Who Am I?

The Frank Inman House, Martin County, Indiana c.1972

I went to school with the Inman children in the 1950s. In the early 1960s,

Frank was killed in a hunting accident and the family moved away.

The house, a clapboard-over-logs structure, was never again occupied.

Rolleicord Vb Twin-Lens Reflex, Agfa film

I began photographing in 1968 and for more than 25 years I photographed anything and everything that I thought might make an interesting picture. My commercial work was moderately successful; my editorial and documentary work somewhat more so. But there was no organizing principle to my work because I did not know who I was as a photographer. I had not found my "voice."

One thing that puzzled me though, was that I always felt drawn to photograph old structures. In the early 1970s, on a trip to visit my parents in the sparsely settled hill country of southern Indiana, I spent a day driving around and photographing the homes of people I had known in my youth. Many were abandoned; some even falling down. I told my wife later that I didn't know why I was drawn to do that -- I certainly would never make a dime from it! 

Surprisingly, though, I eventually did. In 1994, I was commissioned by Rock City Gardens of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, to find and photograph every one of the still-standing barns that had been painted with the white on black "See Rock City" message. Using their barn-painting crew's old records from the 1960s, I drove more than 35,000 miles over an 18-month period, as I could steal time away from my studio, visited more than 500 sites in 15 states, and photographed the more than 250 barns still in existence.

Rock City Barns: A Passing Era was published in 1996 and became an instant best-seller. Sometime later I received a letter from the well-known art photographer Maria von Matteson, who proposed arranging a joint exhibit with her and the great Florida Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher.

The show never happened, but one thing that Maria said to me stuck: she said "You need to write an artist's statement that defines you." So I did, and this is what I came up with.

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

As a commercial, architectural, and occasional wedding photographer, I've done a lot of things that don't fit within that statement. Yet, for the past 22 years I've known who I am as a photographer and have sought to work as much as possible, consistent with the demands of my business, within that vein. How well I've succeeded will be for others to judge, but I know who I am and what I want to do for as long as I am able.

I Like Leica

Praying woman at a secret church meeting somewhere in Moscow, March, 1990

In fact, I love Leicas. I think they are the ultimate and perfect expressions of the camera-makers art. When I wrote in a previous post about "those miniature mechanical. . . marvels with their enticing clicks and whirs," I had Leicas especially in mind.

But do I use them? No. I like Leicas, but Leicas don't like me.

In the late 1960s I was living in Miami and working as a teacher. For some time I had been looking longingly at the cameras in Brown's Camera Shop in North Miami, where I could have bought a mint Leica M3 with a 50mm Summicron for $275. But when I got a $300 windfall, I instead used the money to buy a Nikon F and a pair of Tamron lenses, mainly because with the 135mm f2.8 telephoto lens I could photograph my school's football games.

I did later buy a Leica, a IIIC with a 50mm f2 Summitar lens for $40 at the Bird Road Drive-In flea market, but found it inconvenient to operate. However, I didn't want to give up on the idea of rangefinder photography. In fact, I tried for 40 years (no kidding!) to make myself into a rangefinder shooter because I believed all the many, magazine articles written in praise of the rangefinder approach to photography and because many of the photographers that I most admired shot with rangefinders. 

Along the way, I owned a number of fine cameras: several Leica M3s, a lovely Canon P, and numerous non-interchangeable lens rangefinders.

But I sold my last Leica, a treasured M3 with 50mm Summicron in 2010. The Retina IIc and the Olympus SPn went two years later. They were part of a world in which I do not belong and which I left with some sadness. I still believe all the things I read, but I also came to believe that there is such a thing as a rangefinder temperament, and that I do not have it. I reluctantly faced the reality that I am not and never will be a rangefinder shooter.

In my heart I’m a globe-trotting, Leica-toting, black & white documentarian of the human condition. 

Well, I have indeed done the globe-trotting documentation thing, and some (but not much) of it was with Leicas. But mostly it was done with a bag of Olympus OMs. Because in reality I am an SLR-shooting, zoom lens, color photographer whose style (I flatter myself) probably most resembles that of Sam Abell.

But I have wondered many, many times how my life and career would have been different if I had learned serious photography with a rangefinder system instead of an SLR.

Note: Commenting on my previous post about Leicas, reader and fellow photo-blogger Dennis Mook thewanderinglensman.com/ gently called me to account for not mentioning other fine rangefinder cameras such as Nikon, Contax, and Canon. My only defense is that the majority of rangefinder shooters used Leica, so I used Leica to stand for the whole category in my post. 

About the photo: In March of 1990 the Berlin wall had fallen just four months previously. But in Russia, persecuted evangelical Christians were still meeting secretly for fear of the government. The photograph was made with a Leica M3 and 50mm f2 Summicron lens on fast but grainy 3M 640T film pushed one stop to E.I. 1280.

