Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll round up the latest social media news with CNN tech reporter Clare Duffy. We'll have a live in-studio performance from the Moroccan rock group Bab L'Bluz, and we'll hear from musician Katie Gavin, who will be at Radio City tonight and tomorrow. That is our plan. Let's get this started with an extraordinary new photo exhibit.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison: Photographer Dona Ann McAdams is looking back, back at her childhood in 1950s Ronkonkoma, before the Long Island Expressway had even arrived, back at her many cross-country adventures, including when she left home at 19 to head to Bohemian San Francisco, and her days as a New Yorker, including her longtime gig as the house photographer for the Performance Space 122. The Pratt Manhattan Gallery has just opened a new exhibition of Dona's work spanning 50 years.

There's also an accompanying monograph, a photographic memoir that includes some of Dona's early journal entries as she writes, "I was always looking through the glass light within the dark." Dona Ann McAdams: 'Black | Box' is on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery at 144 West 14th Street, now through June 7th. You can see some of her photos on our Instagram stories right now @allofitwnyc. Dona is now here as my guest. Welcome to WNYC.

Dona Ann McAdams: Thank you so much, Alison. It's such a pleasure to be with you.

Alison: I also want to mention that Dona will be in conversation with Poet Eileen Myles for a special event at the Gallery that is happening on Thursday, May 15th at 6:30 PM. Dona, as you were putting together this exhibition of your work over the years, first of all, how did you react to seeing your older photos?

Dona: I found a lot of pictures that I hadn't seen before when I started to dig deep into the archive. A lot of them were surprising because they were photographs that were, for me, good photographs, but I had missed them 50 years ago. That was exciting. It was exciting to look at old work and make it new work. That was a big pleasure for me.

Alison: What did you notice about younger Dona as a photographer and what she was interested in?

Dona: Younger Photographer Dona was more interested in street photography, and older Dona, photographer, became more involved with activism. I took more responsibility for making the photographs than taking the photographs, as I did when I was in my 20s.

Alison: What led to that shift?

Dona: I met Harvey Milk, and he changed my life. He encouraged me to use my photography for social activism. He encouraged me to get on the street. He encouraged me to realize that gay pride was more than just a slogan. It was going to be a way of life, and he was going to make that happen as the first elected gay official in San Francisco.

Alison: People don't know this about you, but you were you were kicked out of Catholic school, you graduated high school, and then you went to California. You left home. You drove across the country to San Francisco. First of all, what was calling you West?

Dona: I got in my car, and I just started driving. I did have a friend, a photographer named Jon Countess, who was attending the San Francisco Art Institute. He was my boyfriend at that time, and he encouraged me to leave the island and come out and join him in San Francisco. I did that and started to sit in on classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and become involved in the community out there. As a young photographer, I was really fortunate to be able to be at the Art Institute in the '70s, when photography was just coming into its own as an art form.

Alison: What did the West mean to you as a person?

Dona: The West was big, wide open skies. The West was my Leica camera, 250 at eight, lots of light, lots of horizon, and Long Island was 3000 miles away. The Long Island of my childhood and my young adulthood was not really part of my life anymore, and I was glad to have the freedom to be who I wanted to be.

Alison: You tell great stories about your time out West, including how you met Harvey Milk. Would you share that story with us?

Dona: I like to call these stories my little ditties.

Alison: Ditties? [laughs]

Dona: Little ditties, pretty little ditties. I was just out shooting, taking pictures with some friends up in Dolores Park, and I ran out of film. Somebody said, "There's a camera shop over on Castro Street. You can just probably get a couple of rolls of film over there." I thought, "All right." I headed over there and I walked in and there was this guy with a mustache and long hair and the barber chair that you hear about or you see or you saw in the film. He went behind the counter and said, "What do you need?" I said, "I need a roll of Tri-X."

He said, "Just one?" I said, "Really, that's all I have money for." He set up a charge account for me and said, "Anytime you're in the neighborhood and you want to come in and charge a roll of film, just ask for me or ask for Scott." Then I later found out who the guy behind the counter, behind the mustache was, that he was Harvey Milk, and he was running for office. I got involved in getting him elected. He didn't win the first couple of times, but he finally did. It was really great to celebrate with him when he did win.

Alison: What did you take from that interaction of him setting up an account for you, although you said you could only afford that one roll of film?

