Helen K Garber Noir Photography, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Helen K Garber Noir Photography – Helen was was the instructor of a Noir Photography class that my wife and I took last year. Helen is an internationally known photographer, and her art is shown in numerous museum collections. She is also an author and works in other art mediums.

Helen took her love for night street photography and merged it with extensive research into Film-Noir to create the class on Noir Photography. During the day, we watched Film-Noirs and learned about the visual elements. At night we took to the streets and ranches of Santa Fe to practice our Noir Photography skills.

I think you are going to find it very interesting and it will aid in our understanding of Film-Noir. So, let’s get going.  

Helen K Garber Noir Photography Tanscript

Helen K. Garber Noir Photography Tanscript

(00:00):
Today. I’m here with Helen K. Garber and she’s a professional artist and I’m very excited to have her here and I appreciate her taking the time, very much to come on the show and share some information with us. Hello, Helen, how are you?

(00:14):
I’m good. A little chilly today. In Santa Fe, other than that, pretty good.

(00:19):
Pretty good. I want to jump right in and could you please tell the audience about your artistic background. I don’t know if you consider yourself an artist or a photographer that does art or an artist that does photography or how, how wide you,

(00:34):
Well, actually I started out as a scenic designer in theater, so my degrees in scene design, but I was always a film lover and a photographer, my dad taught me when I was pretty young, how to use a camera and a dark room and worked with film up until the early two thousands when I switched to digital. So I’m a photographer first, but I’ve made video films and I paint and do mixed media and scenic design, write. I do many, many, many things, but my main focus or a master would be photography.

(01:13):
I was looking on your website earlier and I saw all the international awards and national awards, the books that you’d contributed to. It’s pretty extensive and we’ll get the link at the end of the show for everybody.

(01:24):
Sure, sure. So it’s been a lot of fun.

(01:28):
Yeah. So as you, as you moved in to kind of the urban photography and got into the night photography, not in, not quite into the noir, noir yet, but how did, how did that evolution kind of take place?

(01:42):
Well, I, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and night was a very scary place there. I had this very Jewish mom and she would, you know, make sure we were home before dark was like dark, was a scary thing. And I guess it kind of thrilled me to be, once I became a teenager to be out at night. And then, especially in the summer, it’d be very hot during the summer days and then at night it would be really wonderful to be out there. And in Brooklyn, you as a young age, you could use mass transit and get around pretty easily. And I started to go down to the village in Manhattan, really fell in love with the urban landscape and night photography thing started. Well, I became a professional photographer in the early nineties. And I was doing all these different things and then I was taking a drive up the coast to Seattle to see a friend from college, Oh, finish up a play up there, Shirley Woodard, she saw that the TV show, now I’m called ‘Pose’ and we stopped at a used bookstore and there was a book on Versailles Paris Night in used book version of that.

(02:58):
And I said, Oh, what’s this? And I went, Oh my God, this is it. It just really spoke to me. And that was 1997 and that summer we were back in New York. We’d go back to New York from Santa Monica, California, where we lived about once a year. And I was telling my friend about the book I guess or whatever, and he said have you ever been to the Empire State Building at night because you could do that. And I’m always looking for roofs. I love to be high up and looking down. And for my wedding, he was Bruce was the best man at our wedding and my husband’s roommate and he, we, we got married back East and then went to the Waldorf for a few days for a honeymoon because I love Art Deco and anything, you know, sophisticated New York. So we did that and then, and Bruce came down from Woodstock, New York and said, you know, I could get up to the roof, you know, want to get up to the roof with the Waldorf.

(03:55):
And I said, fantastic. We went up there and I looked down through this city lights and took my first kind of night image through the point shoots, still camera, I guess. And then I’m 97, he said, go to the Empire State Building at night. So we did, we went there. I thought it was open late. So it might’ve been 10, 11, maybe close to midnight, very warm summer night. And I had my knapsack, this is back in the time of film camera. So I probably had two cameras, a couple bunch of lenses. And when I got there, the security desk said well, okay, that’s all fine, but you can’t have a tripod. So I said, Oh no, no, I don’t have a tripod. And I, I think I even signed an affidavit, affidavit, that I didn’t have a tripod, but I was lying. I did have a tripod.

