ANDY SWEET: A PORTRAITMiami Herald, The (FL) - December 5, 1982Author/Byline: MADELEINE BLAIS Herald Staff WriterEdition: FINALSection: TROPIC MAGPage: 8Readability: 5-6 grade level (Lexile: 930)The final image is unfair: Andy Sweet, photographer, age 28. Found slain on Oct. 17 in his apartment at 215 30th St. in Miami Beach. From Officer Robert Bluni's report:

"I observed a pair of blue jeans soaked with blood in the hallway of the apartment. I turned toward the bedroom, pushed open the door and observed blood on the walls and the mattress pushed off the bed. The telephone was off the hook, on the floor and covered with blood. There was a foot visible under the mattress. I reached over the mattress to feel the body to determine if rescue was needed. The foot was cold and stiff."

The scene has the power of a certain kind of photograph. It captures a split second of horror: life stilled.

Though young, Sweet was virtually an institution on the Beach, having made thousands of images of the place and the people. He had once done a series on city employes and among them is the photo of one of the detectives assigned to probe his homicide: Tom Hunker, standing in Flamingo Park, tall and mustached, his arms on the shoulders of two buddies, all three cheerful in the sun. Even Major Louis Reilly who heads the detective bureau had met Sweet, at a Miami Beach City Commission meeting in September. Sweet wanted the city to participate in the funding of a book of photos of Miami Beach that he had been working on for years with Gary Monroe. Isaac Bashevis Singer had been asked to write the introduction. The Miami Beach Photographic project had received $135,000 from the National Endowment of the Arts, Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Labor. Sweet told the commissioners: "All revenuefrom the sale of the book, which might be $100,000 -- or possibly my mother might be the only one to buy it -- would be to the City of Miami Beach, possibly for the Bass Museum."

The family and friends have offered a $10,000 reward for the apprehension and prosecution of Andy Sweet's killers. The police have issued composite sketches of two men believed to be the last to see Sweet alive: a white American male with tinted gold glasses, light brown hair parted in the middle, thin mustache, 18 to 20 years old; and a white Latin male, 21 to 23, stocky with a heavy beard and full mustache.

It has been reported that the two men took turns stabbing the photographer and that he tried to hide in the closet to avoid their blows, but Detective Tony Marten says that is only speculation, arising from the great quantity of blood throughout the apartment. The killers changed from their splotched clothes into the clothes of their victim, leaving their own behind, including a distinctive T-shirt with Keep Surfing written in black lettering on both sleeves.

The final moment of Andy Sweet's life is bold and ugly and unforgettable, but it would be wrong to allow it to overshadow a lifetime. The only theme categorically missing from his work was that of violence. He did not chase ambulances nor did he try to find the visual equivalent of a siren. Naturally he addressedhimself to the vanishing essence of things; that is what photographers do. But he nearly always found the moment with the whole story: a narrative anchored in time and space. His photos imply a past and suggest a future. And that is why the final scene is such an injustice and such a slander. It says nothing true about the person who died, whose work was curious and gentle and winking and full of humor. His death was the opposite of his life: a spooky leering negative, a sickening reversal.

Nelan "Chick" Sweet, Andy's father:

"I have no real art appreciation. No technical knowledge. I don't know whether my son's work was good or not. I know my favorite photos -- the one of the old man hanging from the tree, and The Dorothy. A lot of people say it was good. I'm a product of the Depression. I grew up thinking you had to have a profession or a career that would assure you a living. I went to accounting school: 'People are always going to need accountants.' I didn't like it, so later I went to law school. I never would have thought of going into photography as an art form. I remember years ago some friends of ours hired Andy to take pictures of a party they were having, and after he had taken all the pictures they wanted, he said to me, 'Now I'm going to take the pictures I really want.' Recently he'd taken to playing golf with me on Sundays. He'd call and say, 'Got an opening tomorrow?' And I'd say, 'Sure, come along.' He did that three or four weeks in a row. You know what he told his sister? He said he was worried about me. The way I get mad on the golf course, yell at the ball. I have high blood pressure and he was very concerned. He told his sister that about a week or two before he died."

About two hours before her son's funeral, Audrey Sweet called the Newman funeral home on Dade Boulevard and said, "Look, Eddie, I've been sitting here reflecting on how many friends we have and I have the strangest feeling we're going to need more room. How many do you hold? 350? Total? That's not enough."

She called Rabbi Irving Lehrman of Temple Emanu-El on the beach. Audrey Sweet's father was a founder of the temple. Rabbi Lehrman officiated at her marriage and at the marriage of her older daughter, Ellen. He was the rabbi for Andy Sweet's Bar Mitzvah. He said that of course she could have the temple, and instructed her to start a telephone brigade. The ceremony took place with a 15-minute delay. Audrey Sweet says she does not know exactly how many attended. She has been told between 500 and 1,000: "It was so mobbed people didn't even get to the books to sign them."

"My oh my, the curse of crime," said the rabbi. "The tragedy of crime. To think that our beloved Andrew should have been victimized by it."

