The Truth About Reality

The school where I teach digital photography urges its instructors to remind our students that “Photoshop is not a verb.” I do, and everyone always laughs and then we talk about what the point of the statement is, about how important it still is to learn lighting and exposure and composition and cropping images in the camera and blah, blah, blah. In order to further encourage them to learn the skills necessary to "get it right in the camera" I ask them to pretend, for a little while at least, that it’s 1989 and Photoshop is not only not a verb, it’s not even a word because it hasn’t been invented yet. That goes over like a lead balloon.

Writing in the December 1, 2007 online edition of Newsweek, Peter Plagens posed a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately— “Is Photography Dead?” He goes on for several pages about how, on the surface at least, photography appears to be alive and kicking, maybe even too much so. “There are hordes of photographers out there”, he writes, “working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo ‘shoots’ whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets.” Plagens believes, however, that digital technology has led many of these photographers into a world of make-believe, one where “reality” is often defined by their fictive imaginations powered by Photoshop skills instead of their truthful observations. In his view, photographers are moving away from their traditional role as "truth-bearers" toward a postmodernist sensibility fueled by easy and popular access to digital cameras and software. He sees it as nothing less than struggle for photography’s very soul.

And so do I, kind of. But I’m thinking a little more, I suppose you might say, cautiously optimistic than Mr. Plagens. I actually think that a more pertinent question to ask ourselves is “Is Digital Photography Alive?”, and my answer to that is "Of Course It Is, If You Want It To Be." To understand where I’m going with this, you have to consider what one self-help cult I got roped into joining by an ex-girlfriend used to like to demand of its adherents back in the 1980’s. You have to understand and accept “The Truth About Reality”.

Photography has never been about “truth” or “reality”, and anyone who thinks that it has been probably sees the film-versus-digital debate in far more starkly divided terms than I do. Photographers are visual editors. That means that all photography is editorial (opinion-based) in nature for many reasons, the simplest of which is the existence of the camera’s viewfinder. In use, that innocuous little square or rectangular window is anything but ambivalent and all-inclusive, and civilization has been manipulated by it since the first photographer tried to figure out just what exactly to point the contraption it was attached to at. Using it to frame the world in combination with our all-too-human proclivities toward empathy, revulsion, and awe results in not the photograph itself stating “Here is the truth”, but rather the photographer exclaiming “Here is the truth I saw”.

In general, photographers (unlike painters, for instance) don't start with a blank canvas when composing our images. We're forced to bring order to THE ENTIRE WORLD by using the viewfinder to exclude everything that doesn’t belong. We edit, even the purest purists among us, every time we choose to point the camera HERE instead of THERE. By doing so we are eliminating options and manipulating our images in a way designed to elicit a particular response. Photographic composition is a wonderful puzzle-palace of tension driven by a constant subjective analysis of what to include and what to exclude, always shooting for what Edward Weston described as "the strongest way of seeing. But make no mistake about it. Whether editing in the camera, in the darkroom, or in Photoshop, we have always manipulatied not only our images, but our viewers. The rightness or wrongness of that really only comes down to a matter of degree.

The temptations offered to us by digital photography can be either inclusive or exclusive to the point of becoming occlusive. If we're not careful, we wind up spending far too much time thinking about way too many options, and in my opinion, too much of it after the fact. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said something along these lines: “Photography doesn’t take brains. It takes sensitivity, a finger and two legs.” These days, photography does take brains, and it requires a lot of thinking. Unfortunately, the complexity of the process usually means that we’re thinking when we should be feeling, witnessing and reacting instead. As a result of that we often wind up “Photoshopping” the living daylights out of what should have been a more clearly perceived image in the first place. When asked by a student “how do I get rid of the telephone pole growing out of the top of this guy’s head?” my answer used to be “pay more attention to the visual relationships between EVERYTHING in the viewfinder next time, that’s how.” Nowadays, I still say that, but then I have to go ahead and show them how to get rid of it anyway. It sometimes seems as if the perception of photography in 2007 has more to do with the Clone Stamp and Patch tools than it does with learning how to see, think and feel clearly with a camera. It's why I think we should be asking ourselves not whether photography is dead, but whether digital photography is alive. Being alive, even when practiced diligently, is an exercise in unpredictability, intuition and faith. For me and what I do, photography is just like that and it's why I love it. It's alive and well and always will be, regardless of whether I use a digital camera or not. But like so much else in our world today, I see it being over thought and overdone by so many people, and when something is overdone, the way to correct it is to apply restraint. Unfortunately, restraint isn’t available as a Photoshop plug-in, at least not in the current release.

Plagens quotes photographer Lisette Model as saying “Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest.” She said a mouthful there, especially as it relates to photography in the twenty-first century. But I think Jerry Uelsmann’s perspective is equally valid here. A true visionary, if anyone should be pissed off at how Photoshop and digital technology have transformed the practice of photography it should be him. Uelsmann creates incredibly realized, impossibly stitched-together dreamscapes with traditional film and chemical photography, and has been doing so for the better part of four decades. He uses a series of enlargers in his darkroom to record and blend portions of multiple negatives onto a single sheet of photographic paper. The result is a composite masterpiece that can take days to make perfectly (like the one at the top of this post), but that could be made so much more easily, precisely and repeatably by anyone with a computer and a modest knowledge of Photoshop. When asked about this by John Paul Caponigro in 1997, Uelsmann was surprisingly upbeat.

“I certainly don't feel threatened by the computer. It's a tool. It's another way of making marks…I figured out pretty early, even in the darkroom, having too many options is counter productive to the creative process. The computer is the king of too many options.”

And maybe that's the point of all this. Too many options may be just that, too many options. Truth and reality, while never clear or absolute, can be snugged up pretty close to by eliminating unnecessary options.

Relevance, Reminiscence, and Teaching Smart People

When I left the freelance world and took a job as a catalog photographer at Filenes in 1995, I made a sign for the top of my computer cart that said “Just an analog guy trapped in a digital world”. It stayed there until a bright August day 11 years later when the merger with Macy’s shut the place down forever. My sign started out as a smug statement of defiance and skepticism toward the intrusion of cold, hard digital precision to what had always been, for me at least, a soft and wonderfully quirky craft.

But by the time I flicked off the studio lights that last day, my feelings about digital photography had changed completely and irrevocably. Filenes’ parent company had been an early adopter of high-end digital photography and had equipped our studio with state-of-the-art gear and first class imaging support. Even so, most of our photographers and designers seemed to be unwilling or unable to overcome the inertia resulting from years of working with film (and I definitely included myself among them, at least at the beginning). We were shooting digitally the way we had shot with film, and what we did often seemed pretty crazy and ass-backwards as a result. Seeing that, and seeing how much of the rest of the photographic industry was finding new ways of doing the same old stuff better, I challenged myself to fully embrace and even champion “digital thinking”, often to the consternation of many of my colleagues. I just couldn’t understand why everybody else wouldn’t be itching to take the dive with me. But never one to doubt the righteousness of my position in the face of overwhelming lack of popular agreement, I hung tight and managed to drag anyone working with photography at Filenes kicking and screaming into the present. The advisory “Grow or Die” never seemed more prescient than it did among the ranks of photographers and other creative professionals in the 1990s. Reluctantly or not, we all grew, but inevitably, Filenes died.

Then I started teaching, and I found myself standing at the front of classrooms packed to the rafters with smart people. Doctors, lawyers, authors, Harvard and MIT professors, software engineers, web developers, even a “user experience designer”; you name it and they came to my workshops. But regardless of their backgrounds, every one of my students loved photography and the majority of them were way more digital-savvy than me. I was faced with the awkward challenge of teaching technology to people who, in many cases, wound up explaining it better right back to me.

At Filenes, our problem was not proactively updating the skills that some of us had spent a long time acquiring, partially out of laziness, partially out of fear of the steep new learning curve, but mostly because the nature of the work simply didn’t require it. There was no directive from senior management to “be more digital”; in fact, there was moderate opposition to it. I eventually changed because I wanted to remain intellectually and creatively challenged in an otherwise numbingly routine environment and, frankly, because I felt I owed it to myself to remain relevant as a commercial photographer.