(04:42):And I like to break rules. I had a little mini tripod that I learned about taking a class Photographing the National Geo Way through UCLA. And the teacher said a mini tripod is just a fantastic thing to have. So I got up to the Empire State Building and hooked up my mini tripod. And there’s a if you seen Sleepless in Seattle [1993], I’ve been up there, you’ll see that there’s a, there is a chain link fence around the observatory fence, but there’s like a little ledge outside the fence. So I was able to use that ledge with my mini tripod and photograph the cityscape from there as well as use the telescopes that back then you put 25 cents in and that to be able to shoot up and shoot the radio tower itself. And when I got back home I, I developed the film, saw the contact sheet and went, Oh my God, this is something.

(05:42):
And it was something, I mean a lot of those images from that contact sheet are in museums now and because nobody lied and brought up a mini tripod up to the Empire State Building, we now you can take photographs from there with your iPhone. No big deal. It’s, you could stand hand hold it. The back then you couldn’t, film wasn’t, didn’t allow you to be able to take a clear photo at night. My image of the World Trade Center was still up. It’s 1997. Well that’s a number of museum collections because there are very few images. If any of the World Trade Center from the Empire State Building at night, It couldn’t, it couldn’t be done without a tripod. And back then too you, it was very, you couldn’t photograph these buildings are own, they’re privately owned and you had to have permissions to photograph.

(06:32):
It’s not like today where everyone runs around with the iPhone and photographs, concerts. And if you ha if you pulled a camera out during a concert at the Hollywood Bowl back in the day the, the security guard would just stop you. It was, you was breaking copyright and for the artists and for the structure itself, people own the rights to those images. Now there’s no way of controlling that. So everybody just shoots away.

(07:00):
A different time.

(07:01):
Quite a different time. Yeah.

(07:04):
You did the same thing for Los Angeles, I believe.

(07:07):
Yes. So, so I took that contact sheet and by, we were living in Los Angeles and I said, what equals the Empire State Building in Los Angeles. And that’s the Griffith Park Observatory. And I brought my tripod up there and I took a shot up there. And that image is on the cover. Oh, of ’em.

(07:28):
I’ve completed the book after the check the film from Akashic Noir book Los Angeles Noir. And that, that image I sold a lot of those prints. It’s one of my iconic images and that’s 1997. And so that’s sort of off the series. It became New York Noir, LA Noir. And then I went off to Europe. Oh, I did Amsterdam, Venice, Rome, Paris. And my intention was to just travel around the world. I just decided early on it was going to be a 10-year project and I, I, we traveled to as many cities as I could and photograph and why I ended up with in 2007 I was back in New York. I was given a one person show at the college, the university I went to. And I purposely, I never photographed Coney Island at night. I grew up in Brooklyn and Coney Island was a big deal for me and I was already shooting digital, but I kept shooting only film for this series.

(08:30):
And I brought my film camera and we landed in it at night at JFK. So we go directly Coney Island And very strangely it was pea soup fog, which I don’t remember it’s fog growing up in New York, but there it was. And we got there. It was just, it was like late October. So there was us a couple of prostitutes and that’s it. I mean a handful of people in the streets of Coney Island. Yeah, I admit that we’re up there. And I was like, so I, I photographed there and then my house was that I grew up in was about 10 minutes away by car at that time of night cause there were no cars. And we drove there and I photographed that. And that was a very strange night too, cause it was still foggy. And it was a, I guess an important Jewish holiday where the Hasidic Jews that had now moved into the neighborhood were out going to synagogue.

(09:23):
They were coming back for synagogue after midnight. I never knew of this then. So it was a very kind of eerie sensation because they say you can’t go home again. And this was of course no longer my home. It was a whole other group of people there. And a number of the homes were remodeled because the Hasidic Jews like lots of children and they it’s, even though the homes were quite large to begin with, they made them even larger. So there’s a lot of remodeled houses and that house directly across the street was just a big hole in the ground. So it was a very to be, you know, creative to be made into another house and a house that I grew up knowing. And then, you know, with everyone being gone, it was very surreal. And that’s how I ended that series.

