Martine Barrat, a photographer without fear or limits
At 93, the artist has lost none of her vitality or curiosity. She lives at the legendary Hotel Chelsea in New York, where she remains one of the last year-round artist residents. Today, her work is the subject of a retrospective at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.
“Come on, get that out of here! Take it out! I don’t want to see it!” She banished the walker, a poisoned gift from the hospital where she had just spent three months. “It makes me walk all hunched over, not for me!” Photographer Martine Barrat has never bowed down to anyone. At 93, she still has the figure of a dancer, the quick wit of a Paris street kid, and speaks in a lively Frenglish. Though she sometimes struggles to get around, she all but escaped from the hospital, determined to return to her own place and to her unstoppable vitality.
At the start of June, as a heatwave bore down on New York, there she was, flitting from the bedroom to the kitchen of her small apartment on the 10th floor of the Chelsea Hotel. She is one of the last year-round residents. She moved into this legendary place more than 50 years ago, a building that sheltered New York’s bohemians of the 1970s and 1980s.
Musicians, artists and poets on every floor. Drug users, too. “You had to have a strong stomach to cross the lobby,” recalled her son, Mustapha Barat (with only one “r” in his last name), who spent a brief year of his adolescence there before moving out on his own at 15.
“At night, we would go from one room to another, depending on the music we liked,” recalled Barrat. During the day, she would go to Harlem or the Bronx to film or photograph people she met by chance, people who eventually became her friends: “They called me ‘Picture Girl.’”
Today, the Chelsea Hotel has been transformed into a luxury hotel with an English chic vibe. “They really tried to throw me out, but there’s nothing they can do; I’m not leaving,” she said. In her bright two-room apartment, plants grow freely, tied to the ceiling with pieces of string. Free jazz pours constantly from a hi-fi system that never seems to rest. And dozens, hundreds of photos cover the walls, everywhere.
‘She doesn’t care about money’
Martine Barrat? The name resonates with photography enthusiasts, yet her work has somewhat faded into obscurity. Yet it is substantial – remarkable, even – as wild as her life has been. This year, the Rencontres d’Arles, the major international photography festival held in the South of France, running from July 6 to October 4, is devoting a vast retrospective to her spanning more than half a century of “career.” The quotation marks are intentional, since the word hardly seems to apply.
“Martine, above all, is an absolute survivor, saved by her persistence and integrity. She has struggled to make ends meet her whole life. But she doesn’t care about money. If she doesn’t get what she wants, she doesn’t hesitate to tell you ‘fuck off,’” said Chuck Kelton, co-curator of the Arles exhibition along with Agathe Cancellieri, director of Galerie Rouge in Paris. After 44 years of friendship, Kelton continues to support Barrat daily. He admits with a smile that, even for Arles, the negotiations were tough.
Recognition, fame, the market – none of it interests the photographer. During the few hours we spent together, she only wanted to talk about others. “That love, it’s my strength.” She spoke of the musicians she revered, the gang leaders she loved. More than once, she made us promise: “Talk about him! And her! You promise, right?” Wherever she went, she gave her subjects the photographs born of their encounter.
Giving and receiving have been her whole life. “Have some pineapple! Do you want some ice cream?” she asked the team that came to photograph her for this article. A bottle of Bordeaux was waiting for them at the end of the session. There she stood, posing with her short white hair tinged with pink and her eyes shaded blue with makeup.
“Wait, I haven’t put on lipstick, let’s do it again.” She put on, took off, and put back on her crimson afro wig. An actor at heart, always and forever. She gave up smoking pot last year and hopes to soon resume her daily swimming sessions. She refuses to give in to boredom even for a second.
As she moved from one room to another, she tried to awaken her thousand souvenirs. Her memory has begun to fail her, but the walls of the Chelsea Hotel spoke for her. By her bedside, graffiti from all the children she has loved and photographed – the kids from Harlem, from the Barbès neighborhood in Paris, her granddaughter Aïcha. On a shelf, among their many drawings, a small painting filled with orange and yellow hearts proclaims: “Martine, wake up in the morning knowing that you are loved!”
Amid the jumble of images, certain faces stand out: Che Guevara and Bob Marley (“He sat there, on that bed. He was the one who suggested coming to my place when I asked to photograph him”); and jazz musician Ornette Coleman, “one of the great men of [her] life.” But above all, there are dozens of unknown faces: half a century of New York’s history, captured on its fringes. “Martine has an intimate story with each of them,” said Kelton. More than anyone, he witnessed it. In the late 1970s, he ran a small photo printing lab in Harlem.
“Martine entrusted all her film rolls to me. Sometimes, she would show up at four in the morning, too eager to see the results,” he said. “She loved him, because unlike many printmakers, he knows how to bring out the nuances in Black skin,” explained her son, who was born in 1959 in Oran, Algeria, and later became a photography director in Brazil. “Chuck is half of my work, but he also has his own body of work; he’s a great artist,” she added, gazing out her window at the Hudson River.
