Black and white photographs in a Brazilian market send a writer down a rabbit hole into music legend
The Brazilian city of Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, is 180 kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro. On a good day, you can get from the city to New York in about, well, a day.
What kind of serendipity is it that takes photographs shot in New York half a century old, and somehow transports them into the hands of a person in Juiz de Fora, and then into the hands of another who knows the intricacies of their backstory, generations and miles, apart?
The Brazilian magazine Revista Zum has a piece which takes this serendipity as its starting point: some black-and-white photographs taken in 1970 at a gig in New York which turns out to be the last concert of the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed; those same photographs, or contemporary enlargements of them, found in a market in Brazil in 2019 by photography enthusiast Igor Palmerim (the man selling them said they were in the trash); a nightclub in São Paolo where the story is relayed to student and writer Carime Elmor; a café where Palmerim hands over a brown envelope containing 24 photographs to Elmor.
This article, and the photographs which accompany it, mostly of a handsome late twenties Lou Reed, is the wonderful, unexpected, unexpectable result.
The photographs themselves were of different sizes. They indicated different enlargements. One, however, revealed its author: stamped with the name Leee Black Childers, a Kentucky-born photographer who wound up in New York in the late 1960s, living in a tiny flat and spending time at the intersection of the rock music and the queer scene. (Elmor writes that when Childers met the painter Andy Warhol and said he wanted to be a photographer, Warhol’s advice was simply: “say you’re a photographer, and then you’re a photographer”, gesturing at trans icon Candy Darling: “Look at her. She says she’s a woman. And she is.”)
How did Leee Childers come to be taking photographs at a Velvet Underground gig at an iconic crossover New York venue called Max’s Kansas City on the night that Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground’s most famous member, decided to leave it? Serendipity also, one has to imagine.
But he wasn’t the only one recording the event, albeit in a different medium. While Childers snapped on his Canon, Brigid Berlin was recording the audio of the concert on a Sony portable recorder. A couple of years later the bootleg was released as an album.
Nor were the photographs from Max’s Kansas City the only ones in the set that Igor Palmerim picked up in Juiz de Fora. There’s several more, from a concert in Paris in 1972 (Elmor isn’t able to identify who took these ones) and from the University of Maryland in 1969.
Translator wasn’t able itself to identify if Velvet Underground ever went to Brazil when Lou Reed was a member. Yet somehow, through an unknown chain of events, these photographs did make an inter-American voyage to live another life half a century later. Call it serendipity, call it something else, but we are grateful for the result.
The full original article by Carime Elmor was published in Portuguese on 23 January 2025.
It is available here: ‘Lou Reed em Juiz de Fora’, Revista Zum
Revista Zum is a Brazilian publication of contemporary photography, online and in print, produced by the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paolo. The institute also has an annual festival. The last one was in 2024.
