Brooklyn-based photographer Steven Hirsch tells us about the inspiration he gained as a child from an insane asylum, how he adapted his photographic style after a dramatic event, and blended his photography with his paintings later on in his career. 

How did you get started in photography?

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. One of the outer boroughs of New York City. My father was an avid photographer in the 1950’s and 60’s. I don’t remember him having film cameras, but he was into 8 mm film and Polaroid cameras. I was fascinated by not only the images they could produce but the technology. I remember my father setting up a portable screen in the living room, threading the film projector and the family gathering around watching movies from the summer vacations. It was mesmerizing. The Polaroids were something else. Waiting a couple of minutes after the exposure was made for the image to appear seemed like a lifetime. And then a photograph would materialize. Almost like it was some sort of magic trick.

My oldest brother Martin, was a soldier in occupied Japan in the 1950’s and would send back Kodachrome slides of street scenes from Japan. I eagerly anticipated opening the mail, thick packages with a lot of exotic stamps plastered to it, to find the little yellow rectangle boxes with the Kodak logo. I couldn’t wait to pop them into the battery-operated plastic viewers that resembled a little TV set. The photos transported me to another world of Japanese street scenes, temples and the amazing snow-capped Mount Fuji. The colors were vivid and striking. The experience inspiring.

Before the age of news on television and the internet there were newspapers and radio. The early editions of the local tabloids, the Daily Mirror and the Daily News were delivered to a candy store on Lenox Road and Albany Avenue, a few blocks from my apartment building at 9 PM every evening. I would eagerly wait outside for the news truck to pull up and for the driver to open its side door and throw out multiple huge bundles of papers tied up in heavy string. The proprietor would come out with a box cutter and the papers would fly off the stack right in the middle of the sidewalk where all the news junkies were waiting for their fix. I scurried home and the first thing I would do was open the paper to the center page where all the major photographs of the day would be published in a double spread. I was hooked. I wanted to be a photographer more than anything.

Can you tell us more about your relationship with NYC? How did you approach the people you photographed?

I grew up in East Flatbush, a middle-class enclave in the Brooklyn. I lived down the block from Brooklyn State Hospital, a notorious insane asylum. Unbeknownst to my parents, I would observe outpatients wander down the block while talking to themselves. Unafraid, I befriended them and listened to their stories. Years later, the schizophrenic visions I ingested would emerge on photographic paper and canvas. I would prowl the streets of Manhattan looking for exactly these types of characters to photograph. I’d always try to photograph them up close and from a low angle to replicate the look and angle I would see as a small eight-year-old child, also to feel their energy. The flash added to the bizarre quality I experienced when I would stand there dumbfounded listening to their delusional and majestic rants. So, the photographs are in many ways recreations of moments from an earlier time.

In your New York City photos, you seem to be pouncing on people, whereas in other series you establish a deeper narrative with your characters. For example, ‘Crusty Punks’ and ‘It's Called a Party’ make me feel you go beyond the photos per se to tell the stories of the people you capture. How did your photographic practice evolve in this sense?

Good question. It didn’t really evolve, I adapted my way of shooting because of a dramatic life event. I had been working since 1994 at my dream job as a newspaper photographer for The New York Post and for a decade before that for the National Enquirer and The Globe, two notorious and scandalous supermarket tabloids. At the Post I actually got to take the pictures I would fawn over as a child; photographing the mayhem, murders, fires, plane crashes and politicians. There were no longer centerfolds of photos in the dailies, but I did manage to get the cover photo periodically and lots of photos inside. I loved it. Then it all came tumbling down.

In 2005 I was diagnosed with hepatitis C. Told by doctors I had little chance of surviving I began a daily routine of chemotherapy that would last for six months. Remarkably, I survived but was left so debilitated I could no longer work covering the news. After a hiatus I eventually went to work in the office as a photo editor for a year or so. One day I was called into the Photo Director’s office and told I would have to try to go back to the street or lose my job. Now, a year and a half after being diagnosed I would try to recapture the career I had become so addicted to and successful at. But now I could no longer even do it on a rudimentary level and was chastised by the photo editor for doing a poor job just a few days into my comeback. Unable to mentally focus, physically disabled and suffering from PTSD from being at the World Trade Center the day the towers came down and fighting this disease; I was broken and finished. I no longer had a job. Unable to work I started looking for a simple photo essay I could do to try and find a way back from the abyss. I needed a project I could photograph from my car window. I had an idea. Photograph sex offenders without having to find people to pose up and tell their story, which would be fairly impossible anyway. Though exhausting I was able to go out almost every day, drive to suburbia, roll down the window and photograph the homes of sex offenders. The houses and a statement about their crimes would be chilling. The project called “Love Thy Neighbor” though as depressing as I felt at least proved to me that I could still make a statement.

