by
Thomas F. Morrissey
Circa 1978, when this interview was conducted, Thomas F. Morrissey was recently graduated from A.S.U. with an M.F.A. in ceramics. He studied with Todd Walker, Jerry Uelsmann and Doug Prince at The University of Florida from l974-l976, before beginning his graduate work at Arizona State University. In the fall of 1977, Todd Walker joined the faculty of photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Other students who assisted in the production of this issue include: Ronald Clark, Tom Fertig, Gretchen Greve, Carole Hollander, Ruthe Morand, Jenny Reavis and Mary Virginia Swanson. Special thanks to Dan Brawner.
For Thomas F. Morrissey's current biography, see Between the Lines: Photographs from the National Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, Washington, DC, 1983 - 1999.
This interview was originally published circa 1978 as the feature article in Northlight #9 magazine at the Arizona State University. It included a lithographic print made by Todd Walker especially for the issue. The interview is reprinted as part of the Todd Walker website with the permission of Thomas F. Morrissey.
Q: Let's start off with some biographical information.
A: I was born in Salt Lake City in 1917. My grandparents came from Scotland. Grandfather was a stonecutter and Father was a civil engineer and architect. He worked in the motion picture studios, which was how I wound up there. He designed the first sound stages that were built at Universal Studios. Before that, he worked in the art department as a draughtsman, drawing plans for sets for the first Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney and All Quiet on the Western Front. I got out of high school a couple of years after he died and worked first as a painter outside the studios and then on the basis of that, got a job as a laborer in the paint shop at RKO. I worked there for about a year and a half when I was promoted to apprentice, then served three years apprenticeship as a scenic painter -- not as an artist--that was a different classification. I learned to age and marbleize and work on sets -- whatever had to be done.
U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Harold Todd Walker, pilot.
Copyright Todd Walker 1945.
Used with permission of Melanie Walker.
Betty and I were married after I'd gone through pilot training at Williams Field in Arizona. She married me for my silver wings -- just like in one of those bad movies. We have two children; Kathie, who is now living over in Long Beach, California, and is married to a veterinarian, and Melanie who has been teaching at State University of New York in Albany for three years.
Q: What is she teaching?
A: Photography.
Q: She graduated from Florida State ?
A: Yes. She went to undergraduate school at San Francisco State , then went to Florida State for her MFA.
Q: Wouldn't it have been a more obvious solution for her to have gone to Art Center School and taken classes from you?
A: No, we never really worked together. She was very defensive as a kid, as most children seem to be towards their parents. I didn't ever work with her, other than to offer her a little fatherly advice, which she frequently ignored. She's gone her own direction pretty much. She took photography in high school. the classes were very commercially oriented and it was there that she really got intrigued with photography. I was teaching at Art Center School where she could have gone without paying tuition, but she said she didn't want to get into photography. She went to San Francisco State but after a year up there, she decided that photography was really what she wanted to do and transferred to the Art Department. I think the whole purpose of school is to come out your own person and not emulate somebody else.
Q: The time when you worked at RKO ... when did photography start coming into its own for you? Was that going back to the wet plates!?
A: No, not quite that far. Actually, photography had been invented quite a while before I started to do it. My father was an architectural draughtsman working for the motion picture studios. It was important to have records, so he used to go around to the buildings and take pictures of them. He used a 9 x 12 centimeter plate camera--not a wet plate--and he used to process the film himself, first plates and then film packs. When I was six or seven, he had a red light in the bathroom and I used to go to the bathroom a lot because I wondered what was going on in there. That was my first experience with photography.
I had a box camera when I was twelve which I used mostly to take pictures of all the airplanes I saw. There was a field near where we lived in Glendale, California, where all the stunt pilots worked. They had parachute jumps and acro- batic performances every weekend. It was one of the most active aviation areas in the world at that time. On the West Coast, it was THE place. I remember hearing about Lindbergh flying the Atlantic. That really turned me on! I was ten the year he did that and I'd seen my first airplane just before that.
From that, I got interested in radio, got a license and an amateur radio station when I was thirteen and kept doing that until I went in the Army. That coincided with photography because part of my photography initially had to do with taking pictures of the tubes and the coils. I wanted prints bigger than those the box camera made. About the time I was working at the RKO studio, Popular Photography published its first issue. I can remember the first day Life magazine came out. I went into the paint shop and everybody was huddled around a table. There were forty people looking at the magazine as somebody turned the pages. It was that much of an innovation. Then amateur photography magazines started to come out -- before, there had been Camera Craft and American Photography which were verv salonish and even though I'd seen those magazines, that kind of work didn't intrigue me. Life magazine was part of what sparked my interest in photography, besides working in the studios, helping to make the films.
In one of the early issues of Popular Photography there was plan of how to build an enlarger, so I took the plate back camera my father had used (every negative that ever came cut of that thing had light leaks all around the edge!), and decided to make an enlarger out of it, made prints up to about 5 x 7 inches. The exposure used to be half an hour with a photo-flood and the negatives would come out all buckled. After I'd done that for about a year, I discovered that there was enlarging paper, which was a lot faster. Before, I had used contact paper. That was what my father had bought so that was what I bought. I didn't know there was anything else and the magazines weren't very explicit about some of those things.
By 1938 it had gone somewhat further. I'd built an enlarger that worked and was making some fairly good prints. Then at the studio, they started a camera club. Ernie Bachrach , who was head of the still department at RKO used to come and talk-- he was part of the club. I was working at night, but I'd sneak away from the set, change my clothes, go to the meeting, come back and change my clothes and go back to work.
