Photo: Footballers, Central Park, 1968. Vintage gelatin silver print.
“Lucky Man Speier,” they call him, and this is true. At the tender age of 88, native New Yorker Len Mitchell Speier is receiving his due with his first solo exhibition of photographs, Nearly Everybody, currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, now through October 29, 2016. Drawn from an archive that spans six decades, the show features 48 vintage photographs made in New York and Europe between the 1960s and ‘80s.
Also: Profile | Arlene Gottfried: Bacalaitos & Fireworks
As with many things in his life, Nearly Everybody came about through the fortunes of fate. Following the success of her recent exhibition Bacalaitos & Fireworks at the gallery, Speier asked photographer Arlene Gottfried if she could introduce him to Daniel Cooney; Gottfried said it was okay to use her name so Speier did just that.
Nearly Everybody, vintage gelatin silver print
Cooney remembers, “The call came out of the blue. After we spoke, I Googled him and not much popped up. I went up to visit him at his apartment and that was it. It was an amazing moment.”
Speier, who received his first camera at thirteen years old, has been taking photographs throughout his life. He specializes in street photography, in seeing the world as it unfolds before our eyes, relying on the twin engines of chance and dexterity—to see it as it happens and capture it before its gone.
Dog on Car, Canal Street, 1979, vintage gelatin silver print
He got the name “Lucky Man Speier” when he was drafted in the Army just as World War II was coming to a close. He served at Fort Knox then transferred to Camp Drake, Japan, where he worked as a clerk in the general’s office. He remembers, “I was a corporal, up for sergeant. The colonel called and said, ‘We need guys like you.’ I told him, ‘I’m a civilian.’ The colonel told me, ‘You won’t like it on the outside.’ I told him, ‘You don’t understand—this is the outside.’ I got out three months earlier. I was lucky. I’m a pacifist by heart. No one shot at me. I never had to shoot anyone.’”
Speier returned home, studied law, and began practicing civil law. But he never gave up his love for photography. He entered his work into a competition run by the New York Bar Association and he won first prize. One of the partners at his firm, an older French man, admired Speier’s work; he told him that he had a darkroom in his home and invited him to use it in the evenings, as long as he would like. Speier remembers, “After work I would drive to Larchmont and I’d be in the darkroom from nine until three a.m.” Then he would return home and get a few hours of sleep before doing it all again.
Polka Dot Man, Parsons, NYC, vintage gelatin silver print
He developed a taste for street photography while taking classes on the Lower East Side. “It was like going to a shrink,” Speier remembers. “We would get assignments each week, then we would have to talk about it. Some people couldn’t talk.” But Speier was a natural.
The ease with which he delves into a story is mirrored in his photographs. Each image is emblematic of the New York of old, a city of characters as idiosyncratic as they were bold. But Speier did not photograph exclusively in New York; he took the camera wherever he went around the world.
VW Bug, NYC, 1968, vintage gelatin silver print
Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s landmark monograph, The Decisive Moment, Speier’s work embodies the master’s ideals. Cartier-Bresson wrote, “I believe that, through the act of living, the discover of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds—the one inside us and the one outside us.”
This brings us to Nearly Everybody, a celebration of life in its many splendored glories and infinite facets. Every photograph is a page from Speier’s book of life, a story of the world as it unfolds before the artist’s eye. He observes, “It’s a great contest. If I go on the street, I may walk for blocks before I see anything. I’m looking and I’m not looking. It’s all serendipitous. It’s finding found art and recognizing it.”
East Harlem Children, NYC, vintage gelatin silver print
To see the world as fine art, to recognize one’s role is to capture truth and beauty awaiting our discovery, this speaks to the heart of a poet and the eye of an artist. And perhaps this is why Nearly Everybody is a love letter to life on earth. It’s a celebration of humor, of joy, and of the absurd. It is finding happiness where happiness find you, right here at home.
Please join us on Saturday, October 1 at 3:00 p.m. as we celebrate Len Speier’s 89th birthday with a public conversation between the artist and myself.
Fight Racism, White Street, NYC, 1969, vintage gelatin silver print
All photos: © Len Speier, courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
