The story of Chris Sky Earnshaw would be a sad one if I did not know him to be such a spirited man, even at this stage of life when it seems he has next to nothing. Without a doubt, he is a masterful photographer, one whose work has been lost to all up until now. As an artist he is nearly anonymous, and as a human being he hovers inches away from a destitute life. To offer him a hand, to save his work for others, is all that one can do to express one’s gratefulness for what truly enriches our lives.

Earnshaw has maintained an extraordinary and obsessive passion for documenting the disappearing architecture he has loved in Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia, since ten years of age (he’s now 57). On the edge of homelessness, he is bi-polar, a reformed alcoholic, hanging out at the local mental health centre, panhandling at times to save himself, to get through another day—the son of loving parents whose father suffered alcoholism and mother severe bouts of mental illness. He had been coming to me for months with handfuls of Polaroid prints with rubber bands around them, their significance obscured by the sheer chaos he brought to presenting them. Their lack of pretension was what kept the eye but I must confess that his brilliance was not recognised at that point in time. As a fellow photographer I simply felt great empathy for his situation and offered to help, to organise his work for him but with the stipulation that he bring me everything first. Three thousand five hundred images later, in the form of Polaroid and Kodak Instamatic drugstore prints, I was confronted with the undeniable fact that he was one of the most beautiful photographers I had ever come across, one who simply never learned to print. I have now completed a master set of gravure-like prints – 750 in number, with the promise to the artist to devote myself to their publishing, their exhibiting and eventual housing in a permanent collection, never to sell the prints, but to gift them…for others. Earnshaw is an artist whose all-encompassing vision is internal at the source, flowing through his hands in whatever medium he has chosen to work in, which includes drawing, painting, music, poetic writing, as well as acting, a member of the guild as a younger man. Savant-like in his intelligence and memory for the images he has taken, he is able to speak in depth of the great architects of his time and place, as well as of the details on the building and the destruction he witnessed of their beautiful works.

To hold in a photograph what is precious, the delicate nature of what is passing, what is transitory, led Earnshaw to document the great Mississippi bluesman as well, who, like the buildings falling down around him, he witnessed being lost to us at an alarming pace. Whether turned toward a building being wrecked, or a soul being lost, Earnshaw knew instinctively not to interfere with the camera’s ability to see clearly, and in return the profound nature of these men and women was captured with the same great beauty at the heart of his architectural work. His is the true spirit, and his focus and artistic passion have never waned. To grasp mentally his entire body of work, is to witness something rare and increasingly precious in our time, as the artist’s ability to maintain a succinct vision over a life-time wanes, replaced by short term trends at the expense of the long view.

I wrestle with Earnshaw’s work, having photographed the same streets, at the same time that he did with a camera, for I know now that, after 45 years, anonymity was our greatest friend, there being reciprocity between anonymity and clarity. But I also know as well that we do not bring these works forth only to be lost and forgotten to the world, that we have a responsibility towards the things we create, to insure their survival. So as artists we offer each other a hand held out, we try to save the work, that which truly enriches our lives. It is what sustains for it is our connection to the truth of things.

In the beginning of Bob Fosse’s 1979 film All that Jazz an eager, hopeful, young man dressed in black, tries his best to keep up with the auditioning group of young dancers, but is hopelessly out of sync with those around him. The perfection of this scene as metaphor for Earnshaw’s life, out of sync with the world around - always first to be rejected, lies in the fact that this young man in the movie actually is Earnshaw, a budding actor at the time.

It will always disturb me to know that I did not recognise Earnshaw’s beauty as an artist at first, that I rejected him at times in my own way, out of my own shortcomings, as others have. So close to being lost. How can that happen? What have we actually lost through our own inability to see past the awkward human surface, and might it be that our finest artists have never been known to us?

Text by Joseph Mills