(10:07):
And that was Urban Noir LA, New York. Yeah. We made a projection out of that and added jazz music that was composed by a Grammy nominated jazz musician and composer John Beasley. And you could see that on YouTube as well, or Urban Noir LA, New York. And then I started reading because literature is always important to me. I started reading public fiction and has a lot of poetry in it, and I would, I would capture, I would highlight the, the lines that that use the city’s character. And then I captioned in my images. It was just like a big fun game and then put it all together and it was accepted very well. And the most exciting presentation of it was at the Academy own Samuel Goodwood theater Goldwin Theater. I’m sorry. And so I got a call from them. They were having a Noir festival.

(11:09):
They had heard about my piece and I assisted come, let’s do it. Tech check. And this is the greatest movie theater in the world, at least back in. I think that was 2009, 2010 when I did that. And so I got to drive to Beverly Hills and bring my, it was on a CD back then. DVD. Yeah. And it was me and the head of the department just in this fabulous theater with two giant Oscars. I mean, even side of the screen. And we did the tech rehearsal and that was thrilling. I mean, that was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. It sounded. And it was just fantastic. And then that Friday night we drove, I think the theater holds about 3000. And we drove to as invited guests. And there was this huge line around the, the block and I that as a photographer, you’re a very solo person. You don’t really show your work with an audience like an actor would or a director would. But there I got to share my work with,u3000 people and it was very, very exciting to hear the applause and be treated like royalty and introduced to the fans. It was great.

(12:19):
Well that’s fantastic. Well, I wanted to back up and ask this one quick question. PR in Paris, did you shoot from the ground or did you shoot from an elevation?

(12:27):
Well I went up the empires of the Eiffel Tower. You can take an elevator. So that’s shot high up from there and the top of ’em the cathedral, Notre-Dame. Notre-Dame. Yeah. Cause it was before the fire. But, and then one of what I did do was take the camera and put it on the ground directly facing up the center of the Eiffel Tower and put it on a self-timer I guess. And, and it made the Eiffel Tower look like a piece of jewelry and that images in a number of museum collections as well. It’s Eiffel tower straight up.

(13:12):
That’s fantastic. I’m going to jump I think I’m going to jump these two questions together. You, you were, by the time you were reading the pulp fiction, you were already into the Noir part of it. The noir aspects of it. Yeah.

(13:25):
Oh, okay. Yeah. Go ahead. I’m sorry

(13:28):
If I understood right, you kind of evolved into that part of it. Yeah.

(13:32):
Yes.

(13:34):
Where did that kind of change take place or,

(13:38):
Mmm. Let me see it. Maybe I’m just as it once I met Eddie Muller and started going to the Film-Noir in the early two thousands and I started just cause I grew up seeing these films on TV. And then I read the, the first Raymond Chandler book because my friend suggests, she says, you know, Helen, you, you would like Raymond Chandler. And I think she gave it to me like in 1987 and just sat there on the shelf and then I read something, I, that the books were being reissued and it just kind of clicked and I read the first one and I was like, wow, this feels like he and I were walking hand in hand together through the streets of LA and but you know, 40 years apart I guess at that time. So then I started to investigate it. Pulp fiction was written by all cultures and men, women, gays black people, Jews.

(14:36):
I had one Japanese in any whatever culture wrote the person, use that culture as part of the pulp fiction. So it became much more deeper than just as the same detective story over and over again, which, yeah. And so I read about 150 books set in LA and then my friend helped me in New York because after a while they are at the same detective story written over and over again with just a little culture and I got all tired of it. So I had great help from my editor who was taking a break. Abigail Lewis and we got some more of those. And, and the Akashic books, they have ’em they have like urban Noir anthologies in cities all over the world is you could find book’s Rome. Okay. I mean it’s all over the world. That’s Brooklyn Noir L.A. Noir there working on a Santa Fe Noir right now.

