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George Forss, 80, Photographer Discovered on the Street, Dies
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Dave P.
Aug 5, 2021, 10:56:47 PM8/5/21
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George Forss, 80, Photographer Discovered on the Street, Dies
By Alex Vadukul, Aug. 2, 2021, NY Times
In the 80s, a street photographer named George Forss was
selling his black-&-white pictures of the Empire State
Building & Central Park to tourists for $5 a pop. Like so
many of New York’s sidewalk peddlers, he was just trying to
make a buck. But his images stood apart from the typical fare.
As he saw it, New York was the Emerald City, and his
cityscapes portrayed a luminous and majestic metropolis.
In framing the Brooklyn Bridge’s grandeur, he captured the
masses who trudge across it daily. As fog crept over New
York Harbor, he photographed Statue of Liberty seemingly
trying to peer thru the mist, awaiting another ship of
immigrants. And in what became his best-known picture, he
snapped the QE2 gliding past the twin towers of the World
Trade Center beneath a dark, ominous-looking sky.
He died at 80 on July 17 at his home in Cambridge NY, near
the Vermont border. His rep, Phyllis Wrynn, director of
the Park Slope Gallery in Brooklyn, said the cause was
heart failure.
To those who rushed past Forss on Midtown Manhattan
sidewalks, he was just another street peddler. But that
all changed in 1980, when the renowned photojournalist
David Douglas Duncan encountered him near Grand Central
Terminal and was riveted by his work. A former staff
photographer for Life magazine, Duncan decided to use his
influence to promote Forss.
Duncan published a photography book, “New York/New York:
Masterworks of a Street Peddler,” thru McGraw-Hill in 1984,
& it made Forss a sensation. “Astonishment, disbelief,
excitement, confusion and admiration held me captive
while my eyes swept the vendor’s display of prints on a
sidewalk,” Duncan, who died in 2018, wrote in the intro.
The dust jacket carried praise from Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Gordon Parks and Norman Mailer. Ansel Adams was taken by
Forss’s hi-contrast image of the Rocket Thrower sculpture
in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. He wrote, “I have seen
no photos of recent years as strong and as perceptive.”
Reviewing a Forss show the next year at the NY Public
Library in Midtown, Richard F. Shepard of The NY Times
called Forss “a master of perceptions of the strength &
beauty of the city in a way that few, if any, others
have been able to achieve.”
He appeared on the “Today” show & was the subject of a
BBC documentary. An exhibition of his pictures was held
at the Brooklyn Museum, and the Int'l Center of Photo-
graphy in Manhattan acquired his work. Forss started
charging $20 for his photos, and he gradually stopped
hustling on sidewalks entirely.
“This is a whole new life for me,” he told The Times
in 1985. “I was deteriorating on the streets.”
Much of the attention he received focused on the adver-
sity of his life. Raised in orphanages, he grew up in the
Bronx with polio, which made him reclusive as a child, &
found escape when he discovered photography in his 20s.
After his career took off, things sometimes got weird in
interviews when he spoke of his belief in an ancient
race of extraterrestrials who, as he told it, began
telepathically communicating with him when he lived in
the Bronx. He believed they'd given him his photographic
talents and helped lift him out of hard times.
Forss purchased his first camera from a pawnshop on
8th Ave in Manhattan and later mastered the craft of
building his own cameras from old parts. Working as a
bike messenger, he trained his lens on New York as he
pedaled across the city, and before long he started
selling his prints.
With his modest profits he supported his invalid mother
in the dilapidated frame house they shared in the
Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where he had built a
darkroom. An early portrait subject was his
one-eyed cat, Bingo.
“Sure, I have a lot of resentment,” Forss said in an
interview with Popular Photography magazine in 1984.
“But it’s not going to show in my work. I want to be
uplifted, & brought to the level of a beautiful place.”
His time in the spotlight would not last.
