Who are the worst three people in the world? Back in the mid-to-late-1960s, you had quite a few to choose from. However, when Lou Reed picked his trio there was, really, only one name on the list. “The three worst people in the world,” said Reed back in 1967, “are Nat Finkelstein and two speed dealers.”
Reed’s frustration with a poor amphetamine supply is understandable. His dislike for one of the most dedicated and talented photographers to shoot the Velvet Underground in their prime, as well as Warhol and many other Factory luminaries, needs more unpacking.
“It was a good insult,” says Elizabeth Finkelstein, the photographer’s widow, who has helped oversee In and Out of Warhol’s Orbit: Photographs by Nat Finkelstein, a new show of his work, opening at Proud Central in London this month. “Nat described the Velvet Underground as ‘the psychopath’s Rolling Stones’. He didn’t mean that as an insult. Lou responded. I think Nat wasn’t offended.”
In fact, some credit Finkelstein’s rough Brooklyn manner – as well as his connections at world-class photo agencies, shooting for Life, among other titles – as the very qualities that allowed him to stroll into Warhol’s studio one day in 1964, more or less unannounced, and stay until 1967, chronicling Andy and co in exquisite detail.
“There were three photographers that captured what is now known as the Silver Factory,” says Joseph Freeman, who served as Andy Warhol’s assistant from 1965 until 1967. “Billy Linich, later known as Billy Name; Stephen Shore; and there was Nat Finkelstein.”
Today, Name is a bona-fide Warhol Superstar, and synonymous with those fertile years when Andy produced his Marilyn and Elvis screenprints in the silver-walled studio on East 47th Street that welcomed the Velvet Underground and Nico through the doors. Shore, meanwhile, is an acclaimed fine-art photographer, and the subject of a 2017 Museum of Modern Art retrospective in New York. Yet Finkelstein “seems to have got lost in the shuffle”, says Freeman; in the years leading up to his death in 2009, Nat’s profile was fairly modest and his archive was in disarray.
This unevenness of legacies is all the more unjustified when you look at the pictures. “I think Warhol may have thought that Nat’s pictures were the best, but he didn’t really get along,” says Freeman. “Stephen Shore was very wealthy, and he looked at me as just like a nothing,” he goes on. “Billy was very friendly, but Andy gave Billy a camera, and told him to photograph what was going on around here. Nat was a yeoman; he was there every day just photographing.”
One of Finkelstein’s key subjects were the Velvet Underground, a band who he grew almost too close to, says Elizabeth. “As individuals he loved them,” she explains. “He felt very connected to them, as his friends. He was a little older than the band [Finkelstein was born in 1933; Cale and Reed were both born in ’42], and I think that he also felt left out, later.”
The band’s guitarist, Sterling Morrison, was especially close. “Sterling was a historian, who went on to earn a PhD in medieval literature,” says Elizabeth. “He was somebody who Nat could talk to. He loved people who were funny and smart.”
The photographer also had a soft spot for Edie Sedgwick, the socialite and Factory superstar who fatally overdosed in 1971 at the age 28. “He was very fond of her,” Elizabeth says. “There’s a certain tenderness in the photos of Edie.”
Finkelstein’s relationship with Warhol seems cooler. Elizabeth is much younger than her late husband, whom she met in the early 2000s, but she believes Andy let the photographer into his studio because Finkelstein could get Warhol good press coverage. However, Finkelstein was at odds politically with Warhol’s conservatism. “He was very taken with the glamour at the Factory,” she says, “but he had a conflict within himself with how disengaged it was with what else was going on in the United States.”
Finkelstein’s machismo, while serving him well in the early days, may have also led to his estrangement from pop art’s high table. “The Factory was predominantly gay and Nat was sort of macho,” says Freeman. “I think that he was a presence that they tolerated because his pictures were so good.” Elizabeth agrees. “He felt left out from the history,” she says. “You had so many incredible cultural landmarks coming out of that time. There were many cooks in the kitchen.”
Finkelstein was in favour when the Factory hands were preparing any early pop-up book, Andy Warhol’s Index, recalls Freeman, “but then they tried to cut him out.” Half a century later, this move could be considered one of Warhol’s very few aesthetic missteps. As Freeman says: “I think Nat’s pictures are right up there.”
In and Out of Warhol’s Orbit: Photographs by Nat Finkelstein is at Proud Central, WC2, to 9 June