DON SNYDER
June 14, 1934 – August 29, 2010
Don Snyder was a photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist whose work portrayscountercultural life in America from the 1950s through the 1980s. He is best known for hisphotographs documenting the social upheaval of the 1960s. His penetrating portraits of hippies,their communes, and their controversial leaders appear in his book, Aquarian Odyssey,published in 1979 by LiveWright (W.W.Norton).
“While not really a hippie, Don wanted to document the era and its unique sensibility. He had an ability to fade in and out of the zeitgeist. In it, enough to know the players and ethos, yet out of it sufficiently to record its signifiers objectively."
- Charles Giuliano, Berkshire Fine Arts
CONEY ISLAND IN THE 1950s
Snyder picked up a camera when he was growing up and began photographing beachgoers clustered on rock jetties and cavorting on the shore of Coney Island, where he lived.
Some of his most compelling images are intimate glimpses of Russian Jews and Eastern European immigrant families in repose at Brighton Beach in the 1950s. The boardwalk, the Cyclone roller coaster, and the multiple freak shows of Steeplechase Park had a profound impact on his early artistic development.
After school, and on weekends, Snyder worked in a narrow, cramped darkroom behind one of Coney Island’s “five for a dollar” photo stalls, where he learned to rapidly develop film and print photos while customers waited impatiently in the alley for their prints. From 1948 through the 1950s, he combed the beach and shot more than 24,000 black-and-white photos with out-of-date World War II military film that he bought from a Coney Island hawker for pennies on
Drawing by Steve Wardlow
the dollar. These photos comprise his first photographic opus which he called Coney Island Inferno. Ralph Ginzburg’s famous art magazine, Eros, featured Coney Island Inferno images in its second issue. Photographs from the Inferno series were exhibited at the Municipal Art Society of New York in 1987.
EDUCATION
ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, W. EUGENE SMITH, ALDO TAMBELLINI
Although he was awarded three full scholarships at prestigious art schools, Snyder chose to attend Syracuse University because he was in love with a girl who planned to go there. At Syracuse, he was influenced by the radical ideas of
Snyder was drawn to radical
photographers whose work he admired.
artist Aldo Tambellini, who was then a graduate student teaching in the art department. His creative alliance with Tambellini continued after Snyder returned to New York City to study painting and photography at Cooper
Union. He enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s famous Design Laboratory at the New
School for Social Research, and later studied printing techniques with W. Eugene Smith, a Life photographer famous for his haunting images of a community suffering from a factory discharge of toxic heavy metals in Minamata, Japan. When Tambellini resettled in New York
One photo instructor made him collect blood from a slaughterhouse to use as photo developer.
City, Snyder joined his emerging Group Center, an artists‘ collective intent on challenging the hegemony of the art establishment.
EARLY DAYS
PRINTING FOR DIANE ARBUS
In the mid 1950s, Snyder began working for the fashion and advertising photographer Alan Arbus, developing & printing commercial photographs.
There he met and formed a close friendship with Diane Arbus, who frequently stopped by her husband’s studio with film she had just shot on the streets of New York. Snyder developed the film and made prints for her in his spare time. They spent many hours together discussing art and critiquing contemporary photographers. Snyder showed her his Coney Island Inferno photos, which she greatly admired, and which may have influenced her subsequent preoccupation with freaks and carnival characters. They exchanged photographs and remained friends until her death in 1971.
During the golden age of fashion photography, with its glossy magazine spreads and luminaries such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Snyder aspired to be a high fashion photographer. Examples of his creative fashion photography were published in his first book, Don Snyder’s World of Photography (Fawcett, 1967), which illustrated his innovations in lighting and special effects. To get by, he sold photographs as record jackets and book covers, and published them in periodicals such as The Village Voice, the East Village Other, The New York Times, McCalls, Rolling Stone, Print Magazine, and Modern Photography.
“Don always seemed to have ideas for projects. He was the first person I knew to use a fisheye lens. Of course it quickly became a cliché. But he was on top of all the new gizmos and chemicals. There was a frenetic curiosity and experimentation.”