(15:31):
Oh, fantastic. Yeah. And look forward to that. I finally finished a Ride the Pink Horse (Book) [1947].

(15:37):
Oh yeah.

(15:38):
Was shocked by the different book ending than the movie ending. Yeah. Well this is primarily a movie podcast and I do a lot of Film-Noir, but could you take the time to talk about the changes, the German influences on photography that we’re paralleling the German influences on movies at the same time? Kind of it.

(16:01):
So it’s so German Expressionism was very big in the 1920s. And so we saw those here. I mean, I got to see them in New York in these art houses as these old silent films, black and white films like Metropolis [1927] and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920]. And those are the three ones I could just think of off the top of my head. And they kind of stuck in my head. And so World War II started, the Nazis started prosecuting these people. They were artists, a lot of Jews. And they ended up escaping and then coming to the United States there was a great show at the Skirball Museum uh called ‘Light and Noir: Exiles and Emigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950’ about these people. And Otto Preminger was one Billy Wilder and Casablanca (1942) is a very interesting film because most of the people involved in that film were these escapees from Germany.

(16:57):
And whether the, the technical people, the director well, Michael Curtiz and, and so okay, so now it’s in the forties. And they got the, they were famous from Germany and they started making these films and they, they started changing the look of the films. And I liked them because they were very, they look great. And they, they were shot at night and they were very sophisticated, mostly set in urban settings. I loved Art Deco and architecture and, and then the films just had fantastic characters. Women who, you know, were strong women. This is, yeah, I’m watching his films in the sixties and seventies. Women’s lib is just starting to happen. I mean, before then all you had was Katherine Hepburn was, you know, I, I always idolize strong women and Bette Davis and I got to see all those little films growing up on the Million Dollar Movie in New York.

(18:00):
They used to play the same film like every day at four o’clock for a week. So, you know, my husband doesn’t understand why I could enjoy a film over and over again, but there’s so much more to see each time you watch it, you could hear it, you could look at it, and then you could study the characters. I like to look at the, the settings, the historical settings. It’s, it’s fascinating to me. So film was very important to me and jazz music and even Woody Allen films cause he also was inspired by the same films. He would go see the same films that I would in those same theaters in New York. And then, you know, everybody gets influenced and it trickles down and you create this beautiful imagery. For me, it was all about this beautiful imagery. Yeah.

(18:56):
Oh, let me see. No. Can you talk a little bit about your favorite Noir films and why they’re visually important? I know you showed us some in the class but what are you, what are your favorite ones?

(19:09):
I think my most favorite, favorite is Double Indemnity [1944]. It’s just brilliantly everything about it. The script, the acting is visually fantastic and yeah, it runs around the streets of L.A. It’s very recognizable and it’s set in that period. And you, and you have the Barbara Stanwyck is fantastic. It’s just a perfect film. Billy Wilder. I mean it’s just perfect. And no, I’ll just say The Third Man [1949] is also up there, one of my favorites cause it’s, it’s set in the Vienna and, and Joseph Cotton is fantastic. And then Orson Wells and it’s the action and the plot, but it’s very exotic. That’s one of my favorite. And The Maltese Falcon [1941]. Wow. Okay. I should have written a list.

(20:08):
Well, I know in The Third Man [1949] man, you’ve got to really pay attention because that movie is intense I guess.

(20:14):
Yep.

(20:15):
And it’s, you have to really watch it where it’s jumping around. So I like it that, but yeah, that sounds like a that and a Sunset Boulevard [1950] and a few of the other ones.

(20:25):
Oh yes.

