Bill Abranowicz Turns His Lens on the Catskills

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Bill Abranowicz  0:03  
I worked in a darkroom sixteen hours a day. My fingers were black from the chemicals. My skin was sallow. My eyes were dark, but I learned to make a good print.

Brett Barry  0:16  
Bill Abranowicz is a renowned photographer who started snapping pictures fifty years ago. Bill's career has taken him around the globe many times over, taking pictures for the likes of Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Martha Stewart Living, and the list goes on. In his latest photography book, "Country Life," Bill turns his camera on our very own Catskills and a portfolio of twenty homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley. Welcome to Kaatscast. This week, a conversation with Bill Abranowicz from his and wife Andrea's home in Margaretville, New York.

Bill Abranowicz  1:01  
My name is Bill Abranowicz. I am a photographer and we're sitting in the living room of my home in Margaretville, New York. I have been a photographer for fifty years. This ... this coming year, I turned 67. I started when I was 17. I majored in economics at Rutgers for a couple of years ... took a photography class, immediately transferred to the School of Visual Arts ... started taking classes at night ... worked for a number of photographers towards Tice ... a master printer from New Jersey ... a wonderful photographer, the urban landscape ... that became a freelance printer. Then, I started ... I always asked to print for Horst P. Horst [the fashion photographer], and then he asked me to assist him and I was, you know, in my thirties by then and kind of ready to get over it. Assisting just seemed too attractive to work with a legendary photographer like that. He was 83 when I started working with him, so I started doing that for a few years, and ... and then I got an artist residency at Peters Valley in Sussex County, New Jersey ... and discovered the wonders of a rural area and I was still printing at that time and I got tired of printing other people's negatives and I thought I want to ... I want to survive on my own doing my photography and the gallery thing was working pretty well, and then it just collapsed in the '90s. So, my wife, Andrea ... she's a well-trained salesperson ... worked for Time Inc. for, you know, selling ad space for People Magazine for a number of years and decided to take my portfolio around. It was never ready. Never ready that, you know, typical artists ... I can't show it. It's not ready. She just took it in ... got one assignment. There was a big call for fine art photographers to do a commercial gig and I got into ad campaign. My wife was able to negotiate a credit and a commercial career took off. Commerce is ... it's a necessary thing and I enjoyed doing what I did. I never ... I never felt like I sold out ... did a couple times maybe ... but I was involved with Martha Stewart in the first issue. When I met her, she had three people in her company ... couple years later, there were 600. Photography ... when I started was only 150 years old, it was still relatively new. It was an oddity among the arts. People didn't, you know, it was not being collected on par with a lot of other media and ... and then that started to change. 150 years is certainly a long time, but it was still digital photography didn't exist. The craft of photography is something that you studied for decades. You know, I worked in a dark room sixteen hours a day. My fingers were black from the chemicals. My skin was sallow. My eyes were dark, but I learned to make a good print.

Brett Barry  3:59  
How did your experience with film photography influence how you approach digital photography now?

Bill Abranowicz  4:05  
There's always something new happening in photography. There's the latest this, the latest that, this camera that's, you know, I'm sure it's the same in ... in sound engineering, you know, so there was a science to the photography at the time. I really loved math and I really loved chemistry and science. I always excelled at those in school. They were things that just ... I just enjoyed that aspect of it, you know, and then when you started to realize the depth of what you could do in the darkroom that the layers of silver. You know, micro-measurement ... what it could stimulate, you know, and, you know, digital photography ... I enjoy being able to take a lot of photographs, not worry about the cost. I don't, what do they call, spray and pray. You know, I don't photograph everything and hope I can find something in an edit. I ... I'm trying to make a photograph, not take a photograph. The democratization of photography is a wonderful thing. You know, the things that we're able to see around the world because everyone has a camera is a remarkable thing, but the photography I do is ... is a little different than that. It's like ... I think like ... I think a poet might think, you know, there's an economy, there's a simplicity, there's a tightness, you know, and you still have to get to that, whether it's digital or film, you still have to, you know, it goes ... it goes much deeper than just snapping, you know, just pushing the button and that's the difference, you know, for me, I mean ... my best assistants know film photography. They understand in a classical sense and I think it matters that in the craft of photography, it's very important to me. They understand that and, you know, stuff is what it is and that's the way I don't ... I don't go removing, adding, you know, it's not a purity of any sort, but it's just the way that I was educated in photography.

