As If Ako...

A few weeks from today will mark the fourth anniversary of the death of my friend Chikako Atsuta. Had she maybe taken a moment longer to leave for work on that brilliant August morning in 2004, Ako would have simply been 39 years and 202 days old. Instead, she perished beneath the wheels of a lumber truck on a city street while riding her bike to work, and those precious few years and days were all she got. Some of her ashes and bits of bone are buried under a bench overlooking the sea in her beloved Gloucester, Massachusetts. The rest of her earthly remains are interred at her family’s shrine in Osaka.

Ako, an artist, author and poet (and amazingly, incongruously, Tiger Woods’ webmaster), had just e-mailed me something she had written in the early morning hours of her last day. It was a short poem describing her feelings about the sterility of the sports marketing office in which she worked. Nearly all of it was forgotten in the grief of the ensuing hours, days and weeks, and especially in my own misplaced guilt over not responding to her message immediately upon reading it that morning (and by doing so perhaps delaying her just enough to take her safely out of synch with an anonymous, inexperienced truck driver). The opening line, however, carried more irony and coincidence than I or any of her friends could stand.

“The air is dead, and so am I”

Ako was the most passionate worshipper of art and the natural and spiritual world I have ever met, which made the manner of her demise even harder to accept. That evening I was reminded of the grace and magic of the world in which Ako was so enmeshed. As I was leaving to meet my best friend and his wife and daughter for dinner at the 99 Restaurant in Waltham, I found myself bombarded by the most spectacular hailstorm I have ever witnessed, and afterwards, by an equally unsurpassed sunset below the dark receding storm clouds. The temptation to begin the next sentence with the words “it was as if…” is as strong now as it was that night when I toasted her memory with people she didn’t know at a restaurant she would have hated.

Al Stewart

I just finished my third album cover for singer/songwriter Al Stewart, a design project that was very close to my heart. I usually tell some version of this story when I am introducing myself to new classes at CDIA, so I thought it might be a good idea to post it here. This piece was originally written for my friend Neville Judd’s website. Neville wrote Al’s official biography Al Stewart: The True Life Adventures Of A Folk Rock Troubadour , published by Helter Skelter in 2002.

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Sometime during the summer of 1974, a friend loaned me a copy of Al Stewart’s Past, Present and Future . I looked at the picture on the cover of that LP and, no lie, I told myself that I was going to learn to make photographs just like that, maybe even for musicians like Al Stewart someday. I had discovered photography earlier that year and had already decided that I would be some kind of professional photographer after graduating from high school, but it wasn’t until I saw that very well known black and white image that it all came together for me. I saw Al in concert for the first time at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in early 1975, which was coincidentally the inauguration of his nearly 20-year partnership with guitarist Peter White. Just as coincidentally, a drummer named Steve Chapman opened for Al that night as part of Leo Sayer’s band.

After graduation I went on to drive a subway train in Philadelphia at night so I could teach myself photography during the day. Then came a stint as a camera store manager, 5 years as a portrait and society wedding photographer in Newport, RI, and, disillusioned by that experience, many, many more as a commercial and advertising photographer and designer in Boston. Throughout it all I continued to follow Al’s career over the years and never forgot the epiphany that he had unknowingly provided for me.

In 1991, I worked up the nerve to call Steve Chapman, now Al’s manager in Los Angeles (and Peter’s, who had started his own very successful solo career as a jazz guitarist). I asked if there was anything I could contribute photographically to Al’s next album. Steve said something like “what a strange coincidence, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do for that just the other day”. After describing an idea I had for a cover image, Steve gave me free rein to work with Al and Peter at their performance at the old Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia. The resulting images became the front and back covers of Rhymes In Rooms , and one of my teenage ambitions was happily checked off the list.

My career kept me pretty busy for much of the next decade, so it wasn’t until 2001 that things got interesting again. Peter and I had developed a friendship and he visited me one afternoon at my house outside of Boston that summer. Around the same time I sent some of my old concert photos of Al taken throughout the previous 25 years to Kim Dyer to use on alstewart.com. That led to an invitation to shoot Al’s Grace Cathedral show in San Francisco in November of that year where I met, unforgettably, Neville Judd. Neville and I hit it off instantly and he later hired me to design the package for the Live at Grace Cathedral DVD.