When he shot promotional images for Mercedes-Benz, his
photos were deemed unusable, and he shrugged off the
rejection. After a prospective client asked him to photo-
graph a series of American cities, starting with
Cleveland, he bombed in the interview and lost the job.
“What do you photograph in Cleveland, anyway?” he told
The Times in 1984. “There’s no place like New York.”
George Forss was born on May 4, 1941, in the South Bronx.
His father, Hank, was a street tough who was deported to
Finland after George was born. His mother, Norma, was
an amateur photographer who camped out around the city
with a box camera and a flash gun to snap pictures of
celebrities. Although details are scarce, city social
workers had apparently removed George from his mother’s
care.
After leaving the orphanage system in his late teens,
George reunited with his mother, who suffered from
crippling osteoporosis & rheumatoid arthritis. They bonded
over their love of photography, & he became her caretaker.
In the late 80s, as his rent in Brooklyn increased, an
uncle left Forss a modest inheritance. He used it to buy
a storefront building on Main St. in Cambridge, opening a
gallery on its ground floor, where he sold his work and
represented local artists. He lived with his mother & a
half brother, Mickey, in Cambridge, where he became
known as an eccentric figure. Occasionally a customer
who noticed a black-&-white photo of NYC in his gallery
would ask him, “Is that a George Forss?”
He's survived by his half brother Mickey as well as another
half brother, Donald, and his partner, Donna Wynbrandt.
As Forss settled into life upstate, his interest in extra-
terrestrial life was only heightened. In 2007 he self-
published a book, “Enos,” in which he detailed his communi-
cations w/aliens, & wrote of extraterrestrial experiences
in a blog. He became an avid U.F.O. investigator who would
drive across the region in a Volkswagen van checking out
tips of sightings he had received.
When Forss searched the skies for alien life, he also
trained his camera upward, hoping to photograph the beauty
of something cosmic and incomprehensible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/nyregion/george-forss-dead.html
By Alex Vadukul, Aug. 2, 2021, NY Times
In the 80s, a street photographer named George Forss was
selling his black-&-white pictures of the Empire State
Building & Central Park to tourists for $5 a pop. Like so
many of New York’s sidewalk peddlers, he was just trying to
make a buck. But his images stood apart from the typical fare.
As he saw it, New York was the Emerald City, and his
cityscapes portrayed a luminous and majestic metropolis.
In framing the Brooklyn Bridge’s grandeur, he captured the
masses who trudge across it daily. As fog crept over New
York Harbor, he photographed Statue of Liberty seemingly
trying to peer thru the mist, awaiting another ship of
immigrants. And in what became his best-known picture, he
snapped the QE2 gliding past the twin towers of the World
Trade Center beneath a dark, ominous-looking sky.
He died at 80 on July 17 at his home in Cambridge NY, near
the Vermont border. His rep, Phyllis Wrynn, director of
the Park Slope Gallery in Brooklyn, said the cause was
heart failure.
To those who rushed past Forss on Midtown Manhattan
sidewalks, he was just another street peddler. But that
all changed in 1980, when the renowned photojournalist
David Douglas Duncan encountered him near Grand Central
Terminal and was riveted by his work. A former staff
photographer for Life magazine, Duncan decided to use his
influence to promote Forss.
Duncan published a photography book, “New York/New York:
Masterworks of a Street Peddler,” thru McGraw-Hill in 1984,
& it made Forss a sensation. “Astonishment, disbelief,
excitement, confusion and admiration held me captive
while my eyes swept the vendor’s display of prints on a
sidewalk,” Duncan, who died in 2018, wrote in the intro.
The dust jacket carried praise from Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Gordon Parks and Norman Mailer. Ansel Adams was taken by
Forss’s hi-contrast image of the Rocket Thrower sculpture
in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. He wrote, “I have seen
no photos of recent years as strong and as perceptive.”
