I had a moment of epiphany in 1968 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I found myself wandering the city streets looking for street photo ops. I wanted to be Cartier-Bresson. The decisive moment was out there somewhere and it had my name on it. If you werent a "street photographer" well what else was there? I should have been in an economics or biology class but would Cartier-Bresson worry about guns and butter or dissecting a fetal pig? The museum had a photo exhibition and all of a sudden I was looking at a large print of Hernandez NM. I was a bit dumb struck. Here was a REAL photograph. Today in my mind I remember the print was 2x3 ft. It was probably a 16x20. While looking at that image I swear I could feel the wind blowing off the mountains. I could smell the food cooking in the houses. I could hear dogs barking and babies crying. None of my photographs could do that. Not even close. I looked at my old double stroke Leica M3 and blamed the camera. That was my epiphany. At that moment I realized that my life's work would be photography. As Joseph Campbell would say "follow your bliss". Well I did only because that one photograph evoked such a response in me. If most of you have set apart a good portion of your life to make photographs has there been a moment of photographic enlightenment for you? Most people I talk to about this say that their experience is similar. It is immediate and not gradual. Interestinly enough in the same exhibition there were a number of Jerry Uelsmann prints. So not only did I realize what my lifes work would be but I found out that flying hamburgers were also OK.
I think it was 1980. I was just a 17 year old kid working summers for my uncle, a studio still life photographer in NYC. Up until this time I was mostly cleaning up, taking film to the lab and developing 8x10 B&W film in tanks. I remember one day he needed prints made for a job and he needed to be doing something else. He asked me to make the prints, and I was excited about it. I had been printing since I was 13, and had thought I was a good printer. Needless to say after spending an hour in the darkroom, he came in took a look at my prints and shook his head. I felt smaller than nothing at this point. He came back a few minutes later, dropped a book on the counter, opened the book to a specific page and said " use all the paper you want, don't come out until your prints look like this". The page was a photograph of some african mud men, the book was Worlds in a Small Room by Irving Penn. Four hours and 120 sheets of paper later I realized I did it. Not that I was able to get the few prints he needed, but that I knew what to look for when printing a negative. That was my epiphany.
My moment came when, at around age 12 or 13, I spotted a young, darkly handsome photographer with a large wooden view camera (looking back it must have been a Dorf) setting up a shot at a local state park. His convertible was parked nearby, and it wasn't long before he attracted a very nice looking young blonde. She inquired about what he was doing, and I heard him say "This is how I make my living." The photographer and the blonde then left together in his convertible. I thought, "Man, I want to be a cool-looking dude with a big camera and get a blonde, too." Forty years later, I've got the big camera, but no blonde (but a wonderful wife).
Nowadays, that blonde would probably run away in horror from a large format photographer who had set up in a park, straight into the arms of a guy with a Canon 1DS Mark II, and they'd drive off into the sunset in his Honda Element listening to tunes or looking at pictures on his I Pod Photo.
But blondes and the new generation are entitled to their epiphinies, too.
For me, it was as a kid looking through a large-format Smithsonian issued book called, "American Album;" A history of the U.S. as told through historic photographs. The black and white photographs had such depth and and detail that it was like entering through the looking glass to lost worlds. The chuff of steam leaving the locomotive cylinder, the sound of conversation on somebody's proud victorian front porch, the street kids yelling in New York's old bowery seemed almost present, the hand reaching for the beer... just a shutter's click away from the present. I've spent half a lifetime working to construct my own album.
For me it was hanging out in the college library one day with nothing to do. I was already kindof into photography, and had fun with my Canon A-1, but had completely dismissed anything other than 35mm as not worth a moments consideration.
I already knew about Adams, and Atget, but then there was a big book by "Avedon". Who's that guy? American West? I like America, and the west, sounds cool.
I started to flip through the pages, then slowed way, way down. "Whoa........ whoooaaa..." just staring at these images, even though they weren't real prints, they were in a book. But still. I'd never really seen anything like it. I mean, these we're 'regular people' ostensibly. But there was nothing regular about any of it.
After that, well... I still don't have an 8x10 yet (only 4x5), but someday, someday. And then all I need is 10,000 sheets of Tri-X and an army of assistants. Then, well... that'll be a start, anyway.
Mine was years into a thriving career escalating from news photographer, to metro daily photographer, to magazine and freelance work and despite success I found myself drifting closer to a black hole of despair. During a lecture a renouned historian, philosopher of art, issued ideas that brought me back to the days of studying in England, serving the life of the mind. A few months later I closed shop and moved to a two-room cabin in a remote winter-climate state, liberated. I became a steel-worker, did construction work, and eventually found myself serving academe. That was about thirty years ago. I have never regretted leaving the photography career.
Mine was August, 1968. I was playing in a rock 'n roll band in Savannah, Georgia. It was a Sunday afternoon - the band members and some of the patrons of the club where we played were cooking out (barbequeing to you non-Southerners) and sitting around the apartment drinking beer. I pulled out my Polaroid Swinger - the white one that took roll film. I swung around to take a photo of our organ player drinking a beer. He was about three feet away, and I was using flash. Somehow I realized that at that close a distance, the flash would wash out the photo, so I cranked the little exposure control knob down - it was not marked with f/stops. The photo was excellent.
At that moment, I understood that photography was a medium that could be controlled in the same manner as my painting and my music. I was off in a new direction of artistic expression.
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