As an apprentice, I was always being sent on weird errands; if there was a set somewhere that needed a little touch up, they would send the apprentice out to do just that. The foreman at that time was a man who had worked at 20th Century Fox in special effects and felt that the apprentice should know all the special methods. He had been a very good "ager" so he wanted me to learn those techniques as well as spraying, all of which paid more money. As soon as you picked up a spray gun you got almost double the pay of a brush painter. It was the same way with marbleizing and graining.
I had to sort out the oil paint, the shellac and the water color into different barrels to be saved and reused. There was a big work light right over the top where I did this and I began to fool around to see what would happen if I mixed these colors together. That got to be a lot of fun, at least it kept me from going crazy. Well, one night when we were working on a set, the foreman, the man who normally matched the colors, was sick. We ran out of paint on the set, so I had to go down and mix up five gallons of color to match. I ran down and came back in about twenty minutes with it all mixed. That was quick for when I didn't have anything to do. I would mix these things up just to see what they would do. All of that led to understanding a little bit about color and, as a result, I became the color matcher for the night shift, even though I was still an apprentice.
While the camera club was active, I used to come in early and bug Ernie Bachrach , telling him, "The photographs you do are so much better quality than mine, what's wrong with my developer?" So he'd give me a developer formula and I'd go try it. After about a month of new formulae I realized that he was giving me one formula after another out of the Kodak book. I was just going through the list; I'd mixed about fifteen different formulas and tried them out but nothing seemed to get any better. Still, all that helped me to build a background in chemistry and how the film worked. Eventually, the photographs started getting better. I was in a couple of the inter-studio salons, in one of which was a man named Kosti-Ruohomaa who later on became a very well-known photographer in the East. He was at Disney working as one of the animators and his work was really quite different from the others, most of whom did just stock portraits. His work really fascinated me.
About the end of 1938, U.S. Camera published the first issue and in that, I saw my first Weston prints. There was also an article in it by Will Connell who was teaching at Art Center School . There was also an advertisement for the school, so I went down to see what it was like. By that time, I'd decided to give up working at the studios, because, as a painter, I'd look around and all the other guys were thirty or thirty-five and dying of inhaling the paint or drinking too much, so I figured I didn't want to do that for long. I was beginning to realize that I had another year of apprenticeship and then I'd be like all the rest of the painters, working one or two days a week and moving from studio to studio. Then, I'd have to wait for somebody to die before I could move up the ladder. That's probably why they all died young: worrying.
I began to notice that all the still photographers on the sets really had a pretty soft life; they'd go out there and sit with the 8 x 10 inch camera and watch all the girls. Then as soon as a scene was finished, the still photographers would jump up, slap in a holder and say, "Hold it!" Everybody'd freeze in position and they'd shoot a couple of stills for promotion. I spoke to some of these people on the sets who all seemed to be more intelligent than most of the painters I was working with. I needed to know a couple of things. I didn't have the faintest idea what art was and I felt I needed to know more chemistry. I went to Glendale Junior College and took an art history course, a drawing course, a chemistry course and a photography course.
Q: Did you already have a degree at the time?
A: No, I'd only graduated from high school. The photography class was taught by a physicist. There were two of us in the class who knew which end of the camera to point at something, so he decided that the thing for us to learn was sensitometry. He'd built a sensitometer on which the two of us spent the first semester trying to figure out the speed of SuperX film by exposing the film and reading it on the sensitometer, then processing it under special conditions and making graphs of that. I didn't think that was the kind of photography I wanted to do. They had a Kodak Out-of-Focus (Auto-Focus) enlarger, but I could make better prints on the ne I had at home. We figures out that the film was pretty close to what Eastman said it was so we got A's.
Then I took the chemistry class and the drawing class. In the drawing class, we were supposed to do a rendering of a rubber plant of the teacher's, so we spent the whole semester redrawing this rubber plant. I got pretty good at rubber plants, but that's about as far as my drawing went.
That was in the spring of 1939. In the meantime I went down and checked out the Art Center School . For full-time classes, the tuition was something like $300 a year, which was astronomical at that time; since I was supporting my mother and sister, there was no way I could enroll. But they did have a six-week summer course for about $100, which was supposed to be a brush-up course for people who were in the field. I went down and talked to them and looked around at the photographs that were on the walls. I went home, made some similar pictures, took them in all nicely mounted up and said I was from RKO Studios and I wanted to brush up on my photography. I got in the class. I took the six-week summer class with a man named Eddie Kaminski who taught "creative" photography, which consisted of... well he took us to the beach and we photographed rocks and things like that, which was really creative compared to some of the other classes that had somebody direct all these models in the swimming pool and then when somebody'd say "now!" we'd all shoot at once. So whoever was lucky enough to be in the best position got the best picture. Sometimes, the instructor would set up the camera and we'd put in the holder. He would do all the directing and we'd just pop the button, and the critiques had to do with how good your technical quality was and how creative you were at that moment. I did that for six weeks, which were really very good -- I mean I learned an awful lot. Then I went one day a week. I think I was the only part-time student they'd ever had in photography. One of the instructors, Frank Judson, who thought I showed some promise, interceded for me. I went one day a week to a layout and lettering class which left me enough time to earn a living.
I did that for a year, then the next year -- in September of l940, I went into Kaminski's class. He really got me fired up because he talked about Braque and Picasso and other people I'd never heard of. All the art I'd ever seen in my life was in magazines like Ladies' Home Journal or on the covers of Saturday Evening Post. Sometimes, the assignments had to do with mutilating the film in some way, cutting it up or fooling around with it, to do collage or solarization to produce surrealistic effects. That was an eye-opening time for me and was probably the most important influence on my work.
In the spring of l94l I decided either I had to go to school full time, which meant I would have to get a scholarship to pay for my schooling and still work nights to support my family, or figure out some way to get a job doing photography. I applied for the scholarship but was not one of the finalists, so I left the school.
