spectrum of emotion that Jan's photos evoke even with children. And which I think that really impressed me when we, Catherine and I decided like, okay, let's go with this kid thing, which might seem sort of like, not so serious, but especially thinking about what was happening on the streets of New York during a pandemic. And then we're, you know, during a pandemic curating exhibition, looking at the streets of New York and imagining like, wow, this, this happened at another time in history. So yeah, those things speak to me. Maybe I can look at another section if any, and I guess I also want to invite our audience, if anyone, you know, is feeling really moved to reflect on anything or share something, I'm happy to hear. Marianne, I'd love to hear from you if you're wanting to that'd be so special. No pressure at all. All the kite flying is in Spanish Harlem. That's all with the Maristani family. So he has photos almost of the same days that Jan does. Like this photograph, he has his own version of this photograph. The same stack, the same vent. So I've been, yeah, I've been, yeah, right now, yeah, even I just don't, I'm staying so local right now, even getting down the subway kind of feels, I'd love to, you know, kind of print out a little book and bring it up because a lot of people in the neighborhood, he said, are still there. Wow. I thought maybe in the spring when it's warm and, you know, it'd be fun to go up there and just engage with people, you know, through him, you know. Yes. There's one in this section I wanted to pull up and hear any thoughts on. And there's a few in the section that I think this section is play. Oh, go ahead, go ahead. It's not there. The photo is not there. That photo is not part of it. That was the intro. Well, there's another photo we have that's not in the show where they're all standing on the edge of the roof. And my mom was saying, so they're up on the roof and there are a bunch of the teenagers are sitting there. And he said, Hey, man, you want to see some action? My father was like, what? He's like, wait till the cops come and he had a stack of bricks. My father was like, Oh, wow. That's not really what I'm looking for, you know. But he was such a risk taker in his life. And that I mean, I'm just going to open this photo. But Cory, maybe you can speak a little to that because I think because of the resonance between us choosing the text from his from Jan's childhood, and then also just maybe you can share a bit about where what that's from. And I'm just looking at, you know, this photo of these like, really risky scenarios of kids and wondering like, how is Jan looking at these scenarios and maybe not thinking it was as treacherous as we might think. I think so very much so because if you look at the city, even into the 80s, there's that film downtown 81 where they follow, follow Basquiat around with Lower East Side. And just how bomb that the neighborhood was. And there was a couple bars, there's a bar, bar that was called downtown Beirut, because that's what it looked like. And that was just, you know, and so I was recently with an Italian guy and a Russian guy, and they were talking about how, you know, New York City is, you know, going to hell on a hand basket. And I was like, Well, how long have you been here? And they were here 10 years. It's like, I mean, if you look at the city in the 70s, you know, it was burnt out cars and buildings were empty and, you know, all that. And yeah, free range kids, you know, we would, we were probably 13, we were bicycling and skateboarding to school by ourselves in traffic, no bicycle lanes, and just this idea of what is safe, what's not safe. And I remember in, in I guess early 90s, with Giuliani, he started tearing down the old playgrounds. And he said, these playgrounds aren't safe. I said, this is generations of a group on this. So I think the same. Yeah, no, I, yeah, and same thing with even some of Jan's photos of construction, you know, you could see Osho did not exist yet, you know, I mean, this would never happen. This would never happen. Yeah. Like there's a public pool around the corner from here. And everybody who grew up in the neighborhood, every generation, they all climbed the fence and went swimming in the summertime in the middle of the night, you go swimming at, you know, come home and you go for a swim before you went home at four in the morning. And now, I mean, you could not and the attitude was kids being kids and nobody as long as you're not doing damage, you're not being a vandal. It was, you know, or even like the kid climbing there at Papo, you know, yeah. Yeah. You know, he's 10 feet off the ground or something, you know, some spiky bar sticking out below him, you know, no shirt on for protection or anything. But yeah, no, I think the whole world like what is what is what is considered appropriate or I had a friend the other day, she said her son is going to Catholic school and he tore his pants. And he wanted her to throw away the pants. And she insists on patching. It's like all the kids are gonna make fun of me on a patch on my knee, you know, and it's I mean, just these these these incremental shifts of what becomes normal, you know. And I mean, you look at all the people on the fire escape now people that would, you know, you know, even one person on a city on a fire escape seems risky. Here you have like 20, you know, and hanging off. Yeah. Oh my god, I love these. Yeah. I love