- Charles Giuliano, Berkshire Fine Arts
LIGHT SHOWS
MILLENIUM FILM WORKSHOP & THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS
Nor was Snyder’s artistic creativity confined to photography. He made short films and ventured into multimedia, creating a series of exquisite, hand-painted, aniline-dye slides that could be projected on a screen. He combined his sepia, black and white, and brilliantly colored projections with live music and dancers in elaborate light shows, which attracted the attention of the media and ignited the whole psychedelic light-show era. Snyder created multimedia environments for festivals, and at venues such as churches, clubs, and high-society parties and balls. His hand-painted slides projected onto nudes were printed on an array of perforated stamps and included in issue No. 9 of the multimedia magazine, Aspen. His slide images formed the solar centers of Angus MacLise’s New World Solar Calendar. He received a commission from Bob Masters & Jean Houston to build an altered states multimedia chamber at their Foundation for Mind
“Black vinyl-clad dancers moved to disperse and fragment the ‘magical’ imagery. Many levels, very beautiful . . . the best of the festival.”
Howard Junker, The Nation
Research in New York City. The high-end fabric designer Jack Lenor Larsen printed Snyder’s slides onto innovative new fabric, and commissioned Snyder to create a spectacular light show to introduce the novel fabric to the fashionindustry. Modern dancers undulated down the runway draped in futuristic white stretch fabrics while bathed in Snyder’s brilliantly colored abstract projections. An unanticipated mishap
with two giant Rube Goldberg light projectors sent frequent volleys of electrical sparks flying from the control booth out over the audience, adding further spice to the spectacle, according to some. Other multimedia exhibits were staged atvenues such as The Filmmakers Cooperative, The Millennium Film Workshop, and the Electric Circus, bringing Snyder further recognition for his work.
FAMILY
Drawing by Steve Wardlow
Snyder met his wife, Mikki Maher, in 1964, when she was a showgirl in the Folies Bergère. She later earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology. The marriage produced 2 children, Degan and Ariel. When they finished college, both offspring worked in the television industry and later founded a healthcare company in Silicon Valley.
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THE ADVENTURES OF MULTIMEDIA
Maher worked with Snyder on his multimedia projects and together they formed a company, The Adventures of Multimedia, composed of five New York artists skilled in photography, filmmaking, and the graphic arts. The group soon garnered media spreads
in newspapers and on prime time WNBC and WNET TV shows. The Adventures of Multimedia received a commission from Paraphernalia to make an avant-garde film promoting its trendy new clothing line. Directed by Snyder, the film featured high-fashion models in mini-skirts skiing down
“The film produces an eerie and strikingly contemporary glimpse of pop culture.” - Grove Press
down Vermont slopes at night in a phantasmagorical display of Snyder’s slides, special effects, and fireworks. The film was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967.
TIMOTHY LEARY
THE CASTALIA FOUNDATION
The Adventures of Multimedia came to the attention of Timothy Leary, who sought to incorporate Snyder’s art into his lectures on LSD. Leary invited Snyder and Maher to the Castalia Foundation, a retreat he had established at a country estate in Millbrook, New York, for the purpose of researching the virtues of psychedelics. The 63-room mansion was surrounded by 3,000 acres of woods. There was a meditation house and a 1930s bowling alley. A big brass bed was installed in the garden in case anyone wanted to sleep outdoors. Leary and Snyder formed a close association and Snyder filmed and prepared multimedia audiovisuals they called “The Psychedelic Moment” for Leary’s drug free weekend seminars and Fillmore East shows. Snyder also documented life at the Millbrook estate, photographing intimate portraits of Leary and his family members, which were included in Aquarian Odyssey.
I was very much impressed by the “Big House,” as it was called. The mansion was rather dark inside and even a bit spooky. Mahogany wood paneling lined the walls, and a huge ornate mirror in the entrance foyer had already seen many intellectual and spiritually minded luminaries passing by, drawn by the charisma of Timothy Leary and the promise that LSD held for exploring the multiple levels of consciousness. During the summer, the front lawn was used as a grassy baseball field. Timothy was very fond of sports and people would play baseball all afternoon while they were high on LSD.