A few months later Neville fell ill while driving Al to a series of shows in the Northeast. Steve Chapman called that night asking if I could fill in as driver for the last week of the tour. Assuming it was actually just Neville having a bit of fun with me, I laughed at the thought of such a thing. Apparentlys the joke was on me because two days later, I stood in front of a hotel in Northampton, MA with his faxed itinerary in my hand and a big nervous smile on my face. A black limousine pulled up in front of me and out jumped Al, switching chauffeurs for the long haul to Philly and eventually New York. We had a blast over the next 5 days, and after finally delivering Al safely to his hotel in NYC, I called Steve’s office and told them that it was safe to take Lloyd’s of London off their speed dial.

After many more roadtrips with Al and a fully recovered Neville over the next few years, I was starting to feel pretty well acquainted with both of them. But I was absolutely unprepared for what happened next. I came home from work one evening in early 2005 to find a message from Al wondering if I “would like to knock off an album cover” for him. Neville had evidently filled Al’s head with exaggerated accounts of my design skills, so for the next month Al and I would talk on the phone most days and review design comps online. A Beach Full Of Shells was the result. ABFOS was later nominated for a media industry packaging design award, and was bumped out of the final round by, among others, the designer of Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm . Had I made it to the final round, I would have been invited to the awards ceremony in LA. The industry legend who was rumored to have been on hand to acknowledge the winners that evening was none other than Storm Thorgeson, the creative genius behind Hipgnosis, the London design firm responsible for the cover of Past, Present and Future in 1974. That was a handshake I would have enjoyed, and, in the words of Maxwell Smart, I missed it by “that much”.

I figured that that was that, but Neville always has something up his sleeve. He called me earlier this year to ask if I had any interest in doing it all again. I said I did, and the next call was from Al. “It has to have a trireme on the cover this time”, he said excitedly, and after asking him 3 times to spell the word, I listened to a précis about Hanno the Navigator while googling like a son of a gun. Like many of us, standard equipment while listening to Al’s music for me was always an encyclopedia and a dictionary, but these days I need to be close to my MacBook’s high-speed internet connection when I see his name come up on my Caller ID.

I found some excellent high-resolution photographs of a reproduction of a trireme built by the Hellenic Navy on their website. With their permission I used one as the basis for an illustration for the cover; I ghosted some Phoenician text of a contemporary account of Hanno’s voyages over the image and mocked the whole thing up with the working title Hanno the Navigator set in a font named Herculaneum and sent it over to Al. He liked it immediately, and without going any further he said that it was exactly what he was looking for (in one take, even!). The rest of the work came together over the next month or two, with the last remaining decision being the name of the CD itself.

Al told me he was thinking that the name of the disc would be Sparks Of Ancient Light (with the perfect acronym SoAL) as I was preparing the final artwork for Appleseed and EMI. I loved it, and hoped he would stick with it. Everyone involved began referring to the project as SoAL, but then he changed his mind. “How do you like The Secret Life of Clocks ”, he asked me one afternoon. I did, I told him, but I was already trying to figure out how I would bring a clock into the trireme illustration. “But maybe it’s not in keeping with the look of the artwork”, I said, realizing afterwards that that sounded a little self-serving.

“Then how about Yesterday and Tomorrow ?” he asked.

It seemed I was in on the naming decision at this point and tried my hardest to be diplomatic but helpful.

“That’s good too, but…”

“ Lost Victories ?” He had a list, and was reading through them all.

“Interesting”, I said. “That might work.”

“ Rose Colored Morning ?”

“mmmmmmm…” I wasn’t sure what to say about that one.

“ Wet ?”