But the teaching thing is different. First at NESOP and now at CDIA, I’ve been very surprised to learn that most of my students, regardless of age, know very little about film photography at all. Their exposure to the medium is entirely through digital cameras and computers, the result of which seems to be equating photography with hardware and software instead of with images and ideas.

So what do I do? I teach them photography. Photography the way I love it and learned it, but with digital cameras and computers instead of film and darkrooms. Photography that is primarily about pictures, not pixels. For every lecture about bit depth and color management there is an assignment to make photographs that illustrate how the students think and feel. For every Photoshop video tutorial by Scott Kelby and Jeff Schewe, there is a slide show about Duane Michals and Robert Frank. Old school, maybe, but I try to remember that even old schools eventually wind up with shiny new wings, and the good teachers are the ones who do their best to stay relevant.

Drinking the KoolAid

I showed Jenny my Leica the other day. It’s a modern M6, but other than some cosmetic changes and refinements, it’s essentially the same camera that many photographers have relied on for well over 50 years. She looked at it, held it in her hands, and acknowledged its substantial heft, obvious quality and sheer coolness. She raised it to her right eye, worked the aperture, the focus tab, and the film advance lever and dry-fired a shot. The shutter went “tick”. We both smiled. She looked up at me and said “you can’t sell it”.

The Leica camera came into being in Germany in the years prior to World War One as a pocketable alternative to the bulk of plate cameras and tripods in common use by serious photographers at the time. Alessandro Pasi, writing in “Leica: Witness To A Century” noted that the birth of the first still camera to use 35mm motion picture film brought with it “a new way of telling the story of the world with images. Without it, the twentieth would have been a truly shortsighted century.” I bought my M6 in 1997, just prior to a trip to Holland to photograph my then sister-in-law’s wedding. Owning a Leica rangefinder had been a dream of mine since my teenage book-learning days spent staring in awe at what Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank had been able to do with Leicas of their own. Perhaps foolishly, I associated the quality of these great artists’ work with the camera that they used. It wasn’t until I started learning to use my own M6 that I realized that there was something about it that actually did change, if not improve, the quality of my photographs. This small, simple, yet extremely robust camera nearly begs to be used close-in with a wide angle lens and both eyes wide open. By doing so, photographers learn how to be unobtrusive participants in the scenes we capture, and that way of thinking about picture-making made me a better photographer almost overnight. Prior to my being born again as a digital photographer, I carried that camera for years through the streets of Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris and many other strange and familiar places and never felt more in touch with the artists who had first inspired me.

Regardless of all that, however, I have been considering selling my beloved but under-used little film camera to help finance some new lenses for my digital Nikon. Leicas are almost prohibitively expensive but manage to hold their value pretty well, even in the digital age. I’m not a wealthy man, and the only way I managed to buy the M6 in the first place was by trading a 3-lens 4x5 view camera outfit for it (and even then, I had to throw in a check for $700). The nature of what I do these days calls for me to be all digital all the time, and the nature of my bank account calls for me to either dig for loose change between the sofa cushions when new equipment becomes necessary, or sell stuff that I’m not using. The Leica unfortunately sits at the front of that pile right now. Selling it would almost certainly pay for the lenses I need for my D200, but it would also be selling out, completely and absolutely. The romance of photography, for me at least, resides in that perfect device and the adventure it invites. The day I sell my Leica to buy ANYTHING relating to digital photography is the day I finally drink the KoolAid all the way down and lick the disgusting dregs from the bottom of the Dixie Cup.

Or so I thought. The circles close, at least mine usually do. The other night, a colleague at CDIA showed me his DIGITAL Leica, an M8. It looks and feels exactly like my M6, and works more like a simple film camera than any digital camera should be expected to. It’s not perfect, but considering the relentless march of technological overkill that has already made it an oddity a year after it hit the market, it’s perfect enough. As crazy as it sounds, seeing that camera makes me want sell everything I own, buy one of the things and go back to Amsterdam and Paris again. The day after I saw that guy’s M8, I fired up my MacBook Pro and opened a scan of one of the many Leica negatives I shot on that first trip to Holland in 1997. It was a nearly-forgotten shot I made at Amsterdam's Sex Museum that Jenny seemed to really like, so I worked it up in Photoshop a bit, then I made a gorgeous archival digital print for her apartment.

Friday Morning In Strobe Alley

“Ya wanna see Edgerton’s lab?”

I had to chuckle at the way the question was posed, under her breath casually as if she had flashed the inside of her raincoat and said “Ya wanna buy a Rolex cheap?” But coming from Cheryl Vossmer, one of my students at New England School of Photography and a sergeant with the MIT Police Department, I knew those few words were ripe with possibility. Asking a photographer if he would like to see the workspace of the guy who made all those iconic stop-action images of impossibly fast-moving objects was like asking a short-order cook if he’d like to see where they invented the ham and cheese omelet.

“What do you THINK?!!” I whispered back conspiratorially, presumably so that jealous students in the class wouldn’t organize and riot.

“Friday morning. 8:30. Talk to Heratch”.

She smiled, slipped out of the room and was gone. I could only assume that Heratch Ekmekjian, my friend and colleague at NESOP, was in on the scheme and would have been at home that very moment polishing his lenses in giddy anticipation. A quick phone call, a few e-mails and a couple of days later, we pulled up 10 minutes tardy in front of MIT Police headquarters bearing a dozen hand-cuts from Ohlin’s in Cushing Square. Cheryl was waiting outside with her boss, Chief John DiFava, looking at her watch.

“How often do you get to bring donuts to a bunch of cops?” Heratch apologized.

Groans followed, handshakes were exchanged, and the hand-cuts were left inside at the dispatcher’s desk. A 15-minute walk in the brilliant early October sunshine brought us to Strobe Alley, Doc Edgerton’s suite of classrooms and labs in a building just east of the MIT dome.

Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton didn’t invent the strobe light or the electronic flash, and he wasn’t the first photographer or scientist to explore the potential of using strobes to stop rapid motion on film. But his genius transformed the strobe from a laboratory curiosity into an important tool for science, industry and photography. In their biographical memoir of Edgerton published in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences, J. Kim Vandiver and Pagan Kennedy laid out his legacy in a paragraph:

“He made flashing light cheap and portable, and found endless applications for it, from the airport runway to the office copy machine. But despite his importance as an innovator, Edgerton is best known for the photographs he took: the drop of milk exploding into a crown, a bullet hovering beside an apple, an atomic blast caught the instant before it mushroomed, a smudge that might have been the flipper of the Loch Ness Monster. His strobe photographs illustrated scientific phenomena in a way that was instantly understandable to millions of people. Later in his career he developed sonar tools that revolutionized marine archeology, again using images to explore the unknown”

Joining MIT’s faculty in 1932, one of his earliest contributions to the science of photography was the introduction of argon gas into electronic flash tubes, a technical achievement that enabled brighter, faster flash output than had previously been available. Indirectly, this development would contribute far more to the esthetic of photography and to the popular visual perception of time and motion. Many of his experiments with high-energy, high-speed strobe lights took place in the room in which I was now standing, a room that looked more like a gadgeteer’s crowded basement workshop than a prominent point on the star map of the history of photography.

Vandiver and Kennedy described the place:

“The hallway echoed with the report of gunshots. Flashes jumped across the walls. Boxes spilled wires, capacitors, barnacled wood. By contrast, other wings of MIT seemed downright sterile. Strobe Alley, the hallway that cut a line between Edgerton’s labs, sucked visitors in and invited them to become part of the action. To make his lair even more inviting, Edgerton hung displays all along the hall: photographs, framed bits of equipment, buttons to push. [Former student and side-scan sonar expert Marty] Klein, who wandered into Strobe Alley as an undergraduate in 1961, loved the tantalizing smell of the place. It reminded him of the junk shops in lower Manhattan, the perfume of ‘connectors and coils and motors— sometimes motors that have burned out.’”