them. Well, you know, I just really try to meditate on what yawn was experiencing when he was observing these moments. And when I reflect on his writings from his childhood, which we included in these sections to sort of parallel them. I imagine like he had such a wealth of experiences in risky situations and exotic, you know, situations that were so different from his own, you know, home place. And and he was very adventurous up until this point. So he might not have even thought like, Oh, that there's any concern about what these people are doing. So so yeah, that that really strikes me as like the photographers. I don't know maybe Jason, you can say something about that to and your photography practice, but like, the question of how does the identity of the photographer actually change the essence of what is being photographed and what message is conveyed through it? Yeah, well, I mean, this this, the topic that we're talking about is something I think that you see in a lot of contemporaneous work, you know, you certainly see it in Helen Levitt's photographs. And you see it in John Goodman's photographs. A little bit later, you see it in Roy D. Carava's photographs, Rebecca Lepkoff's photographs. This this sense of the city as the living room, or that the city as the, you know, the open, the free space of childhood. It I'm sure it was completely taken for granted in that era. Yeah. And it's only in, you know, it sort of makes us aware of our own narrowing or the, I don't know, the normalization of a certain kind of social anxiety or social fear that we see the image of children free in public spaces unsupervised, making their own games, making their own meaning, making their own worlds and living in them, alongside whatever other worlds are going on that adults are living in. The fact that this is a not a normal site any longer, or at least in the same way is, you know, it's really a point of reflection of broader changes that are hard to quantify their heart, you know, they're hard to account for why it is that, that this, this, that these kinds of changes have occurred. I don't know exactly why they've occurred. I mean, I can speculate like anybody can speculate. But it is interesting to me that, that as a, there's something, you know, I never, I never met Jan yours, and I can only speculate about his manner as a photographer. But it seems to me if my my intuition is reading the photographs that there's something extremely humble about his presence in the street, there's something very unassuming, very welcoming, and that that he somehow figured out how to be present with a camera in a way that normalize that fact for other people. And because, you know, we know that that when the way that a photographer is with herself or himself has a great deal to do with how other people are with with the photographer. And so there's something, there's something very unassuming about these photographs, or, and this is what's so surprising about them also is that they're very honest, they're searing, there's something searing about them that comes out of that unassumingness. They have this edge to them that, you know, like yours is not a, to my eye, is not a photographer who's casual about what he's doing. He's he's serious about what he's doing, but he he's working in a way that is non the sort of non dominating of his environments. And and that's a certain, you know, I mean, I'm I'm just imagining that I sort of looking into his photographs. But you can tell you can tell something about like the vantage point of the camera. For example, in this picture, you're looking at, you know, he's, he's on his knees, or he's or squatting or something, the camera is low to the ground, you know, the camera is waist high to a young child. So he planted himself there. And he just hung around and he stayed and he he observed and he kept going. And somehow he made it normal for everybody that that somebody should be doing that. I really appreciate you saying that, even just thinking about the height, I think that factor with the kids specifically is something we might take for granted of like, of course, if you're a, you know, six foot tall, well, I don't know how tall was, yeah, maybe we should know that maybe that's relevant. I think like five, nine, five, 10. Okay. So yeah, like a five, nine, five, 10 person would have to adjust, you know, his body would be very much like a somatic exercise to photograph children. And yeah, it makes me wonder if any of you in the Corey, Marianne, Catherine screen, if any of you would be willing to talk a little about what was Janne's presence and like, how is what Jason saying resonant with the way that he walked through the world as you experienced it? I think he was also somebody described him once his baby faced. So I think it was very unassuming. And I wonder if it's something he learned from living with the with the Roma with the gypsies of a way of moving in the world. And then during occupation, again, a way of moving through the world without drawing attention to yourself. You know, I think that had to be part of it. Because that was one thing I had. You know, you think about Harlem in the early 60s. And you know, the subject is kind of in, he seems invisible. They're not reacting to him. He's in the moment there with them, but they're not like looking at him. He's not he's not interrupting what he's documenting for the most part. There's not much of an interaction. And most of the time, even if there is kind of like a catch of a glance there, there's like an acceptance to their gaze. They don't seem for the most part like upset by his presence or angered by it. They very much are comfortable with his presence being there. