I'm much saddened to hear of the recent death of photographer, journalist and downtown Springfield fixture Keith Sikes. I first got to know Keith more decades ago than I care to count, when we were both on the staff of The Ram, which was the student newspaper at Springfield Technical Community College. Keith was the editor of the paper, but he actually spent most of his time in Professor Jack Holowitz's photo darkroom facilities located in Building 19.
Sikes would have a lifelong journalistic career working for Turley Publications, but his first love was always photography. He really did have an uncanny knack for spotting just the right moment when a photograph would not just capture a moment or a person, but would define them. This picture taken outside the Fort Restaurant is the best image of da Guvnah I've ever seen.
He also chronicled the local entertainment scene, such as this shot of Ray Mason at the Bing Theater.
Keith liked to capture images of Pioneer Valley characters such as the eccentric attorney and diarist J. Wesley Miller, who was a sexual masochist who would sometimes walk the streets of downtown Springfield dressed in bondage attire.
The most colorful part of Keith's photo career was the several years he spent in California as a paparazzi, that infamous tribe of predatory photographers who make their living capturing images of famous people out in public that can then be sold for surprisingly high prices to the always ravenous media outlets that cover celebrities.
Sikes was good at it, although most of his celebrity shots were later destroyed in a fire at his home. Keith told me that he eventually became disillusioned with the profession after seeing a mob of paparazzi in Beverly Hills knock an old lady to the ground because she was in their way as they stampeded off to check out a rumor that Robin Williams had just departed from a nearby ice cream parlor. Keith said he was the only one of his fellow paparazzi to stop and help the woman get back on her feet. She was unharmed, but Keith said he didn't want any more to do with a profession where it was okay to trample on old ladies just to get a picture of a celebrity licking an ice cream cone.
I also recall Keith telling me about an interesting encounter he had with the beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg. Sikes had attended a poetry reading by Ginsberg and of course took pictures. In his typical fashion, Keith managed to get a particularly flattering image of Ginsberg, which was not easy because much of the poet's features were typically shrouded in an untamed maze of hair.
Years later, Keith was invited to a charity event that he knew Ginsberg would be attending. Therefore, he decided to bring a copy of that photo to the affair in case he had the chance to get Ginsberg to autograph it. Such an interaction did occur, and Keith said he was surprised by how it went.
Sikes thought Ginsberg would be pleased with the photo, but instead he sternly questioned Keith about when and where the picture was taken, seeming skeptical that Keith had even taken it. Ginsberg finally signed it, but added beneath his signature a drawing of a copyright notice and the date. In other words, Ginsberg was claiming the rights to control any future use of the photo. Sikes had never suspected that someone like Ginsberg, a notorious anarchist who had spent his youth in the the wild company of madmen like Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs, was capable of being so concerned about protecting the copyrights to his image.
Eventually I moved to the northern Valley and Keith became more immersed in the downtown Springfield scene, which revolved around a great gallery he ran in Tower Square (ironically, once dubbed by The Ram as "Baystate Waste") in the prime Main Street location that had once held Valley Bank. Weeds grow up to choke the unused path, and the last time I spoke to Keith in the flesh was about fifteen years ago in that gallery at the opening of a new photography display that heavily featured Keith's work. At that event he paid me a compliment that has stuck in my mind, as compliments (and insults) often do.
The event had the usual bohemians in attendance, but it also had more than a smattering of Chamber of Commerce types. I saw several city councilors and a school committee member. As Keith and I were chatting, we noticed the Mayor of Springfield himself coming through the door.
Keith gave me that sly, toothy grin of his and said, "We're a long way from when we used to smoke joints in the stairway behind The Ram." I replied by saying something about people from our generation becoming gentrified. "Not you, Tommy," he said. "You stayed real." I don't recall how I responded to that compliment, but I know what I wish I had said, and now never will.
I should have said, "You too Keith. You too."
Not a lot happening at UMass, but more than you'd think, such as this series of outdoor performances held last month out doors.
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