The pushbuttons, photographs and showcased exhibits of equipment are all still much as they were when Edgerton walked the hallway. On my left, I had immediately noticed a very old and possibly homemade device sitting on a workbench, looking like a prop from a 1950’s sci-fi flick. It also bore a passing resemblance to the Speedotron power packs that I once used to light countless bread-and-butter catalog photographs. But this thing was bigger, blacker and scarier looking with its knobs, dials, toggles and ammeter, and was plastered with various labels warning of the dangers of working alone with high voltage. I understood what that was all about. Years ago I was shooting in a studio with another photographer, who decided to straddle a 2400 watt-second Norman pack and rearrange its cables in order to change the power ratio of the flash heads he was using. Brazenly ignoring the standard practice of turning the pack off and dumping the energy stored in its capacitor before disconnecting a flash cable, he yanked on one of the thick black leads and the pack promptly responded by arcing and exploding in a flash of yellow light and white smoke between his legs. When the roiling mushroom cloud dissipated against the high ceiling a few seconds later, there he stood, scared stiff, still holding the cable in his hand and covered from head to toe with soot and pulverized electrical insulation. The misshapen power pack lay on its side a few feet away from where it had been. Fortunately, with injuries to nothing but his ego, I am pretty sure that to this day he follows directions carefully when working with electricity.

My thoughts were brought back to the here and now by a bearded, casually-dressed fellow welcoming us from the opposite corner of the room. Dr. Jim Bales is the assistant director of what is now known as the Edgerton Center, and the warmth of his greeting made it obvious to us that Cheryl and Chief DiFava were old friends. Heratch had told me earlier that we were not just going to be able to see the lab, but that there was a good chance we would actually see a demonstration of how Edgerton made his stop-action photographs of bullets piercing various objects. We were to bring along our cameras, tripods, and some “targets”.

“Ya know...” he started with the same two words that he has opened countless conversations with in the past, “...a Boston Cream donut might make a pretty good target.” It was an observation that I had enthusiastically agreed with at the time and which I now presented to Dr. Bales when he asked us what was in the small white box tied with string that I was carrying.

“You’d be surprised”, he said. “The bullet goes in and out and the donut absorbs all the energy and just sort of folds around it before any of the cream squirts out. We’ve never really gotten a very good shot of a bullet going through a cream donut.”

“Right, right, of course, that’s pretty fascinating.” I tried to make it sound as if I had never really believed the donut would work. In that moment the door to the enormous warehouse of topics that I don’t know the first thing about but venture a comment on anyway opened just a crack. Heratch shot a look at me; he knew that I had been planning to title this essay “Time To Shoot The Donuts”.

Jim showed us around the lab a bit and introduced us to the other scientist in the room, Dr. Bob Root. Bob told us that his company, Prism Science Works, designed and built the small strobe unit we would be working with. Its flash duration was astonishingly short, somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of a microsecond, literally faster than a speeding bullet. Jim and Bob explained how a small microphone, positioned a few inches from the target, captures the sound of the shock wave (a miniature sonic boom) that precedes a supersonic projectile and fires the strobe as the bullet enters, is inside of, or exits the target, depending on where the mic is actually placed. With the room completely darkened, a digital or film camera with its shutter held open captures the infinitesimally brief burst of light and the scene that it illuminates; in one-third of a microsecond, a bullet and any ejected debris from the target appear to be stopped in mid-flight.

“And the thing that you shouldn’t forget” Bob continued, “is that your eyes are also a camera. Once you get used to what is going on, you will actually see the bullet stopped in midair the same way that your camera will record it.” The principle is the same as what happens when a strobe light is turned on in a darkened nightclub; fluid movement on the dance floor turns into what looks like a really bad Quicktime movie.

Jim told us that he would start by firing at the thin edge of a playing card, attempting to capture an image of a bullet tearing the card in half. He asked for a volunteer to help him sight down the bore of the rifle. Skip Hoyt, another photographer friend of Cheryl’s and an acquaintance of Jim’s from MIT’s Lincoln Labs, stepped forward to help. For the first time, I noticed the .22 caliber target rifle strapped along the length of a gray wooden sawhorse positioned next to a workbench on the far wall of the lab. I don’t know why, but I had thought the setup would be fancier and maybe just a bit safer. Jim stuck a Joker in the folds of an old felt blackboard eraser resting on a stand in the center of the room, and with Skip’s help, positioned it perfectly relative to the immobilized rifle. On the other end of the rifle range, a gaffer’s tape-covered metal cylinder about the diameter of a coffee can and twice as long appeared to be lined up to catch the bullet. From rifle muzzle to coffee can, our shooting gallery measured less than 8 feet in length. Anyone scoring a “Maggie's Drawers” in here would have some explaining to do to whoever happened to be in the room next door. Doc Edgerton’s safety issues had been even more serious; for some of his pictures he had used a .30 caliber military rifle firing heavy bullets at nearly 3 times the speed of sound.

“The first thing you should be asking, Skip, since you’re standing in the line of fire, is ‘where’s the bolt?’” Jim stood up from sighting-in the rifle. The bolt is part of the rifle’s loading mechanism and contains the firing pin. Shaking his pants pocket he said “Don’t worry, the bolt’s right here.”

At that point we arranged our digital SLR's in a tripod-mounted scrum a couple of feet away from the playing card. The squarish white strobe, about the size of a lunch box, was perched on a light stand to the left of the cameras. A small black box containing the microphone was suspended slightly to the left of and below the playing card, poised to trip the strobe as the bullet tore the card in half. The sawhorse holding the rifle was to the right of the whole arrangement, about 3 feet away from where my camera was and where my right ear would soon be. As we all fumbled with the settings on our cameras, Jim tripped the strobe by clapping his hands once near the microphone so we could determine the proper f-stop to set on our lenses.

“I always wanted a clapper strobe”, Heratch quipped, beating everyone else in the room to the obvious.

Finally, it was show time. Jim distributed headphones and protective eyeglasses to everyone as we all crouched down in a little huddle behind our cameras, right index fingers poised on shutter releases. Being closest to the rifle, I felt the nerve endings tingling on the right side of my face as Jim got into position. After checking to make sure everyone was ready and where they were supposed to be, he started his very deliberate countdown.

“OK. Bolt’s in the pocket. Eyes and ears on? Loading. Loaded. Lights out.”

The lab was plunged into total darkness. Remembering what Bob had said about trying to see the bullet with my eyes, I stared at where I thought the card was.

“Shutters open.”

The sound of 5 camera shutters snapping open came faintly through the protective headphones.

“3...2...1...BANG!”

For the briefest instant imaginable, I saw the perfectly bisected white card brilliantly illuminated less than 4 feet in front of my face. Suspended in space on its left side was a jagged field of bits of torn paper, and, perfectly frozen against the blackness just beyond, the unmistakable oblong shape of a dull gray bullet. I saw it with my eyes, and a few seconds later I saw it again on the LCD screen on my Nikon D200. That instant digital preview appearing on the back of our cameras was the one fundamental thing that differed from Doc Edgerton’s experiments 70 years earlier. How hard it must have been for him to have to wait while his film was processed and printed! How lucky we were! We all knew it, and the room erupted in spontaneous, amazed laughter.

“Shutters closed. Lights on. How’d we do?” Surely Jim had seen this reaction a thousand times in his years at Strobe Alley, but he smiled nonetheless as he checked the thumbnails on each of our cameras. We repeated the process 7 or 8 more times, firing at more playing cards and each other’s business cards. At one point Heratch, realizing he didn’t have a business card with him, started looking through his wallet for a photo of his family. Jim stopped him.

“Sorry. We don’t do pictures of people or pets. No ex-wives. It sends the wrong message.”

The last target we used was a particularly plump green grape perched on top of a plastic film canister. Jim’s first shot was a little low, resulting in an interesting but less-than-spectacular image. He adjusted the height of the next grape by placing it on a wad of bright blue modeling clay, and the ensuing explosive impact left us all wiping grape juice off our faces and lenses while marveling at the images we had made. Packing up my camera as we were getting ready to leave, I looked up above the general area where the targets had been placed and saw bits of dried Jell-O, egg, peanut butter and who knows what else splattered like a gravity-defying Pollack on the ceiling.