‘My Hatred of Racism’
Beside her bed hangs a portrait of a young Berber woman, painted by her mother – a reminder of the shores where she was born: Oran, in 1933. Her grandmother, a Russian exile who became a surgeon in French Algeria, “had a house close to the sea, like all the bourgeois families in Oran. One day, I saw something like flowers in the water. They were Algerian women swimming in their beautiful outfits, and I heard the settlers’ anger: ‘Can you believe it? They’re starting to go into the water!’ That’s when my hatred of racism began.”
At 15, after breaking ties with her family, she left everything behind. A Swedish woman befriended her, found her a job on an ocean liner, where she cleaned cabins and earned her first paycheck. Weeks later, Barrat arrived in Sweden, alone and with no connections. “At night, I slept under carriage entrances, clutching my money close. Later, I sold vegetables by shouting, they loved to hear me shout!”
She soon was in Paris, where she discovered a form of dance therapy that helped her overcome past pain and become a dancer. She started acting too. “At that time, she was very close to the Argentine community in Paris – painter Antonio Seguí, for example, and also the Franco-Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky,” her son said.
In 1966, together with her friend Copi, the Argentine figure of avant-garde theater, she found herself naked in a bathtub, under the direction of Jorge Lavelli. Alongside the dancer Graziella Martinez, Seguí’s partner, she performed on countless stages.
“One day, we were performing in Scotland when a woman from New York came backstage and said to me: ‘I want you in my theater.’ ‘You’re crazy!’ I replied. It was already hard enough to find the money to come here, let alone to New York! She paid for both tickets, for me and my son. That was La Mama.”
Gogo girl, café waitress
Barrat landed in New York in the summer of 1968. She never left. “La Mama was an extraordinary woman. She owned two theaters, and her madness, her passion, was to bring artists together. She had me working with some of the greatest musicians.” A broken ankle forced her to give up the stage in her thirties.
She became a go-go dancer, a café waitress and set up workshops for children: “New York makes you discover unexpected strengths.” She lived in downtown Manhattan, but her heart was already beating for Harlem. On the steps leading up to the brownstones on 125th Street, the neighborhood children taught her their language, which sounded like jazz to her. Her dream, from then on, was to film. At the time, video cameras were rare, heavy and expensive.
She met the philosopher Félix Guattari by chance at a Parisian protest in the 1960s, and he promised to help her. “With Gilles Deleuze, he wrote a beautiful book that says it all, Capitalisme et schizophrénie [Capitalism and Schizophrenia],” she explained. “I admired him a lot; I used to stay in his spare room when I was in town.” Eventually, Guattari managed to find her her first camera, thanks to a university in Canada. “So we set off from New York, with five children from Harlem and my musician lover, in a truck, to go pick it up.”
The state-of-the-art Portapak video camera quickly found a purpose. One day in the early 1970s, Barrat met Pearl, the leader of the Roman Kings gang. They arranged to meet on Freeman Street in the South Bronx. The neighborhood, nicknamed “Korea” by its residents in reference to the Korean War, was so dilapidated it seemed war-torn. She showed up “in heels and a long sexy dress,” as she always did at the time.
“They admitted it to me later; they had only invited me to steal the camera. But they liked me right away.” They took her to an abandoned building that served as their headquarters so she could film the trial of one of the gang members, accused of starting a fight. “These people, regarded as outcasts, were surprised and moved that she was not afraid of them,” explained her gallerist, Cancellieri, who wants to screen several of her 1970s films in Arles. “And since she herself had been through tough times, she understood their mistrust and their need to test her.”
They even invited her, for example, “to film a porno in a basement, to see if she would dare, and she didn’t back down,” Cancellieri continued. “That’s what her freedom is: never imposing anything, and being open to others, without judgment. Her perspective is driven by a quest for social justice, a desire to give a voice to people who aren’t represented. It is political, but from an intimate standpoint.”
With her Portapak video camera, Barrat turned the medium into a collective tool anyone could claim as their own. She spent years, “with great joy,” alongside the Roman Kings street gang, as well as the Roman Queens, their female counterparts, whom she depicted in her film Vickie. In 1978, the project that grew out of these encounters, You Do the Crime, You Do the Time, was screened at the Whitney Museum. “At the opening, all the gang members were there, surprised to see these bourgeois admiring their photos hanging on the walls,” recalled her son Mustapha, 66, proud of his fearless mother, whom he accompanied on quite a few shoots, and with whom he only lived intermittently.
“I admire Martine tremendously, a woman ahead of her time who paid a heavy price because society frowned upon being a free woman – the exact opposite of a stay-at-home mother,” he said. “She lived without ever knowing fear, always going everywhere. Even in Brazil, she walked with my 9-year-old daughter through the most dangerous neighborhoods of Salvador de Bahia.”
If you say the word “fear” in front of her, she looks at you with wide eyes, a mix of scorn and disbelief. “That is the last thing on my mind.” Such boldness allowed her to move between a thousand different worlds effortlessly.
‘Helping Yves Saint Laurent run away’
In the early 1970s, when she was not in Harlem or the Bronx, Barrat made several films for Yves Saint Laurent, the childhood friend with whom she used to swim on the beaches of Oran. One of them was titled Woman Is Sweeter. “YSL Perfumes had commissioned her to do a portrait of the designer, but as always, she subverted the assignment: set to music by Galt MacDermot, the composer of the musical Hair, she turned it into a very hippie, dance-filled ode to a world without borders,” Cancellieri said. In the end, the company that commissioned the film vetoed it.
