A look back at Ferlinghetti’s stint as war photographer.
As the armada of allied ships formed up for the DDay landing on June 6, 1944, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in command of a submarine chaser off the coast of Normandy. He had one hand on the controls and the other on a Navyissue camera.
Lt. Lawrence Ferling, as he was then known, carried two small boxes of negatives out of the war and on to San Francisco, where he was to make his home as a poet, painter and cofounder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. He tucked the two boxes of negatives into a rolltop desk in his home office and, except for a few released for a documentary film, the collection has never been printed or shown. But on Friday, Aug. 9, 50 blackandwhite prints will make their world premiere at Harvey Milk Photo Center, a cityowned facility and gallery at the top of Duboce Park.
The exhibition is titled “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Photographs: When We Arrived in Normandy, 1944,” and it is the final surprise in a season of parties marking the 100th birthday of San Francisco’s first poet laureate.
Mary Gilardin, a longtime friend of Ferlinghetti’s, is a volunteer caregiver for the famed artist, who is now housebound in his North Beach flat. Twice a month, she makes the threehour drive from her home in Ukiah to spend two days with him, and during one of her stays she persuaded Ferlinghetti to allow her to have the negatives scanned and printed. She weeded out the ones that were blurry from the roiling seas and brought 50 enlarged images back to show him.
“He remembered the circumstances of each image. It was astonishing,” Gilardin says. “He had never considered
them to be important enough to show.”
But Gilardin did, and so did Dave Christensen, who runs the photo center. The original 50 images, which Gilardin had shown Ferlinghetti, have been rescanned and made into 6by8inch prints, just small enough to retain their sharpness and draw the viewer in.
“They are not changed. They are not shiny,” Gilardin says. “Dave and I insisted on leaving all of the dirt on them to preserve the authenticity.”
In his centennial memoir, “Little Boy,” Ferlinghetti describes his experiences on DDay. “We were so young and didn’t know it,” reads one sentence in the book — but you’d know it by looking at the images Ferlinghetti snapped of his crew staring directly into the camera.
“They are intimate and direct,” Gilardin says.
Ferlinghetti had marked one box “June 1944” and the other “September 1944.” The June box shows DDay preparations in England, the dawn landing and lots of sinking ships (his own boat was damaged and nearly sunk in a storm and had to return to England for repairs, according to Ferlinghetti), while the September box contains pictures of liberated Cherbourg, where the skipper and his crew eventually landed.
Ferlinghetti was then sent from the Atlantic to the Pacific and was off the coast of Japan on the day Nagasaki was bombed. He made it ashore there, too, but he didn’t have his camera. Images from that devastation by other photographers will be shown concurrently with Ferlinghetti’s exhibit at the Harvey Milk Photo Center. Both sets of photographs will be on display through Sept. 14.
Ferlinghetti is unable to attend the opening reception Thursday, but he dictated to Gilardin these words to use as an artist’s statement:
“We were seeing Normandy with the eyes of an invader — which is ourselves. Seeing Nagasaki changed everything.”