Fred W. McDarrah, 81, Set Photo Style at Voice

By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 7, 2007

Fred W. McDarrah chronicled the New York demimonde in photographs for the Village Voice starting in the late 1950s. He was still on the masthead as a consulting editor when he died yesterday at his home at 81.

McDarrah's photos documented the 1950s Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac frolicking at a 1958 New Year's Eve party. He was also immersed in the New York art scene of the day and its standouts, such as Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline, whom he shot in their studios.

Despite documenting artists, McDarrah never considered his portraits to be anything but photojournalism. He ran the photography department at the Voice for several decades and trained generations of photographers, including Sylvia Plachy and James Hamilton.

McDarrah once told the East Hampton Star that he bought his first camera at the 1939 World's Fair and began "taking pictures of my brother, my mother, street scenes, trolley cars." He served as a paratrooper during World War II and stayed on as part of the American occupation forces in Japan after the war, documenting all he saw with his camera. He studied journalism at New York University on the G.I. Bill. In 1959, he joined the Village Voice as an advertising salesman, but soon graduated to the news side of the operation.

In an early stunt that somehow made national news, McDarrah in 1960 placed an ad in the Voice offering "RENT GENUINE BEATNIKS — BADLY GROOMED BUT BRILLIANT (MALE AND FEMALE)" as entertainment at parties. The ad garnered so many responses that he actually sent poets and artists to office and dinner parties. United Press International reported that a "23-year-old girl beatnik" poet he sent to one party, Mimi Maireux, refused to read but "just kind of declines around looking attractively languorous — beat."

As McDarrah started a family of his own in the early 1960s, he became less personally involved with the scenes he was shooting, but continued to compile a nearly encyclopedic catalog of New York youth culture through the 1970s. He caught Bob Dylan saluting his lens outside the Voice's office; snapped candid shots of Janis Joplin and Jasper Johns, and shot Roy Cohn chatting up a young Donald Trump. He was on the scene for the big events, too, such as Robert Kennedy campaigning for president in 1968 and the Stonewall riots of 1969. "I had absolutely no idea" of the riot's historic importance, he told the New York Times in 1996. "Otherwise I would have stayed there for five nights."

Most of all, McDarrah was an expert on New York City, its politics, institutions — especially museums — and its people. Every few years he bicycled around the city to document changes and exhibited the results at local galleries.

"He was really what I would call a reporter photographer," a 50-year veteran writer of the Voice, who credits McDarrah with setting the visual style of the newsweekly, Nat Hentoff, said. McDarrah was perhaps the most frequent contributor of the photo that accompanied Mr. Hentoff's weekly column for decades. "He was indomitable," Mr. Hentoff said. "Nobody could intimidate him."

McDarrah had dozens of gallery shows and was co-author of several books including "The New Bohemia" (1967) and "The Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village" (1998). He won numerous spot-news photo awards and was a Guggenheim fellow in photography in 1972. He used the award money to sponsor a cross-country trip in the footsteps of pioneer photographers. Like them, he erected impromptu outdoor darkrooms to develop his photos on the spot, his son, Patrick McDarrah, said.

Fred William McDarrah

Born November 5, 1926, in Brooklyn; died November 6 at his home in Greenwich Village; survived by his wife of 47 years, Gloria, his sons Patrick and Timothy, and three grandchildren.