Brett Barry  6:10  
So what kind of we call it post-production? What kind of work do you do to the photograph after it's been taken?

Bill Abranowicz  6:15  
So what I'll do is I'll take a photograph. I'll adjust the color. I will do the same things I was taught in the darkroom. Is it too light? Is it too dark? Is it too hard? Is it too soft? With minor cropping, help it. You know, the photograph doesn't work. Why? Robert Capa said, "Because I'm not close enough." You know, George Tice, my mentor, for whom I work almost eight years. You know, gave me a very concise ... he was a wonderful teacher gave me a very, very concise list of things to consider, so that if I went through that list, I could forget the rest. The more rules you know, the better you are at breaking those rules and getting beyond that, you know, so ... so the process in a lot of ways is very, very similar. I don't have to send the images out to make a print. I still edit, you know, if we go downstairs to my office, I ... I still edit on a large board moving images much like a filmmaker might. You know, I sequence them. I tried to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's the same thing and I don't care what the mechanism ... the tool is not going to change what I see. No, I ... I just know, you know, everything is second nature to me at this point. You know, 50 years. A camera is just an extension. I know the things to go through to get what I want and I suffer a lot to get it. You know, I do. I mean ... it causes anxiety, it causes depression, it causes all of the same, you know, if you are not getting to the core of what you're trying to do, then it's ... it's frustrating. You know, the suffering is all relative. We're sitting in a, you know, in a nice place overlooking the beautiful mountain. It's all relative. You don't have to go very far to realize how lucky I am to do this.

Brett Barry  8:07  
So what brought you here?

Bill Abranowicz  8:09  
We came ... we were invited by some friends who had a house in Fleischmanns to come skiing for the weekend and I'm from Bayonne, New Jersey. We didn't ski much and the first time I did ski, I wore blue jeans and got wet and frozen and all that stuff. So, we went skiing. I had a great time. The next week we had rented a house in Arkville; we did that for five years before we found land waited three more years, and then built a house. So, I came here for the skiing, but I stayed for the other three seasons as well. Although a couple of months I could do without.

Brett Barry  8:46  
So, this beautiful book that just came out. "Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley" is certainly not your first book. Tell me about the other picture books. I don't know if you'd call them picture books, coffee table books, or is that pejorative?

Bill Abranowicz  9:01  
No, I just ...

Brett Barry  9:02  
Yeah.

Bill Abranowicz  9:02  
They're just ...

Brett Barry  9:02  
It is a nice book for a coffee table because it's beautiful imagery to thumb through.

Bill Abranowicz  9:08  
Yeah, books ... books as objects, I think. For me, there are things I enjoy. You know, I, you know, having a book ... a good book around in the, you know, we have a lot of books and they move around and, you know, so it's just a book. I've done books on the Greek Islands, the country of Greece. I have done a book on the photographs inspired by the history of voting rights. You know, they're kind of varied. I'm just a photographer. I'm not an interior photographer. I'm not an architectural photographer. I'm not a landscape photographer. I am just a photographer and I photograph a lot of things. I don't want to be pigeonholed. I just enjoy the world as a big entity and I want to look at things close. I want to look at things macro, micro. I am a sap, you know, I am romantic. I get emotionally involved, you know, with Greece. I saw a way of life disappearing. You know, I was ... maybe in my ... I was in my early thirties when I started and, you know, this way of life was disappearing. It was mournful to me. So, I made photographs that were about all of these elements: silence, the sea, all of the things that I experienced and turned this little book of poems; almost visual poems. I did that; and then the economic crisis in Greece in 2008 through 2013. It went on and on and on in Greece and I had been going there for many, many years and my kids thought they were Greek. The recession in the United States was, you know, difficult. It was really difficult for a lot of people in Greece. It was devastating. I get involved in these things, and then, you know, I just find a wanting to tell a story about it. I was appalled by the 2016 election. I had an assignment in Alabama near Selma; went to Selma and just thought like, you know, how's it possible that this place that still looks like 1930s Walker Evans photograph is still dealing with, you know, after all of this time, they are still struggling over voting rights and to stand in the place where John Lewis was beaten that we all know just like January 6th. We all saw it with our ... or at least I did. I just thought that, you know, I want to do what I can in with a medium I have to try to do something. You know, the photography is a great social tool as Eliot Porter has talked about. You know, it's ... it's a propaganda device in a lot of ways. I have addressed the environment in a book on the Mianus River Gorge ... voting rights addressing the way people live is, you know, this ... this book is a pretty book and I'm fine doing a pretty book. I try to sneak a message in here and there, but I think we all need a respite from the heaviness man. It's just, I mean, that's why living here is so important to me, you know, because I might spend 23 and a half hours inside this house, but the half hour that I will get outside is just like, you know, it's incredible what it does to you. You know, if I go to the city, I'm crawling out of my skin after 36 hours as much as I enjoy it. I want to go home.

