My life would have been much more complicated if I had married someone uncomfortable with being photographed at any moment, often with little primping time. Fortunately for me Barbara is usually fine with any impromptu, “Hold that,” or, “Look here,” or, “Stand right over there.” If mainly just mugging for the camera, her first instinct is to wave.
So when I saw this art installation, I had to have this picture.
Courtesy of the City of Savannah Municipal Archives
“A wormhole is a hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime.” Wikipedia
A friend, doing some research on properties in Warren Ward, a neighborhood less than a block from our home (Washington Ward), came across this old newspaper clipping from March of 1967.
I do not remember that assignment. I was 19 years old, working full time as a staff photographer at the Savannah Morning News-Evening Press (two different newspapers, with two separate editorial staffs; I swear). I was also a full time student at Armstrong State College (now Georgia Southern University), trying to hang onto my 2S Selective Service student deferment. I dropped Calculus, lost my deferment, enlisted in the Army, and reported for active duty 6 months later.
If you had told me then I would live in the next block, the idea would have been so alien to me I wouldn’t have even bothered to pooh-pooh it.
We lived downtown when I was 3, mostly because that would have been the cheapest rent my parents could find. Our family was part of the “White Flight” movement from urban to suburban, except we went a little farther, to countryside, where we were surrounded by forests. Mom and dad were country people and wanted enough land to have a garden. City living was not in my experience nor on my radar.
Also, the preservation/restoration movement was only about a decade old then and downtown Savannah was another 1-2 decades from approaching the kind of popular appeal, and sometimes magical beauty, it has now.
Ann and Mills Lane were early proponents of reviving downtown, investing in the area just east of the central business district. They moved this house across the street from it’s original location, and had it restored. Lane also restored the building our home is in, with one of the workers finding an old gold coin while doing the roof work.
Now my parents’ little acre is just part of the metro area, surrounded by a large school and tract housing; the neighborhood is bisected by the Truman Parkway. And I have fallen through a wormhole, living down the street from the Carswell House.
Sam was a complicated man. He was one of the brightest and most clever people I’ve known, and very self-aware. In 1992, we were getting ready to put a new version of the old Nikon School back on the road and the team (5 of us) had gone to Toronto to see Larry Frank’s Canadian Nikon School for ideas. We came across one of the Sam the Record Man Stores and I wanted this photo. I shot it, but Sam staged it. It has always seemed to me a conscious balance of ego and self-parody. That intellect, along with a wealth of knowledge about his profession, photography, and maybe even more knowledge of another love, the movies, that was my partner Sam.
We were friends, with friction sometimes, for about 35 years, and in the 9 years we taught together I spent almost as much time with him as I did my wife. We were on the road together for 26 weekends a year, speaking to 400-500 people each weekend, and sharing a lot of downtime, with meals leavened by swapped stories of movies, old assignments, travel, politics, sex, religion. We generally agreed on most things. In thinking about him this week I realized our texts and conversations had continued in the same character, as when we were traveling together, yet it had been 25 years since we shared a stage, and almost that long since we had actually seen each other.
The School was quite a production in those days–9 projectors, 24 trays of slides, programming and audio gear, redundant gear for backup. The second photo is Sam catching a nap on the 20+ cases of equipment we shipped from city to city, during one of our regular “waiting for somebody to do something” periods. On Saturday and Sunday mornings we were “Admin,” selling and taking tickets. During the daylong presentation we were the “Talent.” But most of the time, we were the “Roadies,” unpacking, setting up, taking down, packing up.
I learned some things from him. I had done a fair amount of photo instruction of small groups, but he told me a large audience is easier to manage than a small one, and it’s true. We saw a kind of herd behavior happen regularly.
Another important insight was that if you are going to charge someone real money to sit in a hard chair, in a hotel ballroom, for 8 hours, while you talk about your pictures and how you took them, you also damn well better be entertaining. His storytelling chops and sonorous voice, illustrated by his strong photographs, could capture an audience.