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you can see that in the photos that I'm pulling up now from the 30s that he is in some of and also photographed some of. Yeah. And these are the photos that he did as a teenager. So it's, you know, it doesn't really seem to be like a learning curve with him somehow. You know, I mean, these are much more snapshots, but they're still, you know, they still have a presence. They still have engagement. I think I was talking about how he the childhood, how it being so different. I mean, Jan Hald was Jan, when he when he left for like 13, 14, something like that. Yeah. He left to go live with the Roma and traveled and didn't have a set home, except for parts of the year when he would come back to Eugene and Magda. But, you know, it was very much more openness to. Yeah. Oh, he's insisting. He's enjoying the conversation. Yeah, good. Everyone's welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, I mean, Catherine, maybe can you say a little bit about the background part that we chose to include, because it wasn't, of course, the same photographs from the, you know, it wasn't a new photograph, but like maybe we can share a little about why we justified that that was important to include these background photos of him. Yeah. I mean, I think it was important to show where he came from. And I mean, from the very start, I feel even in the early ones, especially the ones where he's playing, you can see that he had very unimaginative creative mind and probably a sense of adventure. I mean, obviously, if you're 13, you can go off and live nomadically for several years. That's not typical kind of experience or mindset. So I wanted to show sort of that background and as to, I think also his we felt like there was a almost like a freedom that he seemed to really love in photographing children. And I think it's he was very free roaming in his life. So there was like an appreciation of that sort of just being an openness that he was very drawn to. And then his ex, let's say his mother was involved in a lot of, you know, human rights issues. And she'd met through Quaker friends in England. She'd met Gandhi in 1931. So I think he grew up also with Tagore and, you know, an awareness of world cultures, you know. Yeah, yeah, the bridge between the the early year, let's say the thirties and then the decades later is really striking just that he was practicing already. This one strikes me a lot just because that connection. So this was 1930s when he was quite young and you can already see his ability of connecting with his subjects and the images. And I think that was so clear for us, especially in the contact section. Yeah, I think this was one of the most intense sections for like Catherine and I when we were curating it because I just felt like every photo, it felt like this person is looking at me and there was, you know, a sense of, wow, like look at these faces. Like they were really connected in a profound way that isn't just like a usual glance. There's of course the camera, but just to be able to capture that relationship of like person, camera, other person. And now we're still engaging with this look, you know, decade or half a century later, feels very profound to me. There was a comment that was made a long time ago about Roy DeCarava's photographs that I find to be relevant here too, which is that DeCarava's wife in writing about his work made a distinction between tenderness and sentimentality. And she described his work as being very unsentimental and very tender at the same time. And I think that something like that is true about these photographs also, which is to say to me that in photographing children, he doesn't infantilize them, he doesn't reduce them, he doesn't reduce their complexity or their depth because of their children, they're fully humanly present in that kind of complexity. And I think that that's very noticeable to me. And certainly he could have photographed children in a much simpler kind of way. Yeah, wow. Yeah, I am also in this section really struck to remembering that there are a few images of the Orthodox Jewish boys specifically in the correction. But I love, I mean, just to hear from all of you, anyone, I mean, of course my connection with Poland, this makes it very especially profound because some of like this particular image, this reminds me of the streets of Tajimierz, of, you know, in Krakow, it's like Jason, you probably photographed this on the Odova street that was something like this. So, and then Corey, I don't know if you remember, but when I was working on that exhibit in 2010, I actually chose to focus on the Orthodox community at Coney Island and the photos I chose were like the Orthodox kids on the rides. And I just love the contrast of like the playfulness, but still fully, you know, evidently religious. So I don't know, I love any thoughts about it because this just feels like a special niche of this collection that I feel connected to. I did, there's a group in New York called Choland. So it's pretty much people who grew up in the Chassidic community who aren't comfortable in the community for one reason or another, but yet all their cultural references