Sylvia Plachy began shooting photos for the Village Voice in 1974, and continues snapping pictures to this day. As the holiday season heats up, we’re taking a look at the scenes and characters Plachy caught in her frame in the 1980s and ’90s, when taking newspaper pictures involved focus rings, aperture settings, exposure readings, shutter speeds, negatives, dark rooms, printing presses — and a great eye gazing through the viewfinder seeking out what the French photography legend Henri Cartier-Bresson termed “the decisive moment.” In other words, all that visceral hands-on stuff that gives old-school black-and-white half-tones their continuing documentary and emotional resonance.
In the November 30, 1982, issue, Plachy got up close ’n’ personal with America’s favorite (during the month of November at least) fowl.
That same month, Plachy, who had been making a name for herself at the Voice and other outlets since the mid-’70s, was also having gallery exhibitions on Fifth Avenue. The ad for a selection of her archival prints featured her great 1979 shot of brown-bagging “Santa Clones” heading off for their shifts of either ringing Salvation Army bells or providing laps and sympathetic ears to unruly tots in the city’s many department stores. Those were the good ol’ days, before Santa clones became drunken Santa cons.
In the November 29, 1983, issue, Plachy again focused on turkeys, but this time a pair of toms displaying epic wattles — those lumpy, bumpy neck extrusions handy in attracting those sexy hens.
In the December 3, 1985, Voice, Plachy’s photo of Big Joe Turner, who had died a few days before Thanksgiving that year, spanned the top half of the Contents page. In a remembrance, jazz sage Gary Giddens wrote that in his secure handling of “blues, boogie woogie, swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll,” Turner was “timeless despite changing fashions,” and that compared to this legend from Kansas City, Missouri, “most other blues shouters sounded vaporous.”
And now we take a moment for a commercial break — those of certain age remember that Thanksgiving just wasn’t the same without a full-page broadside from Crazy Eddie, retailer extraordinary, who cut prices so much he eventually did time in federal prison for fraud.
In the November 21, 1989, issue, Plachy aimed her flash at a low-end banquet, where off-brand sodas and buckets of … well, whatever it was, were going fast. And, ever incisive, Plachy zeroed in on an intense conversation between the generations.
The Bart Simpson balloon made its debut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, in 1990. The following year, Plachy captured everyone’s favorite junior misanthrope being held in check by a massive net. That theme would prove prescient when, in 1993, the skateboarding smart aleck’s inflatable effigy ran afoul of a lamppost, tearing his T-shirt.
A full-page ad for the “Macy’s Parade Line Up” in 1993 listed “Fox Inc’s BART SIMPSON™ Balloon” along with such other attractions as “Fred Flintstone® & Dino® in the Flintmobile,” “USDA Forest Service’s SMOKEY BEAR Balloon,” various marching bands, Broadway performers, the Rockettes, and the “’69 MIRACLE METS on the New York Daily News BIG APPLE float.” No doubt that last entry was a lift for the Amazin’s faithful, after their team finished 59-103 in ’93.
In 1996, Plachy was sent out to snap a portrait of Richard Foreman, mastermind of the Ontological Theater: “Today’s gym culture being what it is, you can probably touch your toes 20 times without any effort. But if you can’t put your right brain where your left brain should be (or vice versa), and you can’t stretch your frontal lobe till it tickles your medulla oblongata, you need a Richard Foreman (pictured) workout.” No turkeys here, but from theater critic Michael Feingold’s description, we can be pretty sure that Foreman brought his own duck — or is that a goose? — prop to the shoot.
We conclude with an exuberant gentleman wearing a chef’s hat and shooting his cuffs in the November 18, 1997, issue. All we know is the scene is Las Vegas and he’s exhorting an armadillo to race. But where? To the finish line and a big cash payday? Or maybe to a cook pot? It was that time of year, after all, and whatever Thanksgiving traditions they have in Vegas stay in Vegas.
That was the beauty of Plachy’s Unguided Tour — you could go along for the ride and make up your own story on the way.
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