Dona: The generosity of an elder in the community. Not that much older, but somebody taking an interest in a young photographer, in a woman, and saying, "Look, here, you need these items to take pictures, you need film, you need supplies. Just come in here and charge them, and we'll worry about the money later on." It was a very generous offer on his part, and he was just really a nice and incredible guy. People would always go in there and hang around, and there was always a big fight to sit in the barber chair.

Alison: What was his magnetism?

Dona: He just was a straight shooter. He was the mayor of Castro Street. Anita Bryant was around. Things were happening. He wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity to experience the freedom that they should have as a gay person. Stonewall had happened, and things were changing. Polk Street was alive with parades and activities, and he wanted to be a part of that. Like I said, he was the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco. Of course, we lost him and George Moscone just a short time after he was elected to office by Dan White. That's when I moved back to New York.

Alison: My guest is photographer Dona Ann McAdams. We're speaking about a new exhibition of her photography at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. It's called "Dona Ann McAdams: 'Black | Box,' presenting over 50 years of Dona's black and white photography. It's on view now through June 7th. I want to take you back to Long Island to Ronkonkoma in the '50s. You said the Long Island Expressway hadn't opened yet that far. How would you describe Ronkonkoma in the '50s?

Dona: We moved there in 1960 from Cambria Heights. We moved into one of the first little track developments on Samuel Street, and there was just a lot of farming. There were potatoes and there were ducks. There was not a whole lot of houses or development at that time. We had a backyard, we had woods around us. It was like a paradise for a young kid. My two brothers would get on our bicycles and ride around. At a certain point, when I started entering high school, I just didn't feel like I was going to be able to go anywhere. I decided that I needed to get off the island and do something different, so I went west.

Alison: When did your interest in photography actually begin?

Dona: When I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, I was looking at pictures. I wasn't really taking photographs at that time, but I would go and I would sit in on the classes that Hank Wessel held. It was called Sweet 16. It was a man named Hilton Braithwaite who encouraged me to get a camera. He said, "You're looking at pictures and you're interested. Why don't you just get a camera and see how it feels to shoot?" I had a little Olympus half-frame camera.

After about six months, he said, "You need a Leica. Get a real camera. Not that that's not a real camera, but you need a full frame. You don't need a half frame. Go get yourself a Leica." I did. He was a big early supporter of my work. Also, when I moved back to New York, I lived in his loft with his partner, Aldona Regalis. He helped me out West, and then when he moved back and I moved back to New York, he housed me for about a year till I got myself on my feet.

Alison: I believe there's a picture of him in your monograph. Can you describe that picture of him?

Dona: There's one picture of him standing next to his wife, Angela Davis, who I also got to know, gave me my first reading list and reading assignment. I was lucky enough in 1982 for her to give me a copy of Women, Race and Class, which was an important book for me to read at that time, too.

Alison: The other picture?

Dona: The other picture is Angela and her two dogs, my friend Karen, and my friend Yvonne on her deck in the Oakland Hills. I'm back there in the foreground, and I'm a ways away, and they're just leaning on this fence with the hills behind them.

Alison: It's interesting. In the exhibit, there's a picture of you. It's an early picture of you, a self-portrait of you. What was the story behind that picture? You're young.

Dona: The one of me in the Empire State Building?

Alison: I think so. It's one of the first ones you see.

Dona: I know you're talking about the photograph of me in front of the television set.

Alison: Yes.

Dona: My father took that. I'm just sitting in front of this big box, grainy television set. A lot of my life back in the day was listening to the television set through the wall of my bedroom because my bedroom wall shared the same wall as the TV, and the television was always on in my house growing up. Another reason to move to San Francisco for television.

Alison: [laughs] How about the image of you taking a picture?

Dona: The one on the Empire State Building was just-- When I first came back to New York from San Francisco, I just decided to do touristy things. I didn't spend any time in the city when I was a kid. I came back as an adult, and I just decided to poke around, take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, go to the top of the Empire State Building, and I just saw my reflection in the glass with my little disheveled coat and little purse, and I made that photograph.

Alison: Why was that important for you to make that photograph?

Dona: It marked a time in my life, a young artist back in New York, trying to find their way. There's something just about the disheveled look about me, like immigrant look about me, a new immigrant to New York City, even though I was an American. I was born in New York, in Queens, in 1954.