When we had hiccups with equipment, or any sort of class disruption, one of us would have to “dance,” AKA keep the audience entertained, while the other fixed the problem. He could dance. One time he had an hour long section to present, and for a variety of reasons (very long story) he only had one slide. He kept the room engrossed.
He could also piss off the Pope. His rapid delivery once provoked a shout from an audience member, “Talk slower!” His response, never missing a beat, was, “Listen faster.” We did lose that student. One time someone objected to him calling one of his models a “girl.” He pointed out she was only 15, with great makeup.
At the end of one class a very satisfied student was going on about how good the program was and how good we were, and suggested we should go on stage. Laconic Sam said, “We just did.”
My favorite part of the School day was always the Q & A for 15-20 minutes after lunch. We took questions from the audience and tried to give useful answers, while Sam and I bantered. Matching witticisms with Sam required you to bring your A game. That was fun!
Back when Dennis Miller was funny, and taped his show on Friday evenings, one Friday afternoon I met Sam in Anaheim to set up for our Nikon School weekend there. He knew I was a fan of Miller, told me he had reserved a ticket for me at the show, and that he would do set up alone. It was a nice gift, and I enjoyed the evening. I also think he liked introducing a naif into a bit of the entertainment milieu he loved.
Sam once saw a cheap promotional airfare from NYC to Bermuda, bought two tickets returning the same day, and took a female co-worker to Bermuda for a lunch date, but in recent years a once gregarious Sam had gone from someone ready to travel almost anywhere and on short notice to someone who rarely left his small apartment. He seemed to tire of friends’ efforts to get him out more when he preempted the conversation with me, telling me if he could find a waterproof TV he would never leave the bathroom.
The first thing I noticed was the richness and variety of color in this small leaf, about palm-sized. It was under a canopy of much larger caladium leaves in my deck container garden, and I started thinking of how to photograph it.
It wasn’t until later that I saw the circle of life piece, where the lifespan of this leaf is visible, from top to bottom, in one moment.
But, before that….
I understood I needed a light tent to get soft, even, diffused light, and to remove any distracting ground. I tried to remember what white, translucent material I had that would work, and then what to use for a stable frame to hold the fabric over, under, and around the leaf.
Then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have something like that setup all the time, in a little corner of the office, so I could quickly pick up any small object and shoot it immediately.
Well, in that case, I should build something perfect, and with some flexibility. Just before pulling out my drafting board to start designing some working plans, I remembered the little leaf. It would not wait for my design/construction scheme.
I don’t know where it came from, but “mixing bowl” popped into my head, and I got the biggest one we had in the kitchen. Leaf in bowl, bowl in some open shade, I got the soft light, and the simple ground.
As I was finishing I remembered: Edward Weston, from my personal Photography Pantheon, made his famous “Pepper #30” photograph by placing the pepper in a large tin funnel, laying on its side. Great minds, or, more likely, he planted a seed.
“They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” ― Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Little House in the Big Woods” (It works better if you can hear that in a young Melissa Gilbert’s voice.)
And yet it was such a long time ago, chronologically, emotionally, psychologically, philosophically.
Hunter Teen Town was, as implied, a teen club for military dependents at Hunter Air Force Base, before it was an Army base. Visitations by “civilians” like my sister Kitty and me were normally limited, but they never said anything about us being regulars almost every weekend. Because of my involvement in Civil Air Patrol I was friends with many of the dependents, and several of the older guys wanted to date Kitty.
I even achieved the status of being allowed in the DJ booth to keep the music going on the dance floor on normal weekends, but for holiday dances, there was a live band, although it seems like it was always “The Fabulous Sphinx.”
As I remember it there were two other rooms–a TV room, and a game (pool table) room.
Mrs. “Mama” Hoover, the military spouse who took on the responsibility for managing this hormone-laden multitude was beloved, in spite of always knowing instantly when someone turned off the lights in the TV room.
What does a teenager know about time? We never thought it would end, but the Air Force base closed and the dependents scattered to new cities, college, military service, jobs, careers.
