BY TOM STAFFORD ’76
PHOTOS BY JON CRISPIN ’73
When Jon Crispin finished his bachelor’s degree in art from Wittenberg in the spring of 1973, his first commission was a monochromatic assignment in Meadville, Pa.
He painted his parents’ house – the outside.
“It was the classic thing,” Crispin said. “Your parents didn’t know what they were going to do with you.”
But like many fellow graduates with an artistic bent, Crispin would find his own way – in his own time.
Several years would pass before a series of suitcases containing personal items left behind by patients in the shuttered Willard, N.Y., psychiatric hospital called to Crispin’s heart.
His artful photographs of them served as part of the centerpiece of the first major exhibition in the West Gallery of San Francisco’s new Exploratorium museum.
“The Changing Face of What is Normal” attracted strong notices in Slate, The Huffington Post, The Daily Mail and Collectors Weekly. And during an interview given near the end of its run this spring, Crispin had a sense that at 62, he is just hitting his stride.
“It seems like it’s been building up to right now. This is the beginning of something that could be great.”
The beginning of that beginning goes back to the fall of 1969 when Crispin arrived at Wittenberg intending to major in political science. Although captivated by Professor William Buscemi’s classes in political philosophy, Crispin never considered himself a great student. High Bs were his comfortable range for two reasons: He wasn’t adept at absorbing and recalling information as readily as tests required, and his writing skills fell short of sharp.
Like so many of his classmates and students before him, at Wittenberg he
found another path.
While growing up in Meadville, where his father was a German professor at Allegheny College (Crispin’s middle name is Kreighoff), “I early on had a real connection with the arts,” he said. But because he wasn’t a facile drawer, “I never thought of myself as being able to be an artist … until I started going to art classes at Wittenberg.”
While learning to draw “reasonably well,” he also did what so many Wittenberg students do: First dabbled and then explored more deeply the interests that would grow into the passions of a lifetime. Professor of Art George Ramsay’s classes in printmaking grabbed him because of the tools of the work and the strong design elements in prints. Late Professor of Art Don Dunifon’s ceramics courses had him sitting for hours at a potter’s wheel working with the dynamics of form that are a part of every art.
A STUDENT OF HIS TIMES
Parting his down-the-back long hair in the middle above wire-rimmed glasses and a
mustache, he was a person of his radically changing times. His senior picture shows Crispin with all those counter culture attributes, but wearing a coat and tie.
“Being in college in Ohio in the late ’60s and early ’70s was an interesting time,” he
said. “There were lots of things going on.” While working elbow-to-clay-crustedelbow with others in the Crabill Art Studio, a converted home on Fountain Avenue, Crispin grew “really close to a lot of the students,” finding the camaraderie and sense of common purpose he needed. He found some of the same in four years of involvement with music and other music lovers at WUSO.
After post-graduate work on his parents’ house, Crispin drifted off to Providence, R.I., for eight months, then migrated back to stay with Wittenberg friends who’d taken up housekeeping in Springfield. While supporting himself as a junior high tutor, Crispin began sorting things out and realized he’d like to pursue one of the two loves he found at Wittenberg: radio, through his years at WUSO, and photography, which he’d explored in independent studies in art with then University Photographer Jim Voris. Perhaps more inf luent ial wa s Hedwig Gilliam, who did the photo prints for Voris and “kind of took me under her wing,” he said. Photo printmaking again involved tools, starting with the camera that again helped Crispin connect with his artistic self.
APPRENTICE WITHOUT A MENTOR
Leaving Springfield, Crispin tried his hand at art under the tip of one of New York’s Finger Lakes at Ithaca.
“Radio didn’t pan out, and nobody was hiring photographers full-time,” he said. But Ithaca College needed a freelance photographer, so he started “shooting anything they’d give me. I had one camera and one lens, and if I got another assignment and needed one, I’d buy another lens.” First fuzzy photographs of a football game were forgiven, and what he describes as an apprenticeship without a mentor began to unfold.
“When you learn from your own mistakes,” he said, “you really learn.”
He picked up additional work from Cornell University, then landed freelance assignments with The New York Times, thanks to the photo staff of the Ithaca Journal, which funneled the work his way. All that led to connections with “a broader world,” Crispin said, connections he could afford to develop because his wife at the time had a steadier job.
