DECEMBER 2013
LETTER TO DAVE
As a pre-school child in the early 1950s, nestled beside my father at one end of the living room couch, I both learned to read and learned to appreciate the emotional subtleties of black & white photography. My father slowly leafed through the latest issue of LIFE magazine, allowing me time to take in the black & white images, point to certain aspects of those images and ask my innocent questions. He would read the photo captions aloud. In this way, he introduced me to the world, a world it took me decades to comprehend.
The pictorials in LIFE set the visual tone for two of my creative endeavors, photography and my freelance editorial cartoons. When I was eight years old, Santa Claus brought me a Roy Rogers box camera. At twelve, my Christmas gift was a Brownie Starflash camera made by Kodak.
Through high school and college, I took no photos. In the Air Force, at the PX at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York, I bought a Minolta SRT 101 and a tripod. Hancock Field was part of the Air Defense Command that monitored the skies of the Arctic Circle, an early warning system in case of a Soviet attack. At Hancock Field, all bachelor officers had to live off base. I lived in a seedy rooming house near Syracuse University. Some of my best photos were taken at an anti-war March in Washington, D.C., in April of 1971.
In 1973 I was living with a college friend, Geoff Fletcher, in an old house in farm country east of Cincinnati. My first big project in my 35-year career as a renegade nomad loner carpenter, was a gut-and-remodel of that house. I traded the Minolta for a Martin guitar like the one Fletch owned. Of all our duets, “Cowgirl in the Sand” was the best.
In 1976, I packed the VW van and headed west to Montana. I put all of the 8x10 glossies and negatives of the anti-war march into a cardboard box, a time capsule, and hid it behind the wall in the attic. When I returned to that house twenty years later, the new owner allowed me to enter and search for my time capsule. It was gone.
I am the family archivist. I have hundreds of black & white photos dating back to the early 1900s. Almost all of my editorial cartoons are made from clips from black & white photo images found in magazines from the 1940s. The camera is a great invention. It gives us the ability to frame and freeze a moment in time, preserve the attending emotions, and contribute to the massive archive that is Americana.
It was in the cabin on the Blackfoot River in Montana where I taught myself writing skills by reading over my head. I read “On Photography” (1977) by Susan Sontag. She spoke of “the ambiance of an instant in time.” My love affair with black & white photography was rekindled, the relationship with light and shadow, with mood, and with silence. When I moved to Seattle in 1985, I commandeered my brother’s Pentax SLR and launched a black & white photo frenzy that culminated in four best-of albums. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
DAVE RESPONDS
I share your fascination with black & white photography. In the early 1970s, while serving our nation as a member of the armed forces in Germany, I spent 300 of my hard earned dollars to purchase a Minolta SRT 101 at the PX in Frankfurt. This instrument was my constant companion in my travels about Europe. Our Army base had a well-equipped photographic dark room with enlargers, everything needed to develop and print black & white images. I lived in that room for long stretches. I can't recall the whole process in that dark, blue-light space, but I do remember clearly the last stage, dropping the exposed paper into the tray filled with the requisite chemicals and watching the image slowing appear, while rubbing gently with the fingers to highlight this part here, a light touch there, a deft modulation, perfection.
In the early spring of 1972, I took the train into Frankfurt to see Leonard Cohen in concert at the Jahrhunderthalle. I recall enjoying the performance as it unfolded in real time, but the experience was far richer as a memory which I enjoyed years later via my black & white photographs. What I recall, more than the performance, was climbing up onto the stage at the conclusion of the concert. I mingled with Leonard Cohen and his group of pretty-lady back-up singers as if I somehow belonged there, no security thereabouts, just myself, a few other hangers-on and Leonard and his entourage.
I had my Minolta and I snapped a few shots. Leonard's attire in that era was dark slacks and a black turtleneck shirt. The picture I nailed, the good one, the keeper, from the many I shot from the edge of the stage and up close, was Leonard's angular, soulful face in profile, highlighted from behind, a somber abstraction paired nicely with his left hand upon the neck of his acoustic guitar. Just the face, his hand, and the neck of the guitar.
I, too, have read Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” To refresh my memory, I searched for a book review and found “A Different Kind of Art” by William H. Gass, The New York Times, December 18, 1977. He called the camera “one of the most promiscuous and sensually primitive of all our gadgets. Unlike a painting, a photograph comes into being all at once, sliced from time like cheese or salami. The camera confers an identity on what it isolates. It permits its subject to speak to the world. The camera is a leveler. The perfect cook, the camera can make anything, in a photograph or on a platter, look good.”
I too loved B & W photography. I set up a darkroom in my apartment in college at Ohio State.