I decided that in order to have a portfolio so I could get a job, I needed to do an industrial book, which was one of the assignments most everybody did. I went to the head of the miniature department at RKO, who was a pretty good friend of mine. He was the foreman for the night shift and had done the actual work on all the pieces for King Kong -- they were all around his office. I told him I wanted to do a series of photographs of some industrial business. He was good friends with the manager of the Good Humor Ice Cream Company, which consisted of one small building on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. I went up to see him and explained what I wanted to do. I said, "I'll give you a book and make a book for myself." Then I had to talk to the president of the company who said, "Sure, go ahead!" not knowing what he was going to get -- probably thought I was going to hand him a bunch of little snapshots. I spent three weeks making the photographs and was paid 200 free Good Humor Sticks.
Q: What were you doing for money?
A: I was still working at the studio, but I was really broke; this was in 1941. The war broke out in Europe and the draft was being initiated, so there was pressure from every direction. I'd alloted myself four boxes of film -- that was about 48 sheets, and two 50-sheet boxes of 11 x l4 inch paper. Out of that, I planned to make 40 photographs for this book, then print two books -- I figured they would be about 40 pages apiece.
I did this elegant layout where all the photographs were mounted back-to-back and plastic bound to make it a book. I went to a printer and conned him into setting the type and pulling the proofs for me so I could photograph it. It was a professional operation; a real 11 x l4 inch book. When I gave the second copy of the book to the president of Good Humor, he nearly fell off his chair. I planned to use my copy of the book to go around and try to get jobs. I still have it.
The next day after I gave him the book, he called me up and said he had talked to some people and that I would be getting some telephone calls. One of them was from the Popsicle Company. The art director for the company in New York who happened to be in L.A. , called and asked me to come over for an interview. He offered me the job of art director for L.A. I said, "I'm not an art director, I'm a photographer." The second call was from a man named Shirley Burden from Tradefilms, Inc.
Shirl and two friends of his had started the film company. They were making training films for the aircraft industry in Los Angeles because there was a sudden need for airplanes. So I was hired on a contract basis with a good friend of mine from Art Center School. We were hired to do 60 photographs of how to rivet with flush rivets on the wing of an airplane. They gave us a script, a pile of film and a pile of paper -- I'd never seen so many photographic materials together in all my life. I think they paid us each $100 for the job, and it only took us a month and a half to do it. By then it was 1941, around November. They really liked the film. There were some others they were going to have us do, but just as we were getting ready to start the second film, December 7th happened.
Everybody else in the company was from back East and immediately scattered to go to their draft boards, leaving me along in L.A. Since I was the sole supporter of my mother and sister, I was the head of the family so I was classified 3-A instead of 1-A which meant I was exempt for a while. Tradefilms then asked me if I wanted to do more of these films and I said yes. It was hard working for the studio at night and Tradefilms during the day. I went to work for Tradefilms in February of 1942 as a photographer, turned in my union card, and said good-bye to the studio.
We got a contract to do films on the P-38. We hired Elmer Byer, who had been the cinematographer on Hell's Angels in the late 1920's or early 30's. He went up with his assistant with a l6mm camera and shot our stuff, but it was unusable because he didn't know what to do with a l6mm or even how to run the camera. So Shirl and I wound up doing the cinematography -- Burden most of it. In the process, I rode piggyback in a P-38 with one of the test pilots from Lockheed and flew along the beach at Malibu at 400 miles per hour, which was pretty fast in those days, and chandelled up and out, scaring all the people on the beach, doing a half roll and a vertical climb. This got me excited about flying and later led to my decision to become a pilot.
With the help of the engineers, we figured out how to fasten the camera to the tail of our plane and I had the button in my hand so whenever things looked right, I would hit the button. We worked on 17 or 18 of these projects. By that time, the company was very active -- we had an animation group and there were several other photographers. I was the head still photographer at that point and hired some other people from Art Center.
U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Todd Walker, circa 1944.
Copyright Todd Walker 1945.
Used with permission of Melanie Walker.
By 1943, because of the war, I had to get my deferment checked
every three months, which I didn't bother to do because I didn't
have the time, so I got drafted. I could probably have stayed
out of the service for the whole war, but I was getting a guilty
conscience like most everybody else at that time. Just before
I went in, I was offered a direct commission in the Navy. In
the meantime I got drafted and since you couldn't change from
service to service, I went in as a draftee and was assigned to
basic training in the technical training command of the air corps. I was assigned as a lab man because of what I had
been doing. They said they could train photographers in
six weeks, but it takes a long time to train a lab man,
so we'll make you that. I signed up for cadets because I
didn't think I wanted to spend the war in a darkroom. I
passed the exams, went through college training detachment
and then into the army air corps as a cadet and later became
an instructor in Arizona. We couldn't have cameras with us
at all, so I didn't do any photography for about two and a
half years.
Todd Walker, circa 1944.
Copyright Todd Walker 1945.
Used with permission of Melanie Walker.
When I was finally stationed at Luke Field in Phoenix, they had more pilots than they knew what to do with because by then the war was just about over. I heard that they were looking for somebody to do the darkroom work in the portrait studio on the base. I transferred and got off the detail that I had, which was to be in charge of 275 German prisoners of war while they were keeping the lawns cut. I shot weddings and all kinds of good things like that. They had several people doing the printing and it would take them all day to do the prints but I could do them all in half an hour because I was a pretty good printer by then. It was a good job for me because I got to use the camera a little bit and start fooling around, re-establishing my technique.
Self Portrait in the Studio, 1947.
Copyright Todd Walker 1947.
Used with permission of Melanie Walker.