are there. So they can't quite leave either. And so they get together once a week, kind of a support group, socializing. And I did a slideshow for them once. And I think I was the first one to go home at like four in the morning, or yeah, Friday morning because four a.m. and they were still going. And we're going through the photographs and they were all, and I wish I'd recorded it because they're all like shouting out names, they were identifying people. And I said to this guy who, you know, I said, how did they know? There's a lot of photos of rabbis and stuff like, how did they know these people? This is a different generation. He said, these are their rock stars. Wow. So I was named another observation that somebody made was actually, because you'll see people with clean shaven, you know, within the Orthodox community, he said it's become more rigid since then. It was a little looser, a little, you know, but also I think the same thing. I wonder what my father felt having come through the Holocaust and then coming to New York and seeing this thriving community, you know. Hey, I am that mom. Mom. But I want to say when we came to America in 1950, we had no money and we walked, and we walked and young took photos. So let the camera, and every photo that is shown here, young and unabashed walked the streets, and we know all the children, and we know all the parents, and we were adopted in the family, and we were invited for weddings and for the bat mitzvah. And young published a book, Only One New York, and after every photo is a story, and we lift it because we couldn't afford a taxi or a car, and we had no money to go to restaurants, and we had five cents to buy a quiche, and we shared it between the three of us. And there was so much story and effort, I couldn't sit still. After every photo is a story. Jonathan, I celebrated Christmas. I'm 95 now. So Christmas, Easter, we celebrated. I've got a quick story, and then I will shut up. We had the first time that we were invited at Horton's house. She had four children, and it was the first time we came in, and Jonathan was a little bum who was a little bum took off Jan's shoe, and he looked at his leg, and he said, you are white all over. He thought that you were white on the top and not on black legs. So he was so surprised, and he said, you are white all over. So that was a fun story. I have hundreds of those stories, but now I like let Corey and Catherine talk. Thank you so much. Now I can't talk anymore. So he is my son. Yeah, I know. Corey, who doesn't talk so much. We're so lucky. Thank you so much. I want to hear all of these stories. I know. Wow, we're very fortunate. But that was the other thing I thought, because the cost of film, the cost of printing, that somehow it's drastically different than digital. You're trying to make each photo count. To me, people now, I was talking to somebody on the phone once and I was saying how we had about 60,000 images, and he was like, oh, I shoot that in a year. And I was like, okay, that's kind of the end of the conversation then. It's not, because then every time that we go back through the contact sheets, the same sheet, we're seeing things that we missed the first time and the second time and the third time. We're still finding images on the same sheets that we've gone through many times. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, from a photographic point of view, even just about all of us having a device that allows us to take so many photos all the time, I wonder. Yeah. I would actually like to look at the last section together. Maybe it can be sort of our closing section. So this is the section that Catherine and I included photos of Jan in his older adult life and as him in action, just so we could get a sense. And then this section, we're so fortunate to have this text by Jason. So thank you, Jason. This was such a gift and important sort of like, I love that you called it a meditation. I really felt that and thank you again for including that. I hope everyone here who looks at the exhibit will also engage with this text and give you a sense of, yeah, it's like, well, what did you call it? Maybe you can say something about it. I'm just thinking of our exchange about the format of it and how unique it is. Well, I think that one of the things about photography that's difficult and always kind of an item is how long does a photograph ask to be looked into or even what words are we using to describe what it is to engage with a photograph? We can look at a photograph. We can look into a photograph. We can look around a photograph. Maybe we can even look through a photograph and pictures, especially in our time are cheap. They're cheap to make. And we look at pictures on our devices and we don't spend more than a little tiny fraction of a second or two seconds. If I'm looking at a photograph on your phone for five seconds can strain your patients. And so I guess the point of departure for me and this is just, I don't know, maybe particular to my own life as a photographer, but I have a longer tension for photographs. And so for me it's kind of natural to linger and especially to allow photographs to expand. And some photographs kind of lend themselves to this. I think others don't, but I think that the photographs in this exhibition really do. And they give themselves away at different speeds, at different sort of in different registers and in different speeds. And so the act of