(20:26):
I noticed that when out in the class you were, you know, looking at the horses, moving through the snow and I was from my, film mind, I was thinking, Oh look at the dialogue and stuff and you are doing the visual stuff. And I was like a little different. But some of the, the visual things like in Blood on the Moon (1948) where the horses riding through the snow. Do you have any other examples like that of really striking visuals that,

(20:55):
Hmm. Oh, Oh, I’ll switch over to Alfred Hitchcock. I didn’t mention Alfred Hitchcock even though he’s not like Noir, but he has all the components of Noir plus more humor. So visually his movies because it’s all the angles and stuff. What depends the, the, his choice of how to shoot or Citizen Kane [1941] too. These are kind of non-Noir but visually important films and that style of Noir. Mmm. So in terms of Blood on the Moon (1948), if I remember back then, it was just the fact that they were able to, they actually photographed that at night, back in the day when they did that. What was it, late forties. I can’t remember when they shut that off.

(21:42):
It was the forties, but I don’t know what year.

(21:44):
Yeah, I think it’s like 47, 49 and yeah, it’s so hard to shoot at night with film. So back then even still today, they would do day for night, where while we did in class where we should just before sunset. So, they’re very strong shadows and then you play with it and post-production and then you lower the exposure. And so it actually looks like at night you lower the exposure and you up the contrast and that kind of gives you this real fake night that generally works. But he, they actually shot at night and I thought that was kind of fantastic and the snow adds ’em another dimension {}, you know, it gives a softening though. Wow. That I, because I liked the sharp contrast, but then there’s this one, if it gives it a more romantic kind of feel to have that filter of snow through that. Oh, sharpness,

(22:43):
Right. Kind of just breaks the, the mood a little bit.

(22:46):
Yeah. It’s just, it’s one more step from reality. I love to shoot my horses when it’s snowing. It just, it’s just an unusual thing to see through those little dots.

(22:59):
Right. so I guess we’ve already covered it, but I mean, you can go ahead and ask in case I missed anything. Why is Noir photography important to study or practice?

(23:11):
It’s, it’s, what is it? It’s just what, what’s important to you? I mean, it’s a subjective thing and, and visually I find it exciting and beautiful and dramatic. And with my background in theater and growing up in New York City, it, it appeals to me and there’s an adventure involved. I mean, getting up on the high roofs to shoot down is as important as anything else I would was, my big bonus was in L.A. I met someone who is an important with ’em gentrifying downtown L.A., And I said you any good roofs I could shoot off of and he said, Oh yeah. And he got me up on the helipad or the at that time was called USBank Tower, which in 2005, which was the tallest building in Los Angeles. So I got to go up there. I was at a very special deal to be allowed up there.

(24:04):
It was soon after the World Trade Center came down. So, it was very big security. So they allowed me up there and I was so high, I could see probably a hundred miles and was able to document the entire city all at once in this speed, 360 degree Panorama. But just the whole thing of what it took to make that project. And that’s on my website. You can read the story about it. It was really, really exciting and it ended up with the Venice Biennale. So you know, who was a lovely ending to just, Oh, I have an idea. Can I get up on a cool roof? Yeah. The next thing I was in Venice, Italy at the opening reception from the Venice Biennale in 2006. It was great.

(24:50):
That’s fantastic. Can you, I spent a little bit of time talking about the Santa Fe film. I Santa Fe Noir photography class and any planned future classes.

(25:01):
Yeah. We’re going to do it again in 2021 probably in September. I want to make sure everyone stays warm. We love, we lucked out. The last day we had beautiful weather, but that I remember that first morning was really cold. So we’re going to move it until September of 2021 and then we’ll have different adventures. I mean, cause the whole point of that class is fun. It’s just, let’s, cause I think again, with the adventure of going to Bill Mann’s ranch, it was the actual doing it more than anything else. And then it was so thrilling for me to see that the images were so fantastic. So it just showed how everybody was so super excited about the experience. And so that was a great thrill and the school was thrilled and everyone’s so happy that we didn’t even leave the classroom before they invited me back to do it again. And plus adding another class of shooting horses and doing that this September how to take portraits of horses.

(26:08):
Oh, very interesting. I was looking at those today on the website too. They’re beautiful.

(26:12):
Oh, thank you. Yeah, so we’re going to, we’ll go to different beautiful ranches because again, it’s the adventure more than anything. And they want, Oh, and also for the Santa Fe Noir class, we’ll add a printing two days of printing as well. They were sorry that we didn’t have that. The students, so we’re going to lengthen in the class to five days. You have two days in the lab afterwards.