I got out of the Army in October of '45 with separation pay. Betty was pregnant and Kathie was born in December. I gave myself three months to build up a portfolio of some kind, then got a business license in February of '46 and started doing whatever I could find. I did baby pictures and passport pictures, copy shots and all sorts of things -- anything to survive. The first couple of years were really very bad -- I painted houses in between times. But by 1948 I started doing architectural photographs for the L.A. Times Home Section which didn't pay a lot, but it was a continuing thing and a fairly steady income.
I was still pounding the advertising agencies and doing a few
jobs occasionally--not very lucrative, local accounts and
things, but I was starting to build up a reputation there.
By about 1951, I was starting to do annual reports and small
advertisements, so I was no longer doing the Home Section.
That gradually kept developing and by 1953 I was doing lots
of different things--fashion work for one place, still life for
another and industrial photography for another. Then all of a
sudden, in the Art Director's Show, I not only got in the show,
but because I was doing so many different things, I was given
several awards.
Self-Portrait by Todd Walker, 1953.
Copyright Todd Walker 1953. Used with permission of Melanie Walker.
From then on, I began to do higher and higher quality work for
better and better pay. In '54 I did the Mobilgas Economy Run
coverage, which was done in a very journalistic kind of way --
they were all fake photographs, I mean I took out these cars
and the people, posed everything and made it look like a
journalistic operation. That attracted a certain amount of
attention in the automobile field, so a couple of art directors that I had worked with were hired by Campbell-Ewald, the Cheverolet Agency in Detroit. They were supposed to develop future campaigns for Chevrolet, some of which involved
photography. Photography was not very widely used in the car
field -- illustrations were a great part of the advertising at
that point. I did some experimental things for them, just
sort of test shots which were never used for anything, but
I was paid fairly well for it. Then in '55 Chevrolet had
a whispering campaign where we did photographs of a couple --
2 guys or 2 gals or a guy and a gal -- each one a provocative
photograph with a caption. In one, the guy is holding his
coat open, saying, "In a 50th of a second I'll show you my
secret smuggled pictures of the new 1955 Chevrolet." Those
ran as a teaser campaign before they introduced the car. They
were picked up everywhere. The New York Daily News ran a whole
series similar to them, and another photographer got awards in
the New York Art Director's Show two years later for doing pictures which were direct take-offs from my Chevy stuff. The following year, Chevrolet did another campaign where they wanted
to blur the cars and since I'd done things like that, they hired me.
Q: What was Betty doing all this time?
A: She was raising kids, mostly, up until 1953. Melanie was born in 1949. Betty was busy with that until about the time things started to cook for me. She came over to the studio one day while I was doing a newspaper advertisement for Sunkist Oranges. It involved Don Wilson, the announcer on the Jack Benny Show, in a posed situation as if he were in a radio broadcast room. We needed a microphone and I couldn't find anyplace to rent one. Wilson was coming in two hours and we had to pay him $275 an hour besides renting all the props. The budget was to the point where we had to do it all in an hour. When Betty showed up, I told her our situation and she sat down and called every store in the county. Finally, she called somebody at CBS and they said, "Sure, we'll loan you a microphone." So she went over and got it and from then on, she began to chase all the props, cook them up sometimes, and doing things to help like interviewing the models, casing locations, and doing the billing. A lot of the work involved findmg props, like the time we rented an elephant for two hours or when we had to find a Venetian gondola and get it to Ballona Creek so we could take photographs of a Venetian situation in L.A.
Then the Chevy thing started to go because after I did the teaser campaign for them they decided to try a woman's campaign with color photographs. I'd never worked outside with an 8 x 10 inch camera and color film. I'd done still-life in the studio and occasionally I'd shot outdoors in color, but never anything as complex as that. They wanted me to meet the art director in San Francisco and we were going to shoot five ads in a week. I met him there, and brought every piece of equipment I'd ever owned along with me in the back of my station wagon, along with a friend of mine as an assistant.
When we got there, we went into the bar to talk to the art director about what we were going to do and he said, "Well, you just do whatever you want." I said, "You know, I'm not sure that I know what to do with all these reflectors and things." He said, "Why don't you photograph the car the way you think it ought to be photographed?"
We did five ads and every one of them was well received. The first one was done at dawn. We spent two days trying to find a place that looked like a commuter station, they have those in the East but they just don't have them out West. We found one in Atherton, California--a little green shed. There were about 400 people there and I couldn't get releases from all those individuals, so I just made a long exposure so everybody blurred except the models who were holding still. That was the first outside color photograph I ever did with an 8 x 10 inch camera. Then we did an ad that same evening on top of California Street with all the signals red and one car in the middle -- I blocked the traffic all over San Francisco and messed up the traffic for two days!
Q: Did you get permits to do all this?
A: Sure, we just went and talked to the police department. Those two ads were done in one day, then there were three others, all of which were quite successful. That was about the first time Chevrolet had ever used photographs for magazine ads. I did a lot more work for Chevrolet, mainly brochures. I was doing a lot of other work as well, all kinds of things for Hunt Foods and a lot of big accounts -- aircraft companies, steel companies -- you name it. At that time, I was probably the only photographer in Los Angeles who was known in New York as an advertising photographer. There were other people doing journalistic photography in L.A. but I think I was probably one of the few who were hired by a New York agency to work in California.
At that point, I had art directors coming from all over -- St. Louis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York -- they would come out to do things related to television and I would do the space ads for them while they were there. In 1959, I did the entire consumer advertising for Chevrolet, with the exception of one photograph that was done in Detroit. Then I began to feel really backed into a corner; I was a car photographer and nothing else. I'd been working for Ford, Chevrolet, Chrysler and Plymouth. So as soon as the car pressure was off for the year, I started to pound the other agencies. I wouldn't show them any of the car photographs. After you've photographed a car ten different ways, they all begin to look pretty much the same, so I tried to get into something else. It was hard, but by 1964, I was only doing maybe one major car advertisement a year while the rest of my work was in still life and other photography.
