It seems impossible that a year has passed since I last wrote about Victory Programs and Mother’s Day, but it has, and here I am back at it. Last year, in an attempt to bring a moment of special attention to women living in Victory Program’s shelters, my daughter and I set up a studio in one of their Roxbury shelters and shot as many women as we could over 3 days. My daughter Molly Cranna, an accomplished professional photographer in her own right, served as tech support as we shot tethered to a computer and cranked out disks like mad for all the women who sat for us.
It was such a success that we set out to do it again this year, adding videographer Erwins Cazeau , and putting a little more effort into the fundraising that seemed to be a natural fit with such an enterprise. It goes without saying that life in a shelter can be a demoralizing, soul-crushing existence, and it takes a special person to rise above it and retain dreams and aspirations. These amazing women brought great energy and beautiful children to our little DIY studio. I think you’ll agree from these photographs that we succeeded in showing the beauty and dignity they all possess, despite the difficult circumstances in which they’ve found themselves.
Special thanks to everyone who saw fit to honor their own mothers with a donation to Victory Programs.
All it takes is one trip to Eastern Europe, where you’re often smothered by brutalist architecture, to make you appreciate good architecture and how it can put a little shine in your day-to-day life and business. People usually associate architecture with buildings, but increasingly our environments are being transformed by architects who have turned to making infrastructure beautiful. I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of time in remote areas in my life, but I, like the vast majority of us, live where we need a sea of infrastructure to function. Roads, tunnels, bridges and dams are all vital parts of our lives and our commerce, but historically, designed elegance was not foremost in the minds of the people designing them. Obviously, there are exceptions; The Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, California immediately comes to mind……
But, there’s something very interesting going on across the world. Increasingly, cities are not just embracing design to make their infrastructure attractive, but actually branding themselves around signature structures. No where is this more obvious than in the revolution in bridge design and construction. Having a cable stayed bridge in your city is like living near a mountain, where changing angle, light and weather conditions make it a dynamic object in the landscape. Savvy cities are learning to incorporate these phenomenal structures into their tourism marketing, and to foster civic pride amongst their residents. The Golden State Warriors use the new Bay Bridge in San Francisco in their logo. In the city of Charleston, S.C., the Ravenal Bridge adorns every tourist item imaginable ( Incidentally, both designed by my cousin Donald MacDonald ).
As I’ve gotten more entranced by these structures, and embarked on a project to photograph as many as possible, my attention is constantly being dragged towards pedestrian bridges. The most successful big bridges seem to be those that enable people to interact personally with them. The constant flow of bikes, runners and pedestrians on the Ravenal Bridge is a testament to how important it is in the community. Pedestrian bridges take that interaction to another level. No longer sharing the structure with an endless flow of traffic, people are more likely to make the bridge not just a conveyance, but an actual attraction in of itself. Santiago Calatravas’ Sundial Bridge in Redding, California, connects a park on one side of the Sacramento River to a museum on the other. Beautifully lit at night, it’s a magnet for walkers, runners, dog walkers, and skaters. The Harbor Walk Bridge in San Diego, California, spans light rail tracks and six lanes of traffic, and now enables unfettered access to the waterfront for pedestrians coming from the northern part of the harbor. Also beautifully lit, it begs for, and receives attention, and has played an important role in the transformation of the downtown harbor front….
So, that big Hockney-like montage I wrote about in my last post was just the beginning of a 15 year relationship with this piece of property and the incredible redemption story that is still going on. The first couple of years were taken up with acquiring all the existing buildings and properties, and gradually removing a century or more of industrial detritus. The fact that 3 cities shared the property was complication enough, but the Malden River was under control of the Army Corps of Engineers adding many more layers of permitting and bureaucracy. But, the buildings gradually came down and countless tons of debris were removed. Next came the restoration of the river edge. Hard hat divers worked for hundreds of hours cutting apart a huge sunken barge in almost total underwater darkness. Cranes lifted the massive, cut pieces of steel out of the river, while up and downstream heavy equipment tore out all the invasive species of plants and prepared it for restoration. Around this time Tufts University built a new boathouse on the site and moved their rowing program to the Malden River soon after.