Alison: My guest is photographer Dona Ann McAdams. We're speaking about a new exhibition of her photography at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. It's called "Dona Ann McAdams: 'Black | Box'. You shoot in black and white. Why does that medium speak to you?

Dona: I've always just been interested in black and white. I'm interested in light and shape and form. Color has never really been that interesting to me. It's a beautiful form. I have my little camera on my iPhone that I will use, but I'm more interested in the abstraction that black and white affords me. It's something I just was always attracted to, and I never had a desire to shoot any other way.

Also, I've never had a desire to use anything except my 35 millimeter Leica. It's the same camera, different film, because Tri-X isn't as nice as it used to be. I use Ilford HP5 and Kentmere now, but it's the same process, the same film, the same camera, the same processing in the darkroom. I also like being able to just process and print my own work in my darkroom here up in Sandgate, Vermont.

Alison: I was going to ask you about printing your own photographs, because some of them have the black border around the edge, some don't. Tell me a little bit about your process of printing photographs.

Dona: I like the black border around the edge of the photograph because it shows you the entire contents of the frame. The photograph is made in the camera, and I don't necessarily do any cropping of it in the enlarger. The black border is the entire frame. I just like that finished edge on my photographs. The darkroom, you're under amber, you're in this red light, and you have your water, your chemistry, you're alone with your negatives. It's a very peaceful, relaxing, sometimes technically challenging place to be, but I enjoy it and I'll continue to do it for as long as I can.

Now, when I make big 16 by 20-inch prints, I always write how old I am on the back of the photograph. If you turn one over, you'll see the negative number and the date, but you'll also see-- I started doing it when I was 63, so if I print now, it'll say 70. It's a little prize on the back for somebody to find later on, when they find the archive, or somebody does take the archive. They'll go, "What is that?" Now they don't know what it is. Thanks to you, Alison.

Alison: There you go. A lot of photographers think that a lot of the artistry happens in the printing and the burning of the photograph. Do you agree with that?

Dona: Yes, you have to make an exposure in the camera, but then once the negative goes in the enlarger, yes, there's a lot of burning and dodging. There's a lot of manipulation that goes into adjusting the light on the paper. I do that in the darkroom. It just basically will give you a clearer image. It's dodging and burning. There is work that goes into making the print. Not every print looks the same.

If I print one image and I print four of those, those four images will look different because I'm not going to, with my hands or a dodging tool or a burning tool, be able to exactly replicate what I did in the print before. Every print that you make or that I make will look different, slightly different. You might not be able to tell, but I certainly would be able to.

Alison: I have to ask about Performance Space 122-

Dona: Sure.

Alison: -in the East Village. You were there for over 20 years.

Dona: 23.

Alison: Oh, wow. How did you first get that gig?

Dona: I was working at this copy shop called Unsloppy Copy, and a lot of people that were performers would come in to have copies made for their shows. There was a man named John Bernd, who was a dancer who came in often. He asked me to come over to PS122 in 1983 and do a publicity still for a show he had coming, an upcoming show. That was the first time that I actually walked into the Space. Then when Mark Russell, who was the executive director, artistic director for, oh, I don't know, 20 years, when he started to run the place, he asked me to come and photograph. That's when I started as the official house photographer in 1984. I stayed there till 2006.

Alison: What did you enjoy about taking pictures of people performing, the physicality of the performance?

Dona: It's like Erving Goffman. It's the quality of life in and out of the theater. Life is a theater, life is a stage, and it was always really wonderful to just sit and watch things unfold before me, as opposed to going out into the world and doing the unfolding by looking as things moved around me in the world, as opposed to in the Black Box. I really enjoyed the theater.

I also wasn't really interested in making photographs that were necessarily ready for the New York Times or the Village Voice. I was interested in making photographs that were good photographs, too, that spoke not just of the performer, but also of the space and the time and the quality of the light. It was a really amazing and fortunate experience to have. A lot of my community and a lot of my friends are from those days and continue to be part of my good circle of friends. It was a special time.

Alison: I was going to ask from that time, what did you learn about photography?

Dona: By that time, I pretty much had a clear sense about how the camera worked and what I was doing with it. What I did realize and what I learned is that you needed to be in the space, and you needed to look and wait and watch and be patient and watch for things to unfold, as opposed to going in and just thinking you could grab something. It was like a meditation on the ground. I usually sat on the floor in the first row off to the side.

