After photography school in California, I was singularly determined on making it as a photographer in New York City. During those years, Brooks Institute was a technical school mainly focused on various forms of commercial photography as opposed to using the medium strictly for artistic purposes. The curriculum stressed black & white and color film and printing processes, lighting techniques, tedious retouching techniques, as well as the use of small and large format film cameras. Photography was different back then - no desktop computers, digital cameras, editing software, or cell phones. I headed up to New York within weeks of graduating from Brooks in early 1977 without a job and nothing but a suitcase of clothes, my portfolio, and some camera equipment. My parents definitely worried about me and wondered what the heck I was thinking.
Fortunately, I got lucky. Friends put me up on their couch while I looked for a job in the dead of winter. I got interviews with some top commercial photographers to include Richard Avedon and Arnold Newman, but they wanted assistants who would work for free. Give me a break - NYC without a paycheck. How was that going to happen? So I lowered my lofty sights a little and got a paying job working as a grunt assistant for Hashi, a very good, Japanese advertising still-life photographer. The work was grueling - six twelve-hour days a week. I got an apartment in Jersey City, NJ and by the time I left my job at Hashi’s studio that summer, I moved to Greenwich Village in the big city down the street from Washington Square Park. I had made enough connections to start working as a freelance assistant to various photographers, mainly specializing in black & white darkroom work.
Eventually, after working freelance into 1978, I took a full-time job as Studio Manager for Mike Harris. Mike was a great guy and better photographer. We worked on a number of national advertising campaigns with a variety of advertising agencies. As part of my employment agreement, he let me use his studio to do my own work when we were not busy. While working there, I found a rent-controlled apartment on First Avenue on the lower East Side. I worked for Mike for a couple of years. I will always be grateful to Mike and Jim Barber (who proceeded me as Mike’s studio manager) for helping me start my own commercial studio. I had my own place until I left New York in 1983.
I shot the black & white photos in this collection between 1978 - 1983. All of the work you see here was done either in Mike Harris Studio or my own studio during that period. The still-life work you see here was all done in my own studio. Commercially, I did some fashion, but mainly still-life for a variety of design firms, advertising agencies, and individual companies. Most of my work was done in color, but I would occasionally shoot black & white film. This work was photographed using large format 4X5 or 8X10 cameras. Set design was important, but the trick to making simple objects look beautiful is, for me, all in the lighting. And in those days, since retouching was so tedious, the setup had to be as clean and perfect as possible - more work on the front end made less work on the back end.
In order to break into the fashion world, aspiring models need a portfolio of photos to sign with an agency or after signing with an agency, to get commercial work. Models and photographers work out a reciprocal arrangement that benefits both. The idea is for both to use great photographs to advance their careers. I did a good bit of this work while a studio manager and after I opened my own studio. The hair and makeup are important - the lighting is more important. But what I consider most important in photographing anyone’s portrait is the eyes. It has been said that the eyes are a window to the soul. The person on the other end of the camera has to be comfortable, relaxed, and trust you to get something genuine and real. Sometimes, it would take multiple rolls of film to get to that point. But you knew when you had it.
On the other hand, fashion work was all about the cloths or jewelry.
My favorite photo shoots were my attempts at, what I considered, creative art. This included photos that told a story or or invoked some feeling or emotion - or sometimes both. All of these photos involving people were shot with either 35mm Nikon or 2-1/4 Hasselblad.
With all of the black & white images above, I not only shot the photo, but developed the film, made and retouched the original prints. Black & white photography is labor intensive when dealing with film, but the range of grey tones you can capture is far superior to simply converting a digital image to black & white. Every photo in this collection was scanned from the original negative or print on a Canon 9000F Mark II Scanner. There is some minimal Photoshop editing to the final digital files.