Native vegetation was reintroduced and quickly took hold as Shadley Associates took over the design of the park and started in earnest to implement its creation. Remarkably, the developer’s vision was to build this beautiful park before building his first building. Many times in that period I would drive a big, orange JLG lift around the site on the weekends, rising to scary heights, hanging a tape measure over the side of the cage getting a measurement. This way I could simulate the view from each floor of the building that would eventually be there. Not knowing that business, I thought it was a pretty radical way of marketing; to use location,visuals, and outside amenities to sell a place in a building that wasn’t even built yet.
However, by the time the building was started, the entire park had reached a point of establishment that was down-right remarkable. When the first tenants moved in they were greeted with views of tree-lined pathways, rowers on the river and the giant weeping willow tree that was the only standing survivor of the prior years. I’ve seen many remarkable things there myself over the years; I started a bird list 5 or 6 years ago and am currently at 77 species. A pair of Bald Eagles flew up the river while I was eating lunch there in April. Last winter I saw a Fisher on the ice (with the skyline of Boston in the background). And, of course, at least one coyote is still around. It’s become a place that’s a pleasure to photograph; exceptional morning light, equally good afternoon light, and impeccable and unrelenting groundskeeping…..
Fifteen years ago I rented a Nikon D1x and shot my first digital job. After over 30 years of shooting film it was exhilarating in its immediacy. but tinged with sadness. It was instantly apparent that everything we knew about making photographs was about to change, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to throw my lot in with the new world.
For this job, though, it was the perfect tool and enabled me to pull off a job that would not have been unthinkable on film, but would have been astronomically more difficult and expensive. My client, PreotleLane+Associates, had just been named the developers of a vast brownfield site along the banks of the Malden River a few miles north of Boston. The site was an industrial wasteland containing derelict buildings, contaminated soil, mammoth piles of tires, a sunken barge and a family of coyotes. The plan was to build an incredible park along the river that would be the home of the Tufts University rowing team, an office park, and a handful of large residential buildings. Before the long process began of knocking down buildings, removing the barge and waste, and restoring the riverfront, the developers wanted a “before” picture. Numerous aerial photographs had been taken already, but none really captured the derelict feel of the long straight half mile of the frontage road that would be transformed by the project.
Flummoxed by the problem of capturing all this in one photograph, I turned to David Hockney for inspiration and the D1x for execution. Years before, Hockney had used Polaroid SX-70 film to shoot hundreds of individual photographs before assembling them, like a mosaic, into fabulous finished composites ( he called them joiners). They were angular and quirky. Bits of sky here, the ground there, often incorporating his own feet.
So this is what I set out to do with the D1x. I started at the far left end of the site and shot a dozen frames from my feet to the sky, turning the camera constantly to fill the frame vertically, horizontally and diagonally. I then took ten steps to the right and repeated the process. I continued to do this over the next hour or more, stopping to change memory cards and batteries as needed. It was a cold day in December and battery technology was not what it is now. My greatest fear was that I’d get half way through and run out of replacement batteries. I had 2 or 3 spares with me and I made it to the end, but by this time the light had changed dramatically. Between the changing light and the 4000+ images I had on memory cards I knew I had a lot of computer hours ahead of me to put this whole thing together.
But, with a little tech help I pulled it off, creating a single photograph that was composed of 1000+ individual frames. The creation of the finished print is a story in itself. Each print was 3 ½ x 8 feet, coated with UV protection and mounted on custom-made frames that floated off the wall. Bolted together in place and hung on giant Z clips the final print was 32 feet long. Two years ago we made a 25 foot long version using newer technologies. Archival pigment prints were face mounted on plexiglass, then mounted on aluminum and floated off the wall. This version now hangs in one of the completed office buildings at what is now called River’s Edge.
