Seymour Licht

Seymour Licht is a psychiatrist and fifth-generation photographer from Germany, now based in New York. His new book, Halloween Underground, features images he made every Halloween for 20 years of costumed revelers in the New York City subway system.

HM: How did you get into photography? 

SL: Early on I had an interest in photography. I had a British friend who took me to his darkroom in Leeds when I was 19. When I was studying I visited my wife and saw how photogenic New York City was. I took a semester off and photographed for six months. During that time I also worked as a club photographer at the Limelight, and that was fun because it was in its heyday.

Photography really runs in my family. My great great grandfather was the first photographer in our hometown in Marburg, Germany. His son was also a photographer, photographing in the villages of Germany. And then the daughters in the 1920s were photographers. I was dimly aware of it before, but that has become more important to me.

I started photographing more seriously when my daughter was born in 1997. I wanted to take better pictures than just snapshots, so I enrolled in classes at ICP to hone my skills.

HM: And then you made a photo book.

SL: My first book was called Fifty Shrinks. I'm a psychiatrist, and I photographed psychoanalysts in their offices. I started doing it in 2002, and it was published in 2014. This was something nobody had done before, and I had the access. I started photographing my colleagues, and then more important figures in the field, and they were surprisingly open. 

I feel there's a connection between Fifty Shrinks and my new book, Halloween Underground, in that they’re both environmental portraiture. In Fifty Shrinks, the environment was their office, the way they decorate it. In Halloween Underground, it’s the subway car. How do they behave in that environment? As a psychiatrist, I'm interested in human behavior. During Halloween people act a little crazy, in a good way. And that's my job — I'm dealing with somewhat crazy behavior.

HM: I’d love to hear about some of the adventures that happened when you took these pictures.

SL: Last year, there was a very tall woman in a leather outfit on the train, and it was packed. I said, “You're Catwoman, aren't you?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Your costume is fabulous. I would like to photograph you, but there's really no room here. How about we do this: I’ll get off at the next stop, and if you can, it would be amazing if you could just stand in the doorway, so that I photograph you from the platform. Would you be willing to do that?” And she said yes. 

So when the train pulled into the station, I hopped off and photographed her, and she came forward, filling the frame exactly how we had discussed it. It was just a matter of seconds before the train pulled away, and I never saw her again. 

HM: What made you keep going back to the Halloween project, year after year? Did you get any useful feedback or support along the way?

SL: Initially I was after the contrast between the drab, mundane, gritty New York subway, which in itself is famous and iconic, and these really outlandishly dressed people who would get on and off almost like protagonists on a stage. Often the New Yorkers would not even give it a second look. I thought, how could this be? That's a unique New York phenomenon. The parade is massive, so you get this convening of people using the subway in their costumes. It’s almost like New York on steroids.

It's always very intriguing to me to look at a mask — who’s behind that mask? That identity shape shifting element connects to my field, it has something psychological. All of that kept me going.

I had great mentors. I showed them the work, and they helped me with their input and how to sequence the photographs. You test it out, you show it to friends, and there is almost a point of no return, when you feel you've got to finish this. 

HM: What did you get from your interactions with your mentors? And what do you advise other photographers? 

SL: A photographer really shouldn't be their own editor. You fall in love with certain photographs, and sometimes they simply don't work. It's hard to kill your babies. But to have somebody who comes in with a fresh pair of eyes, trained eyes, and you spread the photographs on a table and they start weeding them out: “This works, this works, those two go well together…” I also took two group classes with Ken Schles, which were very helpful for the editing process.

I very much recommend having the right mentor and meeting every three to four months. After a while I didn't need the input of other students anymore, so one-on-one became very important. In my training, we have supervision for psychotherapy. Sometimes we have very difficult problems to solve with difficult patients. So I thought, well, I have a supervisor in my field. Why wouldn't I have a supervisor in photography who can guide me? It made total sense to me. 

HM: What was the process like of editing and sequencing the book?

