Cartier-Bresson and Me: Part 5

Re: The Plastic People of the Universe

I did some satisfying photojournalism, combining my photos with the copy I wrote myself, most of which went from editor to editor looking for a home. 

One story can serve as a case study to illustrate the obstacles I faced.  In 1977 I went to Prague on official assignment for Harper’s Magazine, to cover the plight of dissident writers and artists. An aspect to the story stood apart from the others in my coverage for Harper’ s; that was the ordeal of a group of counter-culture musicians and poets called The Plastik People of the Universe. They worked entirely outside the official organs of the arts. They played concerts without the obligatory permits. Some of their lyrics were the stuff of political protest and the regime decided to make an example of them. Band members and lyricists were put on trial for subversion and sentenced to prison. Friends of mine arranged a meeting for me with chief lyricist Pavel Zajicek, just released from prison. I interviewed him and photographed him at a secret meeting in a Prague pub. The very fact of his meeting with a Western journalist risked his return to prison, and my expulsion from the country.

When I arrived back in New York I phoned The Village Voice, New York’s leading weekly newspaper of art and politics. Would they be interested in an 800-word article on Zajicek and The Plastik People, I asked an assistant editor? Drop it by, was the answer. The next day I delivered the manuscript, written over night in a blaze of enthusiasm for the subject and the opportunity.

I waited a few days and rang up the assistant editor, asking to talk with his boss about my piece. “You don’t get to talk to an editor of The Village Voice just by asking,” he told me. “You need to call and call and call and hope to get lucky and catch him in an odd moment.”

I thought about Zajicek risking a return to prison if his meeting with me was discovered and now a gatekeeper was telling me I had to become a petitioner to the The Village Voice to tell his story in print. My answer was curt: “Tell your boss I’m a journalist with an important story. He has my draft, if he’s interested have him contact me, quickly, because I intend to offer it to other publications.”

In the coming weeks I offered the Zajicek piece to Rolling Stone and The Boston Phoenix. Neither publication was interested in a story about a counter-culture band battling a communist regime in Eastern Europe. My piece never reached print. However, a few years later The Village Voice ran a front-page article on the Plastik People and their struggles.  The writer of the article had never visited Prague, never met any of the musicians or lyricists in person. He wrote from the comfort of Vienna.

This told me a few things that contributed to my eventual decision to abandon my ambitions as a photojournalist. First, except for news of general strikes or the election of a pope, the American popular press was not interested in international news. Selling anything on the politics or the arts of countries behind the Iron Curtain was an uphill battle at best. Second, as an outsider in the profession I was invisible, I simply wouldn’t have access to the editors, even if I had an important story ready for copy editing.

[Go on to  Part 6]