A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Theater... Celebrated actor Joel Grey discovered a second career in a shoebox of old photos By Mark Lapin Article rating: 7.65

A funny thing happened to Joel Grey on his way to a legendary career in show-business.  The celebrated actor, best know for his Tony- and Oscar-winning turn as the sinister Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, pulled some old photos out of a shoebox and launched a second career as a fine-art photographer.

As Joel recalled the incident, two artist friends were visiting his home around the time his daughter (actress Jennifer Grey) was about to have her own first child.  Joel took out shoeboxes of old photos to show them Jennifer’s baby pictures.  The shoeboxes also held photographs Joel had been taking for the last 35 years.  ‘What are you doing with these?’ the artists asked.  ‘Nothing,’ Joel told them.  ‘I went, I saw, I showed them to my family. I had the experience.’ ‘No, you have to do more,’ said the artists.  ‘You have to take these images to a printer and see what more there is on the negative.’

Before that encounter, Joel had been in the habit of taking his photos to Walgreen’s, where they received the usual cookie-cutter cropping, and a time-stamp on the image for good measure.  Since he was shooting film, he never really knew the power of his own images until they got the benefit of professional printing and big beautiful enlargements.  ‘It was fun to finally see them blown up to large sizes,’ he says.  ‘The color was what I remembered, sometimes better, even magical.  I'm a sucker for magic.  I got very excited about seeing what was on the original negative.’ 

Joel happened to have a bunch of large prints lying around on the dining room table when another talented friend, eminent book designer Sam Shahid, paid him a visit.  Drawn to the prints, Shahid asked to see more.  Joel once again brought out his shoeboxes, which Shahid gathered up and carted away.  ‘About six weeks later, he called me into his office to show me a mockup of what was to become my first book,’ Joel recalls.

Beginning to demand equal time
A visual memoir of his experiences while living and traveling in Europe, Asia and the Americas, Pictures I had to Take was published by powerHouse Books in 2003.  Far from beating down doors to break into print, Joel was a reluctant auteur.  ‘I actually went to every person in knew in the arts field and said: Don't let me make a fool of myself.  Tell me not to do this.  Nobody dissuaded me,’ he says.

Publication led to one-man shows at top galleries in New York and Berlin, and a second book, Looking Hard at Unexamined Things, by Steidl, one of the world’s most prestigious publishers of fine-art photography.   Joel’s work is now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art.  His third monograph is due out soon, and he has come around to a new view of his own camera work.  ‘I could never have imagined any of this,’ he says.    ‘I'm an actor.  But I have to start coming to grips with the fact that I’m also a photographer, which is beginning to demand equal time.’

Late bloomer, early bloomer
Joel describes himself as ‘a late bloomer in professional photography and a very early bloomer in the theater.’  He grew up around theater as the son of Mickey Katz, a noted Yiddish-parodist (Duvid Crockett, King of Delancy Street) and klezmer clarinetist who recorded six of his own albums. 

Joel was performing on stage in a professional theater company in Cleveland before he hit double digits.  ‘I started right out getting leading roles-- very lucky,’ he says. ‘Playing Pud in On Borrowed Time is about as good a part as a nine-year-old boy can get.’   Discovering that he had the power to move an audience to tears, laugher and applause, Joel knew there was nothing else in this life he wanted to do more. 
Sixty years later, he has played so many roles and earned so much acclaim on stage, screen and TV that a Google search of Joel Grey yields more than half a million hits.  There are, however, a handful of roles that still stand out for him. 

‘Cabaret was like one’s first kiss, one’s first love,’ he says.  ‘It was an international success, a very powerful experience both on stage and in film.   On a more intimate scale, The Normal Heart, the famous AIDS play by Larry Kramer, was also very powerful because we were doing it at the time that people were dying.  It was like being in an emergency ward every night.  And playing the 75-year-old Korean martial arts master in Remo Williams was amazing.  I insisted that the film company do a makeup test.  Not for me to get the part, but for me to believe that I could play it, that it could have reality, and one wouldn’t look at the make-up.  I think I’m the first actor to ever insist on a make-up test before taking the part.  The exterior allowed me to look inside the character.  It usually comes the other way around.’

A lot in common with the rest of us
Although Joel is in a class by himself when it comes to acting, he has a lot in common with the rest of us when it comes to photography.  ‘I started seriously when my children were born,’ he says, ‘the natural time to take a million pictures of every single second of their important lives.’ 

The motivation for Joel’s travel photos also has a familiar ring.  ‘I very often went on film shoots by myself when the kids were small and my wife was home taking care of them.  I knew I was having an experience that they couldn’t share.  I wanted to impart some of the excitement of seeing exotic locales and meeting interesting people when I got home.  I never thought the photos would be anything but things to share with family and friends.’

Joel’s bought his first quality camera in 1972.  It was a Nikkormat, a ground-breaking SLR that helped many serious amateurs improve their photography.  ‘I just played with it, and I'm still very unschooled on the technical stuff,’ he admits.  ‘When I find myself drawn to an image, I somehow make the camera see what I’m seeing.   One could call it pure instinct.’

Educated eye
But Joel does have an educated eye.  He has a long-standing passion for modern art, and a love of photography that goes back to boyhood.  ‘I’ve always been visual to a fault, even somewhat obsessive about color and form,’ he says.  ‘Growing up, there was a photographer named Eliot Elisofon who did a lot of work for LIFE magazine. And every week, I’d look forward to seeing what country he’d been in and what things had inspired him.  My first book has a lot of his influence.’

Joel’s first book also included a group of photos that broke the travel mode. They were more abstract, compositions of form and color inspired by modern artists he admired such as Rauschenberg and Rothko.  ‘So the next book became more about asking myself, what am I looking at and why am I looking at it?  How did it get like that?  What creates the magic here?’

In Looking Hard at Unexamined Things, Joel is often drawn to details that other people might not notice.  ‘Just walking down the street, I'll be drawn to a corner of something,’ he says.  ‘I get as close as the Nikkormat allows.  I shoot, and the often next time I pass that location the image is gone.  Mystery, magic and permanence are big themes in my second book.’

Joel promises that has third book, due out soon from powerHouse, will once again break the mold.  ‘It will be completely different from the first two,’ he says.  ‘But I’m not going to say anymore than that.’

All about dreaming and imagining
Acting and photography seem about as opposite as artistic endeavors can be.  One is about words, rehearsals, community effort and narrative unfolding; the other is silent, spontaneous, solitary and instantaneous.  But Joel believes that both spring from the same part of his mind.  ‘I don't think those parts of me are separate,’ he says.   ‘When I'm looking to find a character, it's about dreaming and imagining and living in someone else's body.  It's a very mysterious experience to imagine a character, and then bring that character to life on the stage.  And I think it’s similar with photography.  When I see an image, something startles me but often I can't take it all in at once, in a nanosecond.  I actually see what I really saw when I look at the print.  It all comes from the dreaming part of the mind.’