In the beginning…(please continue with your preferred origin story).
When I saw this solitary iguana making his way from the ocean inland, it reminded me of an old poster about evolution, with a fish coming from the water, growing feet, and becoming a land animal.
Observing the animals and landscapes in the Galapagos, and looking at my photographs from there, the specter of Charles Darwin and ideas of evolution are unavoidable, but it’s more than that.
The tectonic plate activity on the western edge of the islands makes the archipelago one of nature’s birthplaces and nurseries. Much feels primal, visceral, an ongoing Genesis.
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.
