ZEKE Magazine: Fall 2021, Interview with Joseph Rodriguez

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Interview JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ Joseph Rodriguez is a New York-based photographer whose career spans over 25 years. His work has been published in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Newsweek, New York Magazine and others. He teaches at NYU and the International Center for Photography (ICP), among others, and has published several books including, more recently: Taxi: A Journey Through My Window 1977-1987 and LAPD 1994. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for clarity. By Caterina Clerici Caterina Clerici: Can you tell us about your background and how you got started in photography? and then dropped out and then got into the drug scene, started doing heroin, selling heroin, all that bad boy stuff. I went to Rikers Island. First time I went in, I was 17 years old. The second time I was 20, and I was a much tougher guy than when I first went in. Rikers Island is not a place that I can even describe to you. How horrible that place is, that’s a whole other story. However, I came out at a very interesting time because I felt the need to change and those were the times of affirmative action, the only way for most young people to go to college without the ugly bank loans we have today. Through education I got myself together: got off methadone at 26, got my GED and studied graphic arts technology at the New York City Technical College in downtown Brooklyn. In 1980, I came out of school — first one to go to college in my family — and got a job in the printing business. You would send us your chromes, and we would make negatives, make plates and put them on a printing press. I learned a lot about color and printing and that helped my photography later on. I was making a lot of money in ‘80, ‘81, doing all those big ads you see on the front pages of magazines, but I found myself going back down a rabbit hole, working 50, 60 hours a week. It was a great experience, but I was really unhappy. So I quit my job. My mother was very upset. I went back to driving a cab (taking photos that made up Taxi: Journey Through My Windows 1977- 1987) and worked with a friend who had a truck and an art moving business. One day we delivered to a gallery in Soho where Larry Clark was laying his whole life’s work up on the wall. I went up to him as if he was Jimi Hendrix, like, “Oh, man! I really want to do what you do!” and he said: “Just go make pictures.” That’s all he said to me. I went to ICP and started assisting in the dark room, cleaning up the cibachrome lab. Then they gave me a scholarship and my life changed. I was schooled by some of the greatest Magnum photographers: Gilles Peress, Susan Meiselas, Eugene Richards, Alex Webb, Raymond Depardon, Sebastiao Salgado. The way I work is the way they work. For weeks, months and years. Anything personal is going to take me years. I’m just coming off following Mexican migrants throughout the USA for 10 years. I think about photography in time, and I always felt great work takes a lot of it. And, for me, it was always self-initiated. There were no editors, no one telling me Joseph Rodriguez: I was born and raised in Brooklyn in 1951. I grew up where I live right now, Park Slope, but it was South Brooklyn then. And you know, the Italian American history in New York was very strong. It was a very mafioso neighborhood and I’m not lying — we had the Gowanus Canal and it was not unusual for us to see floating bodies… It was pretty much like the old Sicilian way. In my Catholic school there were only about 400 or 500 of us. There was one Black kid and one Puerto Rican kid: me. The other kids were all mostly from Genoa, in Italy. Every single parent who lived close by used to grow grapes in the backyard and you would stop by to try their wine. It was very old school. But then the drugs came, and that’s what brought a lot of the same problems you have in so many other places. I lost my way… got into high school A young 18th Street Gang member being arrested. At the time this photo was taken the ATF (Arms Tobacco and Firearms) were working with LAPD to try and take down one of the most notorious gangs in Los Angeles. The aim was also to get as many guns off the streets as possible. Photo by Joseph Rodriguez from LAPD 1994. 2 / ZEKE FALL 2021
what to do. We just had that practice, that discipline, which also brings a lot of anxiety because you’re swimming upstream and you’re always alone. The practice is mapping out a story, which then turns into something longer — like when I went to LA in 1992 to photograph gangs and I’m still revisiting that project some 20 years later. CC: Can you tell us how your project on gang violence in LA started, how it evolved, and the challenges you faced? JR: When the Rodney King uprising happened, immediately I wanted to go, because I was missing America (Rodriguez was living in Europe at the time) and I understand the urban narrative, no matter which city it is — Chicago, Miami, New York, LA. I couldn’t do much research while I was living in Europe, because it wasn’t like now where everything’s online, but one thing I did was listen to music: all this gangsta rap, Eazy-E, Tupac, Dre, N.W.A., Public Enemy. The rhymes they were spitting out were the newspapers of the streets. So I was listening to guys like this Chicano rapper Kid Frost, who’s totally East LA, and I was like “Ok, I gotta go there.” I flew in the middle of the night from Stockholm to LA and arrived in my hotel room. I didn’t know where I was going, I had no connections and LA is huge! So I grabbed three newspapers, turned on the news and of course there was a funeral and a drive-by shooting every minute. There was a lot of ground to cover, so I stayed five weeks and worked really hard. No sleep, just worked and drove around, from one neighborhood to another, also with the cops doing the gang unit. But I knew our history already. I began interviewing African-American families in Watts, asking what was the difference with the riots in 1965, in the era when Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and there was a lot of city streets burning. The conversation began and it opened up doors, and I realized I wasn’t interested in just the guns or the people dying. This was a generational story that went back three or Waiting for a fare outside 220 West Houston Street, an after-after-hours club. New York 1984. Photo by Joseph Rodriguez from Taxi: A Journey Through My Window 1977-1987. four generations. That’s when I really felt the power of this story. I went back to Stockholm and we published what we could. I applied for an artist grant there, and then I moved to LA in September of ‘92. It was hard, I had left the kids behind and just kept flying back, trying not to be the absentee father that I was. But that was the path I was on. The gang project was very hard to do and I paid the psychological price for it, in terms of PTSD. At least eleven kids are dead, in the East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A. book. Children were dying and parents were telling me I needed to tell this story. Plus, sometimes people thought I was an undercover cop. I showed them my Spanish Harlem book and my National Geographic stories to prove that I wasn’t a cop, but paranoia runs deep in the hood. That hung over my head for a while — until the book was published — and I was going to quit the project, I felt I couldn’t handle it. I also had guys come say to me: “Yo, man, I’m about to go do a hit, you can come and just take pictures.” This is ethics. I said: “Look, I go with you, I photograph you doing this scene. Detectives come, they find out who’s who, they take my film and they use the evidence against you.” Some of the gang members were 16 years old; they didn’t know how the law worked. They didn’t understand what a camera could do. They were so enamored by their vanity and Hollywood influence. With a camera comes a lot of responsibility. CC: How did your surroundings while growing up influence your practice and your understanding of photography, as well as your mission as a “humanist”, as you often define yourself? JR: I grew up with my mother and her sisters, and there were no men in my family. My stepfather was a dope fiend who died on the streets. There were a lot of not nice things growing up, and that was very tough for me. One thing I remember is that my mom would sit with her sisters in a very old school, Italian way, they would have their coffee and talk about the men. I would hear these stories — it was unbelievable — of abuse and cheating, and those references helped me develop a feminine eye. I’m always asking myself: “Why did this photographer go photograph a gangster with guns, bullets and drugs, but then didn’t photograph a mother at the same time, or the struggling parent?” That’s always been very important in my work. I didn’t always go for the guns. “Raised in violence, I enacted my own violence upon the world and upon myself. What saved me was the camera, its ability to gaze upon, to focus, to investigate, to reclaim, to resist, to re-envision.” That quote is from my journal. That’s how I got here, that’s where this goal comes from. That’s why I went back for East Side Stories (Rodriguez’s long-term project about gang violence in LA, shot between 1992–2017.) Continued on page 70. ZEKE FALL 2021/ 3
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