The Sweet family is prominent, not famous, but rooted in the area, known to many. Chick Sweet is past president of the Miami Beach Bar Association and for more than six years was a municipal judge. Audrey Sweet's father Nat Hankoff built the Monte Carlo Hotel on the beach, "along with Joe Rose ---- he's still living" and the Royal Palm. He was president of the Miami Beach Hotel Owner's Association "back when that was something." Andy was well-known, not only among those in his age group who grew up on the 88 blocks of Miami Beach when everybody knew everybody but also among the older generation. When he first started out, he took pictures at the parties of friends of his parents, and so the crowd at the funeral consisted of the young and the middle-aged and the old. What happens to others in headlines had happened to one of their own, a Beach boy, Miami born and bred, a native. The curse and the tragedy.

Sometimes the memory functions like a snapshot: There is an emblematic instant that we carry around, a picture from the past that takes the form of an anecdote, one of those stories so familiar that anyone in the family can furnish the details and supply the punchline. For the Sweets, the story that seems to sum up Andy happened when he was a pilgrim in the kindergarten pageant, one of 60 children marshaled on stage. The audience could hear the scraping of chairs and the childish squeals. Suddenly the curtain lifts at the bottom, just a little bit. Only a toe. It moves again: the shoe. Finally this little head, surrounded by the kind of dark curls people love to touch, sticks out, grinning: Andy. Andy's older sister Ellen Moss, an artist, hears the story and nods her head and rolls her eyes. His younger sister Nancy, a special education teacher in training to be an artist, says, "That Andy." "He loved attention," says the father. "He couldn't wait for the show to start," says his mother.

"Andy," says Audrey Sweet, "was humor. Most of it was too raunchy for you to print; some people might get offended. You know what he did to a friend of mine? Her mother-in-law died and she was sitting shiva at her apartment for her, and Andy shows up with his cameras and says, 'I'm here to shoot the shiva. Where's the food?' Everyone laughed. What can I tell you? He was a character."

The picture-taking began when he was still a little kid, at Camp Mountain Lake in North Carolina. The owners of the camp remember a chubby kid, not very athletic and the camera was a way of making friends. At first the letters home were typical, scrawled in slapdash handwriting, more inventive in their grammar than in content: "Dear Mom and Dad. I took horseback riding and art and crafts. In an hour I will go to eathar riding art. I went sming today. Love Andy."

Then a suspicious outburst of meticulous spelling and the painstakingly lucid handwriting usually associated with a major request: "My tank spool in my darkroom broke. Go to the photo mart and please get an anscomatic developing tank spool for 35mm or bigger. Not the tank. Just the spool. It should not cost over $3. I am editor of the camp newspaper. Please write. I haven't gotten a letter in three days."

His sister Nancy: "Andy was always into things when he was a kid. He had a rock cutting machine and he could take apart a transistor radio and put it together again and he knew how to wire telephones."

His father: "At the phone company they knew him. He was that kid on North Bay Road."

His mother: "One paper route wasn't enough. He had three. He talked his sister Ellen into going in on a Mustang with him before he even had his license."

His father: "When he was in junior high school he invested some money, and at recess he called the stockbroker."

Nancy: "When Andy first came home with the camera, at first we thought it was another one of Andy's hobbies. Only, you know, it lasted."

Andy Sweet majored in photography at the University of South Florida in Tampa and received his Master's of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado. He used to drive from Miami Beach to Boulder and back in a big old Buick LeSabre and instead of packing a suitcase he put his whole bureau on the roof of the car. Whenever he stopped at a motel he climbed up, stood the bureau on its legs, opened the drawers and took out what he needed. Not known for his fine haberdashery, Sweet's wardrobe consisted of too-short shorts, T-shirts with slogans like Try Me and one brown suit to shoot his jobs. "His Master's thesis consisted of 60 pictures from Camp Mountain Lake: Girl With Bow led the series, followed by a boy whose nickname was "Stomach," sticking his out; a girl on a fat horse predictably named Lightning and a kid proudly displaying the final product of his arts and crafts program, a plaque upon which is improbably mounted a pair of scissors. Instead of wine at the University sponsored show, Sweet served ice cream cones.

When Sweet returned home to Miami Beach in l977, he roamed South Beach for fun and took party pictures for profit, once collecting into a book the outtakes: for instance, a nicely dressed couple in the buffet line scraping food back into a bowl. At the time of his death Sweet was working for the studios of Bob and Sylvia Allen: three or four weddings and Bar Mitzvah's a weekend. Much of the work was dictated by the nature of the events: the predictable aisle shots and the cake cutting, the candle lighting and the group photos of each and every table. But even in that body of work moments stand out, like the older boy kissing his younger brother at the Bar Mitzvah. Not the kiss, but the act of its being wiped from the face.

He developed his own work, and colors entranced him: the flamingo pinkness of a driveway echoed by the trim of a house, the blues of the water, the balloons at a party.

