Richard Misrach on Telegraph 3 A.M.

My name is Richard Misrach. I’m 72 years old. I’ve been photographing for pretty much a half century at this point, which simply amazes me.

I went to school at Berkeley between 1967 and 1971. On campus I had discovered a place called the ASUC Studio. This was where students could go and use darkroom labs, ceramics facilities, and lithography and etching equipment. I discovered photography there. I was 18 or 19 and I fell in love. I had this epiphany: oh my God, this language of photography speaks to me in a way I had never experienced before.

At that time, there were huge political upheavals. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Berkeley was the first place where the big anti–Vietnam War protests were being held. There was a lot of civil rights–movement activity when I was in the dorms as a freshman. There was a project called Operation Silent Majority; I was the head of a program where we went to different communities, other colleges, and made people aware of what was going on in Vietnam. At the same time, I was learning about Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and the great f/64 landscape photographers who resided on the West Coast. And the two—politics and photography—were just fighting each other inside me.

At first, even though I was involved politically on the campus scene, my photography was really about the landscape. Then something happened. I lived about five blocks from campus and would walk down Telegraph Avenue, which led right up to the Berkeley campus, go to work, and then I’d walk back. I was very intimidated by the people panhandling on the streets. You couldn’t avoid them. The Telegraph Avenue scene started in the 1960s with the flower children. And then it became the hippie scene, which got a little more intense. When I got there in the 1970s, it had shifted and became the street people scene. The love-your-neighbor thing gave way to heavy drugs like heroin and opioids that just threw a lot of these kids into chaos.

There were a number of regulars on the Avenue during those two years. Frankie had her dog, Jeremy. I photographed her many, many times. She was almost like the street mom. She was out of it a lot, but she was lovely. She was wonderful.

Julia was out there every day. She was a poet and had a distinct limp. She wore a weird black cape and a yellow hat and blew bubbles all day. She was called the Bubble Lady. And she became the symbol of Telegraph Avenue.

Moe’s Books was central to the scene. It had great art books, and a bunch of the people I photographed crashed upstairs on the floor. Moe’s is still the main bookstore of the Telegraph Avenue community. People’s Park is still a site of political activity, even 50 years later. Back then, the university was trying to take it over to build housing. Today, unhoused people live there and they’re still battling with the university to keep it for people living on the street.

Even though the people in the photos are looking at the camera lens and they’re kind of looking at me, they’re also confronting the viewer. A spectator is looking at the print on the wall at MoMA or in a book, and those people on the street are actually staring back at them. It passes through the photographer to them. In every portrait in Telegraph 3 A.M. there’s eye contact. I made lots of pictures where the subject is looking away. None of them made the final cut.

Roger Minick, who also worked at the ASUC studio, was really supportive. He was a great mentor. At the studio, we had brown butcher paper that we wrapped things in. We called it the “studio stationary.” So we took that paper and cut it to different sizes, made pages out of it, then stuck our photographs on those pages and created a book dummy. Then we played with the flow of images, the sequencing. I would show early versions of the book to Roger and other people at the studio and they’d give me feedback on the editing. And at one point I thought I had a book. I thought it was really good. But Roger told me, “You’re not done yet.” I was heartbroken. I’d been photographing for a year and a half, every day, working really hard, thousands of exposures, and I thought I was done. I decided to check out the Avenue at night, to see if I could make some pictures. I only came up with maybe eight night pictures in the end. But they transformed the project.

I read James Joyce’s Ulysses, which starts in the morning and takes place over a 24-hour period. I took that model and applied it to Telegraph 3 A.M. So the first photograph you see is the street in the morning, and the last one is the street at night, suggesting a 24-hour cycle.

When Telegraph 3 A.M. came out, I was a ripe old 24. One day, at home, I got a call from [the Magnum photographer and curator] Cornell Capa. At first I thought it was a friend of mine playing a joke on me. Capa wanted to do a show of my work with Roger Minick’s at the International Center for Photography in New York, which had just opened. Back then, I didn’t want to spend money on flying, so I drove cross country for my opening. The National Endowment for the Arts also gave me a grant for $1,500 and I lived for a year and a half on that. It was big for me, not just the money but the recognition. So these things were happening, but I no longer saw the people living on the street. And I did a lot of soul searching and felt torn. I felt like I had to decide whether to do social documentary work or to pursue photography for the love of the medium.