(26:34):
That would be fantastic. I look forward to that. Any thoughts? Any thoughts on jumping out to any other cities in the far out? You know, back to L.A.

(26:46):
No Santa Fe right now.

(26:49):
That’s where the photography is going to be from now on.

(26:54):
Yeah. I’m just really happy not traveling and especially now with this virus. Oh yeah. Who the heck wants to get on a plane. You come out and drive this time. First of all, it’s a nice, I love road trips. There’s so much fun.

(27:08):
Yeah I need to drive out there and go through Roswell on the way? Oh, absolutely. The UFO people. Yeah. This is great stuff. If in that class, if there was one thing that you could get your students to take away, what would be that one thing that you would want them to know.

(27:23):
Just how to have a good time. Really go forward. Don’t be afraid. You know, have an adventure and it’ll come through in your art. That’s fine. I’ll come through.

(27:36):
So I have fun now they say that about archaeology. You’re doing archaeology and you’re not having fun. You’re doing it wrong.

(27:42):
Exactly.

(27:46):
Santa Fe in this area is amazing for archeology as well. So once I get through my horse phase, I’m looking for, because this property we just bought is, is tremendous history here on the land. We just, I just read this book Underland: A Deep Time Journey and understanding all the layers of the earth then, and the mountains and that it’s, there’s nothing solid out there. Those mountains are all just like a beehive with all these caverns and over the millions of years of the different creatures, including the humans who’ve lived here. And there’s things underneath this. This land I just bought and I want to do my own little archaeological digs. See what indigenous artifacts I could find. That would be fun.

(28:34):
Yeah. I’ve got a friend out there that’s a retired, a National Park Service archaeologist, lives in Santa Fe. I’ll give you, I’ll give you his address.

(28:41):
Yeah. So maybe I’ll can connect and talk about archaeology. He does a metal detecting on Apache war sites. Really? Wow. And then, so he’s actually found, yeah. A lot of evidence of a, they thought the camps were a, there wouldn’t be any evidence there, but when they, him and Doug Scott took the metal detectors in, they started finding out, well, like, here they are, and then they would be close to like a trail, but they would never be in the same place very long. So it’s a pretty interesting project. He hasn’t written it up yet, but it’s ongoing.

(29:14):
I’d love to meet him because it’s just terrible that they made Native Americans stay put, because that’s just so unnatural. It’s like putting a horse in a stall 24 hours a day. Right. Well, yeah. My last question is the generally that stole this from Rachel Maddow. What have I forgotten to ask you?

(29:37):
Mmm, I can’t think right now. I think we kind of covered it. Anything we missed is just you have to Google my name on the internet. You can read all, all sorts of things in the, there are articles and all my website. There’s also some links to the articles about my work and the video. And you could see the Urban Noir L.A., New York, on YouTube, the put it projected on your TV screen. I think I’d see an HD as far as I know and hear John’s music and read the titles. It’s, it’s, it’s really fun.

(30:14):
Oh, that sounds good. That was what I was going to say. Do you want to give out your particular web link or any project or thing you’re working on for the people?

(30:22):
Yeah. Anyone could friend me on Facebook. It’s just Helen K. Garber. And same thing with the on a Linkedin or Helen’s Instagram or Twitter. It’s always just Helen K. Garber and my website’s HelenKGarber.com. So you got to remember the middle K. That’s the hard part.

(30:46):
Okay. Well I’ll put that in the I’ll put that in all the show note links too, and we’ll do a transcription and everything. So we’ll have all that in there. Helen, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you’re busy and everything, but I really appreciate it. I think my audience is going to get a lot out of this.

(31:02):
Great. Thank you so much.

(31:03):
I’m looking forward to coming to another of your classes because I learned so much in that class. I’m still thinking about it.

(31:11):
Oh, that’s great. That warms my heart. I really enjoyed teaching.

(31:16):
Well, thank you very much. Okay. Bye. Bye.