The Highwaymen and the Street Photographer, or What Do Fast-Painting and the Leica Have in Common?

I’ve written three books about the African-American landscape painters who have become synonymous with the Florida scene in the 1960s and 70s, who were nameless and anonymous during their run and who were, decades later, named the Highwaymen. I connected with their art because it very well addressed mid-twentieth century south Florida and because it mirrored my use and understanding of my medium, photography. I’ve never discussed this parallel before.

In 1960, African-American teenager Alfred Hair encouraged friends and family members to begin painting the landscapes surrounding their Fort Pierce homes as he had done so that they might escape bleak destinies in the orange groves and packinghouses of rural Florida. They painted in their yards, often collectively through the nights, and in the morning took their still-wet creations to the streets to sell; at that time it was unlikely that young African Americans would find galleries to represent them and their artwork.

Realizing fine art was never their objective; they were motivated by the acquisition of wealth during the early heady days of desegregation. Had they been older they might not have had the audacity to do what they did, and they would not have inadvertently created the visual legacy of modern Florida. They had nothing to lose; they painted with abandon, with excitement and promise–the same kind of promise that brought post-war families to Florida… the place to realize the American dream. All but Hair were self-taught painters but, more to the point, they were all entrepreneurs who became artists by default.

They worked feverishly because time was money. The haste in which they painted each picture, often in less than an hour, led to their unique style. Characterized by early critics as “motel art,” the wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, moody seas, and intensely colored sunsets idealized Florida in archetypal tropical scenes that were of broad appeal. And at $25.00 apiece, so were their prices. Their works became popular representations of how residents and tourists alike viewed the Sunshine State.

Their methodology of fast painting was developed not as an aesthetic strategy but as way to save time and even materials; it allowed for greater profits and more opportunities to sell their still-wet paintings. Just as importantly, the revenues allowed for exciting socializing at juke joints, jai-alai frontons and dog racing tracks, and, for some, with family and fishing. They were, after all, twenty-somethings with money falling out of their pockets at a time when Jim Crow attitudes still kept black people in check.

These artists realized a fresh approach to traditional American landscape painting through their fast painting. The process didn’t allow for studied or embellished or even thorough treatments. The resulting portrayals were not generally detailed or treated in a grand manner; rather they revealed temporal places in the process of becoming fully formed. The images, without artifice or embellishments, encouraged viewers to lend their own inspirational meanings. Sales depended on the viewers identifying Florida as Paradise, so the hands of the artists could not be evident. Just enough of each painter’s own presence seeped into the imagery though to brand the artwork as Highwaymen interpretations. These unlikeliest of artists contributed to the landscape genre and this fact places them into the fine art rubric.

Having grown up in Miami Beach, it didn’t take long for me to appreciate these unusual paintings.  Kitsch was in my blood, but my attraction to this art was based on more than this. The images rang true, somehow. I figured out how rather quickly. I put the pieces together based on my sensibility and my understanding of the aesthetic of the Leica, the camera I’ve used since day one. Although more was hardly enough in Miami Beach, I somehow developed a less-is-more attitude with almost everything, except my own photographing. I always equated quality with quantity. Yet prolific, with my images’ frames replete, my work was minimal; my world was fine as it was, and the less I did to affect a resulting picture, the better.

I got lost in the process, by working quickly and without doing much – but a lot of it. This method led me to doing things that I wouldn’t otherwise think of trying, or might think of but wouldn’t attempt. Like moving around till the image in the viewfinder was other than customary, or photographing into the sun. But mostly it was anticipation; not knowing exactly how the image might appear since there was no time lapse from when the moment is recognized and the picture taken. I relied on a deep breath and a prayer.

These were attempts to see what might happen, how the images might look by breaking the rules rather than relying on skills and using formulas to compose pictures. Convention became a bore, and it was certainly unresponsive to how this camera might describe and form imagery. There was no need to synthesize or otherwise contrive imagery. I ventured down unimaginable paths, figuratively and literally. I was without deliberation and without thought when working. There was no time to deliberate or to hesitate. The world moves too fast for that, and the Leica seemed made for acknowledging fleeting moments of recognition – the source and substance of advanced camera work.

This camera also gives nothing – no sharp grains of sand, no strands of hair, not even the sense of volume that large negatives render. Like Highwaymen art it is elemental and it strips bare, leaving scenes with little more than a sense of what’s there and what it might mean. This attribute has been referred to as the camera’s “drawing capacity,” and this differs from the view camera, those big bulky boxes with bellows separating lens and ground glass requiring a tripod and patience. It takes a very different kind of photographer to work those cumbersome machines – and to relish in its glory. My very beautiful wife (note: the politically incorrect reference is agreeable with her; spouse sounds so clinical) summed up this aesthetic posit for me decades ago when she whispered that, while I photographed attractive women in passing, “If you really want to see what she looks like, take a hose to her,” meaning what you have without make-up is what there is.