Then a ray of hope. The criminal courthouse photographer was retiring and they needed a replacement. The Photo Director called and asked, “Did I want to try?” Though broke and desperate, I didn’t want to take the job thinking it would be too boring after all the things I’d seen and done but I realized this was the end of the line and I had no choice. I reluctantly said yes.

Sometime in 2007 I went to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Even though New York is the communications capital of the world, the courts were a backwater with archaic rules going back decades. You were not allowed to photograph in the courtrooms or hallways. The only place to photograph people going through the system was outside, where the defendants out on bail were leaving the building. An elaborate system was developed where the reporter would text me a description and then follow defendants out the door and point them out to me while I was hiding with a long lens in the hotdog stand in front of the building. The vendor thought the whole thing was hilarious and would usher me in behind the lined-up cans of coke to hide and shoot the defendants with a telephoto lens. It didn’t take much effort or skill and at the very least afforded me a way to make a living. During the down time which seemed to be most of the day I would hang outside with two cameras dangling from my shoulders enjoying the weather. One day I realized I was attracting attention from the defendants leaving the building. Noticing me they would come over and complain about the state of the situation they found themselves in. It was usually the same. Bad judges, I didn’t do it, they’re offering me a jail sentence if I plead guilty but it's too long. The rants went on and on. I asked if I could audio record them and take their picture. Surprisingly most said yes. The question I asked was simple. “What did they say you did?” When I got home I stared a blog and called it Courthouse Confessions. A few months later the New York Times got wind of what I was up to and wrote a story about it.

Looking for a follow-up I photographed mostly drug addicted kids,  “Crustypunks” in the park down the block from my apartment in the East Village. I then went out west and photographed Prostitutes in Nevada and people abducted by Aliens in the southwest using the same format each time.

My complete shift in style was dictated by circumstances beyond my control and my need to survive creatively when the street became impossible to tackle, artistically or as a photojournalist. I learned to keep my mind and heart open to the curveballs life will throw at you. Years later I would use the lessons learned from my experiences to start drawing with water color pencils when I was stuck in the house for months at the beginning of the pandemic. The results were another dramatic shift in the art I was creating.

In the 'Cherry Patch' project - the abandoned brothel in Nevada - it seems like time has been suspended. I wonder how many other places like this exist in the US, have you ever thought about doing a series on these places?

I’ve thought about it. I’m intrigued and fascinated by the projects photographers have done in abandoned buildings, air bases, insane asylums and the like. The Cherry Patch is in the same town as the Bunny Ranch where I was doing portraits of prostitutes. The madame asked me if I wanted to visit the abandoned brothel and I jumped at the chance. But like much of my work when I see that an opportunity presents itself and I’m interested in it, I’m all in. But I have to feel it. I’m not sure abandoned buildings per se, are something I’m generally interested in. The Cherry Patch has presence and even though it was closed I could really feel the energy of what happened there. I stayed at the Bunny Ranch and another brothel for a few weeks so I knew what’s going on in each room. I could visualize clients in the reception area after walking in the front door, the girls cooking in the kitchen, what went on in all those beds. I don’t think I can walk into an abandoned building and feel that energy if I wasn’t invested in what happened there.

You strike me as a multidisciplinary artist, mixing photography with drawings and paintings. Are the latter inspired by the people you captured in your photographs? How do you manage to work with different mediums at the same time?

My photographs drive my paintings and drawings. I don’t think I could have ever painted if I weren’t a photographer. I didn’t start painting till I was 69. That’s a lot of decades of experiences that have been stored in my mind. I could probably write a whole book on the differences between the two. But I think your choice of the Pole-less Dancer speaks volumes about the connection. She’s oddly out of place. Without the title it might be hard to even understand what’s going on. Where’s the pole? Why did I remove it? Why is she in a field? Why the violent storm behind her? Like my photos the image is intentionally composed to disorient the viewer, to question what it all means. Like the characters in my photos the environment is all a stage, the characters actors in an ongoing saga about time and place, class and the disenfranchised. The oddities of life. I took to painting to make the images I can’t find. That I only see in my head. That one cannot see in the photographic world. I’m not sure what’s easier. Seeing what’s there and making a photo that transcends time and place or making a painting of something that’s not there and distorts time and place to try to understand what could be. The real world and the imaginary world are all intertwined as is painting and photography for me. Our mind, our experiences, our dreams interpret what we see. Whether it's a camera or a brush, it doesn’t matter. I like to think it's all one.

INTERVIEW FROM TWO ITALIAN RASCALS MAGAZINE - ISSUE 1, WINTER 2022