Stuart Page: Shustak
MIC Toi Rerehiko
11 July -15 August 2008
Larence Shustak was a photography lecturer at Ilam art school while I was a painting student there in the early seventies, and much loved by many of my friends. He came to Christchurch after working in the sixties for Life magazine, doing important documentary projects such as for the New York Jazz label Riverside Records (see the one of Monk above), and making a handful of short documentary films. Much of his work deals with the gritty realities of life in East (Greenwich) Village and engages with communities like handicapped children, or the black Jews of Harlem.
Shustak was a gregarious, big-hearted American who liked to talk about art (a category in which EVERYTHING was included), make images, play his banjo and smoke grass. My impression though was he had toked on one ‘j’ too many and lost a lot of brain cells. A lovely warm man, but hardly what I would call ‘wise’. I imagine others (like Stuart Page who here presents samples from his documentary on Shustak and a curated selection of Shustak’s photographs and short films) will vehemently disagree.
Page’s trailer for his film is extremely informative, but only about 20 minutes long. It is a shame MIC just don’t have continuous screenings of the full 90 minute doco. (After all some of the German videos recently shown at St Paul St were almost that long and people came and went at will.)
I met Shustak several times, know many of the people in the film and am more than a little puzzled. It would be good to get a fuller grasp of what he was on about as a teacher. Many of his black and white photographs were very eclectic – Brandt, Brassai especially – but his jazz portraits are wonderful. Shustak is obviously very highly rated by his peers in the States, and seeing a proper full length documentary would hopefully reveal a great deal. In the meantime there is an excellent (albeit a little worshipful) essay by James Robertson in the free takeaway poster/catalogue.
