Quin Cunningham: Welcome back to our series of chats alongside the Antenne Book Sale here at CSM. I'm very pleased to welcome Thatcher Keats, the photographer behind Branded Bronx Bags, a book which catalogs a record of the names of street drugs floating around during the time of the crack and AIDS epidemics in New York where he is still based.
And he is originally from New Jersey, like me. Which is wonderful. We love New Jersey. New Jersey forever. So I think that about covers it.
Thatcher Keats: Jersey makes, and the world takes, baby.
Quin: This is so true. There's our Jersey propaganda. And I do want to start by talking to you about Jersey because I think that there's something really specific about growing up in New Jersey and looking at New York from afar, and really wanting to get into it.
But you, like me, went to a private school in suburban New Jersey and there's a huge sort of difference between that environment and the sort of environment of New Jersey and then being an artist in New York. So, I was just wondering if we could start by sort of talking about that. I want to hear more about Gill St. Bernard's in the 70s and how that set you up.
Thatcher: I am so lucky that I went to Gil St. Bernard's, it was a profound experience and a lot of us are still friends. I mean a little bit of it is shared trauma. But Gill St. Bernard's had a very progressive program back then–you took one class all day for six weeks and then you did it again and again. So instead of taking whatever five over the course of the day all year, that enabled was sort of a deep dive, whether you were doing algebra or whether you were doing photography.
I got to do a photography deep dive and it was very arty and progressive. I mean, I have two artist fathers: an artist, father and an artist stepfather. And my mom. Not, as they say, an athlete, but an athletic supporter. She did taxes for artists and self-employed people. So at that school, I learned radio and photography, which are kind of the two things that I did.
Now we'll get to this when we do the book, but I've also dabbled in harm reduction. I was sort of around the, I had gotten some artist housing in the South Bronx during the crack and AIDS epidemic. And my girlfriend was, then, she was a psychiatric social worker. Now she's an RN MHP. So I did all those handing out of condoms and bleach kits and eventually needles.
Because that was the, I think it was the first or the second needle exchange in New York City, but that school was very progressive. We got stoned with our teachers, listened to each other's records. I was saying before this one time I went out to go visit someone at UC Santa Cruz and my photo teacher said, “They have psilocybin out there. If you can find some, would you bring it back to me?” And it was pre 9/11. So I just put it in my carry-on and flew back.
Quin: Yeah, that's a pretty wild world to imagine compared to what the W.A.S.P.y suburbanites of Jersey these days get up to. It's totally different. But I imagine that it was still sort of a huge shift, going from that to living in the Bronx at this time.
Thatcher: That said, my father was an actor. And when I was little, he was like living in Upper West Side places and stuff like that, like all New York actors in the seventies did. But then when I was maybe 13, he got a loft on North Moore and Varick, which is Tribeca, but this is old Tribeca. It was mostly businesses—five o'clock, the neighborhood shut down, like empty. And it was just like that movie After Hours, that Scorsese movie, which is a hero journey in old school Soho, Tribeca. It was really magical and wonderful. So I was the kid backstage. My father was in a Broadway play called Oh, Calcutta, which was the first all nude Broadway play.
Quin: Wow.
Thatcher: In 1973 at the Evergreen. So, you know, pretty radical. And it's funny because we kids were six and eight, I guess, so we were not allowed to watch the show cause they were naked.
Quin: Right.
Thatcher: But we could hang out in the dressing room, which was that plus drugs, you know?
Quin: Right.
Thatcher: So like I hung around theaters. You know, all the time. When my dad was on stage, I was like going to Bleeker Street Cinema, which was at that time a revival house where I got to do like my film education—all my Godard, Fellini, Bergman, stuff like that. There was, um, there was a record store across the street where you could also buy marijuana, LSD, quaaludes, all at the record store on Bleeker.
So, yes, it was a shift, and then I went out in the world a little bit. I was working on a movie in California. I chased a costar back ‘cause I thought I was, I was in love.
She wasn't very in love and dispensed with my services. And then I was a little adrift. I was quite young, but I heard about this artist housing program that New York City had and I applied and I got a loft in the South Bronx two floors, a wet dark room for 350 bucks a month.
Quin: Wow, that is quite a prize to have gotten. I mean, from my sitting here now, I can't even imagine two floors for anything less than five million times that. But that's such a great moment of creative freedom that you must have had in the Bronx to sort of just be able to go do this.
