The East End And Beyond Through Rick Gold's Eyes

There are three reasons Rick Gold will never forget August 29, 2005.

First, Mr. Gold’s younger brother, Mark, turned 58. Second, he brought Mr. Gold a newspaper article about a revolutionary camera, which reinvigorated a passion for photography that Mr. Gold had picked back up only seven years earlier after abandoning it for decades. And third, Mr. Gold had just suffered a nearly fatal heart attack.

“Hooked up to all these machines, I looked at the article and said, ‘If I get out of here alive, that’s the camera I’m gonna get,” Mr.

Gold recalled at his home in Noyac last week.

Discharged from the hospital and on the mend, Mr. Gold visited the Berkshires two months later, both to take in the autumn foliage and to pay a visit to his brother.

“Hank hands me this box,” Mr. Gold said. “I open up the box and inside there’s a lens. Just a lens. No camera. So I said, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do with this?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s right, there’s another box.’ In order to give me something to be excited about and help me recover, he’d gone out and gotten one of these new, high-quality digital cameras, and it certainly worked. I started taking pictures like crazy.”

Recent photos of East End scenes, plus pictures Mr. Gold took during the ’60s and ’70s, make up “My Eyes Have Seen ...,” a self-published book of 63 pictures that walk through the photographer’s world—where he’s been, what he’s seen and who he’s met.

“It’s a celebration of life,” he said of the picture book. “It’s like a journal of my explorations of life, things that just happened to be going on that moved me.”

Mr. Gold’s photographic ad

ventures began at age 8 in Far Rockaway when he got his hands on his very own Ansco box camera. He took pictures through junior high school, fascinated by how the device worked—and how everything worked, actually, from radios and watches to people and the universe, he said.

In high school, the self-declared “science nerd” graduated to a 35-millimeter camera that let him capture candid moments when his teachers weren’t looking, he said.

But photography was not—and never has been, up until now—the focus of Mr. Gold’s life. And as a young man, neither was school, he said. He halfheartedly coasted through his classes, which he said he found “tremendously boring.” His academic life completely changed though when the young man discovered computers. And, being a “totally impractical dreamer,” he said, he decided he’d try to build one.

Mr. Gold’s project—not his mediocre grade-point-average of 81—landed him a spot at the Columbia University School of Engineering, he reported. And at 16½ years old, he imagined he’d become an accomplished electronics engineer.

That’s not exactly what happened.

“My project, which started off as my passion, turned into, ‘Rick, did you work on the computer today?’ from my parents,” Mr. Gold said. “And it began to feel like, ‘Oh, this is your project.’ By the time I was finished with it, I had a lot of anger and disillusionment and started turning to different things.”

Instead of keeping up in his engineering classes, Mr. Gold started writing string quartets and symphonies. He grew a beard and wore a beret. He listened to Richard Wagner operas. And most important, he wandered Manhattan with his camera and finally saw his interest in photography as a form of art.

In 1963, camera in hand, Mr. Gold took a trip down to President John F. Kennedy’s temporary gravesite soon after the assassination, he said, flipping to a photo from his visit in his book. He caught the somber atmosphere on film—the flag at half-staff, the sea of onlookers, the shadows of the bare trees reaching out like claws across the cold, snowy ground, he said.

A year later, Mr. Gold had given up on his engineering studies altogether. He slept in and stayed out late. One night, he walked from Columbia University to Greenwich Village—a two-hour trek on foot—and caught an interesting picture of two men on the corner of MacDougal and 3rd streets.

“This guy was delivering to this other guy a paper called ‘Mohammad Speaks,’” Mr. Gold said, pointing to the picture, which is also included in his book. “These were black Muslims and this was the real peak of the civil rights movement. And this guy by the car sees me with the camera and I guess he’s like, ‘Why’s this white boy pointing a camera at me?’”

He laughed and then said as an aside, “Beautiful Corvette, by the way.”

Much to his parents’ horror, Mr. Gold dropped out of Columbia and, after a brief stint at Brooklyn College, he decided at age 21 that higher education wasn’t for him at the moment. He realized that he didn’t aspire to be a single-dimensional specialist, he said. He found it unsatisfying.

