It’s been 12 years since I was there, but one of the things I remember, in going through the people photographs from four days in Kolkata, is a sense of acceptance of each moment, a calm center in the middle of chaos.
Visiting India was like falling into a kaleidoscope, a constant swirl of colors, patterns, textures, sounds, smells; a dense, noisy population in constant motion. But moving in close to individuals, for portraits, was met with grace and generosity, a willingness to confront the camera directly in most cases, and without artifice.
River Street remodeling, looking east from behind City Hall, May 1977
It is a truism that we don’t realize, visually, changes in a landscape when we watch it happen incrementally over time. Older photographs are a quick reminder of how different the same place has become while you were watching.
Recently a friend, the city’s archivist, asked me about seeing some older photos that might be useful for a presentation she is doing. What I pulled out reminded me of how open the riverfront used to be, used to feel.
In the early 1970’s River Street was in pretty bad shape. Much of the old wooden pier was dangerous to walk on, but open to do so. There were 2-3 clubs/bars/restaurants, but it was mostly storage and service oriented tenants. It was not a place that felt safe after dark. The city did a polishing up: re-laying the ballast stones to smooth the street, adding bulkhead and riverwalk infrastructure, and landscaping. That’s what’s happening in this photograph.
Forty seven years later, the landscaping has matured; the foliage has grown and offers shade, there’s lots of seating around, it feels “not new,” comfortable, weathered in, like it’s always been this way. Lots of tourists on some mission, purposely-headed hither and yon. Some of the changes have been architectural. The large dirt area where the delivery trucks and VW microbus are parked is now part of the footprint of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. This view no longer exists.
For anyone who might be interested in the presentation, here are the details:
A “Walk” Down River Street
In a visual history of Savannah’s historic riverfront, Luciana Spracher, Director of the City of Savannah Municipal Archives, uses detailed narrative and unforgettable images to explore the evolution of this iconic landscape, from the colonial era through the present. 12-1 PM, August 21.
Another aspect of this trip down memory lane has been: for many years I looked at a lot of vintage photographs, recognizing their place in a historical context because of the flat but detailed look they had, and understanding their shortcomings needed to be forgiven for limitations of earlier technology. Turns out I’ve been doing this long enough I now have my own “vintage” photographs of a time past. History doesn’t seem to be as long ago as it used to.
Barbara and I have been hanging out together for more than 40 years, but there might not be much more than that many photographs of us. We both shoot when we travel, and have lots of individual shots of each other, but not so many together. A mirror at the Rodin Museum let us each capture us, with the sculpture mimicking our photo-posture contortions.
This ship looks pretty small, by today’s shipping standards, but Savannah was also smaller then. Missing from this view are at least four subsequent skyline-altering properties: the Hyatt, the Convention Center, the Westin, and Plant Riverside.
I don’t remember who the client was, but I was shooting a campaign that included several illustrations of port activity, and getting a hero shot of an arriving container carrier was on the “want” list. Today, just get a drone, but such remote options were not available then, for positioning or operating the camera, let alone having a preview of the composition. Yes, there was a time when you had to make photographs IRL.
Needed a chopper, but no commercial service was available in the area, and not enough budget. There were the Army helicopters at Hunter AAF, but rides on those were generally by invitation, not request. Fixed wing, door off, still a budget issue, but there was one elevated position possible–the old Talmadge Bridge, crossing right over the shipping lane.
The thing about the bridge was…no pedestrians allowed, and it was a two lane roadway with only a couple of feet on the outside of the lanes, so no pulling over and stopping.
I got a driver, drove over the bridge making sure no one was directly behind us, stopped just long enough for me to jump out and flatten myself against the side of the bridge (some open horizontal railings as I remember) while the driver continued on, to wait for a while in the then sparsely populated wildness of the Low Country. After a time, the driver came back across, stopping briefly to pick me up.
I was standing at the highest arc of the bridge where the roadway was a large section of open grating covering the entire width and length of the top. I could see the river under my feet. (I just had a little shiver remembering it.) I also remember a number of cars passing by while I tried to not get hit, them routinely yelling out, “Don’t jump!” Yet, no one ever stopped to see if I was OK, or reported me for being there.
Good light, nice ship, tide, and transit timing, everything came together, got the shot. But then I had to cross the bridge on the open grate, dodging traffic, to catch my ride. (Another shiver.)