Structure is all that matters. The rest is commentary, if not idle banter. Although the Leica draws a sense of reality, it sketches and leaves, potentially, decisive and resolved images, images whose meanings are not fully formed. Indeed, the viewers assign those connotations. Photographic images are so far removed from context that one doesn’t quite know what’s going on in any still photograph. In this way, they are no more facts than fictions, and they may be more reliable as a source of pleasure and wonder than documents of historical precedence.

I intuitively knew the similarities between Highwaymen paintings and the use of the Leica. Paintings aren’t shackled to reality like photographs, which are, of course, intrinsically linked to the physical world. They are fanatically intertwined by their representational nature, and we tend to believe what we see – especially when photographed. The central tenet of a still photograph is that it is convincingly real, and this is not to be confused with Truth.

Explicating the relationship between a painting and a photograph’s veracity and how the two mediums describe is largely what interested me in understanding meaning and function of Highwaymen art. I saw early on that no painting’s narrative appeal affected viewer-consumers more than a piece of Highwaymen art. I was in the thick of more than a craze–it was a cultural phenomenon. People sought out these paintings as if they were on a mission from God. It was the Wild West in an east coast gold rush. Although early hunter-gatherer collectors were passionately driven, they weren’t, to their credit, motivated by financial gain. That came later.

What was these paintings’ aesthetic appeal? Why did people clamor and fawn over these low art paintings? For one thing, I think that paintings do a better job at mediating reality than do photographs. They are a more accurate and complete document than photographs because they embody the attitude and sensibilities of the time.  Photographs might be edgy but they don’t generally conceal attitudes and styles like paintings. Their tempers are, well, tempered by the medium itself; they express differently.

It’s culturally constructed that photographs mediate reality differently than a painting. The medium is the message. Machine-made, photographs look real. They are typically signed on verso, not on the image itself, and usually not even along the border. This is in keeping with the idea of transparency, confirming further the notion that the subject and work of art are one in the same and speaks for itself. Actually, we know less about the subject than more after looking at a photograph. It wasn’t the camera that made manifest the subject’s meaning, but the photographer.

Herein is the allusion of documentary photography: These images are more reliant upon the camera’s notational descriptiveness than anything as monumental as a skill-based and time-costly oil painting. Painting is solidly rooted in tradition. The 35mm photographic image is referenced differently, with a viewer completing the transitory and de-contextualized scene at the same speed in which the image was recorded. At a glance one ascribes meaning; its sole arbiter is context, defined more by what the photographer excluded than included.

Every endeavor is an experience, and some experiences are richer than others. So are some paintings and photographs; I imagine there is a direct relationship between the experience and the artwork yielded. A work of art is a new reality; and it’s harder to grasp this with photography than painting, which is self-referential. A photographs connection to reality is tenuous at best. It’s not a surrogate for the reality or even the experience. It doesn’t “speak for itself” in the modernist’s tradition – it’s too dependent on interpretation for that, however subconsciously.

Practioners who utilize the compact and rugged Leica, a sleight-of-hand camera if ever there was one, tend not to coddle the camera. But it has to be cradled in the hand. It has to be used so naturally that pushing the shutter release button is like snapping one’s fingers. The analogy might go like this: The snap of the finger, the moment of exposure is a moment of recognition. At that moment the stars may align, or the form coalesces, to yield an image that resonates with one’s understanding–the meaning of the photograph is seen, known and established in the flexing of the index finger. Conception and execution are simultaneous.

The Highwaymen paintings share this quality. Like photographs, their meanings are solely a function of each viewer. Meaningful symbolism dissolves in light of the transitory nature of the image – it’s a here-and-now quality. But individual lives come down to trite actions. To assuage this the Highwaymen knew to picture only God’s provenance. The immediate appeal was transcendent; it appealed to our shared biology and collective unconscious, as the viewing experience was undeterred by worldly things. They learned quickly to do nothing to deter from the sublime beauty of unfettered nature. They knew not even to include indigenous animals in their paintings: Florida panthers, sand hill cranes, or wood storks, no bears or bob cats, not even eagles, hawks or barred owls. No alligators or anhingas. No cars, condos, or concrete canyons. Not even an old fashioned general store. To these we think, not react. Reaction was key. It is mostly this visceral quality that these fast-paintings and “drawn” photographic images share – they are known in the moment.

Gary Monroe