writing a meditation on photographs is an act of allowing that one's own response to take shape in response to the picture, which is by definition a kind of open-ended proposition. Many things can arise. For me, some of them are very specific to the pictures. Some of them are more general. A lot of them are questions about the ways that pictures are working. And so I don't know, I'm very grateful to have been asked to write something that was an honest response. Not in the mode of a, I don't know, I don't know, a critic or a scholar or something standing above work as it were, but rather to write something from inside the experience of engaging with work. And so this text is not a text that, you may learn nothing about Jan yours by reading this kind of text. I'm not sure that there's anything called knowledge in here at all, but it is an honest, open-ended. It's a kind of allowance of that experience into language or states of language. Thank you. I think that as you say that, I'm just feeling like that's exactly what I hoped you would feel entitled to do for this, especially because it echoes so beautifully what I think we all are talking about in terms of what Jan's work captured, was this honest, even the physical movement of becoming an equal to his subject. So thank you for that. And as long as you're here, I wonder if you can just say a word about the book you did just publish and if there's some resonance there between this, or just in general, I mean, that is a pretty major thing that you've been working on. So maybe you could just mention it. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I did just publish a book. And you know what, Dara? It came yesterday. Yay! After months and months, I do have it here. Yay, let's see it. How exciting. And also, I just want to mention for anyone else who's here, thank you again for being here. And I know we have some other visual artists with us. So if any of you feel like saying that we're asking something, I welcome that. This book of mine, I'm opening here, published, just arrived in the mail from where it was printed. It was printed in Istanbul in Turkey. Wow. And it's called Alive and Destroyed and the subtitle is A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time. It's a decade long project. It took me a decade to do it. And there were lots of other things that happened in the midst of doing that project. But what I think it has in common with what we're talking about here is the way that a photograph can function on the one hand is a kind of informational tool in the mode of, say, documentary, so-called documentary work. But it also can function in the mode of visual poetics in which there's a direct poetic experience. I don't know a better word than poetic. I'm not, that's not an honorific word. I actually think it's a poetic experience in visual form. And it's not reducible to simple messages or data or objectifiable knowledge. It's a direct experience. And I think that that quality of poetics is definitely present in these photographs of New York and other photographs too, but especially in the street photographs of New York. And I think it's a challenge actually to viewers, when a photographer works this way, it makes the photographs more difficult because it's a kind of invitation that the photographer is making, that a viewer may be equal to or may not be equal to. Thank you. Well, there's so much in there. Thank you so much for that. And everyone buy Jason's book. Maybe the last one. I'm not recommending it, but it's good. Well, I am. I feel like I haven't held it in my hands, but I was in your world over the years of you working on it, so I can just imagine what might be in there. And yeah, I hope it will do very well. It's sort of important. Yeah, thank you. And Sean, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but if you feel like it, I wonder if, as we're kind of coming to a close, I wonder if you wanna share any reflections or impressions or anything that speaks to you from your library perspective. Not necessarily. I'm just grateful to have some insight into the inspiration and just to hear and just to see people working on something that they truly connect with. And I find that very exciting. And I'm just grateful to be able to be a part of providing a platform for you all to have this conversation and then to collect this. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, are there any final thoughts or comments? I think I'll put this full size of this up here while we're closing. I do have a question to ask Corey and Catherine. There's, I'm, you know, it's obvious that the archive contains much more than photography and that his practice encompassed, you know, a lot of different ways of working. And I can't quite judge how he understood the place of photography in all of these different kinds of activities with tapestries and paintings and prints and drawings. And there's just so, there's such an effusive, you know, just an effusion of work. And I don't really know where photography sat in the, is it something that he, and the photographs are so different than many other things in the archive. I mean, as a, if you look at his, I look at his tapestry, for example, it's just a completely different visual vocabulary that's being used there. And so I wonder if you have any thoughts about that or if you can eliminate that a little bit. It's definitely something we struggle with because he did all this work