While researching Edgerton and his work for this essay, I was surprised to learn that he had once lived down the street and around the corner from my apartment. I was reminded of the time I sat just a table away from Philip Morrison, a principal physicist on the Manhattan Project and a colleague of Edgerton’s at MIT, dining with friends on chicken kabobs at a local Greek joint. My own dinner companions that evening were mildly interested when I tried to explain who the lively old guy in the wheelchair was, but, frankly, seemed more impressed with the nice tomato sauce on their fluffy white rice. The devastating effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 haunted Morrison, who went on to become a leading proponent of nuclear nonproliferation. Edgerton, meanwhile, directing his expertise and scientific curiosity toward the same subject, produced unforgettable high-speed photographs recording the awesome, apocalyptic beauty of H-bomb tests in the 1950’s and 60’s with a camera of his own design. Until Morrison became a minor TV celebrity with his popular PBS series The Ring Of Truth, neither of these guys were easily recognizable as they lived their extraordinary lives in our midst. Yet the work that they did became an indisputable part of the iconography of the twentieth century.

Doc Edgerton died on January 4, 1990 after suffering a heart attack at the MIT Faculty Club. “Papa Flash”, as his friend and collaborator Jacques Cousteau had nicknamed him, was 86 years old. “I performed CPR on him”, Cheryl mentioned quietly as we left Strobe Alley. I just looked at her, not quite knowing what to say. But afterwards I found something that he liked to say, and I can’t get it, or the rare privilege of having spent a couple of hours seeing firsthand what few before him had even imagined, out of my mind.

“If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time.”

I haven’t been sleeping quite as much ever since.

The Anchorwoman, The Assassin, And The Day I Shot President Carter

I’ve learned a thing or two about ambition in my life. It lives in each of us to varying degrees, and each of us do different things because of it. And then it does different things right back to us. Take me, for instance. Or better yet, take Jimmy Carter, Jessica Savitch, or a guy I used to know named Charley. Ambition led all of us to be at the intersection of 8th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia on the evening of September 23, 1976. Carter’s ambition carried him there to engage President Gerald R. Ford in the first debate of the ‘76 election campaign. Jessica Savitch, the golden girl of the local TV news scene, was there to cover the event live for KYW-TV, the city’s NBC affiliate, and to continue building the persona that appeared to be leading her to a network gig in New York. Me, well, I was there to cover the event for what I was certain would be my future career as a globetrotting photojournalist. And because I wanted to see a real, live president. And because I had the hots for Jessica Savitch, a fascination that had caused some minor jealously just the previous weekend as my girlfriend and I spent one of many lazy Sunday afternoons poking around the beautiful little artist’s colony of New Hope, PA. Charley was there to participate in the debate, too, but in a decidedly different role. I would have to wait another 4 years to meet him, but he'll enter my story here in just a few paragraphs.

As the sun set that evening, bright yellowish quartz lights clicked on here and there as television correspondents did their pre-debate standups. I had wedged myself into a spot next to where Jessica Savitch was now holding a microphone and brushing her hair away from her face, brilliantly lit. Serious looking men with their suit jackets unbuttoned had appeared from nowhere and stationed themselves along the police line every eight feet or so, speaking quietly into their closed palms and staring across the barricades into the crowds. Then, from across the intersection, the sound of cheering grew louder as a tight quartz-lit group of men worked its way through the crowd. As his Secret Service cordon made the turn onto Walnut, camera strobes popped and Jimmy Carter’s hand shot up over the crowd. He had walked the three blocks from his hotel! I saw his trademark toothy grin directed at Jessica and her camera, directed at ME, as he waved again and then disappeared through the front door of the theater. It was almost anticlimactic a few minutes later when President Ford’s motorcade sped through the intersection and I caught a glimpse of him silhouetted in the back seat of his bulletproof limousine, waving casually from the wrist. In between snapping photos of the boisterous scene all around me, I glanced over to see Jessica shouting rapidly into her microphone while trying to look over her shoulder at Carter and Ford and back into the camera at the same time.

Ambition. Savitch had once told a friend "I'm going to be a network anchor, and I'm going to do it fast”. Sure enough, within a year or so of the debate she was a correspondant and anchor on NBC’s Sunday evening national newscast, an accomplishment that invited skepticism among some journalistic colleagues. David Brinkley publicly referred to her as “the dumbest woman I have ever met”. Another coworker described her as having had "a nut streak in her, but she also had some kind of energy force behind her eyes. It was like she put on her little custom suit, shot a beam across the room, and zapped you." Meanwhile, 6 weeks after the debate Carter won the election and then proceeded to lose the electorate over an energy crisis, runaway inflation and a Mideast hostage standoff. And within a few hours of standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with one of them and across the street from the other, I was back at my dead-end job working the midnight shift as a subway train driver. I made my eight round trips that night in the darkened operator’s cab rocking gently on welded rail, lulled into waking dreams of infinite possibility.

And time moved on; things progressed as things always do. By 1980 I had gone from being bored and artistically unappreciated as a subway train driver to being bored and artistically unappreciated as a camera store manager. My own ambition had led me from a dead-end to a false start. Life, for the most part, was flying past me, and all I could do was watch it go by and occasionally take a picture of it as it went.

Until, that is, Charley walked into my store one afternoon and asked if I would like to see President Carter. He was a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service and one of my favorite customers. He had been on duty the night of the debate four years earlier, stationed inside the Walnut Street Theater as I watched from across the street. An avid amateur photographer, he seemed to really appreciate the few hours I had spent with him one night in the store’s demonstration darkroom showing him how to make black and white prints. Afterward, he bought me dinner, and he told me he had served three tours of duty in Vietnam in a Special Ops unit tasked with assassinating Viet Cong officers and politicians. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but he seemed to genuinely like me and was quite grateful for the help I had given him. So when he took my social security number back to his office and returned a half-hour later with a small blue lapel pin with the letter “A” on it, it felt like a thank you. “Be at the Navy Yard on Wednesday at 12:30”, he said. “Make sure you’re wearing this. I’ll meet you there.”

The little blue pin worked like magic, and two days later I found myself parked in the VIP lot adjacent to the base’s administration building, staring at a pair of immaculate green and white Sikorsky Sea King helicopters. Smartly uniformed Marines stood at parade rest at each of the helicopters’ boarding stairways, and men in suits patrolled the perimeter of the lawn. At one end of the field I saw a low platform and a number of press photographers standing around it, about 50 yards away from the helicopters. I grabbed my camera bag and walked over there, hoping that that was where I was supposed to meet Charley.

I was standing there feeling very conspicuous when several unmarked black sedans pulled up nearby, red and blue lights flashing behind their grilles. Charley hopped out of the lead car looking every bit the Secret Service agent in a three piece suit and dark sunglasses and wearing a little ear bud.

“What are you doing over here?” he said.

Oh shit, I thought to myself. I’m too close. “Am I too close?” I answered as apologetically as I could.

“No, no. C’mon.” He led me across the lawn toward the closest helicopter, and as we walked, he told me that he was working the advance team for Carter’s motorcade, driving the same route about 10 minutes ahead of the President. “Checking for open windows in high buildings, loose manhole covers, lone nuts, that sort of thing.”

And just like that we were standing at the short stairway leading up into the helicopter. The Presidential seal was subtly displayed on the fuselage under the cockpit window, and through the glass I could see the pilot flipping switches. The words “Welcome Aboard Marine One” were embroidered into carpeting on the stair risers. An unblinking Marine guard stared straight ahead; ignoring him, Charley walked me around behind the strut-mounted landing gear to a narrow spot between the fuselage and the tire. The stainless steel railing of the stairway was now right in front of me, close enough for me to touch. One of the enormous rotor blades hung directly over my head.

“You should be able to get some good shots from here. Stay put and don’t move until I come and get you.”

He walked away, leaving me standing there leaning against the polished aircraft that would soon be carrying the most powerful man on the planet. The evidence of that power was all around me, and I especially made note of the sharpshooter teams stationed on the roof of the administration building. The perimeter of the leadership of the Free World was secure and locked down, and I was about to be standing at its epicenter. The sound of sirens approaching brought a heightened state of activity to everyone around the helicopters.

And, perhaps like you right about now, I had to pee.