In 1964, I was involved with a project for a film company that had undertaken to build the sets in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for a film called Night of the Iguana. After the film was completed, they were going to try to build the sets into an American club. They wanted someone to go down and make photographs of the place. They didn't have too much money but they said they would pay my way down there and I could stay for three weeks. The director, knowing my interest in Mexico, said there was a village nearby and the only access to it was by boat, but if I wanted to photograph Mexico, this would be one way to find out what it was really like. I bit hook, line and sinker and went down and spent a day and a half doing stuff for them and then went into the village to talk to the people. When I told them I was a photographer and would like to photograph them, they invited me to take a few pictures. There was still a lot of resistance because all they knew were tourists with cameras. They had, six months before, been confronted with a film company shooting photographs in every direction, walking into their homes and taking pictures, so they weren't anxious to let that happen again.
I did what I could and came back to the U.S., did some other jobs, processed the film and made some prints. Then I hopped on an airplane and flew down there and gave them the prints. Then everybody in the village was my friend, so I spent about ten days doing photography and later went back for vacation with Melanie and Betty. Kathie, my elder daughter had gone down to the University of Mexico to study language during the summer, so when her classes were over, she joined us at the village. We had taken a tape recorder and recorded what the villagers had to say about the photos. Kathie helped me with that part and did a lot of the translating later. This was one of my major projects, but was never published.
It was a really good change though, because it was one of the first times that I had gone and photographed something without changing it. I didn't direct the people. It was a pretty good set of pictures and someday I'll do something with them. I made about 3,000 exposures in 14 or 15 days of shooting.
About that same time the influence of a man I had known for many years became important. He was in a title department of one of the film companies and had always been interested in printing, had a press and was always trying to con me into buying one so I could print funny business cards. Ken Shimer died in 1963 and all this equipment he had collected, since he had no heirs, went to the bank and was sold to a second~hand store. Betty tracked it down and found the press, type cases, etc. It was Fathers' Day of 1964 that Betty gave me all that stuff. Also, at that time, I was writing all the things for the book I hoped to do on the Mexican village I decided at that point to start setting type to see how the text would look in a type and made a lay-out. That was one of my first projects with the press. As a kid, I remembered hearing about a process called "collotype photogelatin." I tracked down everything I could find on the process and it turned out to be an emulsion on glass with a thick layer of gelatin poured over that. It is dried and sensitized with dichromate. After it is exposed, a print can be taken from it like a litho plate.
So I tried it. The first 100 experiments didn't work well but there was some kind of an image and I was just stubborn enough that I worked on it until I finally got it under some control. I started to do a series of photographs of a shack in the desert that I had done before in 1955 and had shown to Edward Weston who said, "I always wanted to photograph a place like that but I never had the time." I always thought that a man like Weston would be able to do what he wanted, but when he said that to me I realized that everyone has the same frustrations I had. So I did these photographs in '55 and they were almost published in the ASMP (American Society of Magazine Photographers) Annual , which came out twice in ten years. Several places like Look magazine held onto it for almost a year and kept writing me letters telling me they wanted to use them but they couldn't justify that many photographs without some specific text to go with it. It was never published so I decided to print it myself. By collotype, I started to do this and after working on it for about six months, I had about six images with 100 copies each. When I would do 10 prints, the plate would break down and I'd have to make another one.
Q: Wasn't that basically a gum-bichromate process?
A: Yes, except that it is printed with greasy ink and pigment. But it's a transfer process. It's like lithography only it's a photographic process. After four months of working on it, I was ready to throw the whole thing in the trash, but I decided, well, maybe I can make a little book, so I used some nudes that I'd done and took eight of Shakespeare's sonnets and eight of those photographs and made the book. That took me about three months. I printed the type by letter press on this little machine, did the collotype images by hand with a brayer, ending up with about 44 copies. Everybody responded to it and I sold most of those through a bookstore in L.A. Then I started to do some other things.
I did the desert story in 100 copies by collotype and then, all of a sudden, I realized that, as a reproduction process, it was hard to work with, although sometimes the images were pretty interesting. I started fooling around a little and found I could use colored ink as well and could print the same image slightly differently while getting different qualities by inking with two colors of ink. Then I got to thinking that if I can't do collotype as a reproduction process, then I should find out about offset lithography. I read books and with $1,000 of the $8,000 I got from doing a job for Ford, I bought an offset press. I tried to get an instruction manual but couldn't find one so I just figured out how to use it.
I was still doing the advertising work but less and less of my energy was going there now that I had printing as a hobby. I kept getting students from Art Center School, where I'd gone, bringing me portfolios. I used to go and talk to Will Connell's classes. Even though he was very ill, he'd have the classes at home and he'd ask people to come out to talk to his journalism or his advanced class. He would give me a bottle of whiskey (and he would have one there) and we would sit and drink and talk to the students about what they were doing. It was a pretty good exchange. So, when some of these students got their portfolios together, they'd come by the studio and show them to me. I felt the work was pretty mediocre, for the most part. The school had changed a lot in the 25 years since I had been there. It had been a far-out school and now it was very commercial.
I was about to ask them if I could teach part time, when they called me and asked me. I asked, "What do you want me to teach?" They said, "Do whatever you want to do." I started teaching and it got to be pretty interesting because I felt that the students were so thoroughly versed in technique that it was hard to get them to deal with any kind of idea. I tried to teach some of that in the class. That was when I got fired up about teaching, because I began to realize that I wasn't doing a lot of those things myself. As a way to evaluate my own work and figure out what was happening with me, I went back through all my personal negatives that I could find, things I'd done for myself, and began to make good prints of those, so I had a portfolio of my own work, separate from the commercial work of which I had a whole roomful. From twenty-five years back, I found thirty prints that I thought were worth reprinting, which was sort of depressing. I decided to start changing some things and the way to do that was to get away from making the world according to some literary notion or preconceived idea, but just making photographs of whatever asked me to photograph it. So, I used a view camera and worked only in my backyard, photographing leaves or bits of things when the light was right.