Once again, the obituary of another creative giant has sent me spinning back through time and into my archives. This week Hermann Zapf, arguably the world’s greatest type designer, died in Germany at the age of 96. Creator of some of the world’s most famous and enduring typefaces, his work is subliminally etched into the minds of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. His Optima face is etched into both the Vietnam memorial in Washington and the 911 memorial in New York. His Palatino face ships with Microsoft Word and his sweeping calligraphic face Zapfino ships with every Mac. He was the reigning giant of a world that few outside the graphic arts industry knew, but his influence is felt everywhere the printed word occurs.
Like most of the world, when I shot my first job for the International Typeface Corporation, I was pretty oblivious to type design. I had been obsessively studying the work of all the great photographers, but had paid scant attention to how their work was being used in print and the type that surrounded them.
That all changed sometime around 1980 when I was hired to photograph Herb Lubalin for the ITC. I can’t remember how the job came my way, but it was a life changer. Herb Lubalin, along with Aaron Burns and Ed Rondthaler, had founded the ITC in 1970, and was himself, a huge presence in the type and graphic design world. He had designed the famous PBS logo that’s still in use, as well as the ground breaking typeface Avant Garde. He had also been responsible for the creation and design of the seminal type and graphic arts magazine known as U+lc (Upper and lower case). I shot him first in the converted fire station that was his studio, and again not long before his death in 1981.
From that point on I became a regular presence at the ITC, shooting their gallery shows and openings, features for U+lc and all manner of special projects. The gallery and the regular shows there became a magnet for all the great talents of the New York graphics world and I met and photographed many of them over the years : The great cartoonist Lou Myers, the illustrators R.O. Blechman and Seymour Chwast, type designers like Ed Benguiat, Matt Carter and Herman Zapf, and even the royal scribe, Donald Jackson. I was young, and these guys were huge in their fields, and a huge influence on me as well. With the influence of the ITC, type for me was no longer just a field of letters that surrounded my photographs, but an integral part of every design I looked at for the next 35 years.
Ironically, Matt Carter now lives in my neighborhood and I run into him regularly. A 2010 MacArthur “genius” Grant winner and a major player in the typography world, he was quoted in the N.Y. Times after Herman Zapf’s death: “Last Thursday, all of us moved up one. That’s my way of saying Herman was on top.”
A few from that period; mostly 1980′s……
Victory Programs is a Boston-based nonprofit that for 40 years has worked with homeless individuals and families. Many of their clients have issues with substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and mental illness. I’ve had many dealings with them over the years; either covering their programs for other agencies and foundations, or working for them directly.
This year, in what I hope will become a yearly tradition, we set out to do something special for all the mothers currently in their shelters and engaged in their programs. Along with my daughter, L.A. based photographer Molly Cranna, we set up a studio in one of their Roxbury shelters and spent 3 days over the Mother’s Day weekend taking portraits of mums and their kids. With me shooting tethered to a laptop, Molly was able to quickly process the raw files, send them wirelessly to another laptop and burn CDs on the spot, enabling each mum to leave with a CD of photographs of her and her children. The staff had rented a bounce house for the back yard and set up barbecues and face painting for the families and made quite an event of the whole affair.
It was a pretty grueling 3 days for Molly and me, but I think you can see from this sample that the event was a major success. These women are struggling to scrape their way back to some sort of normalcy, and living with kids in shelters can be a pretty grim existence. On this day they all looked proud, radiant, and hopeful. I think it was memorable for them, and I know it was an unforgettable experience for my daughter and me.
When I started this blog last year, I hoped that occasionally outside events would send me scurrying to my archives for photographs that had a connection, and hopefully an interesting story to boot. Unfortunately, and I guess, inevitably, sometimes those triggers were obituaries.
