Thursday, October 23, 2008


Harry Redl is a photographer who probably does not take any pictures anymore. Perhaps he might even be older that I am. He was a photographer who shot for Life. I would run into him in photographic exhibitions 5 to 8 years ago and then that distance between his home in West Vancouver and my own seemed to feel wider and wider and I lost contact. To this day I feel guilty I never accepted his invitations to visit him. The Harry Redl I knew always dressed beautifully and he spoke with enthusiam, intelligence and class.

On the night before Sunday June 29th (I received my Sunday New York Times. It does so around 9pm)I was astounded by the full page photograph on the cover of the literary magazine. It was a portrait of American poet Frank O'Hara. Underneath the picture there was the date 1959 and the name Harry Redl. Here is the picture that so arrested my attention. Part of the unusual look of it comes from the fact that Redl used a Rolleiflex with a waist lever finder so that angle is low.

Looking for some link to Harry Redl I found this. The essay is written by David Morton. David Morton is an extremely fine writer. In 1988 David Morton and I went to New York City. We both agreed we didn't like musicals but liked theatre. We saw Jason Robards and Blythe Danner in A Streetcar Named Desire. It was then that I found out about Morton's love of photography. It was with him that I first saw at MOMA those sensual photographs of Ellen Morton (sheer coincidence, that name!) in her wet and very tight bathing suit taken by Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George ca 1914. The picture here is from the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Addendum: July 16, 2013

One obituary lists Harry Redl to have died on May 26, 2011. It says he was 84.