Golden Lane runs along the wall inside Prague Castle, with houses built against the wall in the 1500’s. Today those buildings are shops and displays. Nearby is St. Vitus’ Cathedral, the third iteration of a church on the site, named for a Christian saint from Italy because, purportedly, a relic of St. Vitus (his arm?) was gifted for the establishment of a Romanesque rotunda around 925 AD. Construction of the current basilica started in 1344 and only took 600 years to complete. We think public works projects take too much time today, which they often do, but we also often lack perspective.
St. Vitus was a vaguely familiar name to me because Mom would sometimes say someone was doing the “St. Vitus Dance,” which I don’t think she meant literally. Turns out, same guy as the church.
We visited Prague about a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was adapting to open society quickly, but pricing had not yet caught up to western standards, and service was warm and friendly. And pretty much everyone spoke English. One prominent memory is a dinner experience–cocktails, appetizers, meals and dessert, with wine–that could have been in a “Michelin-starred” bistro in Paris, except the bill was half what it would have been there.
Now if I could only find a way to show the scale of these little shops….
As I said in last week’s blog post, I was 18 and clueless, but also a brand new newspaper photographer, sometimes sent places I was not legally old enough to go, or clever enough to avoid.
Last week’s photograph of the little boy at the fence of doors was on a little-traveled street on the outskirts of Savannah with just a few scattered homes, at least some of them tar-paper shacks, best as I can remember. Today it’s a pretty heavily populated residential area, hemmed in by the arc of a freeway. No more than a few hundred yards away from that fence were patches of woods, and this, one of them, is where I was sent to meet a group of revenue agents who had a tip on an illegal whisky making operation.
When I arrived I found no one had been apprehended, but they did have the still. As I looked around trying to find an angle that would show the story as best as possible I made a couple of exploratory shots, including the photo above, while physically moving into the scene.
Suddenly one of the agents yelled at me, “Get down,” grabbed me and pulled me down, just as a bomb went off. They were dynamiting the still. Hey! This was the first still, and revenue op, I had ever been to. How was I supposed to know?
So any photograph of the still was lost, but the explosion had blasted all the sour mash up into the tree tops, and now it was raining moonshine.
Some context: This was 1966 in provincial America, in the Deep South. Photographers came to work in a coat and tie, every day. So now one of my two or three work uniforms “smells like a brewery.” And my camera is sticky. And at that point in my life I had not yet tasted the demon rum, so there was no upside.
Further context: I still lived with my parents (18, remember) and they never drank. They did not rail against the evil of it; they just didn’t do it, setting an example. So now I have to go home this way.
I was 18, and so clueless it embarrasses me now. But I was also a newly minted “staff photographer” at the Savannah Morning News and Evening Press. I think there were three reasons they hired me, not in any particular order: 1) I looked like I knew how to use a camera (I did not, but that may have been the beginning of my understanding of “Fake it ’til you make it.” 2) I would work cheap; and 3) my friend Bill Murton, who was leaving the job to move to Charleston, recommended me, and that saved them the trouble of having to look for someone.
The photography department then was a service bureau, seldom, if ever, initiating stories, The various other editorial departments (News, Sports, Society-later called Women’s, and I don’t know what now) turned in assignments and we covered them. The one exception for enterprise work from photographers was the regular need for “feature art.”
If page designs were looking a little gray because stories being run didn’t have photos or illustrations, an editor might ask for an interesting stand-alone picture, a “feature.” My boss, Buddy Rich, was trying to teach me about this part of the job, and encouraging me, while out on other assignments, to always be on the lookout for something curious, interesting, pretty that could be available on short notice to fill those “art” holes in the layout. I mentioned a fence made of old doors that I had seen a while back; his frustration with why I had not already made the photograph was obvious.
“…we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” From The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln.
We were staying at a little boutique lodge, with just a few individual cabins scattered around hillsides along the western slope ofLa Cordillera de Tilarán, near the Monte Verde Cloud Forest. The couple who built, owned, and ran the lodge had a 15 year old home-schooled son, who had more practical knowledge about the world than many adults I know. He and a friend arranged for horses to take us on a ride through the mountains and forest, and to a beautiful waterfall where we could swim, and have a picnic.
It was a hot day, and the swim felt good, invigorating, but apparently Barbara’s horse felt left out of the cooling off option. As we were riding back out of the wildness, he simply stepped off the trail, into a deeper pool, and stopped, at which point all we could do was wait for him to be ready to move on.