“At the risk of stepping out of line” I said, “ Sparks Of Ancient Light has Al Stewart written all over it. It’s the perfect combination of words and image, and it supports the material beautifully”

“I know” he said. “We’ll probably stay with it, but I’m just afraid it doesn’t roll off the tongue very easily.”

Obviously, he stuck with it, and I think it’s a great title. I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to contribute something to one of Al’s best pieces of work ever. And if I were standing on that awards stage in LA right now with Storm Thorgeson looking distractedly at his watch behind me while I ticked off a long list of those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, at the head of that list would be Kim and Neville, Steve Chapman, my girlfriend and Production Assistant extraordinaire Jenny Chang (I dabble, but she really knows how to do this stuff), and finally, Al himself. This experience (and so many others like it) has been, for me literally, a dream come true.

Could It All Be Bullshit?

For the vast majority of young heterosexual men who set off in search of a career in photography (or at least for those of us who are honest about our ridiculous self-delusions) its siren song is often the real or metaphorical promise of “fast cars and naked women”. In the absence of more high-brow and imaginative motivators, I’m thinking “Blowup” and “Austin Powers” here, but for those of you otherly gendered or oriented, please don’t get mad at me, just insert your own intrigues in place of ours. Of course, there are those, like my friend and CDIA colleague Tim Lynch, who got into photography because they were told there would be “no math and no English”, but let’s leave that discussion for another time. The point is, many of us who stick with the business long enough eventually come to realize that, if we’re lucky, the reality of a job as a professional photographer usually amounts to something more like a beat-up Jetta and a loving girlfriend. But there is that rare breed, the ones who make it all the way to the top, who get the cars, the women, the South of France, the Tribeca studios, the monographs, the expensive limited edition of their favorite camera with their name engraved on the top, all of it. They drive the rest of us absolutely nuts, because, as we all like to imagine, we could have, we SHOULD have been them, and if we keep on pushing, we might still be. In other words, we’re jealous.

So, before we start, I should put a few things on the table. I’m a nobody in the world of photography, but I have a high opinion about what it means to be a somebody. The following thoughts should be evaluated based on that understanding. Also, if you’ve read some of the older posts on this blog, you know that I have a Leica rangefinder camera, an M6 that I bought it in 1997 because I wanted to make pictures like Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I believed the hype then, and I still do. Nothing I have learned by using the little device has changed my mind about it. The camera is nearly perfect, and in the hands of someone who knows what he or she is doing, it can elevate that photographer’s process and product— it certainly did mine. But shooting with film cameras, even those as intoxicating as Leica rangefinders, has become less and less desirable as digital tools and technologies have matured. I now strive to make equally sensitive, insightful “old-school” photographs with digital equipment. Nevertheless, as anyone who knows me can certainly attest, I have spent the better part of 30 years sharing my awe and enthusiasm for the medium’s classic stylists and innovators who used the Leica camera. One of them, the heavy-hitter and Leica spokes-shooter Ralph Gibson, spoke recently at Boston University’s Photographic Resource Center.

Tim and I brought our “Photographic Seeing” classes to the PRC that evening for what would prove to be a rich learning experience, although some of us felt that the lessons learned had less to do with creative secrets revealed by a master of the medium and more to do with artspeak, intransigence, and a healthy dollop of good old fashioned ego. Our students seemed to agree afterwards that while art can be transcendent, artists can be somewhat otherwise, and it’s usually a good idea to remember to separate the two. I figured this out a long time ago, but still, by the end of the evening I had begun to ask myself whether everything I believe to be valuable and true about the nature of the type of photography that I love might be suspect. Could it all, to put it delicately, be bullshit?

Thankfully, after about 30 seconds of intense soul-searching, most of my heroes remain firmly plopped high on their pedestals, although my confidence is shaken. Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander and all the rest are still up there in my opinion, maybe because they mostly managed to keep their mouths shut and let their pictures do the talking. These photographers, in other words, stayed out of the way of their photographs. Or maybe it’s because I just never sat in a room listening to them talk about their own work.

