Steven Hirsch: A Deranged Brilliance

And I mean that as the highest compliment - like in a mad genius kind of way.

I first became familiar with Steven’s work around 2015 when I started following him on Instagram. Although he’s best known for street photography, I was drawn to his macro photo details of ordinary things that are often overlooked – lines and shapes – paint on the road, layers of paper on construction walls, graffiti, bits of this and that. This is nothing new – it’s been done before by many others.

But in each of his individual frames I saw abstract expressionists – Clyfford Still, Cy Twombly, Pollack. I could easily imagine these images blown up big. I commented on them as such and was thrilled to be able to introduce him to the work of these artists and that, not having studied art history, he would voraciously consume this new information.

What followed over the next several years would be a chronological explosion of creative development unfolding like a time-lapse of a seedling taking root. When you scroll through his work on the Instagram grid you can follow his visual journey and watch the progression of his discovery and expression as an artist regardless of what medium he uses. Photos, paintings, and drawings all converge as one big mash-up via an open spigot from his brain.

It starts to make sense when you hear the stories – and he has loads of them - and you realize they need to be recorded because this is the New York of legend.

Steven Hirsch was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and grew up in middle-class East Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s. It was a nice Jewish neighborhood where kids played in the street and chased after the ice cream truck in the afternoons. An idyllic post-war cocoon of safety and comfort. Maybe even a little bit boring for a kid with an active mind. Luckily just a block away was the Brooklyn State Hospital, a psychiatric institution that towered over the rows of houses. Unbeknownst to his parents, young Steven would watch outpatients wander down his block while talking to themselves. Unafraid, he befriended them and listened to their stories. Years later, their ingested schizophrenic visions would emerge on paper and canvas.

As a teenager whose older brothers had already left the nest, Steven would go with his father, a successful businessman, avid gambler, and horse owner, to the racetrack. It was here that he got to mingle with small-time crooks and other degenerates as his father would have him cash their bets. These guys wore toupees, chomped on cigars, and were always counting money. Next generation versions of these characters would appear decades later on newspaper front pages - almost affectionately documented in their familiarity as they were being led in and out of court in handcuffs.

Working for the tabloids would be a dream job for a young photographer with an affinity for the odd, the outcasts, the deviants. It wasn’t long before Steven started working for The National Enquirer and The Globe - covering subjects that made for gripping headlines that were hard to look away from while waiting at the supermarket checkout line. The tallest man in the world, the woman who kept hundreds of rats in her bedroom, portraits of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

The tabloids were an excellent training ground, but Steven couldn’t pass up an offer from the New York Post in 1994 to cover local stories – fires, murders, crime stuff. This would be a special pass to see what no one else gets to see - on a daily basis. “I saw my first dead body on the second day of my job.”, he says as he tells the story and describes a dank basement in Queens and a closet door riddled with bullet holes. This would be the first of “just another day, just another murder”, as Weegee’s ghost winks from the sidelines.

On the morning of 9/11/2001, Steven was at the World Trade Center. Despite having been accustomed to seeing gruesome scenes on a regular basis, he was traumatized by what he witnessed that day and the days and weeks to follow.

For months afterwards he suffered from lung ailments and it’s likely that the ensuing physical and mental stress triggered a serious health setback in 2005 when a dormant Hepatitis C had flared up with a vengeance, almost killing him.

For nearly 2 years Steven was unable to take photos while he was recovering and undergoing painful and exhaustive treatment.

Easing back into taking pictures would mean having to do something less physically taxing than running around the city all day carrying heavy gear. But what he could manage to do was take pictures from the comfort of his car. Social media was barely in existence at that time so if no photographs of a person of interest were available, the next best thing would be to get a picture of where they lived. Scanning sex offender registries, this became a personal project called, Love Thy Neighbor, a series of photos (and later, some of his earliest forays into paintings of the photos) of the places where these offenders lived. Often these were drab houses that looked a lot creepier with the knowledge of what happened inside.

Fully recovered, Steven went back to the New York Post in 2008 but this time it would be covering the courts. Chances are that if you saw a front page that started off with the words “Sicko Fiend…” you were likely to see an accompanying photo taken by Steven Hirsch. Petty criminals and high-profile law breakers all passed through his lens as they were paraded through the New York City courts. Some would become immortalized in paintings later, adding extra emphasis on details not captured in the photos.

Covering the courthouse beat can mean a lot of waiting before any action happens. But Steven made good use of that time and it led to another personal project, Courthouse Confessions (2008-2009), a series of portraits and stories from the subjects in their own words.

While waiting for the newsworthy criminals to be paraded out, he would strike up conversations with regular, everyday criminals – perverts, small-time thieves, arsonists - passing through the courts. Extractions from the dialogues read like lurid poetry. It was probably those early conversations with the outpatients from the Brooklyn State Hospital that gave him the remarkable skill of being able to connect with those on the fringe. He just sees people – albeit some with more bad luck than others.  

By the time I started following Steven’s work in 2015 – intrigued by the proliferation of gorgeous abstracts mixed in with pictures of criminals and sharp observations of characters – his attention was given to pure color. He had started shooting details of the oily water of the Gowanus Canal in 2014. This lush work ended up being a book and exhibition. And in 2016 he would attempt at making his own surfaces of colors, textures, and shapes by using actual paint instead of photography.

 He began experimenting with materials. But not knowing anything about how to use them he relied on art supply store staff to help him, to educate him on the properties of the paint, the types and suitability of paper or canvas, which brushes worked best. Certainly, a more economical way to learn than going to art school!

While continuing to experiment with paint, he also began to use the camera lens in a different way. In 2017 he would go to Rockaway Beach and create a series of photos taken with a phone by shooting the view seen through a broken boardwalk telescope. The result were fuzzy and dreamy summertime images reminiscent of pinhole camera photos – and if you look at them long enough you might even hear a faint echo of the ice cream truck from his childhood. Here the blur of colors and shapes correlates to the shimmery abstract liquidity of the Gowanus water and the same feeling would appear again later in a drawing of a child swimming, a summer fantasy of floating freely with the fish.

Before long it would become hard to tell Steven’s photos from his paintings. He was also getting really good at the craft – quickly becoming more comfortable with the medium and confidence in his ability of hand/eye skills to flow from his mind to the canvas.

When the entire world shut down in 2020, Steven began to draw. Using colored pencils (that double as watercolor), much of this work would no longer be based on photography. Now he’s drawing directly from his mind – dreams, fantasies, memories – all flowing onto the paper. Since the beginning of COVID, he has made hundreds of drawings – and over 500 drawings and paintings in the last 5 years since he began to make pictures without a camera. These are just a few of my favorites – the last one, called Speeders, striking a familiar chord as I now live in Los Angeles.

Like Courthouse Confessions his latest work continues to be conversations with people in courthouse hallways but this time he takes Fuji Instax photos and handwrites a quote from the subject – in scratchy penmanship with the messy blobs of ink on the glossy paper. They are like little rough sketches that capture a fleeting encounter, telling a story that might not otherwise be heard even if it’s just a squeak.

“I’ve been a photographer my entire life. I photograph things that are real. Street scenes of the city, landscapes, odd people, and things. Though the images reflect how I see the world, they are always depicting real tangible things. I dream a lot. The dreams incorporate a lot of my experiences but are always exaggerated – filled with characters and scenes that can only exist in the imaginary world. The limits of my mind go beyond photographs so the only way I could see it was through painting.”  -- Steven Hirsch