Last week we lost a giant of the music world when B.B. King died at the age of 90, an event that instantly transported me back 30 years to a day I spent photographing him. I had just relocated to Boston from New York City, and Tufts University quickly became a solid client. Over the years I would photograph many people for them; Queen Noor of Jordan, Ted Turner, Helmut Kohl, Peter Jennings, Armand Hammer and countless others. But, the first, and most memorable, was B.B. King. I can’t remember who was responsible for bringing him there, but it was a day of master classes, interviews, and generally just being an ambassador for the blues. The master classes were basically him cradling his guitar Lucille on his lap, talking about life and music, and occasionally punctuating some thought with a casual, but very sweet little lick. It was basically just a conversation; sometimes with the audience, sometimes with Lucille.
As I crouched barely 3 feet from him I was taken with his warmth, gentleness and patience with what was a pretty clueless collection of questions from his adoring audience. But at that distance it was hard not to shift attention to his hands. He didn’t have the otherworldly, impossibly long fingers of the 1930′s blues great Robert Johnson, but stubby, thick little numbers. At rest on his knee they didn’t look to me like guitarists hands, but in an instant they could be transformed when he casually moved them to the guitar and tore off some lick.
I took a lot of photographs of him that day, many of them with his head back enjoying some particularly sweet note, but it is this photograph that’s been on my wall for decades that carries the memory of that day. It’s just a hand at rest; it could be anyone’s, but the ring lets you know it’s a hand that can leap to attention in a nanosecond and make amazing music. R.I.P.
Last fall I wrote about producing a book for the Franklin Square House Foundation to celebrate five years of grant making to organizations that support women. These grantees run the gamut from child care centers servicing low income areas, to organizations running domestic violence shelters, drug and alcohol detox programs, emergency shelters and transitional housing for pregnant or parenting young women.
For the sixth year in a row I spent a fair amount of time photographing their grantees, culminating this past week in the foundation’s annual meeting. As I have in the past, I put together a large collection of photographs to run throughout the networking and luncheon portion of the meeting. I put up big 6x8 rear projection screens on either side of the room and projected with beautiful 4500 lumen XGA digital projectors. Each projector was connected to a Mac Powerbook running the show with the Bridge function of Photoshop. The Bridge is a great way to run a slideshow; background color, dissolve rate, speed and sequencing are easily programmed and need no attention once you hit play. There’s a light table function that enables you to see all the photographs in the folder as if they were on a light table, and you can move them around as if you were laying out color slides. As long as you remember to turn off the energy saving functions in system preferences the show will run uninterrupted until you shut it down.
But, the show (and the book before it) would never have happened without the help and cooperation of all the incredible women who let me barge into their lives and photograph them. For most, if not all of them, the place where I’ve found them is just a step up from their nadir. They’ve often come from addiction, violence, disease and homelessness, yet somehow are willing to let me, a stranger, into their lives. These women are all making valiant efforts to improve their situations, and my mission, more than anything else, is to show that spirit. There are so many sad stories out there, but personally I choose to depict the road back rather than the slide to the bottom. I made hundreds of photographs for the foundation this year, here are a few favorites……
A busy fall and the complexities of shooting film in a digital age got in the way of my follow up to the Nikon S2 post. Hope to be better in the future, but in the meantime I want to continue where I left off…
Shooting with the S2 after 12+ years of digital shooting was like working without a net; no meter, no screen on the back to check your progress (or your screw ups). Stripped down, like driving my brother’s 1954 VW, a tin can with no seat belts. Vulnerable as hell, but exciting nonetheless. A little dramatic perhaps, but you get the idea. Just watching your remaining exposures disappearing on the film counter is enough to keep you alert and focus your attention when you shoot.
My 1955 S2 may be the same vintage as my brother’s VW, but it is by no means a tin can. It’s probably a third of the size of my Nikon D4, almost too small for my hands, but possesses an amazing feel of solid, machined precision. The shutter’s not as quiet as my old Leica M4, but it still has a wonderful, solid release.