The budding artist moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he took one of his most warmly received photographs. It was the night before his 23rd birthday, February 9, 1969. Even though his face and fingers were frozen, Mr. Gold pulled out his Leica IIIf and snapped a photo of his two friends walking through a blizzard. The photo was later dubbed “Lindsay’s Snowstorm” because the public blamed Mayor John Lindsay for not plowing the streets quickly enough.

Soon after, Mr. Gold gave in to his desire to move away from New York and found himself in the middle of the Massachusetts woods, working odd jobs, such as a vending machine repairman, he said. He felt like a lost, wandering soul, he added.

His life snapped into focus on October 9, 1975, another date Mr. Gold will never forget. His younger brother Keith died by his own hand at age 19.

“I was 10 years older than Keith,” he said, eyes downcast. “And he really looked up to me in a way that made me feel happy and nervous at the same time since I hadn’t found my way in life, and here he was following me into whatever confusion I was going. It wound up that he actually helped me find a way.”

Mr. Gold moved back to his parents’ house in Far Rockaway. The weekend of his brother’s funeral, he had a life-changing talk with himself in the mirror.

“I said, ‘You know, for a good deal of your life, you’ve played with depression and the idea of suicide,’” Mr. Gold said. “‘And now your brother’s gone and actually done it.’ He killed himself. And I said to myself, ‘Okay, why don’t you make a choice? Do it, if you really want to, or stop playing with it and affirm that you want to do something with a goal.’ And apparently I must have chosen the latter because I’m still here.”

He decided to leave photography behind and, to his own surprise, Mr. Gold went back to college—this time Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute—graduated and worked a couple engineering jobs, one of which led him to Sag Harbor and a career crossroads.

In his late 40s, Mr. Gold needed a more permanent profession, he said. And so, he turned to the former bane of his childhood existence: education.

“The idea of becoming a public school science teacher popped reluctantly into my brain, which made no sense at all because, number one, I didn’t like school myself, and number two, I wasn’t very fond of most of my teachers, with very, very few exceptions,” Mr. Gold said. “And to make matters worse, I’m a reclusive hermit. Not an extrovert, so I couldn’t picture myself in front of a classroom.”

Mr. Gold’s first year at Pierson High School in 1996 as a physics and chemistry teacher was grueling, he said. The second year was a bit easier. The third year was the best time of his life, he said. It’s when he rediscovered photography.

He read a booklet called “Ten Ways To Liven Up Your Science Classroom” and one of the suggestions was to take candid photos—Mr. Gold’s specialty—of his students and post them on the walls.

“My poor students started to realize they couldn’t hide,” he said. “There was this girl in my chemistry class who did not want to be in chemistry and was bored silly with it. I had them do an experiment and since I’m the teacher, I knew what the experiment was going to do and anticipated that it would really surprise her. So I was holding my camera just waiting to see her reaction.”

He flipped to the picture in the book: the experiment is glowing in the foreground, her jaw-dropped reaction out of focus in the background. “I call this picture, ‘The Spark of Enlightenment,’” Mr. Gold chuckled.

He continued turning the pages—some black and white portraits of friends and zoo animals, local potato fields, the Sag Harbor windmill, scenes bursting with color of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a Pierson High School theater production of “Chicago” and vibrant East End sunsets.

In his retirement, the now 66-year-old photographer is still poring over hundreds of negatives that he found in his basement before putting together the book this past fall, he said.

“None of these pictures have ever achieved exposure to anybody, to the world,” he said. “I thought some of them might be interesting. I thought, ‘Gee, maybe someday I should do something with them.’ And then I said, ‘Someday? Wait a minute. You’ve had a near-fatal heart attack. When is someday going to be?’”

He smiled, theatrically throwing up a hand in the air and letting it slap down on his knee. “And so, here we are.”

For more information or to order “My Eyes Have Seen ...” by Rick Gold, visit mypublisher.com/?e=OHm3Q8zJl3TI1bL0_t89FCk7WsmjrqaZ.