During a drive back from a wedding in Geneva, N.Y., in the early 1980s, he mentioned his interest in old abandoned buildings to the driver, a woman who was a historic preservationist. She drove him up a circular driveway to a building constructed in the 1860s and originally called the Willard Asylum.
After a good look outside, he made a resolution at least some of its former residents would have looked at quizzically: “I really vowed to get into it. I kept trying, and they kept saying no, no, no.”
INTO THE ASYLUM
Eight months later, the phone rang, and Michael Labate, the man in charge of physical plants for New York’s department of mental health, not only said, “Yes, yes, yes,” he told Crispin, “You’d better hurry because we’re going to tear it down.”
Said Crispin, “My whole life is one where a lot of amazingly great things have happened that I have no explanation for.” Now part of a Troy, N.Y., firm that specializes in institutional buildings, Labate clearly remembers why he called Crispin. “I think documentation of those facilities, particularly in an archival sense, is extremely important,” he said. “I was pretty enthusiastic about what he was trying to do.”
But it was the way Crispin shot them that made a long-time fan first of Labate and then of Craig Williams, who at the time was curator of history at the New York State Museum at Albany. Whereas most photos of derelict buildings focus on wreckage and don’t speak to Williams, Crispin’s did.
“Jon’s able to look at these abandoned settings and see through that time-space and get a sense of what was there, what was happening,” Williams said.
Indeed, as much as the buildings themselves – largely buildings of the substantial grandness that went with Richardsonian Romanesque architecture – Crispin found himself drawn to the period furnishings: All the equipment that was left over that represented the institutional working of the times.
Dates and historical themes often escaped Crispin in the classroom, distancing him
from history; but these objects caught both his eye and his imagination, transporting him to the time of their use. He thought they might do the same for others. Images “show history in a way that’s very accessible,” he said. “People aren’t intimidated, they’re drawn in.”
DRAWING PEOPLE OUT
Williams later found that in addition to being able to connect with historic objects, Crispin could draw people out.
After several architectural projects, including photographing the old Erie Canal and prisons – among them Sing-Sing – Williams called on Crispin to document the benefits rural poor people had derived from a housing assistance program.
“It was such classic Jon Crispin,” Williams said. “He so clearly could develop a rapport with people to make them comfortable. He seems to have an aura around him that [makes] people appreciate what he’s trying to do.”
Oddly, Crispin said “shooting things that didn’t move” helped build a foundation for photographing people, largely because of his ability to see an inanimate scene through a 4-by-5 format lens. Where people should be in the frame seemed natural to him. That set the stage for his work at Willard, where he would shoot photos in which people were represented by the objects they once held, owned or wore.
Crispin had no notion of how he would do this when he first saw a traveling exhibit of suitcases from the Willard hospital. That was buried in an urgent sense that he had to shoot them.
And when Crispin asked to, Williams didn’t merely say yes, he said “absolutely.”
A SHUT AND OPEN CASE
The suitcases accumulated from about 1910 to 1970 were available for his creative mind to consider because of institutional thinking that preserved them. “They built racks, and [the suitcases] were divided by sex, exactly the way the wards were in the building, alphabetized,” Crispin said. There were more than 400.
As excited as he was about shooting them, there was a problem: No money was available for the project. He had, however read in The New York Times about the online fundraising tool Kickstarter and decided to give it a try.
“My goal was to raise $8,000, and I ended up raising almost $20,000.”
As helpful as the financial contributions were, Crispin said the confidence contributors showed just by supporting him was “one of the most satisfying aspects of this whole project.”
It also heightened the terror he felt on March 1, 2011, when he arrived at the Rotterdam, N.Y., building where the suitcases were being stored without a clue as to how he’d proceed.
Because he is not a studio photographer, Crispin was about as comfortable with unlimited possibilities of arranging the material as he’d been with the blank canvasses that terrified him in his painting classes at Wittenberg. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
But when he opened the first case and saw how the wrinkled white tissue paper the preservationists used complemented the wrinkled canvas he’d brought for a backdrop, “it all came together.”
