Capturing A Vanishing New York

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Sid Kaplan, a master black-and-white printer and photographer, is the darkroom equivalent of the session man â€" the go-to guy famous musicians revere and want to work with, but known to few people outside the industry. He made most of Robert Frank’s prints for more than three decades, as well as many of Louis Stettner’s and Cornell Capa’s. Yet, people don’t stand in front of those prints in galleries and say, “I bet that’s a Sid Kaplan.”

But I do.

As a teacher of darkroom printing at the School of Visual Arts for more than 40 years, Sid urged students to strengthen their technical chops and helped many become successful and well known. His printing and teaching supported his own obsessive photographing of New York, but the striking images he has made over the last 60 years remain little known outside his circle of students and friends. Face it, he was a much better printer and teacher than self-promoter.

If you want to learn the secrets of holding detail in a deep shadow or the proper incantation to use with ferrocyanide, Sid Kaplan is definitely your man. But if you want to find out how to promote your photography and play the gallery and publishing games, he is not the best source of advice.

Sid Kaplan A discontent commuter. Date unknown.

“I was more interested in taking pictures, and most of the time, I just didn’t pursue it,” Sid, 75, said. “I don’t like that whole system. Besides, to publish a book you have to be able to schmooze, and I just don’t have the technique.”

Sid has been shooting what he calls “the vanishing New York” since he was a teenager living in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx. He has chronicled the continual urban cycle of destruction and creation that crushes warm memories and replaces them with “new and improved” experiences. But he has mainly focused on capturing what is being lost, starting with the dismantling of the Second Avenue elevated subway in the 1940s.

He says he had no idea what to do with the photos, “except that I knew that if I didn’t take pictures of it, it’s going to be gone and I’m not going to get another chance.”

“It was just some kind of an addiction,” he said. “I guess that’s the disease of just constantly wanting to be known as the guy who made the greatest picture in the world. Or in my mind then, anyway.”

After studying photography at a vocational high school, Sid held dead-end, low-paying jobs in studios and darkrooms. Some lasted for just a few days because, he says, he didn’t know what he was doing. But after a while he learned the ways of the darkroom, and by 1968 he had started his own printing business in a loft on 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues.

Sid Kaplan Twin Towers, St. Paul’s Chapel, 1980.

Actually, business might not be the best word to describe what went on in his loft. He pretty much just waited for people to come to him, and they did. He never thought much about promotion; his main concern was making his own photos and having a darkroom to work in.

He became known as an exhibition-quality printer. “I never thought I was that good,” he maintains, “but there was a lot of people I thought that were pretty bad.”

“Sadly enough, I don’t think I have any secrets at all,” he said. “I do like everybody else. I develop prints the same amount of time as they tell you on the data sheet.”

But I can assure you he knew things others didn’t, because I watched Sid Kaplan print in his loft on a spring evening in 1974. I was 17 and had gone there to buy my first real camera, a Nikon F, from a part-time used camera dealer. I remember the air being particularly pungent, and not from darkroom chemicals. The camera dealer may have had a side business.

I was with Ira Wunder, the man who taught me how to print. Sid had taught him.

I watched as Sid coaxed a powerful print from a thinly exposed negative, moving his hands rapidly under the enlarger as he burned and dodged. Each print off that negative looked very good to me, but Sid kept making slight alterations â€" upping the contrast a half-grade, bleaching the highlights and eventually selenium-toning the prints.

Sid is still making silver-based prints â€" he doesn’t own a computer or know how to use one. He’s an analog man in a digital world, focusing on what’s disappearing, not on the next big thing.

Tonight, you will be able to see some of his photos at the opening of a one-man show, “The Last of a Vanishing Breed,” at the 25CPW gallery in Manhattan.

I’m hoping someone will stand in front of one of his lush prints of his own images and say, “Now, that’s a Sid Kaplan!”

Sid Kaplan The Flatiron Building and Madison Square Park.

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