Bukowski, The Shooting: Inscribed by Photographer Abe Frajndlich

Published in 2020 by Hirmer Publishers, The Shooting consists of 96 pages of photographs taken by world famous photographer Abe Frajndlich.

Frajndlich has inscribed this copy.

The photographs were shot on three occasions in the mid-1980s.

In the accompanying essay, Frajndlich describes his editor rejecting the photographs from the first shooting, promoting him to beg Bukowski for another photo shoot. Bukowski obliged and the photographer became close to both Bukowski and Linda Lee – so close, they invited him to their wedding… Which was the occasion of the third shooting.

There are many unique photographs in the book, in both color and black and white. The wedding photographs are quite different than those taken by Michael Montfort.

Also included is the essay, “The Pock-marked Poetry of Charles Bukowski” by Glenn Esterly. It was first published in 1976 in Rolling Stone

An innovative freelance photographer best known for his portraits, Abe (Abraham Samuel) Frajndlich was born in a displaced persons camp in Frankfurt, Germany. During his youth, Frajndlich moved several times, finally settling in the United States. He lived in New York City for thirty-five years, and now resides in Cleveland, Ohio.

From the Publisher:
Charles Bukowski: The iconoclastic writer, the dirty old man of American literature, “the drunk who doesn’t give a damn.” How does an artist create a portrait of a person like that? In 1985, the young photographer Abe Frajndlich took on this challenge, and it was not a job that could be accomplished with a single shot. Bukowski: The Shooting presents one photographer’s attempt to zero in on a legend.

“That face!” Glenn Esterly exclaims in his essay “The Pock-Marked Poetry of Charles Bukowski,” included in this volume. What is fascinating about this monumental author, Esterly posits, is concentrated in his “look”—his pock-marked face weathered by years of hard drinking and hard living. When Frajndlich failed to capture that face to his satisfaction in their first session, he returned for a second time. Eventually, Frajndlich gained the writer’s confidence, to the point that he was invited to the wedding of Bukowski and his second wife, Linda Lee Beighle. Telling the story of their meeting and the friendship that followed, Bukowski: The Shooting reproduces Frajndlich’s various portrait series, culminating in photographs of the wedding. These photographs are presented in both color and black and white, many of them published here for the first time.

Shelf 2