“Those were the days, my friend We thought they’d never end We’d sing and dance forever and a day We’d live the life we choose We’d fight and never lose For we were young and sure to have our way…” Mary Hopkin “Those Were The Days”
What makes a place “exotic?” My proposition is that “exotic” is simply the opposite of “familiar” or easily accessible.
Recently a friend posted some comments (thank you Bill Ryan for this idea) about how some of his photography teachers had pushed the idea of photographing one’s own local landscape, but he noticed they all lived next to places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. He had come around to agreeing about shooting locally, though.
It’s the place you can keep going back to on a regular basis. That does so much to better your odds of catching the right light, the right moment, the unusual moment. Your understanding of the place can be so much more intimate.
So, if I said I made this photograph while we were hacking our way downriver on a tributary of the Congo, you might be intrigued. With a little imagination you might see crocodiles in the shadows of the bank, or hear Tarzan in the distance.
But if I say I’m standing on a well-maintained trail in a state park about ten miles from my front door, it’s no longer exotic, even though nothing in the photograph has changed.
To make “photographing locally” work, you have to suspend the way you see everything through familiar memories, you have to quite seeing the names or “labels” we have assigned to everything, and you have to start looking at just what is there in front of (or behind) you–lines, shapes, textures, tones, colors.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,….”
Of all the American anthems–“Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Bless America,” etc.–my favorite is “America the Beautiful,” especially the second verse (especially with Ray Charles singing it):
O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And every gain divine!
Happy Birthday to the USA, with gratitude for the Founders who gave us an audacious idea, and the millions since who have risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor believing, supporting, and serving that idea, in countless ways.
You have to appreciate someone so comfortable in their work that they can publicly toy with the thin line between clever and corny.
Like last week’s post, this photo was from playing with early digital capture during some free time in the Cascades. My “experimenting” time had been cut short by catching a bug on the way to Seattle, and spending the first couple of days sick in my cheap rural motel room, pleading with the restaurant next door to bring me a meal. (They did.)
Once I was up and out of my room, discovering someone offering levity was a tonic, even with the moody weather.
I could give several reasons why I think this is a nice photograph, but it’s enough to just say, “I like it.”
There is a softness to it that, I think, helps generalize the scene from a specific place to something more than….
I’m not saying I had that sort of insight/ambition in making the photograph, in January of 1999. We had bigger things to worry about back then, with the countdown to Y2K Armageddon running.
This was just me playing with one of the new point-and-shoot digital cameras (the Nikon CP-900) during some free time in the Cascades, trying to get a feel for this budding technology, and the tools for using it. Compared to the high resolution sensors today, with the detail they capture, the early sensors were pretty poor quality. The thing I like most in this photograph is the limitation I probably bemoaned at the time. Go figure.
The thing that was immediately evident was the attraction of/addiction to seeing one’s photographs immediately; of knowing right then if you got what you wanted, or could re-shoot. And to be able to share widely, easily. Remember: we are the generation that was thrilled to pay a premium to get our pictures processed in one hour. What’s not to love about instant gratification?
Layne Kennedy, an excellent photographer, is a friend and former colleague from teaching the Mentor Trek workshops for “Popular Photography.” He recently posted a photo of an almost contemporary modern ruin from a Russian mining town that was abandoned, leaving everyday articles laying around, and it reminded me of Elkmont, TN.
Elkmont, now inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, started as a logging community, and later became an elite level resort. When the Park was created current owners were allowed to keep their property, but by 1992 that changed, and the area was emptied of residents and businesses. Originally all the structures were to be demolished, but with some on the National Historic Register, there was an agreement in 2009 to restore some of them. I haven’t been back since 2008, so I don’t know what the status of any of that is now.
It’s fascinating to see places like this, or Layne’s village where it feels like everyone got up one morning and just left, and interesting to see what was left behind, discarded. I found a similar personal situation a few years ago when I sought out an old dwelling in the countryside west of Savannah, where my father’s family had large reunions when I was a kid.