But it was on Miami Beach, particularly on South Beach among the elderly, that Sweet excelled. Work and art became one. Hewent to the New Year's Eve parties at the hotels for the elderly for three years in a row, taking pictures of the revels. "Now I don't want you making fun of those people," his mother said, and if at first there was mockery of a gentle kind, eventually that was replaced by affection. Once when the scheduled entertainer canceled at the last minute, Sweet put aside his camera and sat at the piano and played old songs. Caren Coleman, a friend whose parents owned Camp Mountain Lake: "A lot of people our age would walk down South Beach and instead of seeing something beautiful they would want to throw up. Andy saw beauty."

A Beach boy: one of ours. In Miami to be a native is to lead a life of unacknowledged exile. The newcomers are united in longing for what they left, and they often plunder what's here, espousing a notion that the resources are endless: After all, one can't use up all the sun. Part anthropologist, Sweet documented a vanishing tribe: elderly Eastern European Jews living in a part of town that will eventually become concrete and new like the other parts of town. He brought music to these people. He felt warmth and even love where others feel, at best, indifference. He had a sense of history in a place that does not value history.

After his death, his friends made jokes, because it was Andy's style to make jokes. Sylvia Allen: "They must have been desperate criminals if they changed into Andy's clothes." She said this with a smile, but there were tears in her eyes. Stanley Stern, his best friend: "Andy would have loved all the attention at the temple. He would have said, 'Wow, look at all the people who showed up.' " His mother: "Knowing Andy, he'd be mad he couldn't shoot his own shiva."

"Actually," said his sister Nancy, "He would have been hurt to see us all so hurt." She said to Stanley Stern and her mother: "You're making Andy sound like an immature idiot. At the time of his death he was making 22 payments a month. He owned three pieces of property, a new Honda and some nice furniture he had bought on time. He was just getting into nice things. He was always talking about putting down payments or ballooning this. He wasn't a child."

"Still," says Stern, not entirely convinced, "he was a maniac."

Carl Weinhardt, director of Vizcaya Museum: "I was very much impressed by his work, always. It had an intense documentary quality in color usually associated with black and white."

Mary Ellen Mark, a photographer of international note: "I did a Miami Beach project and what impressed me about Andy was that he shared his territory. He brought me all around, not just to South Beach but also he introduced me to his parents and their friends. I have a picture of Andy's mother all dressed up after a luncheon washing her dog. He may have been younger, but I considered him every bit an equal. He started in photography so young that we were doing what we were doing for nearly the same length of time. His work inspired me."

Robert Sindelir of the Gallery at 24 and Sweet's dealer: "His work had surprises. A subtle twist. The figure behind the screen in The Dorothy, for instance. Andy's work is in the tradition of Edward Sheriff Curtis who took pictures of North American Indians at the beginning of the century. He documented their everyday life that was in the process of vanishing, everything from the beautiful baskets to the junk piled up outside the teepee, the glory and warts and moles, all with affection."

After her son's death, Audrey Sweet wrote a reminiscence that she entitled "Andy: A Portrait." She signed it "Love, Mother." This is how it ended.

"He tended to lean to one side for the camera equipment was heavy on his shoulder. His Hasselblads and lenses were a part of his wardrobe and he carried them with pride and cared for them as if they were the Crown Jewels. They repaid him, for his camera work was superb.

"This young, talented, sensitive lovable man grew up peacefully. He never cared for contact sports, though he enjoyed an occasional raquetball game.

"Andy wasn't a fighter. It just wasn't his style. The police told us that he fought a very tough battle for his life.

"His murderers have permanently scarred our family and so many of Andy's friends are suffering as well. I feel their pain when I look at Stanley, Mark, Gary, Teresa, Ruth, Sylvia, Bob. I'm so sorry for every one of Andy's friends. One friend, I was told, said: 'What a big void to fill."'

"God, how we all miss that wild and crazy guy."

"There is a bustle in the house the morning after death." That is a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, and it captures a little of the secular side of the shiva, the ritual of mourning in the Jewish faith. For seven days after the burial, the survivors gather. At sundown 10 men pray for the deceased and sustenance is offered to the living: food and drink and company. For seven days the Sweets' home was filled. Audrey Sweet: "Every night an army of people came to bring and to do and to work. All religions have something like the shiva. People shouldn't be alone then."

Now the official mourning is over. For Andy's mother the hardest time is late in the day, returning home, realizing that her son has not stopped by to take in the mail, drop off his laundry, drink all the orange juice from the carton. Every day there are new letters of condolence. From Shirley Kaufmann: "Although we have not met for many years I want you to know that I grieve with you for Andy's loss -- or, better, the world's loss of Andy.

"In his kindergarten days with me at North Beach he was always so bright eyed and eager, facing each new day with joyous anticipation. He seems to have maintained that attitude through his all too brief span of years.

"I am so sorry."

Caption: bw: Andrew Sweet, photos by Sweet (6)Index terms: MURDER MB SWEET OBITRecord: rootCopyright: Copyright (c) 1982 The Miami Herald