Q: Well, where did you look? You mean anything that would be interesting to you?
A: No, something that was asking me to photograph it. Over a period of about a year, I got fifteen or twenty photographs. It had to do with seeing something and then trying to make that be a photograph because it needed to be a photograph. Through the years, I had done work with models in various ways. But they'd always been pretty "arty', too pretty. It had to do with color and gestures. But the ones I had used for the little sonnets book were quite different. They were black and white. Some of those had been from color negatives. Most of what I had done with models until then sort of related to pin-up and fashion or dance. Often the people I'd photograph were dancers.
I then decided I was going to take a chance so I built a structure at home, because I didn't want to work at the studio. There I had electronic flash and any light I wanted and a shooting stage of 25 x 30 feet, pure white with a coved background. At home, I built four flats of just wood with muslin stretched over them, like the things we used to build for the motion picture studios. There was a window built in the side that I could light through. I used only one light and when a person walked in, I didn't say a word. I just started shooting whatever they did. The first session was with a woman who had never been photographed before. She went into this space and in about two hours, I'd shot about twenty rolls of film. I had rarely used 35mm before because most of the jobs involved something that had to be more precise. This was a new experience for me. Out of such experiments, a few things started to work. I did this kind of thing every three to four months for the next three or four years. In fact, I'm still doing it. I shoot a lot each time but I don't get that much to print. I began making gum prints, carbon prints and blue prints, almost as a reaction against my commercial work.
Q: What is a carbon print?
A: A carbon print is a very thick layer of gelatin with pigment in it, unsensitized and, just before you're ready to work it, you sensitize it by soaking it in dichromate, then expose it under a negative and squeegee a sized piece of paper together with that. While the gelatin surface is hardening from the top in, it stands for about twenty minutes then is placed in a tray of hot water. The image is adhered to this second piece of gelatinized paper. Wash away all the unhardened stuff, then throw away the original piece of paper and a beautiful print will come out. It's related to photogravure and gum but that tissue hasn't been made for a long time. I began to fool with all those other processes and all of a sudden, I realized that the collotype had indicated that I could use arbitrary color. I started by trying to make gum prints, attempting to use that process as a means to work from transparencies and make color prints, then realizing that color could be arbitrary color from the black and white negatives. All these things were boiling now. In those two or three years, it was like I rediscovered photography.
In 1968, I began doing solarized prints. All along, I'd done those as prints or negatives. Every time I had a piece of film left over, I'd try to solarize it and see if it worked. Around 1950, I'd done some print solarizing, but it seemed kind of dumb. In those days I felt it had to be a really perfect print. This color thing happened when you fogged the paper. I looked at those and said, "Very interesting," and stacked them in the bottom drawer. In 1968, I got to thinking about them in relation to some nudes I'd been doing, so one day I got some of these negatives out and started to fool with it. This color began to happen. I had done this before in Kaminski's class at Art Center. Wynn Bullock did that too. I had experimented with taking color negatives and then breaking them down into Kodaliths and dying those images, then reassembling them to do sort of what I do now. Because of the fact that these photographs were made in a non-recognizable structure, you couldn't define the space. It was modified by the solarization, and began to do all sorts of things -- spacial things, things coming forward which shouldn't. I had this figure in a strange space and it was pretty intriguing. They were like nothing I'd ever seen or done before. I started to do a whole pile of those in '68. I got a bunch of them together and showed them to Fichter and Heinecken.
Heinecken put together a show called "Contemporary Photography" in 1968 at UCLA and included two or three of my gumprints in that show. Scott Hyde was in the show and it was the first time I'd ever seen any one else work with a press. The show with Heinecken was the first time I had ever shown anything other than commercial work. By December 31, 1969, I said, "To hell with doing commercial photography, it's time I did my own work!" I just shut the door of the studio. I was working on two or three annual reports, a couple of which carried over into the end of February of 1970, but I didn't take any new jobs.
Q: That must have been quite a big decision.
A: It was. At that point, I was teaching part-time one day a week at Art Center School and teaching an evening extension class at UCLA. Bob Brown and Ed Sievers at San Fernando State said there was going to be a 2/3rd time position opening at San Fernando Valley State College in February. They were going to try to get me into that but they weren't sure if they could because I didn't have a degree. At L.A. State, photography was in the industrial arts area. They originally wanted me to teach a color class full time but couldn't because I didn't have a degree. They even wanted me to take tests so I could have some kind of credit towards a degree but I was too busy with my own work to do that.
Robert Fichter at UCLA had studied with Jerry Uelsmann and was from Florida. So the 4th or 5th of January, five days after I had closed the studio, Fichter called and said, "You're going to get a telephone call in half an hour from Jerry Uelsmann." I had met him and seen his work just a year before. Jerry had a faculty grant for the year from the University of Florida and was going to take the whole year off and wanted me to come down to take his place. I said, "I can't do that. I've got this house and a lot of other things going on." He said, "Don't worry about that. My family has a house in Gainesville and I'll live in your house while you live in mine." So when Jerry called me, I said, "Yes."
The job also came through at Valley State. I was then teaching at three places: at Art Center two mornings a week; at Valley State two afternoons a week and at UCLA one evening e week. I decided to go to Florida although it meant I couldn't take my offset press I used in the work I was doing then. I had made two portfolios and a color series that was really a loose kind of nonlinear group. I figured I'd learn how to do silkscreen because it seemed related. I got some fabrics and inks and Betty and I rented a van and drove it to Florida. That was a big chance for me. It was a complete break with the studio. There was no chance I was going to go back to advertising again.