Brett Barry  12:35  
Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Bill Abranowicz, right after this. Kaatscast is made possible by a grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation; and by local sponsors like Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599; and by Ulster Savings Bank. With locations throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley, including right here in Phoenicia and Woodstock. Call 866-440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender. Back in Margaretville, I asked photographer, Bill Abramowitz, about his new book, "Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley," and how he chose the twenty homes featured inside.

Bill Abranowicz  13:47  
I started at the Thomas Cole House. That's the first house I had photographed specifically to this book. It was going to be about the Catskills. Then, the publisher suggested, "Let's do both sides of the river." So, the line went from the Delaware River to the Berkshires through Olana and that, you know, pretty much stayed on that. I veered a little bit, but that was the idea.

Brett Barry  14:08  
Is there a common thread?

Bill Abranowicz  14:10  
Creativity. These are all ... everyone in this book has an element of creativity in the way that they live or their occupation. You know, there's writers. There's set designers, architects, photographers, you know, it's ... it's a wide range, but there's all an element of creativity.

Brett Barry  14:32  
In the introduction to the book, Bill writes of their discovery of the Catskills in the 1970s. We had found our own seasonal rental; a quintessential ski shack with an ornery porcupine who resided just a few inches below our poorly insulated floor. The house was always filled with friends, exhausted from skiing and comfortable in our long johns. We spent the long dark hours of winter in front of the fire with games, pizza, and movies. I think that ... that's a common entry point for a lot of people who come up here ...

Bill Abranowicz  15:07  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  15:07  
... kind of getting away from it all weekend; just have fun experience?

Bill Abranowicz  15:11  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  15:13  
Have you been able to retain that sense of discovery and fun or does life takeover and it becomes a place where you live, but not necessarily taking advantage of those things that the castle offers?

Bill Abranowicz  15:24  
In full ... living here full-time, you know, you know, I'm still working. I have trips scheduled every week. So, when I come home, we try to entertain as much as we can and, you know, we have the wonderful Zada's and Oda in Margaretville. We can get out and socialize. So, that replaces it to, you know, we didn't have that, you know ...

Brett Barry  15:46  
New places, right?

Bill Abranowicz  15:47  
New places.

Brett Barry  15:48  
Wine bar?

Bill Abranowicz  15:48  
Wine bar, restaurants, you know, really? We have Balkan food, we have a Korean place. I mean, it's just an astonishing thing that, you know, the internationality of the world is happening in a place that didn't have the internationality. You know, there is a flowing back and forth between old and new here and I think it's wonderful. I still get a season's pass at Belleayre. We take advantage. We hike, you know, my wife is, you know, quite an outdoorsperson, so she's out there all the time. Yeah, we take advantage of it. It's good living here. It's good living here, you know ...

Brett Barry  16:18  
Some of the houses that are featured in this book. One of the things I noticed that I thought was really neat was the ... some of the outbuildings?

Bill Abranowicz  16:27  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  16:28  
Alan and Peter's house; the outbuildings like that's the one that had the kind of path that ...

Bill Abranowicz  16:32  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  16:33  
... some together?

Bill Abranowicz  16:34  
Yeah, they ... Alan Wanzenberg, who was a really talented architect and Peter Kelly, a landscape designer ... about 15 years ago, I was ... I was asked by Architectural Digest to photograph these cabins that he had built on this property and they were all, you know, self-sustained composting toilets off the grid, wonderfully designed cabins and they lived in those for years. You know, there were ... I think there were three of them. He was developing the land and the conservation wiseway, and then later built this house. The house ... the main house that's in the book. But, yeah, those little cabins. I mean, for most people. You know, that's all you need. You know, that's all, you know, why? Why go on from there, it's just perfection.

Brett Barry  17:22  
And then we had some houses that have quite a history. It's funny because you ... the titles of the ... of the chapters or the sections of the houses are the people's names.