Reviewing a Forss show the next year at the NY Public
Library in Midtown, Richard F. Shepard of The NY Times
called Forss “a master of perceptions of the strength &
beauty of the city in a way that few, if any, others
have been able to achieve.”
He appeared on the “Today” show & was the subject of a
BBC documentary. An exhibition of his pictures was held
at the Brooklyn Museum, and the Int'l Center of Photo-
graphy in Manhattan acquired his work. Forss started
charging $20 for his photos, and he gradually stopped
hustling on sidewalks entirely.
“This is a whole new life for me,” he told The Times
in 1985. “I was deteriorating on the streets.”
Much of the attention he received focused on the adver-
sity of his life. Raised in orphanages, he grew up in the
Bronx with polio, which made him reclusive as a child, &
found escape when he discovered photography in his 20s.
After his career took off, things sometimes got weird in
interviews when he spoke of his belief in an ancient
race of extraterrestrials who, as he told it, began
telepathically communicating with him when he lived in
the Bronx. He believed they'd given him his photographic
talents and helped lift him out of hard times.
Forss purchased his first camera from a pawnshop on
8th Ave in Manhattan and later mastered the craft of
building his own cameras from old parts. Working as a
bike messenger, he trained his lens on New York as he
pedaled across the city, and before long he started
selling his prints.
With his modest profits he supported his invalid mother
in the dilapidated frame house they shared in the
Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where he had built a
darkroom. An early portrait subject was his
one-eyed cat, Bingo.
“Sure, I have a lot of resentment,” Forss said in an
interview with Popular Photography magazine in 1984.
“But it’s not going to show in my work. I want to be
uplifted, & brought to the level of a beautiful place.”
His time in the spotlight would not last.
When he shot promotional images for Mercedes-Benz, his
photos were deemed unusable, and he shrugged off the
rejection. After a prospective client asked him to photo-
graph a series of American cities, starting with
Cleveland, he bombed in the interview and lost the job.
“What do you photograph in Cleveland, anyway?” he told
The Times in 1984. “There’s no place like New York.”
George Forss was born on May 4, 1941, in the South Bronx.
His father, Hank, was a street tough who was deported to
Finland after George was born. His mother, Norma, was
an amateur photographer who camped out around the city
with a box camera and a flash gun to snap pictures of
celebrities. Although details are scarce, city social
workers had apparently removed George from his mother’s
care.
After leaving the orphanage system in his late teens,
George reunited with his mother, who suffered from
crippling osteoporosis & rheumatoid arthritis. They bonded
over their love of photography, & he became her caretaker.
In the late 80s, as his rent in Brooklyn increased, an
uncle left Forss a modest inheritance. He used it to buy
a storefront building on Main St. in Cambridge, opening a
gallery on its ground floor, where he sold his work and
represented local artists. He lived with his mother & a
half brother, Mickey, in Cambridge, where he became
known as an eccentric figure. Occasionally a customer
who noticed a black-&-white photo of NYC in his gallery
would ask him, “Is that a George Forss?”
He's survived by his half brother Mickey as well as another
half brother, Donald, and his partner, Donna Wynbrandt.
As Forss settled into life upstate, his interest in extra-
terrestrial life was only heightened. In 2007 he self-
published a book, “Enos,” in which he detailed his communi-
cations w/aliens, & wrote of extraterrestrial experiences
in a blog. He became an avid U.F.O. investigator who would
drive across the region in a Volkswagen van checking out
tips of sightings he had received.
When Forss searched the skies for alien life, he also
trained his camera upward, hoping to photograph the beauty
of something cosmic and incomprehensible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/nyregion/george-forss-dead.html
John M.
Aug 6, 2021, 7:57:01 PM8/6/21
to
magazine. The following photo has stuck with me since.
https://george-forss.pixels.com/featured/qe-ii-in-new-york-1977-george-forss.html
Well, memory can play tricks as I don't really remember it as such.
What I remember was very similar though but, as memory does play
tricks, this is probably the one. I saw.
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