New Haven Independent

So the retired Yale professor and distinguished photographer decided to turn his acuity to his own backyard, and, in particular, an area of the city he’s always loved: Fair Haven.

What might he find? For example, near his 1977 view of the Grand Avenue Bridge?

At an opening reception at the Lawn Club Friday night for “People and Places,” a retrospective of Apter’s photographs, the Independent posed the question.

Independent: As these photographs and your many published books attest, you’ve traveled the world — Ghana, Nigeria, Peru — doing your work, but when did you first set eyes on Fair Haven?

Apter: I arrived in New Haven from Berkeley in the fall of 1969 to teach at the university. I can’t remember who directed us to Fair Haven, but I’ve always wanted to live in an old house and on the water, and there were some beauties there, right on Front Street, I think it was, across from an old boat basin at the time.

Independent: Why didn’t you plant your flag there?

Apter: Well, the area was pretty much in decline then, and we had two small children and, no surprise, we were looking around for where the schools would be best. So we ended up in North Haven, but at least in an old 18th century house… You see, I grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., but I spent one summer as a kid in the Hubbard House, built in 1717, in Guilford. I’ve always loved old things, and working with my hands.

Independent: I can see how the old buildings and perhaps especially the vestiges of the oystering life in Fair Haven would draw you in.

Apter: Absolutely. Have you noticed that the doorways, underneath, in some of those houses on Front Street, and elsewhere in the area are especially wide? That was so the barrels containing the oysters could get in and out. I own a wheelbarrow, a specialized one, you know, wider than most, for the oysters.

Independent: You’re a sociologist who’s written on the politics of modernization in Ghana [with Apter’s wife Elinor and photo of Kofi Antubam, a leading Ghana artist, 1960] and Nigeria, and you’ve got a book intriguingly titled The Legitimization of Violence. What’s the perspective you might be bringing from all that to Fair Haven?

Apter: Well, it’s really all about people coming together in community.

Independent: And what is “community”?

Apter:Good question. There are these magnificent buildings in Fair Haven. You drive by, you look at the signs in Spanish, and sometimes the proprietor is Chinese. This is all fascinating to me in terms of community. And there are lots of organizations of course working there. But what makes community? The glue does not come from the outside. I can tell you that.

Independent: What is the glue?

Apter: It’s this organic sense of people relating to each other … on different levels, and often at the some time, and about different issues. On defense, of course. But also on schools, for example. Perhaps the thing that is most crucial and unites these all is people’s availability to come together, to mobilize each other on behalf of what matters to them. It’s got to rise up from inside.

Independent: Where did you yourself come by your interests in these matters?

Apter (pictured with friend Peter Cooper]: I dropped out of high school, and my family was very poor. I went to work, never thought I’d end up in college and teaching it! I found myself working on a farm up in Vermont. I met Dorothy Thompson [wife of Sinclair Lewis] … and then I was drafted in World War Two. Trained to be behind a mortar but I ended up as a white medic attached to a black unit. The things I saw that outraged me … medical procedures on the black soldiers without anesthesia …To make a long story short, I went to school on the G.I. bill, and went down South with the first wave of organizers to integrate the labor unions. You know, just as the army was segregated, so were the unions, until we changed that!

Independent: So what are your plans as you contemplate a Fair Haven project?

Apter: My first idea has been to use photography primarily.

Independent: What can you do with photography that you don’t accomplish with more formal research?

Apter: Well, when you study sociology, groups, you knock out the individual. Photography provides interiority.

Independent: I notice that most of your pictures have people in them, except these two whose subject is Fair Haven. Is that perhaps because you don’t know the people there yet? Tell me about the pictures.

Apter: Well. These two of Fair Haven were part of a small series I did back in 1977. That bridge, Grand Avenue, has since been replaced. [Note: It was the circa 1903 motor beneath that was replaced, the superstructure remaining the same.] But actually if you look carefully on the bottom left, those little dots, are kids. The kids are jumping into the water, the polluted water, to swim. That activity, the people, is what drew me to do the photograph.

Independent: So, you were telling me about your Fair Haven plans.

Apter: Yes. My first idea was to photograph all of Humphrey Street, from Yale down to the river … to see how it changes. But I’m not sure of that now. There are all these fascinating historical houses, but who are the people living inside them? I need of course to work with someone who knows Spanish to get to the “interiority.” Do you know, by the way, who some of the very best sociologists in the world are?

Independent: I hope I’m about to find out.

Apter: They’re real estate agents. If you talk to them in the area, and there’s a lot of chat about protection and safety, then you know there’s a problem. And there is over there. But there are also signs of good things happening as well.

Independent: So when are you going to begin this project?

Apter: I’m 84 years old. How about now?

Previous photographic exhibitions/publications of Apter’s include: From Cave to Square, Images of the 1989 Student Protest Movement in Tiananmen Square and Beyond Representation - Photography as Political and Social Interpretation.
For more information, email him here.