But there we all were with Ralph Gibson. He’s got a lot to say about what he’s done, much of it interesting, some of it supercilious, and a bit of it disappointing. He kicked off his lecture by describing himself early in life as a classic screw-up, a child of a Hollywood divorce and a high school dropout given the choice at 16 of either “the Navy or military school”. Choosing the former, he proceeded to flunk out of the Navy’s photography training program. A second chance at the course (granted only after promising to clean the latrine for six weeks) led to a defining moment: standing watch on deck late one night, he screamed to the heavens “I WANT TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER!!!” and judging from a career spanning nearly the next half-century, the heavens apparently answered back “well, OK…” Sensing a bit of a kindred spirit, I smiled as echoes of my own early frustrations driving a subway train on endless graveyard shifts while dreaming of a life behind a camera rang in my head.

After his discharge, he attended art school in San Francisco, made the pilgrimage to New York, assisted Robert Frank and Dorothea Lange, and lived the life of a struggling young artist “nine months behind on the rent”. Then, seemingly like magic, he received a commission to photograph “in Fronce”, joined and then left Magnum, started his own publishing company, Lustrum Press, and basically never looked back. Why and how all that so suddenly materialized he didn’t say, but the old adage “if you want to make a million dollars in photography, start with two million” popped into my head as a possible explanation. He had hooked me with the fist-shaking swabby story and reeled me in with imagined coffee-and-donut runs for Frank and Lange, but I started to wiggle off the hook when it all began to sound vaguely pompous and disingenuous, supported by a slideshow that was at best uneven, and at worst, unexpectedly pedestrian.

None of this is meant to suggest that Gibson hasn’t worked hard and accomplished much. Guggenheim fellowships, NEA grants, Leica Medals of Excellence and Officiers de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres bestowed by the French government are not given out to just anybody, and he has earned all of these distinctions and more. He has managed to support himself through print sales for more than 40 years. His online portfolio (ralphgibson.com) is extensive and powerful, filled with wonderful photographs all made exclusively with Leica cameras. As noted by the former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, if he hadn’t chosen photography, Gibson probably would have become a graphic designer— his compositions are that elegant and formal. Indeed, many of the high-contrast, surreal images he showed at the PRC were masterful and thought provoking. But just as many of them seemed to have made the cut for no better reason than the name-and- place-dropping opportunities they presented; little more than somewhat interesting snapshots made with those expensive cameras.

Gibson stated that he is only as good as his next print, and that he wants to create not photographs, but “a photography. He didn’t explain what he meant by that. He also said that he’s not interested in how something looks, but rather “how it feels for [him] to be looking at something”. Lofty prose, that, and potentially a rhetorical minefield coming from someone whose most well-known images include that of a cheeky young nubile gently coaxing a feather from between the bared lobes of her derriere. Photographers have been saying such things for as long as I can remember, and only rarely make pictures that say anything at all to anyone other than themselves and the ranks of incestuous art-world sycophants or new age nitwits hardwired to subscribe to such drivel. Or ass men.

Where he lost me, and I suppose what became the catalyst for this essay, came about three-quarters of the way through his presentation. He flashed a familiar picture on the screen, a Catholic priest’s chin and Roman collar severely cropped and contrasty, and called it his “old favorite”. His new favorite, an image shot over the shoulder of a man in silhouette gazing at his lover’s tattooed backside while holding a sketchbook displaying a photograph of a classically sculpted male figure, was as trite as the priest’s shot was remarkable. But it somehow proved, to him at least, that a photographer using a digital camera and Photoshop would never be able to make pictures like his.

It was all I could do to keep from blurting out from my catbird seat second-row center “Now hold on a second, sailor. That is simply a heapin’ helpin’ of BULLSHIT!” It appeared to me that what he was saying was that what he had done with his Leica, some film and a darkroom was better than what I or my students would ever be capable of doing simply by virtue of the different tools we use to do it.