Beginnings

Carol was taking a test in my history class.

My Yashica TLR was sitting on the corner of my desk.

I reached over and quietly squeezed the shutter.

 One question I’m frequently asked is “How do you get started in professional photography?” 

My standard answer is that you get into photography the way you get into prostitution: You start out doing it for fun, then you do it for your friends, then you wind up doing it for money!

Actually, though, that's not how I started.
 
In the summer of 1968 my second son was born. We were living in Miami at the time, and the only camera I had was an old Kodak Brownie with a sticky shutter. Obviously, something better was needed to make pictures of the new baby. I found a magazine ad from a company offering to give me a brand new Kodak Instamatic camera and five film cartridges for free if I would send the film to their lab for processing.  

Not long after that I bought a photo magazine — the August,1968 issue of Popular Photography. Then more magazines followed, and better cameras. I was hooked. (As for the influence of the magazines, I think it would be fair to say that I would not be a photographer today if it had not been for photo magazines.)

Also in August, 1968, I began a new job: teaching in a private school. The following year, I was asked to be the faculty advisor to the yearbook staff. By that time, I had acquired a Nikon F and two lenses -- a 35mm f2.8, and a 135mm f2.8, both Tamrons. The school also had a Yashica 24 twin-lens reflex donated by the yearbook company. 

Senior Car Wash

Florida Christian School, Miami, Florida

Yashica 24 Twin-Lens Reflex, Plus-X (probably)

  
As it happened, I wound up making all the candid photos for the yearbook and doing the layout as well. I also photographed school activities and sports and sold prints to the students and their parents -- a practice that would probably be frowned upon these days, but it was a private, not a public, school, times were different then, and it was all perfectly acceptable. In the process, I realized that I liked photography better than teaching.

After that year, I moved my family back to the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, which I consider my home town even though I was not born there, and began looking for ways to get into photography full-time. I picked up a few small commercial jobs, but nowhere near enough to make a living, tried my hand at selling life insurance (a disaster), and worked a year at a newspaper doing page layout.  

In the summer of 1972, I followed up a classified ad I found in my paper and applied for a job at Continental Film Productions, a small film and audio-visual production house. I was interviewed, but nothing happened until that fall, when I was called in for a second interview and hired as a trainee/general dogsbody. Over the next four or five years I worked my way up to producer/director/writer before leaving for a year as director of advertising at another organization. On January 1, 1978 I opened my own business in my basement, with the name Photomedia Productions and a $3000 deposit to create a catalog for an electronics company. 

From there, it has been a long, sometimes adventurous, often difficult, always interesting, ride. Truly a life in photography.

Telling Stories

Lights Out!

Cordele Drive-In Theater

U.S. Hwy. 41, Crisp County, Georgia

The thing I most like to do with my photography is tell stories. Early in my career I realized that, for me, photography is above all an art of exploration. Yet, it took a long time for this understanding to come to fruition. For many years I randomly clicked my shutter at anything and everything without any structure or purpose other than I thought it might make a good picture. My professional work was moderately successful, but I did not really know who I was as a photographer.  

In time, I gradually came to realize that in order to be fully engaged I need to be working toward some sort of story, whether a photo essay or a photos-and-words story. The best years of my career were the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I was traveling around the country and internationally, developing and shooting A-V programs. Telling stories in photos and words. This kind of work was even more comprehensive than shooting for a magazine article, because it was like making a movie; telling a complete story, but in still photos rather than motion pictures.

Later, I moved on to creating books, which is also a great vehicle for photography; perhaps even better in some ways because books are more permanent.

I’m not an art photographer, except perhaps incidentally, or perhaps I should say accidentally. I’m always looking for visual puns, of course, but other than that I’m mostly not looking for stand-alone photographs, although I certainly take them when I find them. Some photos, of course, are a complete story in themselves and require neither context or prior knowledge. Most, however, work better when accompanied by captions or other pictures or text, and some are basically meaningless without that context.

Many of my photographs are not strong on their own, but gain strength from their context as part of a story or sequence. The thing I do, though, is photograph the “thereness” of things. Many of the photographs in Georgia: A BackroadsPortrait are like that, just “there.” Presented without art or artifice. A good example is the photo of Katie’s General Store on page 64. It’s just there and that’s just the way it looked. It bears quiet witness to a vanishing way of life in rural Georgia. As Wright Morris might have put it, it's "commonplace." Not a remarkable picture in itself, but stronger because it's part of the sequence of photographs that precede and follow it.

Katie's General Store

GA Hwy. 376

Echols County, Georgia

On the other hand, "Lights Out," the photograph at the head of this post, can stand alone, telling its story without need of a context. But it also adds strength to the sequence in which it appears, a story of time passing, a world fading away.

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

Georgia: A Backroads Portrait  https://www.blurb.com/books/4973943-georgia-a-backroads-portrait