Bill Abranowicz  17:32  
Right.

Brett Barry  17:32  
And then I come to one that says, "Maria and Thomas Cole." I thought, 'that sounds familiar.'

Bill Abranowicz  17:36  
Yeah, exactly.

Brett Barry  17:37  
Thomas Cole's home.

Bill Abranowicz  17:38  
Right.

Brett Barry  17:38  
And then "Isabel and Frederic Church."

Bill Abranowicz  17:40  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  17:41  
They're home as well.

Bill Abranowicz  17:41  
Yeah, yeah, you know, we know Olana as Frederic Church is home. We know the Thomas Cole Site as the Thomas Cole Site, you know, but, you know, when we were doing this, we realized like, you know, this is about the home. So, Thomas Cole didn't just, you know, he wasn't the only one involved in his home. His wife, Maria, you know, and the same was Isabel and Frederic Church, you know, I mean, it's like the civil rights movement. You know, we know all the men, but man, there were all heck of a lot more in the way of ... of women, you know, behind those men, but we know the men's names.

Brett Barry  18:14  
See ... I even mispronounced Maria.

Bill Abranowicz  18:16  
I learned that Saturday.

Brett Barry  18:17  
So, okay.

Bill Abranowicz  18:20  
So, that's ... it's all good. I'm just passing it on.

Brett Barry  18:23  
And the ... the text that accompanies these. Did you write that or ...

Bill Abranowicz  18:27  
Yeah, I ... this book was done with my son, Zander, lives in Richmond. Zander is a writer and I can write but he's a better writer than I am, and so I would come back with a notebook and jot down my, you know, the senses of that day and ... and then pass them on to him and just it was just a list really and he wrote it in my voice and who better than a son to write it. I didn't, you know, the father's voice. It was great. Great opportunity for us.

Brett Barry  19:00  
Zander writes of homeowners, Jessica and Tim, the Catskills are a study in contrasts. The winters are long, cold, and dark. The summers are brief, warm, and beautiful. There's a certain intensity of green that arrives each spring and every year it comes as a surprise. How can this barren landscape unlock such life and in winter, conversely, how can this Eden simply vanish? The Saugerties home of Jessica and Tim possesses a similar quality, manipulating light and dark in a way that isn't so much disorienting as intoxicating ... yeah.

Bill Abranowicz  19:38  
Yeah, he's ... he's a good writer. This is the third book I've done with them.

Brett Barry  19:44  
And light comes back in again, so I think that's a ... that's a key component not only of design, but is photography is ...

Bill Abranowicz  19:53  
Photography ...

Brett Barry  19:54  
... nothing but light, right?

Bill Abranowicz  19:55  
Tou phós [P-H-O-S], Greek for ... for light, you know, the study of light. That's what it's about. Light. I had to do a questionnaire for someone and they asked, "What's one accessory that is absolutely necessary and interior?" I said, "Good light." You know, you got nothing but if you have good light, you have everything. Acclimating your house towards light is like feng shui, you know, for me. I want the sun rising on my bedroom and I want to be able to see the sunset and I want the house warmed in the winter from the south and, you know, all those ... all those things.

Brett Barry  20:37  
And as I get older, I need more and more of it to actually just see.

Bill Abranowicz  20:41  
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I ... I'm really kind of into like keeping things nice and dim ... and my wife ... she's got them cranked up.

Brett Barry  20:53  
Another home ... Jennifer and Christopher's house is like a designer treehouse.

Bill Abranowicz  20:58  
Yeah, yeah, that is a remarkable house built by an architect. I believe in the '90s and they were coming up and he started looking and they found this, you know, he's a fisherman and they found this beautiful home and just out, you know, outside of town or Roscoe? It is a total treehouse. It goes up and up and up and ...

Brett Barry  21:20  
So, they found it that way. They didn't build that.

Bill Abranowicz  21:21  
They did not build it. Yeah, but they took it back. No, they just started taking care of it in a different way and they live up here full-time. They have a place in the city still, but and he now is the president of the board of the Catskill Art Space.

Brett Barry  21:37  
Where's that?

Bill Abranowicz  21:38  
In Livingston Manor. If you've not been there, I would highly recommend it. It is ... it's top shelf.

Brett Barry  21:46  
One more home that struck me, I mean, they all struck me about Andrea and Clark. It says, "You're built with wood and stone scavenged from crumbled walls and topped by a vertiginous steeple." The structure epitomizes Clark's belief that a house is a livable sculpture. He started constructing it in the Northern Catskills town when he was only 19.