Q: Wasn't 3,000 miles a long ways to go for a one-year position?
A: Yes, but at that moment, I was ready for a change. The distance was an assurance that there would be a clean break from my previous career. I forgot about that very soon for I was exposed to Jerry Uelsmann and Doug Prince, and in printmaking, to Ken Kerslake. Ken is using photographic images, working in intaglio. I began teaching a photo-printmaking class, silkscreen, etc. We acquired a process camera. The contact with the ideas of the printmaker have greatly altered my attitudes toward photography and how each discipline deals with an image.
Photographers are generally very self-conscious when they start to speak about technique because that's some other area that has to do with maybe commercial photography. Photographers are supposed to be immune to that but printmakers aren't. Printmakers are always talking about how you make an aquatint or how you scrape a plate. They're used to talking about technical things. So, I have begun to think photography is doing itself a disservice by ignoring its technical aspects. Everybody's technique is supposed to come full-blown out of his head after his first week and a half of photography and that ain't the way it is. You've got to learn the technique of whatever you're working with in order to be successful at whatever you do. But printmakers are not self-conscious about that. I feel one of the reasons I've been able to do whatever I did has to do with the fact that I had all those commercial years of making the process do what I wanted it to do. If you learn that and still free your mind so that you can do what you want, then the whole thing is wide open. That's been important to me in teaching, even though I don't emphasize technique that much.
Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures. Sometimes they're not really significant pictures, but if you have some idea where that process can go or what you can do with it, then there's much more you can do, if you're not inhibited.
Q: Apparently you're not, but why build your own enlarger instead of buying a commercial one?
A: I build my first one in 1940 when I was still in Art Center School because I couldn't affort to buy one. After I built it and after I used one that I could afford, I found out that mine was better. I could do things on that more easily.
Q: Yours was specialized for you?
A: Yes, I built things into it that had to do with what I wanted to do. And part of my value in the commercial world was being as flexible as possible. Initially, I started out doing architectural work and couldn't always point the camera right. I had to make those corrections in the darkroom on my enlarger.
Q: You mean you could get the correct parallex on your enlarger like you can on an 8 x 10 inch view camera?
A: Well, not the same, but near to it. You can make corrections as you need. That first enlarger I built as a straight enlarger. Then, when I needed to do other things, I altered it so I could make those corrections and every time I had to do some job, I'd go get the saw and hammer and nail on another piece to my enlarger. Finally I'd nailed on so many pieces that the original orange crate was beginning to fall apart. Glue wouldn't hold it together and it had so many pushpins in it that it was beginning to leak light. So I built the one I use now in about 1957, incorporating all the changes I had made along the way. I think somewhere along the line in the history of photography beginning with, maybe, the time that they began to make dry plates, the photographer didn't have to invent everything himself, but that lost part of what photo- graphy was earlier.
Basically, the early photographers were painters or mechanics, so they had either one quality or the other and sometimes a little of both; a man like Samuel F. B. Morse, who was one of the first photographers in the U.S. because he was a friend of Daguerre's. Some, like Steiglitz, were intellectuals; they had background and training in some other field. But yet, the dry plate also brought in another kind of photography, the hobby, the bicycle camera club and things like that where it was funsies. Most people do photography because it gives them a license to go do whatever they want to do anyway -- whether it's ride a bicycle or go visit the Taj Mahal, the camera is just the excuse. That's why they take the trip -- to take pictures of the world or whatever.
Part of my orientation had to do with the fact that I was raised during the Depression and if I wanted something I had to build it. That was exciting. Photography transcended what I found in radio, which I also touched on as a kid. I used to build all my own transmitters. I'd go scrounge parts and take this part and that part and put it together and make it work. That attitude was inherent in photography too. It had that quality, but at the same time, you were making this thing which transcended the making and had a purpose. I built a radio and sat there in the middle of the night, punching on a key, talking in code to someone on the island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which was nearly half way around the world from where I lived in California. What could I do other than make messages for somebody else? I thought about finding a job as a radio operator and even went to school for a short time to acquire a commercial radio license so I could be employed on board ship. That didn't seem very exciting though, sending somebody else's messages. In photography, even doing commercial photography, you're sending other people's messages, but you can subvert them. Nobody is there watching that ground glass. They give you a drawing and you learn how to match it with the photograph. But while you're doing that, you might think, "All right, I'll do this one the way they want it, but then I'll do another one the way I want it," and sometimes you win. Maybe the idea wouldn't be that much more exciting but it would be your own idea and six million people would see it. The idea of printing to me, multiplying that imagery, is a lot more exciting than making a single perfect print that hangs on the wall in somebody's den. Maybe ten people see it in a year.
Q: So that's why the interest in books?
A: Yes. The fact that when I turn on that stupid machine, the press, it'll make as many prints as I can afford the paper for. I did an advertisement about 1956 for Hunt Foods for a ketchup that they made which was supposed to be hotter than other ketchups. We thought about that and got a devil costume and photographed the devil holding the bottle with chilis hanging around it. It was published in the American Weekly , a supplement to all Sunday newspapers. It got such a good response that they ran it every week for two years. Every week, there were eighty million copies of my photograph lining garbage cans all over the world. That gives you a feeling of power! The fact that you do something and a lot of people see it is a pretty exciting idea. The press thing -- I didn't understand when I first started, but I feel the importance of it now.
