“I don’t have a favorite place to take photographs or even a favorite subject. I carry a camera. If I go out into the hallway, I carry a camera with me.”
– Kenenth Van Sickle
Ken Van Sickle, “Columbus”, 1968.
Kenneth Van Sickle was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1932. He studied drawing with George Grosz and Howard Tafton at the Art Students League and drawing and painting with painter Andre L’hote in Paris. In the 1960s, he was taking pictures of Andy Warhol’s Factory to the Greenwich Village, NYC, haunts of the beat poets.
In Photography, we see a collection of 140 of Van Sickle‘s favourite black and white photographs taken in various places around the world from 1954 to the present.
“Van Sickle came early to photography, assisted Robert Frank, and is known for his atmospheric images of New York and Paris,” says his publisher Damiani. “His travels to France heavily influenced his work, manifesting a pastoral and salon style appeal.”
Totem, 2003.
“I’m not a concerned photographer. I’m not trying to prove anything in any way politically or otherwise. I’m interested in beauty and sort of the subtle moments of everyday life.”
– Van Sickle
“La Dame aux Bijoux”, 1955.
“When I was in Paris, I was 23, I think, and I wanted to shoot everything I saw, but I didn’t have enough money to buy, like, more than like a roll of film every two weeks. And somebody said that Chet Baker was playing over at the American club. And I went over and I took two pictures, and one of them is out of focus, and the other one is a great photo.”
– Kenneth Van Sickle
“Les Garcons”, 1955.
“There are a lot of things that make a good photograph. You have to think about texture and gesture and composition, and all the things that painting has in it. Technology doesn’t change the way photography is. It just — it makes it available to more people, which means there’s going to be much, much more really terrible pictures taken or pictures that are totally dependent on subject, which is all, all right.
“If you were there when the Hindenburg caught on fire, and you took a picture of it, that’s a great photograph. But you’re not a great photographer, because you can’t repeat that in everyday things.
“What a great photographer does is, they are consistently able to make something in a style that’s personal to themselves. My pictures don’t depend on extreme sharpness. They depend on the composition and on the subject and on the way I see it.”
– Kenneth Van Sickle
Smoke – 1958
1992
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