Bill Abranowicz  22:04  
Yeah.

Brett Barry  22:04  
What's the backstory there?

Bill Abranowicz  22:06  
I don't know the complete story of it, but he started building this house; and when he was 19, he's ... I think 70 now. It's still not done. I know his wife, Andrea, who was a stylist now owns the little stone house in Delhi and Andrea's sensibility is, you know, to me, some of the most beautiful. You know, the things that she considers in the collection and curation of an object and this house when I saw it on the outside, it's like, you know, something from "The Hobbit," and on the inside, you're in Japan ... you're in ... in the living room. It's like being in a ryokan in Kyoto, and in the upstairs rooms are at the entrance. It's this fantasy Cycladic Greek architecture of smooth white walls and curves and, you know, and in the nether undulates into wood and it's just, you know, it says, "Living a house as I've seen," you know, my friend in Greece designs with the landscape. He just moves, you know, in a fluid line and that's what Clark did in a certain way, you know, he built the structure, he topped it off, and then I don't know how he did it. It's just stunning.

Brett Barry  23:21  
I have one specific question about a photograph ... Gary and Christopher's house ... the tiles around the fireplace. First of all, my grandmother had tiles were still does in the house where she lived and she created them. She painted them all.

Bill Abranowicz  23:36  
Wow!

Brett Barry  23:37  
So, I hope that those get held on to.

Bill Abranowicz  23:39  
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Barry  23:40  
Umm ...

Bill Abranowicz  23:40  
Yeah, insist on that one.

Brett Barry  23:42  
And then that same picture ... that little sunlight filtering through the window looks that portion of it ... looks very much like painting. How did you achieve that?

Bill Abranowicz  23:49  
Well, it's ... it's ... it's their glass, you know, you're going to be cold in that house in the winter. But, boy, when ... when light comes through that glass, it has bubbles, it has movement, and it does something. It gives a painterly quality.

Brett Barry  24:06  
We're ... we're down to the acknowledgments now. We're moving through this book and you say ... you say, "I dedicate this book to my father, William. He would have loved this place." Can you tell me about your dad and why you dedicated the book to him?

Bill Abranowicz  24:23  
Yeah, my father was an operating engineer. He became an operating engineer was, you know, holding down a couple of part-time jobs cleaning a laundromat delivering bread. He was a milkman, studying to become an operating engineer. He had four kids lived in a small apartment in Bayonne, New Jersey and, you know, he was an alcoholic and he was dead by the time I was 17. My mother was left at the age of 35 with four kids and totally ... totally busted. You know, I didn't realize how busted ... and for 50 years, well, 40 maybe, I gave up kind of dwelling heavily darkly on it. It took a long time to reconcile that. You know, took a long time. I would not mention my father. If I did, I talked about him in the most demeaning terms and I remember going to Lake George when ... when I was a kid and how happy he was. You know, there was a lot of beer involved. But I remember how happy he was and I was only small, you know, and so, you know, after struggling with all of this for 40 or so years and watching my own life progress, you know, and struggling with certain things myself. I started to reconcile with him, you know, that it was a sickness that it was a disease that he was not well that he had a lot of pressure and that I'm sitting in a really nice house in Margaretville overlooking the New Kingston Valley because of certain things that he gave me, you know, and so with this book, I sort of thought, "Okay, you know, you're 67." Time to flush that one, so I tried to. You know, there's still remnants, but I'm reconciled. You know, I'm reconciled. Time to move on. If you can't move on at this age, you know, it's like ... "You're in trouble, man. You're ... you're in deep, deep trouble." What I thought was a little traumatic thing when I was 17; it took 40 years to reconcile. So, it wasn't so little, but it drove me. I mean, at my father's funeral, I remember saying to an aunt of mine that ... "I'm going to do books," and so that's what I've been doing, you know, books.

Brett Barry  26:52  
Many thanks to Bill Abranowicz and Andrea Raisfeld for inviting us into their Catskill Mountains home. Bill signed a copy of "Country Life" for us and we're giving it away to one lucky listener. It might be you, just click the link in the show notes to enter and we'll announce a winner in our next episode. Thanks to production intern, Mollie Zoldan, who recorded this interview. This episode was supported by the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com; and by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. I'm your host, Brett Barry. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.