Only kidding. A column of police and Secret Service vehicles quickly rolled past the first helicopter followed by the familiar long black limousine with flags on the fenders. The limo stopped smoothly at the curb, the doors flew open, and President Carter emerged and stepped up on the door sill so that he could wave over the top of the car. As he walked toward the helicopter and shook hands with a line of dignitaries that had formed to send him off, I started shooting pictures. At one point the strut of the landing gear got in my way, and I took a step back and to my left to shoot around it. I was immediately shoved back into place by a heavy hand on my shoulder belonging to someone who I hadn’t even realized was there, and I muttered “sorry” as I waited for my heart to start beating again. I had a momentary glimpse of a dark suit in my peripheral vision. When Charley said “stay put and don’t move”, I guess he meant “stay put and don’t move”.

Carter bounded up the steps less than three feet in front of me. He paused at the top for a second or two, turned around, and waved. The motor drive on my Nikon was going “clack-clack-clack”. I knew I had a great shot. As he turned back to duck through the door, he sort of looked down in my direction. He was still smiling, not at me but from the wave. There was a really heavy look in his eyes, which made me wonder what was on his mind at that particular moment.

As soon as he disappeared into the cabin, the Marine guard followed him up the stairs and inside. All around me now, Secret Service agents were walking around with their arms in the air like NFL referees yelling “That’s it! Everybody back!” I walked over to where Charley was standing near the limosine and watched as the rotors on both helicopters started to turn. The roar was deafening as their engines reached liftoff power; Marine One swayed a bit on its landing gear and then rose straight up in the air. I could see Carter’s white shirt in one of the windows as his helicopter banked and moved off to the south, the second one following in close formation.

I thanked Charley and said goodbye, and, turning onto South Broad Street, I wondered about the kind of ambition that my friend must have had. He had killed for his country and he would die for his President, both oddly in the same cold-blooded, apolitical manner and neither in the abstract. What kind of person would knowingly sign up for that? I could find no answers that day, nor have I come up with any in the years since.

Three months later John Lennon was shot dead on the street in front of his wife. His murder appeared to be an ominous bridge between the failed, lame duck presidency of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”. On TV, Jessica Savitch reported that the killer, Mark David Chapman, had dropped down into a “combat stance” when he fired. Charley came into my store the next day, and all he kept talking about was how “the guy shot him from a ‘combat stance’”. He was smiling when he said it.

My story should probably end there, but it doesn’t. It comes with a couple of postscripts.

First off, Charley was right. I did get some very good shots that day, which indirectly led me to be hired a number of years later to photograph former President Carter when he came to Concord, MA to speak to a Unitarian organization. Evidentally, he liked my pictures enough to request a set for the Carter Presidential Library. I couldn’t print them fast enough.

And then there’s this.

I don’t remember who the network anchor was who announced the death of Jessica Savitch in 1983, but the sad news touched me in a way that none of the people I knew at the time would ever be able to understand. Rumors of a troubled personal life had been leaking out for years and were no longer confined to whispers among colleagues; divorces, miscarriages, depression, cocaine-fueled newsroom tirades, and beatings by an abusive boyfriend had caused NBC to pull her from everything except one-minute news updates delivered on the hour in prime-time. Her career had imploded publicly on live TV three weeks earlier when she slouched and slurred her way through 43 seconds worth of news copy read off a Teleprompter through half closed eyes. That near-catatonic performance on October 3 would be her final appearance before a television camera.

She died on a stormy night behind a restaurant in New Hope, PA the same town where I had spent the Sunday afternoon prior to the debate making my girlfriend jealous by talking about her. Her dinner companion, trying to leave the parking lot, mistakenly turned onto the old towpath that led to the Delaware Canal instead. The car went over the side and tumbled fifteen feet, landing on its roof in a few feet of water. The muddy canal bank sealed the doors shut, and Jessica, her friend, and her dog quickly drowned. Neither drugs nor alcohol were a factor in the accident, just a torrential downpour, an unmarked dirt road, and absolutely miserable, rotten luck.

The first sentence of her obituary in Time Magazine the following week put a now-familiar word front and center in laying out the short story of her rapid rise and tragic fall: “Near its end, her life seemed to carry a storybook warning: ambition may lead to power and fame, but the path beckons to a precipice.”

Ambition. Jessica Savitch had it in spades and it left her humiliated and dead in a muddy ditch. I have absolutely no idea where or how Charley ever wound up, but somehow the thought of a simple retirement on a government pension doesn’t fit the picture I have of him. Me, well, I never made it as a globetrotting photojournalist. Never even tried, really. But my days as a subway train driver are far, far behind me. These days I teach digital photography to people whose ambition reminds me of my own so many years ago. And at 82 years old, Jimmy Carter, bless his soul, was on CNN the other night talking about his hope for a hopeless world.

A Safe Harbor

I wrote this essay in July 2001, during a period of great turmoil and introspection in my personal life. It predated our greater national turmoil and introspection by about 2 months, but recounts an experience that has unfortunately become far too common for photographers in the years since.

---

A month or so before the world changed I decided to spend a perfect summer evening down the Jersey Shore. It was right after my Grandmother's 90th birthday party, and I had taken the train down from Boston to spend a long weekend with her and the rest of my family. But after the party I borrowed my mother's car and took off by myself for a few hours. The eerie drive through the Pine Barrens took about an hour, and before I knew it I had crossed the Causeway onto the island where I had spent so many happy days as a kid. I smiled as I sat at a traffic light and stared at what had once been my grandfather's vacation bungalow on East 24th Street, just yards away from the crashing surf. It had been pink for decades, but whoever owned it now had painted it white with black trim.

The light changed and I drove on for another ten or fifteen minutes. On my right I saw the lights of a new amusement park and shopping area that had been rebuilt after the site I had known as a kid was destroyed by fire. This new complex, while bigger and more ambitious, tried to retain the look and feel of the original, the centerpiece of which had been an authentic old schooner. I parked the car, grabbed my camera and set out in search of photographs and memories.

It didn't take long before I noticed that things had changed a bit in the years I'd been away. The new "schooner" (which turned out to be nothing more than a cinderblock building with a boat-shape built around it and a couple of poles stuck on top as masts) housed a lingerie shop instead of the old five-and-ten that sold slingshots, pea shooters, flip flops and skim boards. As I walked past one of the other shops, a place filled with overpriced t-shirts, hats and beach blankets, a sweatshirt tacked up on the wall caught my eye. It was nearly identical to one that my Grandfather bought for me one summer in the late 60's. It even looked old and beat up; the printing on it was faded and cracked, but closer inspection revealed that it had been designed that way. My ratty old sweatshirt had had to endure a couple of seasons' worth of real adventure to acquire the patina that $40 bought one of today's kids instantly. I wanted to believe that my sweatshirt had somehow been more admirable, but if I could have spared the 40 bucks, I probably would have gotten one for myself.

The amusement park at the far end of the complex looked, literally, perfect. The place was packed with people, and the roar of the roller coaster under its high harmony of screams and shrieks drew me in. Amusement parks and circuses are almost universally favorite environments for photographers, and some of my own best photographs were made in places like this in Australia, Europe and around the US. Even though this new place lacked the seediness and authenticity that comes with age and neglect (like that sweatshirt, come to think of it), I was looking forward to finding out if there was a shot or two for me here.

Pictures were everywhere— the lights, the rides, the shelves of kewpie-doll prizes, the odd row of people leaning on their elbows, asses-out, steadying their aim at the shooting gallery. I worked quickly but not hurriedly, patiently waiting for a telling moment, or moving around to find an interesting angle. It was like sketching with a camera, a simple process that filled me with excitement and satisfaction. This was what was missing in my job, what I crave in my life, and what I kept forgetting was available to me anytime and anywhere I was able to just empty my mind and let it all in. And even though I knew better, it really wasn't hard to pretend that this was the same place I had frequented as a child.

I saw the cop as I was walking away from the merry-go-round after unsuccessfully trying to find a way to photograph the reflections in its convex mirrors as they spun around. He was a young guy, an early Ed Harris type with a blond buzz cut and short uniform pants. He was with a couple of other older cops, and had been laughing with them about something just before our eyes met and locked. I thought to myself "Oh, great" as he fell in behind me, then suddenly stepped out to block my way as I turned to the right.

"Excuse me, sir. Are you with the newspaper?" His manner was friendly but firm.

"No."

"...because some people have noticed you here taking pictures, so we have to check it out." His eyes were fixed on mine.