I go to great lengths to instill in my students my belief that, regardless of what technology they choose to employ, photography is still photography, digital or otherwise. If their goal is to make highly complex photographic illustrations using all of Photoshop’s smoke and mirrors, they should knock themselves out learning how to do it to the highest level of quality that they can. If, on the other hand, they want their photographs to be unmanipulated, faithful representations of what they see and feel, they can do that with a digital camera as easily and masterfully as they ever could with a film camera, and probably even more so. Photoshop is a digital darkroom as well as a retoucher’s studio, and as it’s always been, it’s up to the photographer to decide how much of either to employ.

Later, during the question and answer session, I asked him what he would say to a student learning digital photography in 2008, based on what he said about his new favorite picture. He cut me off before I could finish, saying, “I know where you’re going with this. First of all, it’s not digital photography, it’s digital IMAGING…” the same way he might say “it’s not fois gras on that silver plate there, it’s ground-up goose guts.” He continued with his answer, but frankly, I tuned much of the rest of it out as I tried to figure out whether he was arrogant or simply misinformed. I vaguely remember hearing something about f-stops, shutter speeds, and him knowing about all “those cameras” that he would never use unless he was paid enough money to do so. With that one definitive proclamation, he had dissed my question, my students, and the present and future state of his medium.

As he finished his answer and turned abruptly away from me to take another question (cutting off any chance of the follow-up that I was trying to formulate) I heard a piece of music beginning to loop around in my head. It was the work of another American ex-pat now living in Provence, the truly brilliant underground cartoonist-cum-banjoist R.Crumb. Backed by his honky-tonk ensemble The Cheap Suit Serenaders, he recorded what would have made the perfect soundtrack for Mr. Gibson’s attitude toward those of us unfortunate enough to be photographers in the digital age. It’s an incessant little ditty entitled “Fine Artiste’, and a line or two of it goes like this:

Well, my paintings are famous
And they’re worth lots of dough
Pretty girls all hang around my gallery show
I’m as good with my paintbrush as I am with my lips
Stick around honey, learn some aesthetic tips!
Baby I’m a Fine Artiste
Baby I deserve to be kissed...

Mr. Gibson, I suspect, will keep on truckin’. There’s now a Ralph Gibson limited edition of 50 specially modified and autographed Leica MP camera bodies available from his online “boutique” all tarted up provocatively in black lacquer and red leather. Owning one of these little trollops will set you back $5000.00 sans lens, which is about 2 grand more than the stock version of the same camera. One would drape perfectly around one’s neck while strolling down the Promenade des Anglais, and would surely be the perfect instrument for creating "a photography" of one's own.

My 15 Minutes

I was asked to do a live digital photography demo at CDIA’s Open House last week. I was obviously flattered, but I also couldn’t help wondering why they would ask me, the new guy, to represent and encapsulate the entire program in a concise 15 minute show-and tell. I mentioned it to my friend and colleague Tim Lynch, and he said something like “I used to do them, but….” His voice trailed off and his eyes were locked in a kind of haunted thousand-yard stare. In the back of my mind I had that old Three Stooges routine running as a loop, the one where the boys are in the army and their sergeant asks for three volunteers to step forward for a dangerous mission. All at once the rest of the squad takes a giant step backwards leaving, you guessed it, three hapless heroes-to-be. Suddenly I felt like one of them, Curly being the most likely.

But it turned out to be a blast.

First I had to decide what I was going to do. Bob Daniels, CDIA’s Executive Director, asked only that I do a portrait demonstration. I didn’t want to do a boring three-light headshot; I wanted something a little more dynamic that showed the integration of the camera, RAW development in Lightroom, and a little Photoshop magic. But it had to be something I could start and finish in front of a studio full of people in about 15 minutes. I quickly arrived at a concept for an image that I hoped would look fresh and exciting to an audience of mixed age, experience and expectations.

