Any elder photo grunts still out there?

[Matt Mengel]

I need to post up for my teacher- He seems to parallel you John, in attitude and experience working for Kraft foods, also using 11x14 view. Worked with a crotchety old portrait guy to do a portrait in mayor Daleys office of some catholic guy who went on to Washington. BS'ed his way into the darkroom for at a job with the Chicago Police. Life magazine, Look magazine....was fired and rehired by both a couple of times To him photography is a job- (I think there's alot of artistry in him but he'll never admit it). He had 5 kids to feed, and when there were no photography jobs to be had he drove a truck or hung iron. Whenever he looks at my prints he crops the sh** out of them like an art director. I've learned alot from that guy and continue to do so. I'm only 32, but I think I can really relate to what your talking about. Email me off forum and I could put you in touch with him. I dont think he even owns a computer, and if I brag about knowing him and tell people his name he'd kick my butt.
I'd love to sit down with the two of you and listen to the stories. There are still a few left.

[Al Seyle]

"When you young fellows spend 13 cents for a piece of film you will think twice about tripping the shutter."

When I was at Brooks it was up to 15 cents. Super-XX.

I like your style, John-- I want a copy of that book!

[tribby]

why ted's so old he was at the battle of hastings.

1059? same age as dirt, ted,

me

p.s. dinosaurs need not be so old. i went to photo school in the mid 80's, a mere decade before the digital revolution(we lost that war you boys). and i'm thankful my teachers made sure we knew our way around a lf cam by the second semester. i was talking to a new hire here at the paper night before last. turns out he moonlights as an architectural photog, and is graduating in a month with a bachelor's degree in photojournalism. he seemed taken aback when i told him i had no interest in borrowing his 20d with a shiny, new t&s lens and that i was still most happily analogging along in 'solid state' mode. he then admitted he'd never shot a single frame of medium format film. i asked myself, 'how is that possible?' then i ruefully remembered yon gory war.

[paulr]

I enjoyed your post, too, John, although I feel that you are lumping together some ideas that don't necesarily go together. Or maybe creating some dichotomies that are not necessarily dichotomies. The idea that wrestling with the meaning of life (being an artist) equals being impractical or without any technical ability has plenty of counter examples. As does the idea that being an artist means being a pompous ass ("if i have to explain it, you'll never understand it ...").

I completely believe that you saw plenty of examples of both ... most of us have! But I think there's more to be learned from the example set by artists for whom art was more than a pretense, a lifestyle, or an excuse for a technical (or social) handicap.

I'm sure you can think of more than a few, if not from your personal experience, than at least from the history books. I know a few who are still breathing ... some who aren't even old!

[Kim Schäfermeyer]

Hi John: I miss my brown fingernails. And my green ones and rose....And I MISS: Indiatone, Portralure, Azo, Portriga.... hell, I almost miss Ektalure! I trained as a chemist in the days when calculaus was required and it was a science. So you might empathize with my approach to photography as a discipline. My gold photographs remembered the winter day at dawn when the light turned the early spring ice flow in the Missouri river into tangerine dognuts! And then there was vermillion, and blue and the choclate brown from Nelson's. I miss the delight of a tray developed pyro negative, in the orphan format, 5x7. There are papers designed by CPAs now. And while I feel betrayed by the Great Yellow Father and his bastard cousins, I think it is the same in other disciplines who have lost their way. Medicine and Law among them. They never asked me if the price was too high. Some days I think I will return to the solitary field that lured me into that commercial world you know so well. But I think I will have to learn to tolerate marginalized materials, or take-up platinium emulsions again. Robbie and Sura Steinberg can you please come out of retirement? I have learned to clone sheep. So forgive me if I am close to digging up Alfred, Edward and Edward, Fred, and Ansel and Andy Tau. Stem cells indeed. I think this is the book, or it's beginning. I think you should collect and edit it's content into that other orphan friend; a book. Kindest Regards, Kim S..

[paulr]

I seem to remember a lot of letters going back and forth among folks like Alfred, Edward, and Edward, all complaining about the same thing: Everything's going to hell, no one cares anymore, the good materials are all gone, the golden era is behind us. Of course this was circa 1920 to 1940.