Thatcher: Absolutely. I got so much work done. I mean, remember I slept upstairs and the other floor was my dark room.
I mean, it was three blocks from the Bronx Museum and the Bronx Museum gave me my second and third art shows, really like age 19 and 20. But you know very young.
Quin: Yeah, super young! And I feel like so many people now would look at that feeling how do I even begin to accomplish that in today’s New York. And that’s a whole different discussion. But I wanted to sort of move into the book now and talk to you about how you started and find out where your relationship with these bags start that you ended up photographing them.
Thatcher: So, my girlfriend at that point was a psychiatric social worker, but she had explained to me that in New York City the drugs, the street drugs, were sold by brand names: Heroin was sold by names associated with death and trouble and cocaine was sold by brands like “the high life,” any name associated with that. And then because it was the days of the crack epidemic, the streets were littered with these. And crack cocaine got sold in little vials that had different colored tops. So, there was red top, blue top, yellow top, gold top, green top. Many of us, particularly us white folks have great privilege and great opportunity in this context.
Quin: 100%.
Thatcher: But it doesn't mean that everybody everywhere in the Bronx was hooked. That’s a fake image. There were tough guys, gentle folks; there's arty people, there's mathematicians. So in the South Bronx, there's brilliance. I mean, graffiti for crying out loud. There's art back then. It was vandalism, but it was still brilliant. I actually got to exhibit at Fashion Moda a couple of times. And like, I thought this brand name thing, particularly with the heroin stuff, there's this truth in advertising thing. The second to last image in the book is a brand called “Body Count 1994,” followed by “The End.” Truth in advertising, right? It just seemed so witty and so brilliant and so darkly, tragically poetic. You almost can't turn away from it as a subject.
Quin: That's brilliant. I found that your graffiti tag was DSM 3 (G.A.E.T.) 167 BX, which is I think Bronx. So, you were also tagging and going around doing all sorts of stuff at the same time.
Thatcher: Yeah, so should we explain what the DSM is?
Quin: Yeah, please.
Thatcher: The DSM is the psychiatric business racket community’s intake manual. So, it means the diagnostic statistical manual of mental disorders. So that psychiatric social worker girlfriend gave me a copy of the DSM 3 when I was whatever 19. Um, and I thought it was so great. So DSM 3 and then the G.A.E.T., I made up a fake psychiatric disorder, which is called Garrett's Acute Eavesdropping Toxemia: G.A.E.T. And what that refers to is the blood poisoning that you get from eavesdropping, from reading your partner's diaries or listening to your kid's phone calls. That horrible feeling when you have information that you're not allowed to have, but you know and you have to look them in the face. 167 was where the loft was and BX was the Bronx.
Quin: Yeah, it's so fun. I think it's interesting that you talk about this voyeurism and seeing things that you shouldn't see—because I think it's really interesting to look at this record of these bags and it almost feels somewhat similar. You know that there was an allure and you know, through these bags, there's this whole sort of subculture behind the taking of heroin and crack and the selling of it and the effect that it had on people. And you sort of have to, I guess, as a photographer, reconcile that when you're sort of making this publication. And I wonder what you think about it now as our social outlook on drugs has changed, the reality of drugs in new York has changed.
Thatcher: Well, like what you just pointed out, the two big things that I do is photography and the podcast—my podcast my whole all my brands are called Rancho Thatchmo—and I make a lot of field recordings, for lack of a better term. I get people to share intimacies with me on tape, and then I play them, not surreptitiously, but so dispositionally, I'm an eavesdropper in a way, right? Photography and radio. If I hadn't been an artist, I probably would have been an epidemiologist or a spy. I mean, those are the things that interest me, which are also both secret. Eavesdroppy type of things and in the olden days, from what I understand not taking a lot of heroin and cocaine if you know what I’m saying.
Quin: Mhm.
Thatcher: Now, you don't see drug dealers on the streets anymore. Like back then you would see people lined up in front of abandoned buildings and it's all moved inside or to dealers like 1-800-WEED, which you would see stenciled in the sidewalk and New York and stuff like that.
But the street thing, the street version, it was so secret: You had to know the right place be able to sniff out who the right person was and understand the language of the exchange because at 167th Street and Grand Concourse it was like every block. It was insane.
It was like Mad Max, except everyone was after drugs instead of gasoline. It was post-apocalyptic, horrifying. And like that sort of secrecy thing. I just. . . I thought it was very sexy. I got to say, I mean, not in a sex way, but in secret allure.
