In March, I had two photo books published by Café Royal Books: The Velvet Underground, New York 1965–66 and Play Space, North Kensington 1967–1969.

Craig and his family who run the publishing house print weekly books of photographers’ work. They are all 36 pages, A4 folded and stapled, nicely printed on acid-free paper, and cost only £7 each. Many of them are street documentaries of towns and cities, and others feature various communities and pockets of culture especially in Britain and Ireland with some in New York and beyond.

Since they began in 2005, they’ve published more than 700 books which have been collected by MoMA NY, Tate, Cambridge University, and more. Café Royal prints 300 copies, gives 50 to the photographer, no money changes hands. I love the whole thing. Together, the books all make an incredible social history of Britain. I’ve bought about 45 different ones because they are fantastic.

Imagine doing 700 books, on acid free paper, using his local printer, sold cheap, over one a week for 12 years, mostly from photographers’ unpublished work, otherwise dusty and forgotten — it is a monumental achievement. I’m fortunate to have two of my works among that number, on sale now.

Francis Whately interviewed me for the second part of his three part programme Andy Warhol’s America (2022). The series documents major events in the 20th century through the perspective of Warhol’s life and work. I’m featured in the episode “The American Nightmare.”

The BBC wrote: “The second episode charts Andy Warhol’s response to the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as other major historical events happening in America in the 60s. We hear stories about Warhol setting up the Silver Factory and managing The Velvet Underground, and also how he faced his own personal nightmare; he was shot by a Factory associate.”

And the Daily Telegraph wrote: “Francis Whately, he of the outstanding Bowie trilogy of documentaries, turns to an acquaintance of The Dame for this no-less-compelling new three-parter examining the life and times of the pioneering and endlessly divisive artist and provocateur. Beginning with his early years, its contributors include Bianca Jagger, Bob Colacello and Penny Arcade.”

The legendary Todd Haynes’ film The Velvet Underground (2021) has 47 of my photos in it. Time Out said: “If you already love the Velvet Underground, this is two hours of visual and aural bliss. If you don’t, same.”

Here’s what some other publications wrote:

BBC Culture: “Haynes’ film doesn’t try to explain The Velvet Underground to us, but does its utmost to put us in the room with them, mirroring their jaggedly cool style with fragments of archival footage and the constant rumble of their musical catalogue. As he tells BBC Culture, ‘My job as a filmmaker is to try to bring the medium of film, in some context, to open up the visual language of a movie to a band and their music. It’s really about “how do you make a feeling of watching the movie something on a par with what they did?”‘”

The Guardian: “Haynes gives a very good sense of what I can only call the transcendental quality of the Velvet Underground’s music, inspired as it initially was by the aesthetic of drones, sustained chords and chord variations, a sense that continuous immersion in the music will (at some stage) facilitate an epiphany that cannot be coerced or guaranteed.”

The New Yorker: “If there’s a band from the nineteen-sixties that deserves the label ‘legendary,’ it’s the Velvet Underground; if there’s a director working today who knows what most becomes a legend, it’s Todd Haynes. Somehow the unpredictable excitement, and sometimes almost unendurable boredom, of the Velvet Underground eludes Haynes—but perhaps that should not surprise us. As the film’s most delightful talking head, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers, puts it, ‘You could watch them play, and there would be overtones that you couldn’t account for. You could see [plays a rhythm-guitar riff]. Then you’d hear a lead, a fuzz lead, over that. And you’d hear the bass line. But there’d be these other sounds in the room. . . . It was this group sound.'”

The New York Times: “‘The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.'”

Chuck Smith’s documentary Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground (2018) includes 16 of my photos and an interview with me.

As summarized on IMDb, “Life-long friend Jonas Mekas saved all her letters, creating a rich archive that film-maker Chuck Smith carefully sculpts into this fascinating portrait of a nearly forgotten artist. An avant-garde maverick, a rebel in a man’s world, Barbara Rubin regains her rightful place in film history.”

Here’s some more words about the film from a few publications:

Variety: “With incisive and enthusiastic commentary from everyone involved, “Barbara Rubin and the Exploding New York Underground” recounts its story with infectious energy, and uses overlapping color-coded imagery that conjures the spirit of a Zelig-like figure whose contributions to the counterculture were, the director persuasively argues, invaluable.”

