My most enduring memory of my photography teacher Elaine Mayes in the late 1970s was that she was continually making pictures without much concern about the reception the work would get.
“You can’t predict what the photography art world will think is valuable, so you should just do your work,” she once told our class at Hampshire College, the extremely liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. “If you do good work, sooner or later they will come around to you and you’ll have decades of photos ready.”
I wrote down her words and remembered them: always focus on the work.
So I was pleased to hear about her new book, “Recently” (Daylight Press), and saw her for the first time in 35 years when it was published early this year. I told her of my recollection and asked her if the art world was starting to come around to her.
“That was true under the circumstances then — but the circumstances changed radically, so it is no longer true,” she said. “There are too many photographers and too much expansion of media. Now if you want to get somewhere, you have to really try — and I’m not good at trying.”
So much for my lede for this story.
Even so, she did concede that she is close to a deal for a retrospective book and exhibit, so perhaps she was finally well positioned.
Elaine started photographing in 1960 after studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She said all the “cool people” were down in the basement doing photography and she jumped right in.
“It made more sense to me because I wanted to be in the world,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in the studio.”
She worked mostly as a freelance photojournalist but also shot ads and brochures in the 1960s. Elaine started documenting the Haight-Ashbury scene in 1967 and even lived in a commune for a year. Some of her street portraits from that time got her noticed, and she was soon offered a job by Jerome Liebling teaching photography and film at the University of Minnesota.
For the next 33 years she was a photography professor, following Jerry to Hampshire and then going on to Bard and New York University. Elaine spent more time teaching and photographing than marketing herself. Her work became more personal and ephemeral.
Honestly, I didn’t always understand it.
Which brings us to her current book and my second memory of her.
I remember Elaine telling me in a meeting at her Hampshire office that she lived in constant fear that at any moment she might become a bag lady living on the streets. At first I thought this was paranoia, but then I realized it was just a clear recognition of how tenuous life is. Perhaps this came from her mother’s death when Elaine was 8. Or from living in 10 homes by the time she was 11 years old.
But when I recently saw her, she said that any of us are only a step or two, financially or psychologically, from the edge. In a way, this was where her book “Recently” came from.
Elaine retired from N.Y.U. in 2001, but the economic downturn six years later set her retirement plans back severely. Although she owned two modest homes, she had no money to maintain them and couldn’t sell them because their market value had plummeted. She rented out the houses to pay the mortgages and stayed with a series of friends from 2008 to earlier this year — living in a dozen places, mainly in New York, Oregon and Seattle. And she photographed everywhere she went.
“I just photographed everything that was happening to me — everything — and this is the result,” she said.
The book includes photos from several long-term projects: from auto landscapes and Wall Street to things on the ground and selfies in the dentist’s chair. It’s not a traditional documentary project, but an attempt to make sense of “what was happening both visually and emotionally,” she said.
Though I wasn’t in touch with her for 35 years, I was influenced by Elaine’s words about photography and the art world and her recognition of the precarious nature of life. It pleases me that she always focused on her work and that perhaps she is finally in the right place to be appreciated by the art world.
For her part, she said that she was “influenced by everything around me.”
“I observe all the time,” she added. “I’m always looking around, always finding things, shooting all the time.”
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