"I'm just a photographer down from Boston— this is what I do." I tried to sound polite but professionally perturbed, as I was expecting a lecture about private-property rights and location fees.

"...because we have a lot of children here, and when we see a man walking around by himself taking pictures, well, we have to check it out."

My shoulders slumped a little.

They all thought I was a pervert.

"You have nothing to worry about," I said quietly.

"Yeah, when I saw the camera you're using I figured you were probably OK. But you should have checked in with us first."

I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I said "Oh". A moment before, this confrontation would have been the farthest thing from my mind, so I wasn't prepared to defend myself. I guess I could have asked him if the local police were in the habit of profiling summer people, and if not when had it become standard procedure to question someone for taking pictures at a tourist trap. I could have tried to charm him, congratulating him for recognizing that my Leica was not just some old-time camera. I could have risked real trouble by raising the constitutional issue— surely, in America, even the worst unconvicted Internet-lurking pedophile taking pictures in a public place hasn't done anything wrong— yet. Or I could have said what I really felt, that I was simply enjoying what I was doing so much that it never occurred to me that people might find my presence alarming. I could have said any of that, but I turned away from him instead. This cop and these people didn't care about me or my nostalgia, about five-and-tens that sold peashooters or the smiling Grandfather who paid for them, or about a time and an attitude toward childhood that suddenly seemed as distant and irrelevant as the old schooner that used to rest in its safe harbor right over there.

I tried to regain my interest in photographing the place, but couldn't help imagining hundreds of pairs of suspicious eyes (and probably a few security cameras as well) burning holes in my back and venting my earlier enthusiasm. I went through the motions of scanning for pictures one more time, but all I saw around me now were scores of perfect parents and perfect children wearing perfect artificially distressed and adventureless sweatshirts. They were all safe once again in their sanitized new amusement park, safe from the man walking around by himself taking pictures.

So I left the place, walking not too slowly out to the street, past rows of oversized Suburban Ubiquity Vehicles with their side impact airbags and satellite navigation systems and rear-facing child safety seats, past another gaggle of laughing cops, and found my mother's old car parked at the curb. I got in, turned the key, and drove away.

Of worn-out jeans and crappy cameras

Those of us of a certain age remember what it used to be like to buy and own a pair of blue jeans. They came in mostly one color (“blue”), one style (“jeans”), and one somewhat undesirable cut other than “regular” (“husky”). Worn right off of the rack, they appeared to be made of some sort of ballistic cotton that could stop a small-caliber rifle round, and were so stiff that we couldn’t bend our knees in them for the first few weeks. We didn’t fold them and put them away at night, we stood them up in the corner. We bought them six inches too long because, of course, they would shrink when first washed and because they would last so long that we would “grow into them”. And we loved our jeans. We looked forward to seeing what they looked like and how they fit each time they came out of the dryer, and we mourned their loss when, years later, time and Tide inevitably reduced them to a series of holes held together by mere threads. Jeans were a journey, not a destination; a promise, not a product. In the way they shrank, faded, and eventually ripped and disintegrated, they reflected the accumulation of our life’s adventures, our authentic experience.

Nowadays, of course, we often don’t just buy jeans, we buy “fashion jeans”. We buy them distressed, weathered, acid-washed, stone washed, sandblasted, belt-sanded and otherwise intentionally worn the hell out. We buy them already ripped and torn (perfectly of course) in the most stylish yet functional of locations. Like so much else in our post-modern smorgasbord of infinite choice and empty meaning, with our jeans we have traded the journey for the destination, the promise for the product. We want our jeans, and by extension ourselves, to look like they’ve been somewhere without the inconvenience of actually having to go there. We want them to look that way NOW and at whatever cost. With our fashion jeans, we are buying our own back story.

I call this phenomenon “Simulated Character”, and I was recently reminded of my fascination with it when I received a message and an attached photo from my friend and former student Swami. He was enrolled in the Street Photography workshop at NESOP, and was intrigued by his instructor’s Holga camera.

A Holga, for those of you who don’t already know, is a $20 toy camera made in China that accepts medium format (120 size) film. The body of the camera is made from flimsy black plastic that leaks light like a screen door, which is one part of its appeal to photographers. The other attraction is the camera’s plastic lens, which creates images that are somewhat sharp in the center, softer at the edges, and heavily vignetted. Each camera/lens combination has its own unique characteristics, and the result of all of this unpredictable optical and mechanical imperfection are photographs that can have a somewhat dreamy, distressed quality. Character, in other words, at least in the minds of some, but character that is imparted by the nature of the tool. Authentic character, if you will.

Swami loved the look of the Holga images, but being a digital photographer, he was not crazy about the idea of buying a film camera. One of the great advantages of digital technology is how completely it has replaced the need for chemical photo processing, darkrooms, color labs, everything. But the best way to appreciate the special quality of Holga images is to process and print the film yourself, and Swami really wanted nothing to do with any of that.

So he went a’googling, and, sure enough, quickly came up with a set of Photoshop actions that apply a “Holga effect” to any digital image. He sent me the first image at the top of this post, and asked me if I thought it was truly “Holga-like”. Attaching one of my own “real” Holga pictures in response (the bottom one), I sent him this:

“Yep, it sort of looks like a Holga shot, soft and vignetted at the edges... I guess one question I would ask myself is, ‘do I want to make my digital images LOOK like they were shot with a Holga, or do I want the experience of actually SHOOTING with a Holga?’ For me, it would be the latter.”

... to which he responded

“I'm actually happy with my Holga-like pics processed through Photoshop.”

...to which I responded...

Well, I didn’t respond. I didn’t quite know what to say, and I’m still not sure I do. I’m left with the unsettling realization that either Swami is missing the whole point about using a toy camera in the first place, or I’m missing the bigger point that “it’s the picture, stupid”. I’m beginning to think it’s a little of both.

But since I’m the seasoned professional photographer and teacher, and since it’s my blog, let’s say I’m right, and Swami doesn’t get it. In my workshops, I try to make the point that shooting film is about guessing, and shooting digital is about knowing (at least it is after one learns how to do it properly). A Holga is the ultimate “point and pray” device. It delivers no guarantees but lots of surprises, exactly the opposite of what should be coming out of your digital camera. In other words, let’s say that the whole reason to shoot with that silly little kiddy camera is its “ANTI-DIGITALness”. When we get a cool picture out of a Holga, it’s FUN, it feels like a gift from the photo gods! If we accept all that, then we also have to accept the fact that a Holga image looks the way it does because it just can’t look any other way. Now, to my pea brain at least, that is a whole lot different than taking an extremely high quality digital image (which, incidentally, also looks the way it does because of the tool that made it) and running a software action on it that tries to make it look like something it isn’t. Both of the images you see here have character, maybe even similar character, but from a process standpoint (and process is really what this all comes down to) one is what it is and the other is what it isn’t. Or it is what it wants to be, not what it has to be. One is authentic, one is simulated, but both are photographs and both are interesting.

So, then, here's the big question: should we really care about HOW a picture was made, or is it better to care THAT a picture was made?

Think about that, will you? And do get back to me with your answer. I need to figure this out, and fast.

I should go now. My new jeans are in the dryer.

The one that got away

Here’s a story about three pictures, the two above that I did take, and the one I’ll tell you about in a second that I didn’t but that I’ll try to show you anyway.

I’ve always thought that, at its core, photography as practiced by me and by those whose work I admire most is simply about being able to show people things I’ve seen, and if I'm really successful, maybe a bit about how I felt about them, too. It may mean something entirely different to you, and that is why photography is so damn cool. It’s a big tent, and there’s room for all of us to do whatever we want to with it.

The workflow goes like this. You see something that for whatever reason looks interesting, and may even strike a chord in you somehow. You grab a camera, fiddle with it, try a few angles, snap a few shots, and if you’ve truly seen something interesting and you’ve done everything right, or right enough, you make a print or attach it to an e-mail or upload it to a website and proclaim to the world “Look at what I saw!” Simple, right?

But what about the pictures you see, sometimes with painful clarity, but that for whatever reason you don’t capture with a camera? What about the ones that get away? Is the act of seeing pictures with photographic precision but with only your memory and your words to fix them in time and space sufficient? For that matter, are photographs really any good at all at conveying our unique take on what we see and how we feel about it?