Like the 54 bug, it attracts attention when you go out with it. I hovered around the front of the stage at The Maverick’s show and fielded a lot of questions from curious cell phone shooters….I think Eddie Perez even noticed it; he kept mugging in my direction. Of course, with my precious 36 exposures I couldn’t just blithely fire away…I didn’t want to be fumblingly changing film just when something good was going on, so I thought a lot about timing and the flow of events. A really interesting exercise…
So, of course, film in 2014 poses different challenges than 15 years ago. Throughout much of my life I always had a darkroom and would simply go downstairs and process my film on my schedule. I can still get B+W processed in 24 hours, but now I have to drive 20 minutes each way to drop off and pick up. I had no plans to make wet prints, so I loaded the negs and scanned them with my Epson V700 Photo scanner. The first thing that jumps at you is how we’ve unknowingly gotten used to no grain in our photographs. As wonderful as digital imagery can be, there are times when its unrelenting perfection makes you long for some good old Tri-X grain. There are all kinds of ways to modify digital images, some which make fairly believable “film” looks, but Tri-X will always be the time machine that can transport me….
That said, a few things from the first 2 rolls…
Mavericks Fan, Indian Ranch, Webster, Mass.
Eddie Perez, Indian Ranch
Mavericks Boots, Indian Ranch
The great Eddie Perez
Molly + Friend, Santa Barbara
I was 14 in the summer of 1965, and Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” shared the top of the charts with The Rolling Stone’s “Satisfaction” and Sonny and Cher’s “I got You Babe.” The album it came off, Highway 61 Revisited transformed Dylan from folkie to rock star overnight. Inspired by the cover, I immediately went out and bought a Triumph motorcycle T shirt and started saving for my own bike…..
This album got played + studied relentlessly for years, and by the time I was 17 and beginning to shoot photographs my attention shifted from the T shirt to the camera hanging in the background. It was a Nikon SP, introduced in 1957 to compete with the Leica M3. It was the last in a line of Nikon rangefinders that had begun in 1948, and quickly became the darling of working photojournalists. It would compete with Leica until 1959 when Nikon introduced their first single lens reflex (SLR), the Nikon F. Leica would go on to introduce the incomparable M4 in 1967 and dominate the rangefinder world from then on.A note on rangefinders….Unlike the now dominant SLR, rangefinders didn’t employ a system of mirrors and prisms to allow you to actually view through the lens. Instead, 2 viewing windows, one on either side of the camera combined to give you a close approximation of the lens position. You superimposed the 2 images to focus, and because you weren’t viewing through the lens, there was no blackout at the moment of exposure. With a flash exposure there was an almost eerie frozen-in-time sensation and you knew immediately whether you had captured the moment or not. Because there was no prism housing and no mirror to flip up out of the way, they were smaller and quieter than an SLR; hence the attraction to photojournalists.
By the time I started shooting in 1968, SLRs were taking over the world and my first camera was a Nikkormat FTN, soon followed by a Nikon FTN and a long line that included F2, F3, F4, and F5 film cameras. Even as I dabbled in Leicas with my first M4 in 1970, I never forgot that SP. There was something magical about that rangefinder dangling casually behind the ultra hipster Dylan. It belonged to Daniel Kramer, the photographer who shot the cover ( as well as Bringing it all Back Home ), and was being inexpertly handled by Bobby Neuwirth, the scene-ster and Dylan confidant and tour manager throughout the 60s and 70s.
So… fast forward 46 years; past hundreds of assignments, dozens of cameras, the advent of digital photography and I’m lusting after film and a Nikon rangefinder. After much searching around, I settled on the SP’s forerunner, a 1955 S2. Loaded up with Tri-X, I took it to The Maverick’s show at Indian Ranch last week, then on to LA to shoot surfers at Manhattan Beach. I love not obsessively looking at a screen after each shot, working slowly and using my precious 36 exposures carefully. Hopefully I’ll have something worthy to post here soon. In the meantime, here’s the little jewel……