Ingrid Sischy’s Flame

As a coveted guest in the world where fashion, art, and power converge, Sischy was also one of that world’s more interesting outsiders.Photograph by Matt Baron / BEImages / Rex USA

As a journalist, Ingrid Sischy always wanted to articulate the new. When she began writing the “On Photography” column in this magazine in 1989, she made the post her own by incorporating, in her pieces, all that interested her—photography and looking, certainly, but the politics of gender and social criticism, too. I will never forget, for instance, what a great effect her piece on Minor White and Robert Mapplethorpe had on publishing in general, and on gay readers in particular. (I longed for, and shall always long for, the AIDS memoir  it was rumored Sischy was writing at the time.) In the piece, Sischy not only talked about her own lesbianism but conveyed something of the exhausted, arch style of New York gay conversation. To wit:

The Mapplethorpe show carries a warning that it contains strong material, a reference to the sexual explicitness that has made Mapplethorpe’s photography so controversial. The White exhibition should warn visitors that they might be bored. But there’s something instructive to be found it in anyway.

As a coveted guest in the world where fashion, art, and power converge, Sischy was also one of that world’s more interesting outsiders, a thinker who never let her guard down when it came to being totally accepted by members of the media élite, most of whom she knew by name, of course, and who were often shocked with her gemütlich approach to their problems or joys: no recent birth or marriage was unknown to her and not attended by Sischy and her partner, Sandra Brant.

As a perennially young woman who never lost her excitement about mixing up the adult table with those forces who would otherwise not be seen by those who had the power to help them—black queer artists, outsider performers, idiosyncratic photographers and curators, the list goes on and on—Sischy had the unflagging energy of the born organizer who did not get into the “drama” of being a leader: she just did it. And you can see her directorial skills at work in Interview, particularly the first issues she produced with the art director Fabien Baron (check out John Seabrook’s Profile of Baron; its terrific). Together, they made work that highlighted the skewered, slightly off glamour that defines New York style. Indeed, the Steven Meisel pictorials featured not only famous models like Linda and Christie but downtown legends like the trans performer Connie Flemming. In that black-and-white world, all girls are equal.

Sischy’s interest in stars like Flemming was what drew her to stories like her fascinating study of Takarazuka, the all-female Japanese performing troupes whose audience was mostly composed of women. Indeed, Sischy’s credo as a writer and a woman can be gleaned in this tender and provocative line from the piece: “Self-expression and freedom are valuable concepts in dance, but what about an open show of them in actual life? That takes some courage in this environment.”

The environment Sischy was referring to, of course, was Japan’s often prohibitive social atmosphere. (She reported that “most of the fans seemed nervous about what might happen if their named ended up in print.”) When Robert Gottlieb hired Sischy in 1988, he knew what he was doing: enlisting the services of a young woman who could reflect not only what a changing world felt like but what it looked like, too. During my first weeks at the magazine, Sischy took me for a walk in the West Village and we talked about writing—her writing, specifically, because I felt as though I had yet to do any. I asked her about her “process.” She pointed to a small lesbian-run restaurant and said, “I go in there and I sit at a table and I order a glass of scotch and face it.” What more could she say? As an editor and writer, she did the work, and its importance will reveal itself as we go on, and memories of Ingrid go on, too.

In the meantime, my own most satisfying thoughts of Ingrid are inseparable from Janet Malcolm’s classic piece about her, which appeared in this magazine in 1986. There, Malcolm described her subject, the determined girl from South Africa who, at that point, was editing a magazine that her cultured, intellectual, loving mother did not understand while, to a certain extent, revelling in the world of poets, painters, poseurs, historians, and truthtellers that helped her daughter become the woman she wanted to be.