First he’d shoot the case with the paper beneath it. Then he’d shoot the unopened case by itself. Then he’d open it up, unwrap and unpack and “do a wide shot of every case showing the objects, then detail shots of all the objects in there.”
“I didn’t have any idea of what I was doing until I was doing it, which is the story of my life,” he said. “I had no idea what I was doing in a creative way until my mid-30s.”
He shot more than 80 suitcases and their contents in that first go-round, pausing only when the San Francisco Exploratorium asked whether they could use the photographs as a basis of their exhibit.
OBJECT LESSONS
Initially interested in the Willard project as a straightforward exercise in documentation, Michael Labate spoke to the quality in the photos that makes them special.
“The reason I would share the link to the exhibition and his website with so many people is how poignant and how real they made the lives of people who were, by and large, anonymous. Each one of the suitcases and the contents spoke to someone’s life. Even more [important] than the documentation of the buildings is the documentation of the patients’ lives.”
Psychiatrist Karen Leslie Miller, who wrote poetry to complement the photos for the Exploratorium exhibit, said the raw materials in the suitcases helped.
“There’s nothing like what people held in their hands that’s as valuable to evoke what it’s like to be that person. They are a wonderful kind of cypher.”
Pam Winfrey, the Exploratorium’s senior artist and curator for the program, called that “one of the surprises for me personally” about the show.
Had they not connected with the Willard people emotionally through Miller’s poems, Crispin’s photos and a display of patients’ possessions, it’s unlikely that visitors would have paused to consider the exhibit’s theme: How we define normal and how our definitions change over time.
Winfrey said one element that connected people was the commonplace nature of the objects. Because “these are objects you and I would pack,” she said, it causes people to think: “I could have been like this guy. Maybe that could have happened to me, to my kids.”
The other link was the power of the art, which Williams says artists like Crispin access through a kind of sixth sense.
“Jon is able to look at an assortment of things in a suitcase and understand that person’s personality. He’s able to take that and translate it into not just a photograph of a toiletry set, but a photograph of the person behind the material. There have been a few persons in my life that made me think to myself, ‘that person ought to get a MacArthur (Genius) Grant.’
Crispin is one.
SELF-PORTRAIT
Crispin speaks of himself in much more modest terms, mimicking words spoken by Clint Eastwood’s Detective Harry Callahan the year Crispin graduated from Wittenberg: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Note in what follows that Crispin isn’t satisfied at merely stating his sense of limitation; his words sound like a confession that might be the basis of an appeal for forgiveness:
“I accept and I understand and I’m comfortable with the fact that I have a limited skill set.”
He next admits to one gift: “I’m really good with people. I can put people at ease. It just works.” He then nearly dismisses another talent he brings to bear: “I understand things visually. So I really don’t have to think very much about using a camera.”
Finally, he mentions not how his work might benefit others, but how it benefits him: “I’ve been very lucky to express myself through photography. I’d be suffering greatly if I didn’t have that” as a form of expression.
BACK TO CLASS
Having successfully tapped Kickstarter for $20,000 needed to shoot the remaining suitcases, Crispin now splits his time between that project and visits to college classrooms. He’s given guest lectures at Yale, Columbia and the University of Albany about Willard and other projects, talking to anthropology and archaeology students and teachers.
Williams says his students are every bit as comfortable with Crispin as his photo subjects.
“The kids were in awe,” he said after sitting in on a talk at the State University of New York at Albany. The reason was a combination of what they were being taught and how enthusiastically they were being taught.
Said Williams: “If I could bottle Jon and kind of in a mentor-like way tell students ‘Take three teaspoons of Jon Crispin,’ I’d do that.”
There’s a reason Crispin might agree to provide the doses.
“I never got a lot of encouragement as a young photographer. I want people to know you don’t have to be a straight-A student. You can be like me, a B-plus student who’s struggling to find out what he’s doing.”
Now as a successful artist, the man who felt more like a learner than a student and whose first work was a monochromatic reatment of a home’s exterior has a clear goal: “To positively influence the people who might be like me” and give them encouragement along the way.
The founders of an institution a few years older than Willard might have put it another way: Having light, Jon Crispin feels compelled to pass it on to others.