Photographer Reuben Radding has just released his first book, “Heavenly Arms,” which he says, “summarizes what I’m all about.”
If you run into him, he’s usually got a camera around his neck, and it’s probably a digital Leica. Like any worthwhile street photographer (a term he accepts for lack of a better one), he’s always ready to capture the odd moment.
Those moments abound in this collection, which presents his photos more as questions than answers. “I’m not interested in storytelling,” Radding explains. “I want the viewers to come to their own conclusions.”
Radding, once a bass player, arrived in New York 36 years ago after coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to be able to further his career in music (specifically in the punk/grunge arena) in his native Washington, DC, as it wasn’t a particularly ambitious scene. He landed a gig at the legendary East Village music zine shop “See Hear,” and during his seven years helping owner Ted Gottfried run the place, “everyone who I wanted anything to do with came through the shop.”
Avant-garde guitarist/composer Elliott Sharp was one of those people. “He was my intro to everything,” Radding explains. Switching gears musically, he landed gigs with Sharp, which led to more with notables like John Zorn and Marc Ribot, who he toured Europe with.
“Ribot was one of my heroes before I came to New York,” he says. “I was always busy, because there are never too many bass players in town – someone always needed you.”
“At some point, I thought that maybe it would be helpful to have a hobby,” Radding adds, so he took up photography. “It’s a completely different way to create. … As soon as I got a camera in my hand my first inclination was to go outside to shoot. I didn’t tell anyone that I was a photographer for two to three years.”
Eventually, photography replaced music as a career. “Naturally,” he got his professional career started shooting promo shots for musicians, mostly jazz. There was a 10-year stint shooting for “Experiments in Opera,” which he said “was a blast!”
There were events and parties and weddings too, but that all ground to a halt with COVID in 2020. “It changed my life completely,” he admits. “I had to find a new way to work.”
Giving private photography lessons and group workshops over Zoom became the norm, which he didn’t mind at all.
“It’s fascinating,” Radding notes. “I’m seeing pictures from people all over the world — Jakarta, Germany, the United States … I’m helping people to find their own way of operating.”
He continues to conduct workshops as well as teach a course at the International Center of Photography in the Lower East Side.
Radding’s way of operating is to shoot what he cares about and make the pics available to various publications (he is not with an agency). His images of musicians and various protests — Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestine marches, etc. — have landed in print in everything from Rolling Stone to The New York Times to the New Republic, among others.
Rather than let his more personal work pile up unseen, he began putting out zines in 2019, compiling his favorite images from each period and printing up 100 copies of each issue. Many of those images are in the new book — thankfully, as all 14 of those publications are sold out.
“Heavenly Arms” took about awhile to put together.
“The first six months were the hardest,” he admits. “I didn’t know it was going to take a year to find its correct state.”
His friends helped him with the edit when he had about 80 images together.
“They know me very well, and we speak the same language of photography,” Radding explains. “They helped me to see that the key photos were the ones that capitalize on the presence of unanswered questions. It struck me that what my friends were guiding me towards was what my primary target had been all along — singular images that stand on their own and make the viewer want to know more.”
Alex Paterson-Jones, one of the publishers at Red Hook Editions and also the man responsible for the book’s design, points out one of the things that makes Radding’s work stand apart from others in the genre.
“If you look at a classic book like ‘The Americans,’ you can put your finger on what it’s about,” he opines. “With Reuben’s book, the viewer decides what it’s about. I think that Reuben is still deciding what it’s about. Some photographers work is about what they have to say; Reuben’s work is about what he doesn’t say.”
Veteran rock journalist Michael Azerrad, a longtime friend of Radding’s, is succinct in his appraisal of the work.
“Reuben always seems to be in the right place at the right time — but they’re places and times that only he notices,” Azerrad says. “Then he frames them in compositions that are downright classical. And it all goes down in seconds, often literally shooting from the hip, it’s amazing.”
Jason Eskenazi, the other half of Red Hook, is an award-winning photographer himself. His take is that, “Radding is in the line with all the great street photographers. He’s so dedicated — he goes out every day. He takes chaos and makes something out of it.”
Radding throws in his own thoughts on the matter, saying, ”I’ve been thinking about the question about where I see myself in the pantheon, but I think that where I fit is largely up to others. In stylistic terms, I probably am as much an offspring of William Klein as I am of Robert Frank and Winogrand. In more humanistic ways, Anders Petersen’s work is hugely important to me, as well as Larry Fink, who was a friend and sometimes mentor”.
Summing up his work, Radding quotes Jack Kerouac, as he does in the book’s afterward: “Something that you feel will find its own form.”
Reuben Radding is online at reubenradding.com and on Instagram at @reuben_radding. “Heavenly Arms” is available through redhookeditions.com.
