Bash Backstory

On the evening of Sunday, May 14, 1972, between 8:00 and midnight, some 100 people gathered at the Market Diner at 572 11th Avenue (between 43rd and 44th St.) in Manhattan, to mix, mingle, eat, drink, and photograph each other.

They came at the invitation of photographer Neal Slavin and myself, who had cooked up the concept for this event several months earlier while sitting over a late-night snack in the same classic American eatery. Neal, his then-wife Arlene (a painter), my then-wife Alexandra (a teacher at the Floating Foundation of Photography[1]), and I had come from an opening at the FFP, which docked at the West 79th St. boat basin on the Hudson River, part of Riverside Park. Needing more for an evening meal than the crudités and dip, cheese and crackers, chips, and wine offered at the opening, we’d pulled off the West Side Highway to grab a bite on our way home.

With its naugahyde and formica, its walls lined with mirrors and its gaudy chandeliers, the Market Diner epitomized a distinctively American public space that had become a photographic trope, employed by picture-makers from Walker Evans through Robert Frank and on into the ’70s. We recognized it immediately as an archetype. Quite possibly the FFP show we’d just left included such images.

Certainly among the attendees there had been photographers who, as was the custom at that time, brought their cameras to openings and used the others present as lens fodder. We began to visualize how different photographers we knew personally would make use of the Market Diner space. Then we speculated as to what would happen if more than one of them chanced to come in and start making pictures at the same time . . .

A few weeks later, Neal and I sent engraved invitations to about 200 people from our combined mailing lists, soliciting their attendance at what we dubbed “The Market Diner Bash.” We asked them to come with their cameras, meet and converse with each other, order something off the extensive menu, and make whatever pictures they cared to make during the evening. Then they’d submit their selection of the results to us, and we’d create a group show therewith — in effect, an exhibition composed of photographs of its own opening, nicely circular in its construction.[2]

We solicited RSVPs, but got only a few. At 8 p.m. on the 14th we had no idea how many, if any, would show. Then they began to arrive, singly and in groups: Mary Ellen Mark, Arthur Tress, Les Krims, Charles Gatewood, Lionel Suntop, Bea Nettles, Jim Enyeart, Paul Diamond, Bob D’Alessandro, Jo Anne Frank, Lee Witkin, Jain Kelly, George Krause, Harold Jones, Judy Dater, Betty Hahn, Adál Maldonado, Carole Kismaric, Weston Naef, Michael Martone, Eva Rubinstein, Wolf von dem Bussche, Jill Freedman — a cross-section of the New York photo scene, with some visiting out-of-towners added to the mix.

Sometime around 9:15 a spark got lit and these photographers stood up, almost en masse, then spontaneously began to work the setting and its occupants for their own imagistic purposes. The energy rush had a tangible quality. An hour later it peaked and began to subside. Neal called everyone together for a group portrait;[3] those who were still present arranged themselves in various configurations in the space. The resulting image depicts 66 people (67 if you count a life-size photorealistic facsimile of my New York Times colleague Gene Thornton, who couldn’t attend but send his painted self-portrait as a stand-in). And there, right up front in the first row, sits the diminutive, impish Maggie Sherwood, founder and mastermind of the Floating Foundation of Photography, with the oversized Benedict J. Fernandez on her lap, while her husband, Theo Chunn, looks on beningly from her right-hand side.[4]

Market Diner Bash Group Portrait, 5-14-72. Photo © copyright by Neal Slavin.

I’ve had that picture on my office wall ever since, so I’m reminded frequently of Maggie and Theo and Ben and the others there that night, some of them now gone. I’d call us all bohemians in spirit, and true bohemians to boot, certainly one of the last cohorts of New Yorkers who’d learned to live la vie bohême on a bohemian income. A good thing, too, because we were all devotees of a not yet legitimized medium that offered scant reward of any kind (including financial) to most of its advocates and practitioners. . . .

Floating Foundation of Photography exhibition catalogue, 2009, cover.

(Under the title “Moored and Adrift: Maggie Sherwood and the Floating Foundation of Photography,” the essay from which I’ve excerpted this passage first appeared in the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Samuel Dorsky Museum at the State University of New York-New Paltz: “Taking a Different Tack: Maggie Sherwood and the Floating Foundation of Photography,” a show exploring the history of the FFP, a purple houseboat that graced the shoreline of Riverside Park in Manhattan for close to two decades, serving as an exhibition space for photography as well as a meeting place for people connected to the medium. This show, curated by beth E. Wilson, ran from January 24-April 8, 2009; it, and its accompanying catalogue, evoke a remarkable and much-neglected era in the medium’s history, of which the Market Diner Bash partook. — A.D.C.)