Quin: When you are like looking at the book you sort of feel the background that they're photographed on, that there's a real luxury to it.
Thatcher: I photograph them all on red velvet. Yeah, that's pretty sexy and lush.
Quin: Yeah, you almost imagine the room that some of them have been used in and the room that some people would love to be using other ones in.
Thatcher: Opium den. It's an opium den.
Quin: Yeah, yeah, that's sort of visual opium den. And I guess I have to ask the question for the people watching. Because of course we're doing this in conjunction with a book fair at Central Saint Martins, and there are going to be loads of kiddies who look at a really amazing project like this, and they think, how do I actually accomplish something to a similar caliber? How do I get into a subject like this?
And I guess sort of what they would want to know is how you do that as a photographer without it becoming sort of really either trite or looking like it's really voyeuristic in a bad way that disrespects the subject. Because a lot of people think I'm going to take my camera and go take pictures of a bunch of stuff. And then you look at it and you're like, Hmm, I don't know if this is really paying homage.
Thatcher: I've thought so much and so enormously about this for so long. And very early, my sort of creative artistic compass got set. When I was young, I was like a fancy printer film developer. And one of the people I worked for is this guy named Larry Clark, who's one of the invasion of privacy photographers like Arbus and Larry and Nan Golden and Ryan McGinley and right, that whole thing, of which in a way I am or have aspired to be.
And Larry gave me this very—he gave me a ton of great lessons. He said, “Thatch, you always got to pay the bill,” meaning you can do all kinds of stuff, but you're going to have to pay for it financially, emotionally, legally, right? He also said anything that whatever I asked of someone to let me photograph, I have to be willing to do myself.
So consequently, I've performed on stage at roulette naked, and I've had plenty of pictures of me looking, you know, crusty and overweight and hairy. Like, let go of vanity. And I also as a young man worked for another brilliant photographer, a woman named Rosalind Solomon, who was one of the Lisette Modell students along with Arbus and Larry Fink and even Rubenstein and a billion people who studied with this great photo teacher, Lisette Modell.
Rosalind was utterly ruling class. Like her husband was in the Carter administration. He was a Secretary of Commerce or something. You know, private jet White House dinners, these amazing photographs of ‘witch doctors’ in Guatemala. You can find this photo of a Peruvian wet nurse to a lamb, like breastfeeding a baby lamb.
Quin: Wow.
Thatcher: And I was so fascinated by these two versions of access, but I did not want to be the great white father commenting on something politically. What I've tried to make my brand be as an artist is to try to gain very quick, very intimate access equally. And I photographed with a Hasselblad, which is an old medium format camera instead of a 35 millimeter. It's a viewfinder camera. So, I would look at the subject and then look down into my camera and take the picture so I could keep, keep the intimacy, the conversation, the line of communication.
Quin: That's really sort of, I think, especially with the camera, is a very transformative way to think about photography—because I think if you look at someone like Vivian Meier, she also used that same sort of camera where you're looking down, but she did it in a more secretive way.
So I think it's so interesting how the intimacy can be established in both ways.
Thatcher: I did not want to be surreptitious. I wanted to totally out and to be equal. So, you know, I was running around with people when I was young, I was getting stoned with all those other kids.
When I lived in the Bronx for 10 years, I almost never took pictures on the street around in the world. They're very, very few because I was scared. Like I didn't want to be seen as the white guy saying, “Let me see you and your, your poor social circumstances.”
Quin: That’s super interesting because I think that there's been so many conversations about what you should and should not do. And what provides a service and what doesn't provide a service and what is art and what is voyeurism and when voyeurism becomes something else.
Thatcher: I did not even want a whiff of exploitation.
Quin: Yeah.
Thatcher: My other father, the stepfather was a journalist. He was one of those like hard scrabble, New York City beat journalists–like the Newark riots and stuff like that. So, these are all things that I've thought about in my life.
Quin: Well, it definitely all comes together sort of visually and ideologically in this book, which I think is really fantastic.
Thatcher: That makes me feel great.
Quin: Oh, I'm glad. Of course. And luckily, the thing is, that all the little kiddies can get their hands on the book from the 17th to the 19th of April at CSM!
Thatcher: Christmas gift.
Quin: Oh, yeah.
Thatcher: Gift for a lover or your mom or your nephew.
Quin: Exactly. Or your grandma.
Thatcher: It's a perfect just say no to drugs and violence book.