- Michealeen Maher
ON ASSIGNMENT
THE SUMMER OF LOVE, HAIGHT ASHBURY, AND HIPPY COMMUNES
Meanwhile, Snyder began receiving assignments from the prestigious hardcover quarterly Horizon. He was sent to San Francisco in 1967 to photograph the emerging scene in
“In 1964, Snyder began an odyssey from coast to coast, capturing the mood in spectacular color. With camera in hand, he is just as much an artist as the man with the brush.” - William S. Murphey
Buffalo Courier Express
Haight-Ashbury. A portfolio of Snyder’s portraits of flower children during the Summer of Love appeared in Horizon in 1968. Other Horizon portfolios followed, such as Snyder’s portraits of prominent parapsychologists, including Montague Ullman and members of the Maimonides Dream Telepathy Laboratory. Amid the social turmoil of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Snyder made portraits of countercultural
figures, among them Abbie Hoffman, Ram Dass, Lenore Kandel, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Arthur Kleps, Angus Maclise, Gerard Malanga, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Timothy Leary. He captured the turmoil in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury; documented life in countercultural communes; and photographed and filmed the radical art scenes flourishing on both the East and West Coasts.
CAREER SNAPSHOTS
NYC CLUBS & THE UNDERGROUND ART SCENE
City life with its club scenes and radical avant-garde art also arrested Snyder’s attention. Using only available light, he photographed the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now and Angus MacLise’s opera Orfeo (last staged by Sylvie Degiez at The Kitchen in 1995). Snyder spent many all-night stints in Ira Cohen’s infamous Mylar Chamber, photographing countercultural icons such as William Burroughs and Jack Smith, and teaching Cohen the art of photography.
SHIRLEY CLARKE, YAYOI KUSAMA, JACK SMITH
Filmmaking also absorbed much of Snyder’s time, and he continued to make creative short films throughout his career. He collaborated with experimental filmmakers Jud Yalkut and Shirley Clarke, who edited Snyder’s Kinescope video Chroma. Snyder worked closely with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, photographing and filming her artistic orgies and erotic “happenings.” Maurice Gerodias, publisher of Olympia Press, commissioned him to make a feature-length film of experimental erotica, which Snyder shot at a community of free spirits in the Berkshires. His last known film was a documentary of Jack Smith performing in his original play, Song for Rent, a satire on Susan Heyward in her role as an alcoholic in the movie I’ll cry Tomorrow. The film was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011, and is in the museum’s permanent collection.
MULTIMEDIA
Sculpture was another medium Snyder liked to work in. His early works of sculpture were first exhibited at the LENA sculpture show at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery in the late 1950s. The Bronx Museum of Art’s Magic Circle Exhibition in 1977 included Snyder’s polarized light box, with its 3-foot by 3-foot panel made of tiny slivers of scotch tape. Snyder’s huge triplicate panels depicting the Apollo 11 moon landing were shown in Television’s Impact on Contemporary Art at the Queens Museum in 1986.
TEACHING
PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS
From 1974-1980, Snyder taught avant-garde art and photography at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, offering courses such as Lensless Photography; Photo-Rayograms; Secrets of Light; Multimedia Photography and Filmmaking; Experiments with Light; Special Effects Photography; Painting with Light; Light Graphics; Darkroom Graphics; After the Darkroom; and Introduction to the Spectrum of Light and Photography. Snyder introduced a novel technique he called “Fleshgraphs” at the School of Visual Arts. He had his students blacken their bodies with oil and roll over and over on huge stretches of photographers’ “roll paper,” creating eerie images that seemed to emerge from the depths of human imagination.
“His legacy also extended into his skill in teaching what he knew to others. In this respect, he became the classic mentor. I was one of his protégés. It was like nothing for us to be stumbling out of his darkroom into the predawn light looking for the nearest diner after an all-night marathon where in one particular session, I recall, he'd printed 100 of my portraits for a show I was soon to have at Bennington College, in 1980. The bathtub became one enormous chemical trough for treating each print. Don was the man. He could talk endlessly for hours on the kinds of papers to use; on f-stops and lenses; and he'd make sure you were listening and also taking notes. He could solarize blindfolded. He was also a wizard in the classes he taught at S.V.A. for a spell."
- Gerard Malanga
THE SHUTTER CLOSES
Snyder’s professional career was cut short in the summer of 1980 when he was in a catastrophic automobile accident and suffered a major brain concussion and shattered hip. His head had to be cut from the roof of the car with the Jaws of Life. As a consequence of the accident, he was obliged to turn down photographic assignments and book offers, and forced to give up teaching. His recovery was slow and his injuries plagued him for the rest of his life. Although he pursued his creative endeavors, he became more reclusive and seldom left his studio in Chelsea. Snyder’s health gradually deteriorated and he died of a massive heart attack in his studio on August 29, 2010.
