A pictureperfect life
FotoFest cofounder reflects on globetrotting existence in memoir
Fred Baldwin could easily regale people with all the stories he has to tell from the first half of his life.
Like the one from 1955, when he wrote and drew his way into Pablo Picasso’s busy Villa la Californie in the South of France. He was 26, carrying a borrowed camera, and had no business there, really, except with himself.
For decades, though, the witty, genteel co-founder of FotoFest International — Houston’s globally known photography biennial — has either been more engaged in hearing and sharing other peoples’ stories or discreet in a way that befits his aristocratic upbringing.
Now, at 90, it’s his turn. He has unleashed a torrent of memories with his just-published memoir, “Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair
With freedom.” (Schilt Publishing, $55)
Baldwin recently spoke to me about the book at the Menil campus bungalow he and Wendy Watriss have rented for more than 30 of their 50-plus years together. They had just moved back in, actually, after the Menil folks did a major refresh of the house.
Boxes of books filled the small rooms, looking more important than the furniture. Baldwin and Watriss were using a huge dining table as a shared desk and command central. Work has always consumed them, but these days everything they do has a sense of urgency. They still have so much to do, while they can.
They’re editing the documentary film “Low Turn Row,” about their time in Grimes County in the 1970s, and also are creating a school program with that material. They have several other books to write. And they still travel as often as some people go to the grocery store — for readings, portfolio reviews and other projects.
Tall and still dapper, Baldwin had tied a frayed cotton scarf like an ascot above his FotoFest T-shirt and khakis, a signature look of his elder years. A camera sat within reach on the couch, along with another accessory he is rarely without — a diary.
Baldwin likes to say he became a photographer because years ago his Olivetti typewriter didn’t have spell-check, so he assumed he couldn’t be a writer. Ha.
What a storyteller he turns out to be — eloquent, endearingly self-deprecating, wry and contemplative. His tales take readers through much of the 20th century in ways that would not happen now, as he charms his way into fascinating and often dangerous situations. Beyond the thrilling adventures, he also becomes a better person and a top-notch photojournalist with a keen sense of social justice.
The Picasso escapade fills just one chapter, about a third of the way into the book’s fast-paced narrative, although it covers a decisive moment that gave Baldwin a mantra he still follows: Dream. Use your imagination. Overcome fear. Act.
For that reason, he sees “Dear Mr. Picasso” as something more than his life story. “It’s about how a rather spoiled, conflicted, confused young man deals with privilege and diversity,” he said. “The Picasso experience flipped me from being a doubter to a believer in myself. If there’s any value in this book, it’s that people can do that.”
Semper fi
Baldwin was born in Switzerland and raised all over the world. By the time he was 11, he had lived in 22 houses. His father, a diplomat, died when he was 5; leaving him to be raised mostly by worldly Southern women — chief among them his elegant mother. With equally well-to-do and well-connected relatives on his father’s side who lived in Florence, Italy, the Baldwins were also seriously European.
Always chasing pretty skirts, Baldwin flunked out of his first elite East Coast boarding school and was expelled from a second. When he finally made it to the University of Virginia, he flunked his freshman year — after which his desperate family sent him to work alongside the blue-collar workers of their ice factory in rural South Carolina.
Afraid he was destined to be “sentenced” there for the rest of his life to run the company, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps just in time for the Korean War. He shipped off in the first replacement draft as a rifleman, a duty he requested after he was first assigned to a refrigeration unit. That toughened him up.
He survived the Chosin Reservoir operation, the famous battle in which his regiment was trapped by Chinese forces who outnumbered them 12-to-1 in temperatures that hovered at more than 35 degrees below zero. (Arctic conditions would become a theme of his life.)
“We made it out of there with 60 percent casualties,” he said. “I survived that, then was wounded later, three times — once by our own aircraft, who thought we were enemy. I was blown off the side of a hill.” To this day, Baldwin remains loyal to the Marines and keeps a Purple Heart license plate on his old Mercedes, but he also has strong opinions about the brutal and inhumane sides of war.
Growing a beard for Picasso
His eyes dance a little behind the red metal frames of his glasses as he relives the Picasso experience. By then, with the war behind him, he was on the cusp of his senior year at Columbia University, and worried about his future.
He wasn’t looking for art wisdom. Somehow he had come to think of the legendary figure as an imaginary father, or at least a role model who seemed to have life figured out. “Picasso fascinated me because he controlled his own world. He had a wonderful life, in my estimation: Women found him utterly irresistible. He lived in the South of France.”
Baldwin’s quest to meet Picasso was almost a lark — the craziest, boldest thing he could imagine doing before he graduated and became chained to some mundane desk job. His brother was living in Paris, so getting to France was no big deal.
Getting inside Picasso’s villa, however, was.
Baldwin finagled the address from a saleswoman in the town and knocked on the door the first day with no plan. Turned away, he persisted for four days. “I’d go in the morning and again at midday, and was getting nowhere,” he said. “Then I started looking at a book of his drawings from his show at the Petit Palais that I’d purchased in Paris. And I realized that Picasso had this wild sense of the ridiculous; and if I could figure out how to make him laugh, I might be able to see him.”
Baldwin hatched a ridiculous plan: He wrote Picasso a letter, in French — with the help of the salesgirls he had befriended — and illustrated it with cartoonish drawings about the situation he was in, sleeping in his car at the artist’s doorstep.
“Dear Mr. Picasso,” said the letter dated July 28, 1955, “Iama student at Columbia University and this summer I am a freelance journalist. I know that you are very busy but I am here in my car and each day that you won’t see me, my beard grows longer and longer. I will soon look like Moses. If you would let me take some color photographs then I could go to Florence where I have some money and cut off my beard. With hope I am, Fred Baldwin.”