I learned about what made a good photograph in a dark space. Usually, I was shooting at 60th of a second, all the way open. Most of the photographs in the theater were made with a 50 millimeter lens. The stuff that I do in the world or out on the street or wherever I might be is with a 35. It was a little tighter framework.

Alison: My guest is photographer Dona Ann McAdams. We're talking to her about her new exhibition of photography at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. It's called Dona Ann McAdams: 'Black | Box'. It is on view through June 7th. I went to the show last night on 14th Street, and you feature a lot of women in a lot of your pictures. First of all, why?

Dona: Because I happen to be one, and I happen to love women. I'm not really that interested in photographing or looking at men as much as I am as looking at women. I think that's just my nature. I think we deserve the focus of attention more than the guys do. That's why I photograph women. I happen to be one, and I love them.

Alison: You got to clap in the control room from our director.

[laughter]

Alison: I want to ask you--

Dona: All right, guys. I'm sorry, guys.

Alison: No, it's a girl. She's laughing. I wanted to ask you about this one photo of a woman, I believe her name is Georgia Heard.

Dona: Georgie Heard.

Alison: Georgie Heard. Could you tell us a little bit about the photograph and about her?

Dona: Sure. When my husband, Brad Kessler, and I-- We were living in West Virginia for a while, and actually we were thinking about maybe living down there, but that's another story. I started to think about what I was going to photograph or what I might be interested in doing. I started to work with a bunch of women who were part of the-- Up here, we have something called The Grange, and down there, it was a group of women who were farming women, and I joined the organization.

By joining them and being part of that community, one of them, Cassandra Perkins, actually, said, "You should think about maybe photographing some of the farmers around here." I started to photograph these elder farmers. Georgie Heard, she knew I was coming to her barn, that I was going to photograph her. She got dressed up in a little flowered dress, and she had these white go-go boots on. She was all ready to go out to the barn. I went out there and took a picture of her milking her cow. That's how that happened. You can't see her little white boots, but you can see the tail. You can see her just milking a cow. I think she was probably in her 80s when I made that photograph.

Alison: I mentioned you're going to be in conversation with Poet Eileen Myles for an event on May 15th at 6:30 at the Pratt Gallery. There's a picture of Eileen Myles-

Dona: Yes.

Alison: -in your exhibit.

Dona: That actually is the photograph for a small book that she did called 1969. I photographed Eileen twice, I think, for two different book projects. Then Eileen, when she was curating at Saint Mark's Church, the poetry project at Saint Mark's Church, she asked me to photograph the poets, and I learned a tremendous amount about poetry. We were just really good friends back then. I haven't seen her in a while, but I read all of her work, and I have all of her books here at home in my library. I'm looking forward to sitting down and having a conversation with her. That's where that picture is from. That is the roof of PS122.

Alison: You live on a goat farm in Vermont these days, yes?

Dona: Yes, I do. I have 11 baby goats on the ground right now.

Alison: When did you start goat farming?

Dona: The goats showed up in 2005. I actually think that Brad got them so he wouldn't have to leave the farm.

Alison: [laughs]

Dona: Now we're one of the smallest licensed dairies in the state of Vermont. We make cheese. Brad makes cheese. I'm more of the milkmaid. They've been around for a while. They're really interesting and wonderful creatures. They're like the anarchists of the animal kingdom. My goats, my ladies.

Alison: Oh, explain that. I got to know more about that. Baby goats, to be honest.

Dona: If you think about goats and sheep, sheep are on the right side of Jesus, and goats are on the left. There's Pan, the horn god. Goats have a lot of stigma against them in terms of the dark side, the devil, whereas sheep are the Lamb of God. Goats are a little bit-- They're not as easy to-- They do their own thing. They do their own thing. I'm not saying sheep aren't great or cows aren't great, but goats, they're a class separate on their own.

Alison: Do you have an Instagram account where we can see more of these goats?

Dona: Yes, I do. It's my name. I don't put them up occasionally. You could see some goats. I'll put some goats up for you.

Alison: Love that. My guest has been Dona Ann McAdams. The name of the show is Dona Ann McAdams: 'Black | Box'. It's on view at Pratt's Manhattan Gallery at 144 West 14th Street through June 7th. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Dona: Thank you so much.