The film will be screened in Arles this summer for the first time since 1973. Saint Laurent, the man, remained the most loyal patron of his childhood friend from Oran until the end. “He was one of the most isolated, the saddest men in the world,” according to Barrat. “I dreamed of helping him run away, both of us dressed as Moroccan women, leaving for southern Morocco. But we never managed to do it.”
To talk about fashion, another strand of her life that helped her survive, she sent Kelton into the room where she keeps her archives. His task was to find the footage she shot of residents of Brazilian favelas wearing clothes by Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto in 1989. “Yamamoto was an immensely generous man; he gave me complete freedom.”
Chuck failed in his objective, but returned with a binder stuffed with poems, letters and loose papers: memoirs of Charlie, from the Roman Kings gang, who was eventually murdered. “He used to come here all the time and would sit for hours, writing and writing. He was a great friend, very special, very funny. I would love to see him published!”
‘Do or Die,’ one of her most iconic series
Photography entered her life in the late 1970s. When her video camera was stolen, Pearl, president of the Roman Kings, gave her her first camera, an Olympus. Later, another admirer gave her her first Leica: the driver of the renowned optics company’s president.
She threw herself into photographing her friends in the Bronx and the Ukrainian community of Brighton Beach when she wasn’t traveling to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to capture the sapeurs, or to Japan. These photographs will be on display in Arles this summer, and her gallery currently sells them for between €3,500 and €10,000, with the rarest vintage prints commanding the higher price. But her life was always Harlem, again and again, “the capital of the Black world and of the entire world, the place where my heart beats.”
Meanwhile, she also completed one of her most iconic series, Do or Die. In 1979, a young female boxer asked her to photograph her at the boxer’s club in the South Bronx. Barrat was immediately fascinated by all her companions, who ranged in age from 3 to 12 years old. She attended their training sessions every day. “In places where there is violence, that’s where I find love. Violence is the anger of not having the right to life,” she declared. In those boxing rings, she mostly saw tenderness. And children “who want to make something of their lives.”
At Barrat’s, everything is “transcended by time, friendship, and by an exceptional heart,” wrote Hervé Guibert in Le Monde in 1981 regarding this series. For [her,] “to ‘take on a subject’ does not mean exhausting it in two or three sessions, but nurturing it over several years, coming back, talking, giving, always waiting.”
In 1993, the book Do or Die was released. Martin Scorsese wrote the foreword along with Gordon Parks, the iconic Harlem photographer who had always supported Barrat. Boxing champion Muhammad Ali agreed to sign a few prints – “the most beautiful moment of my life,” she smiled. To this day, a poster of one of his fights against Ken Norton still hangs in her kitchen. She had torn it down from the street.
The magic worked just as powerfully in Barbès, a neighborhood in northern Paris that she discovered in the early 1980s. “I went to Barbès for the wonderful dates, and for the Arab side that reminded me of my childhood.” She was commissioned by French daily Libération; journalist Hélène Hazera, a leading figure at the paper, guided her first steps. Once again, she fell in love with the neighborhood and its children. One image endures: Mamadou, 6, slumped in an abandoned armchair, his small face nearly swallowed by round sunglasses – one of Barrat’s iconic photographs. Today, Mamadou “Mams” Yaffa is deputy mayor of Paris in charge of youth – and he has never forgotten that moment.
“Seeing that petite woman walking around all by herself, without fear, in the Goutte-d’Or in the 1980s, that was unusual,” he recalled with a smile. “She took pictures of us, and we followed her just about everywhere on her report. She didn’t hesitate to come into our families’ homes, and that reassured us – she was both a big sister and a mama. My parents trusted her, and they weren’t wrong.”
To buy him his first bike, Barrat begged Le Nouvel Observateurmagazine to buy one of her photos. A few years later, she took Yaffa with her to New York for three months. “I was tired of hearing the kids from Barbès say that America meant no racism and unlimited sneakers, so I took Mamadou so he could come back and tell them the truth,” she said.
He was 13 years old and found himself wandering the streets of Harlem, at the same time as Nelson Mandela, who was visiting. He met actor Wesley Snipes, director Spike Lee, and the entire African American community. “I discovered rap, clothes, block parties. But I also discovered how little some African Americans knew about Africa: once, some kids even asked me if it was true that Africans lived in trees.”
Yaffa and Barrat have remained friends. A well-known activist in the Goutte-d’Or neighborhood, he acknowledged how much she had changed his life. “Martine is a bridge between different worlds. She has enabled so many people to access worlds that were not meant for them. I am living proof of that. And her relentless activism, her refusal to ever give up, is clearly a sort of torch that I am trying to pick up.” To each of her visitors, as they are about to leave, Barrat says: “Promise me you will live every moment intensely, whether you are happy or sad.”
‘Soul of the City’, by Martine Barrat, Espace Van Gogh, Place Félix-Rey, Arles, from July 6 to October 4.
Read the article online on Le Monde.