Within minutes after he delivered the letter, Picasso’s daughter Maya came to the door and invited him in. Picasso wanted to see his beard. Baldwin really only had three days of blond growth; so when the great artist admonished him — “You don’t have a beard,” he retorted, “I have an imaginary beard!”
“He thought that was very funny,” Baldwin said, chuckling. “He said, ‘You can spend the day here.’ The day, as it turned out, was full of business, not painting or sculpting. Baldwin’s photos show the darkly tanned, tautskinned Picasso, at ease in his 70s. He is shirtless, wearing only faded denim shorts and sandals as he met with friends about printing projects. Baldwin also snapped a self-portrait of himself with Picasso by balancing the camera on the arm of a chair.
“After I met Picasso, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I knew I could do anything I put my mind to,” he said. “I completely reconfigured my ego, and that kicked off all the adventures I describe in this book — following the reindeer herders, traveling with the polar bears, going underwater with the marlin — all the crazy things I did as a photojournalist.”
Documenting MLK
The details would be sketchier if Baldwin hadn’t kept diaries along the way, including one written shortly after he met Picasso. Some were necessary, he said, because he was taking notes for stories he would pitch to magazine editors at Life, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and National Geographic.
Those assignments didn’t come immediately; he made his first money and bought his first Leica by starting a family-portrait business in Savannah, Ga. When he did hit the road, he gained access to locations where few or no photographers had gone before.
In addition to his extensive arctic adventures, he worked in Afghanistan, Latin America, India and Borneo, where he spent a few years with the Peace Corps. He was careening like a tumbleweed across the world, gaining perspective that would come into better focus later, when he realized he could also use his talent to contribute to society.
That transformation actually began as early as 1957, when he happened upon a Ku Klux Klan rally outside Reidsville, Ala. Although he also still bounced around Europe, more and more he was drawn to document the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the protests that were rocking the American South.
“My earlier adventures for magazine stories were all ego trips, no question about it,” he said. “But that changed when I got involved with the civil rights movement. I started giving my time away.”
In some ways, he was making up for being a white Southerner. “My mother always treated black people with respect,” he said. “But there’s a huge difference between being civil and civil rights.”
Much of the book’s vivid detail comes from a 600-page diary Baldwin started in about 1967, during an emotional low point when he was trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong with his mantra.
He’d seen the best and worst of people in Korea as well as the American South. He’d chosen a life of extreme excitement, chasing exotic stories. Yet he’d also married and divorced a beautiful Swedish woman, leaving her with two sons.
“One of the things you learn, doing all of the crazy stuff I was doing to have a good story to tell, is that freedom is a very lonely affair,” Baldwin said. “And loneliness is painful. She thought I could do anything … . But what I needed was somebody who would challenge me.”
Examining his life thoroughly, he decided he had to accept the consequences of human behavior — his own and others’ — as well as understand the phenomenon of nature.
“Interestingly enough, about a month after I came to this conclusion, it’s noted in my diary — June 24, 1970 — ‘Met Wendy Watriss,’ ” he said, laughing. What unfolded is “a love affair with life but also with somebody who could share a concern for how to give back something that you had learned in the world.”
Watriss, an award-winning, first-class photojournalist, didn’t need Baldwin in the picture. But they thought alike and spent their first decade together on a big-picture project about rural culture, and in particular black culture, in the South. That was the work that brought them to Grimes County, the area around Navasota, about 75 miles northwest of Houston.
Dominique de Menil exhibited about 300 of their Grimes County photographs at the Rice Museum and sent six buses to Navasota, so the subjects could come to Houston to see it.
The book ends in 1983, just as FotoFest begins — an idea that Watriss, Baldwin and their friend Petra Benteler envisioned as a way to disrupt the system of photography exhibitions. “We wanted to give back because we knew things, but it was also an act of anger,” Baldwin said.
Creating FotoFest International
In the ’80s, he explained, photographers who wanted to show their work in museums had basically one target — the two or three galleries devoted to the medium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “It was accepted that the curators at MoMA knew all the important photographers in the world. We had seen too much, and we knew that wasn’t correct. We decided to start something in Houston that would open up the world for photographers to be seen.”
Houston wasn’t known then as a cultural mecca, but it had institutions, money and a tolerance for risk that Watriss and Baldwin didn’t see anywhere else. “People here went and poked holes in the ground and spent a million dollars … and kept poking until they went broke or got rich. That was the spirit we tapped into,” he said.
Inspired by a Paris event called the Month of Photography, they proposed a similar organization in Houston. “We were unknown quantities,” Baldwin said. But all the right people bought in — Mayor Kathy Whitmire, city councilmember Eleanor Tinsley, the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle and the millionaire oilman Roy Cullen, who gave them a seed fund of $50,000.
“Could we have done that in New York, Philadelphia, Boston?” Baldwin said. “No way. … This city provided us with a backdrop of opportunity that probably didn’t exist anywhere else.”
He remains charmingly selfdeprecating. It’s a miracle anybody would publish his memoir, he said. “The art director came over and spent 10 days going through my archives. I think he is brilliant, and he’s a wonderful guy … They went to a lot of trouble — got very nice paper, did a good printing job on it, and the pictures came out very well.”
His editor thinks the book could become a movie, with Benedict Cumberbatch portraying him, he said. “This is so outrageous, I haven’t even told Wendy about it. First of all, how do you even launch such a project?”
I reminded him that he knocked on Picasso’s door. He grinned.
“I do have a secret plan, through somebody who might know him,” he said. “We’ll just send him the damn book and tell him my editor thinks he should do the film.”