SL: What became clear to me is that I didn't want this to be a documentary project. I wanted it to be more like magic realism. There's something very real here, which is the New York subway, but something very uncanny is happening. I began to read about Halloween, that it's really a survivor of a holiday. It's older than Christmas. Halloween is also connected to the Mexican Day of the Dead. It's not the same, but the general idea is that the veil between the living and the dead becomes the thinnest around that time.

So this ghostly atmosphere I found wonderfully reflected in the subway, which has undertones of the underworld anyway — the tunnels, the maze, the disorientation. I wanted the book to be hallucinatory. I always had that concept in mind, so if it looked too documentary, too real, the picture wouldn't make it into the book. When I weeded out photos, that was the main distinguishing element I applied. My mentors helped a lot as well. 

HM: Did you work with a publisher? Or did you create the book on your own?

SL: I have a publisher in Germany, but they're more psychological and sociological. I thought, I’ve done this before, I know how to make a book. I have a very good printer in the Czech Republic. I just needed the concept, a book designer, and a retoucher. I got together my own little team of people.

Working with a publisher, there's a lot of people involved, and you have to pass many different hurdles, and sometimes they want you to actually pay them first. If I start laying out money, I might as well do it myself and have full control over the title, the cover image, the price. 

HM: This is a big issue for most photographers who would like to do a photo book. The distribution side of photo books is so poor, and the photographers can probably do it much better themselves if they put real effort into it. You put a lot of effort into distributing Fifty Shrinks. What did you do?

SL: One of my mentors told me, “You have an inbuilt audience: psychotherapists and psychiatrists. And they generally are interested in the arts.” Actually, my analyst said, “Psychotherapists are all frustrated artists.” So that worked because therapists started buying the book and then word got around. 

I don't like Amazon very much, because they are so domineering and are actually getting more complicated to navigate as a seller. But it worked for me — as a small time self publisher, it was actually great. One of the shrinks told me, “If you're not on Amazon with your book, nobody will take you seriously.” And I remembered that.

I also have a website where I sign the books, and a distributor called BCH which I found online. The woman I work with there ships out to Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and does the Amazon orders. I said to her, “You're the best kept secret for photographers’ distribution.”

HM: I think sometimes what it takes is really to get it in front of people. That’s one of the problems with the publishers that tend to be just traditional distribution – putting books in a bookstore and after a month it's not selling, so out it goes. That kind of distribution is dead. 

SL: That’s true. That’s why social media has become so important. 

HM: Have you been using Instagram?

SL: Yes, for Halloween Underground I hired a team called Social Architects to create an Instagram and X account. I had to start from zero. My Instagram presence which was very thin from my previous book. What I'm planning on is to have a feed going on Instagram and Twitter of about one image a week through Hanukkah and Christmas, and see if I can get the book on one of these lists for presents. I also want to put a printed portfolio together and say to somebody, how about an exhibit next Halloween?

HM: Absolutely. Like anything in marketing, timing is important. 

SL: That was the other thing, the 50th anniversary of the Halloween parade. I became aware of that in March. I realized, it’s 50 years and I've been doing this for 20 years. If I don't finish this now, I will never finish it. So I came up with this internal deadline for myself. And all of a sudden, everything had to happen so fast. I said to some of the people I was working with, “I feel like I'm flying the plane while I'm building it.”  It took about five months to make the book. I was printing in the Czech Republic, which takes time, so I had to print by July 15, even though I had until October 31.

HM: You've gotten a lot of press for the project in recent days. Were you pitching it to different outlets? 

SL: I wasn't pitching it myself. I have a publicist. For Fifty Shrinks she got me into the New York Times, and then things really started spinning. With this project, I really didn't know what to expect, but after an article in CNN Style, it also started taking off. 

Working with a publicist is great. She sent out about 1400 emails when the book was ready. I found her through another photographer, Yael Ben-Zion, who I met at the bus stop when she had twins and I had my son. She had an article in the New York Times, and we started talking. She actually looked at early stages of this project and helped me. She told me she had this publicist, and that's how I made the connection. It’s important to talk to people.