From New York to Paris and back again

Adam Ritchie at The Velvet Underground
— New York Extravaganza

Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison and John Cale at the New York Film-makers’ Cinematheque February 1966 © Adam Ritchie

Adam Ritchie made his way from London to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1962, and took up photography by chance. When not taking pictures of the city’s bohemian art, music and fashion scenes for galleries, record labels and magazines, he worked nights at The Bleeker Street Cinema. His first shoot with the VU was on the set of Piero Heliczer’s movie Venus in Furs, in November 1965. “A filmmaker friend, Barbara Rubin, phoned me one day and said, ‘we are filming now, you’ve got to come right away and hear this band,’” he recalls. “I was there in 15 minutes…”  His photographs of The Velvet Underground document their formative, and, arguably, most interesting years, as they emerged, blinking, from the shadows of New York City’s underground cinema and art scene, into the tin-foil glare of Andy Warhol’s Factory and beyond.

John Cale, Maureen Tucker and Lou Reed at Cafe Bizarre on West 3rd Street, New York City, 1965 © Adam Ritchie

Ritchie would go on to photograph the VU performing at the Café Bizarre, Delmonicos and the New York Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, each set of photographs remarkable for their intimacy and raw, vérité immediacy. Ultimately, he would capture the band as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multi-media extravaganza, and it would be here that the aesthetic legacy of the VU would be confirmed.

“It was during this latter period that nearly all of Ritchie’s photographs and negatives were destroyed...”

This summer, 49 of Ritchie’s photographs will be included in a major Velvet Underground exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris in Paris to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the group’s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. In Ritchie’s sharp, monochrome images we see a group in transition, shirtless and covered in ‘war paint’ on the set of Piero Heliczer’s movie, and, elsewhere, just beginning to exude the enigmatic, dark-clad hauteur of their imminent tenure as house band to the speed-freak scene of Warhol’s Factory.

Lou Reed at the filming of Venus in Furs November 1965 at 450 Grand Street, NYC © Adam Ritchie

Ritchie returned to London in 1966, taking pictures of the capital’s musical underground, including Pink Floyd performing at London’s hallucinatory UFO club, but mostly retained a dignified low profile where others might have dined out on the inexorably burgeoning significance of the scenes he’d documented. He would go on to teach photography at the Central School of Art for seven years, before building houses in Wales and later in London. It was during this latter period that nearly all of Ritchie’s photographs and negatives were destroyed, without his knowledge.

Thankfully, one battered paper carrier bag appeared some years later containing the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd photos, images that capture the defining moments of two of the most iconic and still influential ’60s art-rock bands from each side of the Atlantic. It may have been all that was left of ten years’ professional work, but what photographs, and what a decade… It is impossible to imagine popular music iconography’s subsequent half-century-long evolution without them.

Jamie Holman

The Velvet Underground “New York Extravaganza” Exhibition took place at the Philharmonie de Paris, in Paris, 30 March–21 August 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the group’s debut album,