r_harveyr_harvey
I've been making and looking at pictures for a very long time.
When I was a kid I met Walt Disney. I took his picture with my Yashica D; I developed the black&white film in the laundry room and printed it with a $10 Federal enlarger (the one that looked like a stack of rusty coffee cans) and a lens scavenged from an ancient Kodak Autographic camera. The snow scene on this page was made a couple of years later with the same equipment.
I got started in photography because I was interested in drawing, which turned into a passion for animation. Of course, animation requires understanding of lenses, lights and exposure. Walt Disney was, as far as I was concerned, the master of all arts.
My mentor (who mainly let me sweep his studio) taught me the processes of the master—his master: William Mortensen. Film grain was okay as long as it was mushy. And it usually was, since the process consisted of under-exposing film by one or two f/stops, then developing it for a half hour or two, in some well-aged, diluted industrial cleaner. My mentor's favored soup was Molencroft Pictone, which had an endorsement by Mathew Brady on the back of the can.
This soup (which really was what photographers called developer) was like antique San Francisco starter yeast: you'd never open a new pack of developer, just keep spiking the old stuff as it faded, and store it in the back of the refrigerator to keep it from dying altogether. The soup was highly-alkaline; you often had to scrape-away the fungus before using it. Somehow this worked, especially in the 1920s (even though they didn't have refrigerators), when everybody made 5x7 contact prints. It didn't work fifty years later, when you had to enlarge 35mm film 5-times just to see what was on the negative.
One evening my mentor invited me to dinner with Frank Lockwood, who as I recall was a collaborator or partner or maybe just a friend of William Mortensen. That's when I should have realized I was prone to anxiety attacks; I was in the throes of one the whole evening. I remember that it was the first time I had tried zucchini, and it was so exotic because it was served with soy sauce. Later, the dinner table was cleared and scrubbed, and I was told to carefully wash my hands, because Mr. Lockwood had brought a box of his photographs to show. His carefully-mounted prints were presented like ancient holy scriptures; and I was never allowed to touch any one of them. I had washed my hands for nothing. The last thing I remember of that evening was that I didn't think the photographs were very good; they were flat and muddy and not very interesting—they all looked like weeds on the side of the road.
Mortensen it seems was the anti-Minor White. One was all '20s Stieglitz-like with long gray-scales and minimalist subjects, while the other was Cartier-Bresson-like with hard edges and stark reality. Let's make it simpler: one was beret and the other was pork-pie.
I was so nervous meeting Mister Disney, that somewhere along I had shuffled the rolls of film. Later, I accidentally underdeveloped my precious film of Mr. Disney. I never got good prints from those negatives. Mr. Disney died a few months later.
I was trying to learn the William Mortensen school of photography, but I didn't know it well enough to trust it or myself; I confused conventional and Mortensen-style processes. Every image from that day had a gray-sameness that nothing could fix.
Then I grew up, dabbled in this 'n that, took some college photography classes, and worked in photo labs.
There's a secret handshake among professional photographers: you have to use the right camera, and you should act (and look) like it doesn't matter. The first time I experienced this was when I was seventeen, and had wangled a full-access pass at a drag race; I was carrying an old Leica, when somebody carrying an Arriflex came up to ask me about lenses. Carrying a beat-up Nikon is cool; having a bright yellow "Nikon" neck strap is not cool.
One '80s summer day I was standing on the rocks at La Jolla, on the San Diego coast. A guy who was all beard and rumpled corduroy, who apparently mistook my Canon F1 for a symbol of evil and excess, approached me—not unlike the way Green-peacenicks approach women who are guilty of wearing fur coats. I half expected him to splash my backside with red paint, but instead he launched into a well-prepared monologue about how he was a writer, and the model of typewriter didn't make him any better or worse, and a pencil or shard of coal wouldn't lessen his creative juices (this was, after all, the pre-PC '80s), and the kind of camera you show-off doesn't matter, since they're all hammers of the same sort, anyway. Fancy cameras do not have "Brightness" buttons (well, they didn't then; there may very well be "Creativity Program Modes" in today's cameras).
Philosophically, emotionally actually, I mostly agreed with him. But in my corner of the world, where lights and shadows are real, the tools you use do affect what you do and how you do it. Hemmingway might have been more productive and less terse, had he been able to easily revise text (one could wish that, anyway).
In my case, the Canon F1 camera body was very sturdy and comfortable; the high-eyepoint viewfinder was easy to use while wearing glasses, and it rotated to make odd angles more accessible; the 50mm macro lens was extremely sharp and wonderful for impromptu close-ups. And I knew then from personal experience that a computer—even an early '80s computer—helped me more than any typewriter. That Canon F1 has paid for itself many times over.
Pop a specialty lens on, such as an extreme wide-angle, and all of a sudden you see things differently (and different things); your tools help you create. I've dreamt of making photographs that embrace the subject and its context; until we had Adobe Photoshop, wide angle was the only way.
I've preferred 35mm field cameras, and 4x5 or larger studio cameras (the only thing more sobering than shooting a whole box of 11x14 Ektachrome in fifteen minutes is trying to develop that expensive film without destroying it all in the process). I like medium-format, but it's too fragile for use in the field.
Process cameras—monsters as big as rooms, using lenses the size of fish bowls and film the size of rolls of butcher paper—were where I lived and worked, while making personal photographs on the side. Process photography was a fulfilling trade... until computers made the whole industry obsolete; I still miss it.
Now digital cameras are revitalizing photography. Film still offers more latitude—when that sort of thing matters. Digital images are smooth and spotless; at their best, they are perfect for many tasks. And they leave more room in the refrigerator.
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R. E. Harvey