Fred McDarrah, Signed Silver Gelatin Photograph Washington Square Park Architecture Photo NYC, 1959

New York Architect Robert Nichols 11/30/1959
Photographer is Fred McDarrah

Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, the city’s postmodern art movement, its off-off-Broadway actors, troubadours, politicians, agitators and social protests.
Fred captured Jack Kerouac frolicking with women at a New Year’s bash in 1958, Andy Warhol adjusting a movie-camera lens in his silver-covered factory, and Bob Dylan offering a salute of recognition outside Sheridan Square near the Voice’s old office.
Not just a social chronicler, McDarrah was a great photo-journalist.
For years, McDarrah was the Voice’s only photographer and, for decades, he ran the Voice’s photo department, where he helped train dozens of young photographers, including James Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Robin Holland and Marc Asnin. His mailbox was simply marked “McPhoto.”
An exhibit of McDarrah’s vintage photos of artists presented by the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea was hailed by The New York Times as “a visual encyclopedia of the era’s cultural scene.”
artists in their studios, (Alice Neel, Philip Guston, Stuart Davis, Robert Smithson, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline), actors (Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro on the set of “Taxi Driver”), musicians (Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan) and documentary images of early happenings and performances (Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, Al Hansen, Jim Dine, Nam June Paik). The many images of Andy Warhol include the well-known one with his Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964. Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, W. H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Joan Baez, Louise Bourgeois, David Bowie, Jimmy Breslin, William Burroughs, John Cage, Leo Castelli, Christo, Leonard Cohen, Merce Cunningham, William de Kooning, Jim Dine, Mark di Suvero, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Indiana, Mick Jagger, Jasper Johns, Kusama, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Elvis Presley, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Lou Reed, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and others. McDarrah’s prints have been collected in depth by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. His work is in numerous public and private collections.

Robert Nichols (1919–2010) worked as a landscape architect and was involved in a nonprofit construction project for the teenagers of New York’s Lower East Side. He was active in the antiwar movement and in the antinuclear movement. Nichols left home at an early age, and some of his travel experiences are recounted in his first book of poems, Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train (1962). Among his many other works are a four-part series of novels set in Nghsi-Altai, a fictional utopia, the short story collection In the Air (1991), and a number of plays, some of which have been performed by the New York Public Theatre, for the New City, and the Bread and Puppet Theatre.

Robert Brayton Nichols (1919-October 14, 2010) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and landscape architect. Nichols was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He served as an officer in the United States Navy in World War II and graduated from Harvard University. His poetry includes the volumes Slow Newsreel of Man Riding Train (1962), number 15 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, and Red Shift (1977). His wrote the novels From the Steam Room (1993) and a four-part series set in the utopia Nghsi-Altai, and the short story collection In the Air (1991). He was a co-founder of the Judson Poets Theatre and participated in the Theater for the New City and the Bread and Puppet Theater. His first wife was the Village Voice editor Mary Perot Nichols; they divorced in 1969. He married author Grace Paley in 1972; she died in 2007.
His work in landscape architecture includes a redesign of Washington Square Park.