Park Row Gallery News

"The Cats in My Life," an exhibition of photographs by Gerard Malanga, will be on view at Park Row Gallery, 2 Park Row, from Feb. 20 through March 29. An opening reception will be held Saturday, March 1 from 4 to 6 p.m.

Malanga is the author of a dozen books of poetry and four books of photography that span nearly a 45-year period. His most recent books are "No Respect: New & Selected Poems 1964-2000' and "Screen Tests Portraits Nudes." His work has appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, The Paris Review and The New Yorker.

"This work is really a kind of veiled autobiography," said the artist of the 26 pieces in the show, which features photographs of the cats he's known, and that have influenced him, during the last three decades. The earliest work in the exhibit dates from 1972 and features a farm cat in Wales.

"I've taken these photographs all through my career. Over 30 years I've accumulated these images and really, until I decided to do this show, I didn't realize how many pictures I had. Malanga explained that he started making images of cats in much the same way anyone would take photographs of their pets. "Not all the photographs are of my cats, but I think I took the first picture of my own cat in 1974. I suppose it's just natural that as a photographer you just start exploring all the possibilities.

"As a portrait photographer - someone who photographs musicians and artists - I always look to do the portrait. And what is a portrait of a cat? A cat has no idea of self or of the camera."

Malanga explained that he found there are really four basic, traditional poses for cats: There's the headshot; the cat in repose, which is really a cat sitting on his haunches; the full-length body shot, standing or lounging; and catching the cat in some kind of activity. However, what he learned from gleaning through his collection and gathering up narratives for each of the 13 subjects in the show, was that his own life closely paralleled the lives of his feline subjects.

"This is not just a show about pictures of cats. These are basically reminders of certain things that happen in life as I was photographing them. It's a recounting of our lives together."

For example, Malanga writes this about his photograph "Eban in the golden hour. 1985": "Eban was William Burroughs' favorite cat. Whenever I'd run into Bill, he'd always ask, "How's Eban?"

It was Spring '74 that Diane and I answered a classified ad for a kitten looking for lots of love and a home. So when we arrived at this publisher's office in the Flatiron Building, out from the broom closet pranced this little black kitten 3-months tall, immediately scampering up Diane's leg nipping her on the chin.

"OK," she said. "You're coming home with us."

Diane named him Eban, punning on his all-ebony coat - actually an Oriental Shorthair hybrid. He became the central focus in our top-floor apartment which overlooked 14th Street and Julian's Billiards just a ways up. He was super-friendly and super-smart - and beautiful; a statuesque prince.

Many years later, a cystitis that had been in remission flared up out of nowhere. Suddenly, everything was breaking down all at once. Eban lost a lot of weight, but the worst of it was he had difficulty urinating. Weekly visits to the Animal Hospital for blood tests only postponed the inevitable. Twelve weeks later he passed away quietly in my bed while I was up reading.

I buried Eban behind Jerry Martin's barn in the Berkshires, wrapped in his favorite Indian blanket; it was autumn, 1986. A year later I went to visit, but everything was pretty much overgrown, and there were no visual markers that I could remember."

A number of noted writers have best summed up Malanga's contributions in poetry and photography. Included among them, Robert Creeley in a testimonial to the Academy of American Poets had this to say:

"Now and again a poet is found who is a complex of many capabilities and patterns, all relating but none so isolating in its practice that the one is lost to the other. I have marveled for years at Gerard Malanga's articulate endurance as a poet--and also as a photographer of singular power. He has moved with deftness and great authority in the various worlds of art and pop, and never lost either his wits or his footing. In short, he reminds me as do few others of what poets might be in a common world if only they could or would."

Among the many exhibits of Malanga's abroad over the years, an entire wall was given over to his photographs in the 2001 exhibition, The Pop Years at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Malanga's photographs have also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times obits, Vanity Fair, Vogue Italia, Rolling Stone and most recently in The Paris Review 50th anniversary issue; he was the first photographer to be published in The New York Review of Books.

Gerard Malanga lives with his three cats, Sasha, Zazie and Xena, in Brooklyn, New York.

To see more about Gerard Malanga, visit www.gerardmalanga.com. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of work will benefit Animalkind, Inc. of Hudson.