I got to school early enough to make a quick shot of Queen’s, a dry-cleaning establishment two doors down Moody Street. One of the things I love about Waltham is its aging architecture, much of it supporting evidence of the city’s claim to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Queen’s probably wasn't doing Francis Cabot Lowell's laundry when he built the first power loom in 1813, but the great old neon sign above the front door looks like it might have been first plugged in 1954 or so. Close enough. I laid the camera and wide-angle lens down on the sidewalk in front of a manhole cover, pointed it up at the sign, waited for a break in the traffic in the background, and let ‘er rip. I “chimped” the LCD and the histogram instead of using the viewfinder to compose and expose— I thought I already looked odd enough kneeling down in front of a dry-cleaner’s on a bitter-cold afternoon without having to actually lay down on the sidewalk to look through the camera. Satisfied that I had the background for my final shot, I went inside and set up some lights.

We had a standing-room only crowd for the Open House, somewhere upwards of 150 people or so. After some introductory remarks from Bob, people started heading off in different directions to listen to more focused presentations from each program’s faculty and staff. As usual, nearly half of the attendees were there for the Photography program. That meant that as many as 70 people would be watching my demo.

I went on about an hour later. After telling some lame story about my never being very good at “shooting in a pack”, I explained what I was going to (hopefully) do, and then asked for a volunteer from the audience. No sooner had I gotten the first two syllables of the word out of my mouth when a hand shot up on the left side of the room and a young woman bounced to her feet. Her name was Aurora, she had already signed up for the photography program and would be starting in two weeks. I told her she would probably be spending much of the next 7 weeks with me in a pair of modules called Camera And Workflow, but I think at that moment she just wanted to have her picture taken.

I directed Aurora to a low platform I had set up in front of a dark gray seamless sweep and asked her to stoop down. Because I had shot the “background” of Queen’s from such a low angle I needed to do the same with Aurora. And this time, even with her up on apple boxes, I’d be laying on the floor. Being mindful not to flash a plumber’s smile at the folks sitting in the front row, I got on down and started shooting. I was tethered to Lightroom in my laptop using Nikon Camera Control Pro, so the audience could see the shots projected at the front of the room as I made them.

This shot called for motivated lighting, meaning it needed to be lit in a way that was believable when stripped into the existing background shot. I needed to suggest high overhead sunlight with a soft “kicker” low on the opposite side for separation. To do so, I hung a Profoto head shot into a beauty dish high to camera left, with a second head diffused through a 1x4 striplight on camera right rimlighting Aurora’s shadow side. I positioned a large black flag between the camera and the striplight to kill any lens flare that might result from the strong backlight.

After I had made a dozen or so shots, I stood up and thanked Aurora. I used Lightroom’s Library module to compare and rate the shots I had just taken, and we all decided that one of the last images appeared to be the best. Because I had processed the background shot of Queen’s using Lightroom’s Cold Tone preset as a starting point, (resulting in a contemporary-looking color palette of mostly desaturated cool blues and greens) I used the same preset again to develop Aurora’s shot. Finally, I sent both shots into Photoshop to make the final composite image.

At this point, Damian Hickey, a talented graduate of CDIA’s program and one of our TA’s, stood up to talk about the program from an alumni’s perspective. This was prearranged, so I could do the compositing work in the background as he spoke. I separated Aurora from the rest of the shot using Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso, refined the selection edge a bit, and dragged her into the Queen’s shot. I flipped her horizontally so she would work better compositionally (meaning that my lighting notes above are actually reversed in the final composite image). A few quick tonality changes to the background, some Lens Blur added to Aurora’s lower body so she would blend better with the shallow focus in the low foreground, and some fussing with the shadows underneath her feet all resulted in the image you see at the top of this post. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but not bad for about 15 minutes with a bunch of strangers watching.

During Bob’s introduction, he mentioned how our faculty was comprised mostly of “old guys” schooled in the “purer” methods of film, but who had all done whatever was necessary to evolve into successful and enthusiastic digital photographers. I liked that, and I made sure that I left the audience with two important thoughts. First, as I have written in this blog before, being a purist with a digital camera is as easy as being a purist with a film camera— it all comes down to discipline, vision, intent and restraint. But maybe more relevant to the aspiring professionals in the room, what I had just demonstrated, for better or worse, is the way photography is done in the commercial world of the twenty-first century. As a purist, I find it pretty interesting that I find that kind of cool.