New York Times: “Featuring reminiscences and observations from a wide range of friends and critics (one of these interviewees, Amy Taubin, is both), the documentary sketches Rubin’s alliances with the likes of Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and Allen Ginsberg. Because, frustratingly, there appears to be no extant footage of Rubin being interviewed, the talking heads serve as docents through a life that has many corners of obscurity.”

Hollywood Reporter: “For most viewers, even those well-versed in ’60s culture, her identity is a mystery. But Rubin, it turns out, was no shadowy background player. During the brief years that she was part of downtown New York’s avant-garde, she was a fearless creator and a life-changing catalyst. More than one person interviewed for the documentary describes her as angelic, and the late Jonas Mekas, her mentor and dear friend, compares her to Rimbaud, making her subversive mark and then disappearing ‘into the sands of some spiritual Africa.’”

I was happy to be included in the 2019 Portobello Film Festival at the Gate Cinema in a programme titled: ‘EMOTION AND ECONOMICS – THE HISTORY OF THE GATE CINEMA, NOTTING HILL GATE.’

I made a film: ‘Room 1301’, in New York about 1965 with a friend, Yvette Nachmias. It is a 17 minute short exploring New York 1960s office environment, lobbies, corridors, skyscraper streets, lighting, elevators etc and based on her first experience of working in one. The loose structure is that you can’t deliver a parcel to Room 1301 because they don’t have any 13th floors in New York, they go from 12-14 without the 13! We made it on 16mm film stock that becomes a fire danger after 30 years, and Yvette transferred it to VHS and then DVD and it lost an awful lot of definition. Portobello Film Festival apparently still think it’s worth showing. Saturday 7th September 2019 from 1pm-3pm at the Gate, Notting Hill.  

The Gate Cinema, as part of Portobello Film Festival 2019, screened a film programme about the history of the Gate Cinema and British film from 1911 to the present day. Actors performed short sketches that provided context and told a story of emotional creativity in the world of boom and bust capitalism. This monster mash up of films included silent shorts, extracts from the films of 1930s stars Robert Donat, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Derek Jarman, and included 3 premieres, introduced by their directors: Adam Ritchie, Jonathan Barnett, and Constantine Gras.

“Adam captured the first performances of Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, but is best known locally for his activism in the late 1960s that got community spaces under the Westway flyover handed over and run by the community.

Jonathan is the director of the PFF and has a body of VHS shot films that capture important local events and personalities.

Constantine Gras is a multi-media artist based in North Kensington, working on community art projects and has exhibited films at the PFF since 2010.

The last 3 films in the programme made by these directors are about the (anti) psychiatric guru R.D. Laing, a New York high rise drama and a portrait of the garden in the shadow of Grenfell Tower”

Ends with a Q&A session with film makers and Lee Ellwood, manager of the Gate Cinema.
Running time: 1 hour 45 mins.

After success in Paris, the exhibition took over NYC for a full 3 months of Velvet Underground, from October 10th to December 30th, 2018. 

Over 30 of my photographs were exhibited and this time six were made into postcards.

The exhibition took place at 718 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. You can find more details and information on the Velvet Underground Experience website and read a New York Times preview of the show.

[See image gallery at www.adam-ritchie-photography.co.uk]  

Here’s what Wombat say: “With Wombat you receive every two months a limited edition box containing two numbered collectible prints and one artist’s portfolio.

Follow the artists who make the news. Discover emerging talent or internationally renowned artists and photographers through our original collectible art prints, with texts written in French and English. Beautifully handcrafted in our Parisian studio, each limited edition Wombat box is provided with its own certificate of authenticity before being sent out to art lovers worldwide.”

“It is 50 years since The Velvet Underground & Nico album was recorded. A major new exhibition in Paris tells the story of the group which created it and of the New York scene which produced them. Parisians hold the Velvets in particular esteem and, as ALLAN CAMPBELL notes, the city itself has often been the scene of key moments in the Velvets’ history, not least a legendary appearance at Le Bataclan.”

Read the full BBC Arts review HERE, and read about my visit to the show on my blog.

Go see it HERE.

2nd March 1942 – 27th October 2013

[See image gallery at www.adam-ritchie-photography.co.uk]

ONO Contemporary Art Gallery

Via Santa Margherita 10, Bologna, Italy: Dec 2011 – Jan 2012