I hope you’ll agree with me and all the other photographers, writers and storytellers in the world that, if you try real hard, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding YES.

There have been many, many incredible pictures over the years that I recorded with my eyes but for one reason or another was unable to capture with a camera. Those failures don’t usually bother me all that much, but they do make it harder for me to share what I saw with others. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why writing has become such a big part of my creative life, I don’t know. In any event, though, the pictures that get away are often the big ones, the money shots, the ones that tie the loose ends together and make you either slap your head in frustration for missing them or just stare slack-jawed in amazed gratitude for witnessing them at all.

If you’re a friend of mine, or if you’ve taken one of my classes at NESOP (that actually makes you both), you’ve heard me tell the story behind the pictures at the top of this post and many others like them at least once before, and I trust that hearing it one more time won’t kill you. If you’re stumbling across me here for the first time, listen up. It’s a good one.

In the first one, the guy in the right foreground is Noel Paul Stookey. You may know him better as the “Paul” in Peter, Paul and Mary. He and his band mates were famous for a song called “Puff The Magic Dragon” which sounded like a kid’s fairy tale but probably was really about the drug culture of the 1960’s. The guy performing on stage in the background is my friend Al Stewart, the Scottish singer-songwriter. He’s famous for a song called “Year Of The Cat”, which sounds like it’s about the movie “Casablanca”, but also has something to do with Vietnamese astrology somehow.

How I came to be standing there backstage in the middle of a muddy field on a rainy Saturday afternoon at an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn, Maine photographing one aging pop star watching another one perform is a very long story, the details of which I won’t bore you with here. Let’s just say that, once upon a time, way back when I was in high school in the 1970’s, a friend loaned me one of Al’s records to listen to. I loved the music, a brilliant folk-rock concept album about some of the pivotal historical events of the 20th century. But it was the black and white photograph on the cover that really left a mark on me; it actually made me want to be a photographer. Years later, after I had managed to do just that, I met him, and eventually shot one of his CD covers, and most recently art-directed and designed another. We became friendly, and nowadays I even get to drive him around to shows every year or so when he’s in Boston. On one of those roadtrips a picture presented itself to me, one that I was unable to capture, but one that will stay clearly in my mind forever.

In early 2002, I drove Al on a 5-day tour of the Northeast, starting in Northhampton, MA, heading south as far as Philadelphia, and finally winding up in New York City. Seeing that our route on the last day would take us through the Holland Tunnel, the approach to which through Jersey City has a long, close proximity to Ground Zero and the ruins of the World Trade Center just across the Hudson River, I mentioned it to Al. Like a wreck on a highway, I thought it might hold the same dark fascination for him as it did for me.

“I don’t want to see that,” he said.

I was a little surprised to hear him say that. After all, this was the same guy who had made a career out of writing songs mostly about the ebb and flow of history and civilization. If anybody would be interested in seeing evidence of a seemingly apocalyptic clash of ideologies, I thought, it would be him. But then I realized that I was probably being a little insensitive. Al would be flying back home to San Francisco the next day from Newark International Airport, precisely where United 93 had begun its flight to infamy only six months earlier. Perhaps if I flew back and forth between New York and the west coast as often as he did I wouldn’t be all that interested in rubbernecking, either.

So we made our way north on the New Jersey Turnpike Extension toward the tunnel in silence. The Statue of Liberty rose from the harbor on the right followed by Ellis Island, the setting for one of Al’s more obscure story-songs. Then, a shock in the middle distance; that horrible pile, still steaming in places, glittered in the cold, bright morning. The musician who for so long has woven songs about the threads that tie civilizations together dozed in the seat next to me, arms crossed and head down. I just stole glances out the side window across his silhouette at the remains of the event that will most likely shape history for the rest of our lives. The juxtaposition of the two was striking, to me at least. My camera was in the back seat, just out of reach. I thought about trying to grab it somehow and committing the scene to film, but doing so at 70mph probably wouldn't have been the smartest move at that particular moment with that particular passenger. And besides, the poignancy of the scene had already been composed and captured by my mind’s eye. The resulting photograph, had I managed to grab it, would have only meant something to me and a few other people who know the whole story. It was one of the ones that got away, sure. But to me, seeing what I saw in that moment was perfectly sufficient and absolutely priceless.

Now, about that second picture up there, the one that obviously didn’t get away...

Like I said, I drove Al up to the Flye Point Music Festival in Brooklyn, Maine last year. He griped about having to do the gig the whole time, mostly because by the time he factored in all of the costs to fly from LA to Boston, hotels, meals, agent’s commissions, child support, etc., he had calculated that he earned about $85 for a 90-minute gig that ate up 5 days of his life. But then he would always end his rant by saying, “So what are you going to do? I figured it’s a good reason to come to Boston to have dinner with you”. Al always finds a way to make me feel pretty important in the grand scheme of things.

After his set, we hung around for awhile in the backstage tent eating and chatting with some of the other artists warming up to go on stage. One of them was Paul Stookey, and as unlikely as it may seem, in 40-odd years of performing these two guys had never met each other. They seemed to admire each other’s work and career, and at one point I asked if I could shoot a picture of the two of them together.

And that’s when Peter, Paul and Mary (minus Peter and Mary) pinched Al Stewart on the hiney. And I was pointing a camera at them when he did.

Top that one if you can.

Arriving the wrong way

Not all that many years ago, my ex-wife and I made one of our many trips to Holland to spend Christmas with her mother, sister and brother-in-law Gerard and their new baby. The whole lot of us then jetted off to Nice for a weekend (not quite the European equivalent of a $69 round-trip special from Boston to Orlando, but close). Once there we decided to head up the coast to Monte Carlo for an afternoon. We arrived by bus in a rather nondescript section of what is probably the most storied seaside principality on the planet. Our little entourage (complete with baby carriage) wound slowly along the main drag toward the older part of the city, then unexpectedly came off a side street onto the Place du Casino. The spectacularly infamous Beaux-arts facade of Monte Carlo’s casino towered over us.

“Wow,” I said.

The girls, being girls, went shopping. Us men found a table at an outdoor cafe on the square and tried to look sophisticated. We ordered drinks, lit up some Dutch cigars, and took it all in— and there was a lot to take in, most of it having to do with ridiculous wealth.

“I grew up in South Jersey,” I said. “I never thought I’d see this, but I kind of feel like the bus is the wrong way to arrive in Monte Carlo.”

Gerard grunted, then gestured with his cigar as a red Ferrari 360 Modena roared into the square, navigated expertly around the ornate fountain in the middle, and growled to a halt at the foot of the steps leading up to the grand main entrance. A perfectly groomed middle-aged man climbed out of the driver’s side, handed the keys to a valet, and opened the passenger side door. A perfectly groomed young blond woman emerged, took his hand, and they walked up the steps into the casino.

“That’s the right way,” Gerard said.

I mention this here because, should you decide to visit the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston’s Waterfront District (which you should), don’t take the Silver Line to the World Trade Center stop. That's the wrong way. Sizing up this architectural masterpiece while approaching on foot through Anthony Athanas’ vast parking lot is a lot like trying to appreciate a cancan dancer from backstage. One quickly feels somewhat ripped off when one realizes that all of the good stuff is pointing in the opposite direction.

The building's big, pallid, blocky backside, as it addresses Northern Avenue, is simply butt-ugly. And it is apparently arrogantly so, since its location and scale dominates everything in its immediate vicinity (as of this writing, Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant and several acres of asphalt). I was thinking how a nice “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” mural might dress up the place a bit, or, better yet, draping that huge inflatable padlock and chain from the self-storage warehouse on the Southeast Expressway around the unnervingly massive HVAC plant on the museum’s roof. The building is nothing as advertised until it is viewed from the business end, which is how we would have seen it had my friends and I de-bussed at the Courthouse station (our bad). Once we traversed the parking lot, found an opening in the chain-link fence and made our way around to the museum’s proper face on Boston Harbor, the brilliance of the structure revealed itself to us in all of its impossibly-overhanging glass-encased beauty.

“Wow,” I said.