simultaneously. So we did a book, a catalog for retrospectives and we just ran the work chronologically, which is a little disorienting for most people. And even for me who I've lived with my whole life, it's a little disorienting for me also. I think, yeah, it's, and it's also he died at 55 years old. So, I mean, it's a phenomenal amount of material that he's generated in a very short amount of time. But I think it was, I think he was just doing everything at the same time, you know. Some days he'd be, you know, to go for a walk, there'd be an event, they'd go do photography, they'd go home, they'd probably weep for a few hours and, you know, the next day you might work on a drawing. And then he had some kind of a rhythm that, you know, a different medium has engaged him in different manners and different moods and different moments. But I think it's all this kind of churning and a lot of cross-referencing. Like there's, he did a commission travel around the world and we have color slides from that. And there's a slide of a moped in Thailand. And it's an orange moped with a hot pink seat and there's a blue pinstripe. And we have in a tapestry with those exact colors that were like 10 years later, you know. So I think it's all these connecting, like perpetually connecting dots and kind of moving forward, you know. There is a whole section where he also starts using abstract photos, photos of abstractions that then become tapestries. So we did a small show on that. And that starts, try to think when that starts. I mean, definitely by like 71, that's becoming part of his process, abstract photos that then get translated into water into washes and then become tapestries. That's, yeah, that's, you know. So I think when he starts off, it's much more, early work is much more like on an easel, laying out sketches, working it up. And later on, it's, you know, abstract photos then very clearly translated, you know. So almost one to one, just the, you know, the crop and the color combinations that, you know, from the photo. Yeah, I just pulled this one up as yours just to show him an action. And I love that kitten. I never noticed it. Wow, so cool. I love that. Maybe this is a good one to end on because obviously your family and just really beautiful to, I mean, also striking in contrast with so many that are black and white to be something in color. But yeah, maybe. Well, there was actually the thing. So when I was, you know, so when my mom was talking about earlier how they had no money and that was very much the family conversation. That, you know, they never had any money. They were very poor. But then I think this studio, they paid, so early 60s, they were paying $400 a month rent for the studio. It was this enormous place. And we were watching a document about William Klein. And he talks about how he gets in house. I think for Harper's Bazaar, he's shooting for them and how they pay him $400 a month. And what an amazing lifestyle this $400 a month afforded him. And I said to my mom, that was just your rent, you know. And then you sold food, materials, all the rest of it. So I said, it wasn't that you didn't have money, but your priorities were so completely different than everybody else's. You know, you were to spend nine months weaving a tapestry and the wall was expensive. And you were to go out and, you know, it was like, so, yes, you had to make your priorities, but it wasn't, then the priority was making art. Again and again, it was probably once said to my father, why don't you even have a TV? He said, well, there's so many good things to watch on TV, I wouldn't get any work done, you know. So I think it had this kind of element to it. It was, I can't imagine just like being that engaged all the time in producing and, you know, engaging with the world, you know. And I think that's probably why he liked photography as a discipline as opposed to weaving or painting, because it's not solitary. You're in the world, you're engaging with people, you're interacting, you're, you know. So I think it was probably a balance, balance for him, you know, so. Wow, thank you so much. I just feel like anytime, like the opening the Yon-Yours book, it's like full encyclopedias can, you know, just continue. So I hope for us all of us here, I mean, I know for sure with me, I feel like, great, when do I get to do this again? Yeah. It's an awkward topic, it just feels like limitless. I called Catherine, I'm saying it, I'm documenting it. I'm like, give me a grant to have a Yon-Yours museum. I'm in, so. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. So, thank you so much. Well, you know, it's like a golden age of photography books right now. Yeah. I mean, if there were any era that Yon-Yours would have dreamed of to have his book come to the world, that probably should be this one, because there are more interesting photo books of so many varieties being published now. It's a golden age, really. Okay, hey, yeah. Yay, I love that. Okay, that seems like a very optimistic note to end on. Obviously, we, well, I hope we'll reach an end again soon, but I mean, I'm in for whatever way I can support this. And thank you all so much. Thank you all who came here or watch us in the future. You know, Sean, just so meaningful to be able to do this. And Corey, Mary Ann, Catherine, Jason, it's really special to be with you all. Guys, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, have a good day, everyone. Bye. Bye.