This state of change, when everyone's favorite material vanishes some time after people have forgotten it hasn't always been here, has been the perpetual state of photography since the beginning. Weston almost hung up his hat when commercial platinum papers vanished. But he didn't. He learned how to print with silver, and went on to do his best work with it. Now wave after wave of silver papers are going the same route. Those of us entrenched in the past don't want to hear about carbon pigment inkjet printing, or whatever's going to come along later, but I'm willing to bet this: it's going to be another golden age (just like right now is someone's golden age), and it's going to end someday too.

If this still sounds like bad news, there's always the option of staying in the past. If you've got good reason to do so, you can do work. It worked for Atget ... he used materials and techniques that were decades obsolete in his time. And it's working for a lot of people now, which explains the growing cottage industry of vintage processes, including photographers formulary, the re-emergence of platinum papers, and gather of groups like this one (even if it required the new fangled internet) bringing together people who think the world has gone to hell.

[Andy Andrews]

Yes, John Cook SHOULD write a book or, at least, an article for submission to a photography publication. It would amuse both young and old and put things into perspective. Kids today ask,
"Did you really use cameras without batteries?" Or, "How could you get the shot, with only one piece of film in that big holder?" A lot of times, I didn't was the answer, but said, "Experience, son. After awhile, you learn to anticipate what the subject's going to do and you make sure you're ready" Ha! Sometimes, the #*+* flashbulb wouldn't fire or the synch cord would part company with the shutter. There were all kinds of fixes to keep that from happening, but it still happens today. Why Prontor couldn't come up with a bayonet socket instead of a push-on contrivance is a mystery to me...and a lot of other people! But I digress. What I would like to say to you younger photogs out there is you have never had it so good! Everything that can possibly be automated has been automated, or so it seems. Just remember that when you rely on someone else's software, you give up some of your own judgement and flexibility. And what the engineers put into even the finest professional cameras by the way of features will not replace creativity and your own individual viewpoint. It just makes it easier for more to accomplish more, quicker.
Funny, as I look back on my life, I seemed to have more spare time when there were fewer 'labor saving' devices around. Has anyone else out there noticed this too?

[Christopher Nisperos]

John, I don't know if this makes me a "photo grunt", but I did spend a bit of time taking a photography course at Laney Junior College in Oakland, California (early 1970's) under an ex-Navy instructor and great photo teacher named Bill (Something). (out of respect to this man, if any alumnus of Laney remember his name, please post it!). The assistant professor was a Navy man too.

Our textbook was the Navy Manual, "Photographer's Mate I and II". We learned to use the Speed Graphic, basic portrait lighting (military style), develop sheet film. "YOU'D BETTER LOG HOW MANY SHEETS HAVE PASSED THROUGH THE HC-110, DAMNIT!" , he'd yell. He was a really tough guy and the course was memoriable. He seemed to have known absolutely everything about photography, even being able to do basic repairs on shutters while talking to you at his desk. Years after, fellow students I'd meet from that course still feed a strong comraderie.

Thanks for evoking a nice memory, John.

[John_4185]

John Cook, you are an enigma. I cannot tell how old you really are. In one post you mentioned that you were in college in '68 which one might guess makes you about sixty. That is not old.

Art Center School, Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco Art Institute, Chicago Art Institute, IIT, and of course any state school I wished ... I checked them all out and was admitted to each but elected to follow my father's laboring Irish family penchant for an early family and daily drugery so I chose, and won, news photography positions. A mistake? Why, I could have marinated my young brain exclusively in the discourse of High Art rather than contrasting Art and Work on the grinding daily basis, but I would not have become stronger for the constant tension between the two. Today I am surrounded by Art Scholars who have no craft other than the literature of criticism. Thank God for the fate that let me be involved in both worlds at once so that I gained a sense of humor, otherwise the Irish angst may have led me to become a kind of Jack the Ripper who chose to render his victims in their own medium, that is to say I'd have become be a writer and possibly dead by now.

jj - County Cork, Oxford, Chicago, rual America - a downwardly mobile kind of person