We went to the ICA to check out the terrific Philip-Lorca DiCorcia show. I know this is supposed to be a photography-related blog, but I will leave it to you to either visit the show while it’s in town (through September 7, 2007) or discover more on your own about an artist the ICA anoints as “among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years”. Under another set of circumstances, I might even have had something to say about that. But right now I can’t get the image of that 4-sided white box with 2 good sides, its back turned on what is quickly becoming the hippest, most vibrant corner of the city, out of my architecturally-untrained noggin. Am I missing something here, like maybe the master plan for the site? Probably. But this humble first time visitor had the very distinct impression of arriving at the ICA “the wrong way”, an impression that really doesn’t make sense for a high-profile building that is standing in the middle of a parking lot. It wasn’t exactly like arriving in Monte Carlo “the wrong way”, but it left me with a similar vague feeling of not being smart enough (or rich enough) to appreciate the place the way the really smart (or rich) folks do.

Speaking of Monte Carlo, by the way, just as that perfectly groomed couple was about to disappear into the casino, the gentleman turned around to watch as the valet climbed into his Ferrari, started it up, and proceeded to grind the gears and stall the thing over and over until its owner interceded and parked it himself. Gerard and I got a kick out of that.

Right way? Wrong way? Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose.

Don't get me started...

My pal and colleague at NESOP, Heratch Ekmekjian, took me out for breakfast at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown yesterday. We pulled into a spot on the street, he turned off the engine, and the automatic door locks engaged. I made an exaggerated attempt to get out of the car by pulling on the handle rapidly and repeatedly, and, seeing that this didn’t seem to bother him much, I upped the ante a bit.

“This is what’s wrong with everything. We’ve let technology complicate the simplest of processes. This is just like image-stabilized lenses and autofocus. I can‘t get out of your damn car.”

Relax. This is not another middle-aged neo-Luddite rant. I do have a point. Or at least a destination.

I love digital photography. I love the fact that the camera confirms the technical and aesthetic quality of what I’ve shot instantly. I love the fact that I can go from recognizing a picture opportunity to admiring a big, beautiful print in about as much time as it used to take me to drive a roll of film over to my color lab. I love the fact that for the first time since 1975, I do not have to own and maintain a darkroom. And I love that red racing stripe on my Nikon D200.

But something has always bugged me about autofocus technology in general, and image-stabilized lenses in particular. I mean, how hard is it to focus a lens?

“It’s pretty hard.” Heratch replied. We were seated in the diner at this point, looking at menus. The pancakes are so good they’ll reduce you to tears, so of course I went for the ham and cheese omelet. Heratch went sunny-side-up, as usual. Our coffee mugs steamed.

“It’s tough to manually focus a digital camera, because the focusing screen is clear, not like the ground glass screens we had on our film cameras. They’re usually also smaller and sometimes dimmer, too, so I’m glad to have autofocus, since I mostly shoot events in low light.” He waved to somebody he knows. Heratch knows everybody.

“I shot weddings with a Hasselblad and a manual flash for five years.” I said, pausing to let a momentary bout of nausea pass— it happens every time I remember those dark days. “You couldn’t focus that camera visually and still get spontaneous-looking candids. I hyper-focal focused everything from 7-10 feet away [this means I used the lens’ depth-of-field to establish a zone of sharp focus], made sure I stayed in that range, looked at people over the top of the camera, and, Voila! Perfect exposure, perfect focus, perfect ‘decisive moments’, all in very dark rooms with the most basic technology. We don’t need no stinkin’ autofocus!”

“Sure we do. It all works together now. Focus, exposure, flash, everything. It’s all integrated, and once you have it all set up right, it’s a wonderful thing.”

Our food arrived, and I dug right in. Heratch, however, poked an egg with the corner of his toast, then paused with the dripping bread suspended in one hand and a fork in the other. He continued.

“I could never get the hang of hyper-focal focusing. When’s the last time you saw a usable depth-of-field scale on a digital lens, anyway?”

“Those great new Zeiss ZF manual-focus prime lenses all have D-O-F scales.”

“New? They look like something I couldn't afford back in 1978. And they’re made by Cosina in Japan. They’re about as much ‘Zeiss’ as microwave ovens are ‘Polaroid’. C’mon, you love the digital stuff as much as I do.”

“Maybe.” I sulked. I was half-finished with my breakfast while Heratch was still grinning at me with his soggy toast hanging halfway between his plate and his mouth. “But I won’t buy an image-stabilized lens. Never, ever. No way. No how.”

“You would if you were shooting a night game from the pit at Fenway Park. There are a lot of world-class photographers using IS glass, and you know it”. He finally took his first bite of toast, triumphantly. Like I always tell people, Heratch is not a man. He's a state of mind.

“It’s hard, all of this stuff is, you know?” he said, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn.

We sat quietly for a bit. I thought about how, if I ever found myself in the pit at Fenway, my image-stabilized lens would pick that moment to malfunction. That little vibrating lens element would refuse to shut off, and in frustration I would rip it off my camera and toss it on the dirt in front of me and watch it vibrate out onto the playing field and I’d wind up getting banned from baseball. I thought about the new consumer cameras that recognize faces in a picture and automatically focus on them. I thought about plenoptic technology, which someday may allow photographers to focus a picture AFTER it’s taken, with software. I thought about it all, about how many years I’ve spent learning how to make interesting pictures with a camera, and about how difficult it had been to face the fact that much of it became irrelevant with the advent of digital photography. Then I smiled a little bit.

“We changed, though. We learned it, and we continue to learn it. I’m more turned on by photography now than I’ve ever been. We don’t have to buy into all of it, just the stuff that helps us do what we do better, right?”

“Right. Let’s get out of here. I have to go into Harvard Square to buy some chipboard. It’s good for mailing high-res photo CDs to clients.” I wondered if Heratch had ever heard of FTP.

As we approached his car, he poked the button on his remote door release and the car alarm chirped loudly. I immediately thought of the commercial I had just seen about the new Volvo that has a “heartbeat detector” on the remote control, so you can get a heads-up about whether someone has broken into your car and is lurking in the back seat ready to brain you with a sledgehammer. But don’t get me started.

“I hate that alarm,” he said. “Whenever a truck goes by the house at a certain speed the damn thing goes off, at all hours of the night. I want to see if they can disconnect it somehow.”

Welcome to what I think!

You’ve landed on Amalgamated Idiosyncrasies and Intangibles, my blog about photography, the creative life, and whatever else happens to pop into my head at any given moment. I have a lot of stories to tell, and I hope to bring some of them to life here.

I teach an “Advanced Digital Camera” (ADC) workshop at New England School of Photography (NESOP) in Boston. I am also about to start a gig writing camera reviews and video tutorials for a great new digital photography site called digitalcamerainfo.com (DCI- so many acronyms!). Prior to that, I was a commercial photographer for 25 years, the last 11 of which were at Filenes, where I was a digital advertising photographer and assistant studio manager. I’ve been around the block a few times and pretty much lived to tell about it, always with a camera in my hand. And I’ve suffered the growing pains of someone who learned photography the old-fashioned way, then had to learn it all over again to continue working professionally in the digital age, and then had to REALLY try to learn it in order to help other folks learn how to do it.

I hope to use this blog, in part, as a teaching tool for my NESOP workshops. My intention for this is twofold; first, to be used by me as a way to expand each week's classroom discussion, and second, for current and former students (and their instructor) to continue to contribute to and benefit from the learning experience.

Starting with the Summer 2007 semester, in addition to this blog, the workshop will be supplemented by a new Flickr photo-sharing site. You will be able to see all of the photos from each week's shooting assignments, make comments on your fellow students' work, and even link your own Flickr account to the workshop's site if you'd like. Current students will receive information on how to use the site during our first classroom session; former students will be invited to join the site by e-mail. Many thanks to Jenny Chang (ADC Spring 07) for helping me to get all of this started.

The summer semester starts June 25, and ADC meets every Monday night for 10 weeks. Remember, parking is a challenge in Kenmore Square when the Sox are at home (July 2, July 16, and August 13), so plan ahead— arrive early or take the T!

I'm looking forward to the new semester, new students and sharing stories and information on this new blog. Thanks for reading.

--Randy