With the books I'm doing -- I'm working on another one now -- each image is an original print. I start from the original negative and work with the process camera. The first time I see the print is in its final form when it comes off the press all finished. You print three black and white images from a negative, run them through the press and the print comes out in color. You see it for the first time when you have already ruined the paper, and if it's wrong, it's really wrong.
Q: Are you moving away from screen printing?
A: I have done one screen print since I've been here in Arizona and that is the first one since February of 1976. I probably will do some more. These experiments here may or may not go the other way. I feel now that the idea of a book is important and it doesn't matter whether it's original or a reproduction. What matters is the fact that the image is something that has an intimate contact with whomever is seeing it. I think most photography I've seen is an intimate revelation of the artist to somebody to understand. I think it is a lot more exciting for that intimate contact to happen than to have something hung on the wall as decoration. I believe once something is on the wall, if there is an intimacy there, it is hard to see. It's difficult to stand there and really look at it. If it's on the wall of a gallery or museum hardly anybody is going to spend the time to find out what it is about. It's considered decoration by many and I feel that a large part of my photography is a lot more personal than that. I think the book form is where it ought to be, or in a portfolio where you can see it and contemplate what's going on. If you can interest the person long enough to look at it, then there may be some response to whatever you have to say.
Q: Books tend to get dented up and abused. The thought that your screen prints would end up like that seems sad to me.
A: Yes, but on the other hand, they are different things. I feel that, for me, the possibility of the response to that book is a lot more exciting, at the moment, than the screenprint, but I'll probably do more of the screens.
Q: What about the print in the faculty show in Gainesville, the Chevrolet? Before, you were talking about going back through your commercial negatives and finding imagery.
A: Right. That particular one is a very significant image for a number of reasons. One of those is the fact that it was one of the first times, commercially, I really got to do some- thing that I wanted to do with a camera. That photograph was made the first week in November of 1955. The art director I was working with was open to making photographs of the car out in the sun light. We talked about how you could photograph the car so an artist could draw it. There is a dry lake right outside of L.A. , about 100 miles away. We could go up there and watch the sun come up and go down and photograph the car from all angles. I felt he wanted the light to be just right so that it revealed the size and shape of the thing.
So we drove out of L.A. at 3:00 in the morning and up to Rosamund Dry Lake, where Edward's Airforce Base is now. We were out on that lake when it began to get light and we were still there when the sun went down that night. We used a view camera and about two hundred exposures, shooting from all different angles as scrap to draw from. It was not the first time I'd ever spent an entire day on a dry lake and just watched the light change all day long. I have always loved the desert. I used to drive out there and take pictures -- terrible pictures -- when I was first getting into photography. I was always pretty much of a loner so I'd get out there by myself and take pictures all day long. The desert is part of my whole experience with photography--to be out there and to have a feeling of what it is like to be in that space. You can see from horizon to horizon. You can see a mountain that is one hundred and sixty miles away. You get the feeling of light, the quality of the light, the shadows falling and changes of color. All those photographs were in black and white. I had photographed the desert before and since in color, but it never looked the way it ought to look. That screen print is the way it ought to look. The camera doesn't record it that way, but that is the way it is to me. So, that is a very intimate photograph, even if it is a Chevrolet out in the desert.
It has to do with the kind of color you only see in the desert at dawn or at dusk. I didn't really realize that until 1975. I was doing a workshop in L.A. We left Needles at 4:30 in the morning driving toward Barstow, when the light came up behind us all of a sudden. There is nothing on this stretch. There is hardly any vegetation. You see this mountain, which is blue-green and the light coming up is reddish, then another mountain that looks normal and another red one. You see layer after layer after layer and that is really what I do with a silkscreen. I didn't realize it until I was driving across that stretch and all of a sudden, there it was! That is what I used to look at when I was a kid. I'd drive out there to the desert in my Model A Ford, bounce over the rocks and watch the light change.
Q: What do you see as the technical future of photography what with all the RC paper and less and less of the silver process?
A: I think a change to electronic photography is in the works. We are too dependent on silver and it's too hard to get. We have to turn to other ways of processing.
Q: It seems that the less photographers know about the chemistry of the process, the more dependent they become on the manufactured package.
A: The reason we stuck with the materials we have is that those materials are commercially feasible. So, if they decide to phase out silver, you have to either find out how to make your own film, which is a very sophisticated operation, or go along with whatever happens.
Recalling my work with collotype, it took me two years to figure out how to do that. If you want to do carbon printing, which I mentioned before, it is very hard to do. To just make the paper is a very sophisticated process. Nobody makes that paper anymore in any quantity. I used Varigam paper from the time they first came out with it in 1947 until 1970, when I went to Florida. When I was leaving for Florida, Wynn Bullock came over and we cried on each other's shoulders because they were phasing out Varigam. So I learned to use Varilour and now there is no more Varilour. Now I'm using whatever I can get, if I make silver prints. You're at the mercy of the manufacturers. If you want to make images, you have to deal with what you can get.
But printing is going to remain with us for quite some time, I'm pretty sure. So all I'm doing with the offset press or with the silkscreen is using commercial methods. The offset press is not going to disappear yet. It is a significant part of communication in our society. These techniques are going to be available to us for a long time. If you can take something that is being used commercially and change it to your own use, then you're okay, and that gives it identity. For example, if you take a television set and subvert that to do whatever you want to do, that's a viable method. The silver process is going to disappear and soon, if you can't make beautiful prints on RC paper you aren't going to have any prints. When I was a kid, school pictures were made in black and white. Those are going to exist for a while. But all the kids who are having their pictures taken in color, aren't going to know what they looked like by the time they're thirty because the prints just aren't going to last. That's because, not only are they dye images, but they are also on plastic, not paper.
Q: That's one thing I think about a lot -- the idea that America takes more pictures than ever right now, but none of them are going to last. We are going to go virtually undocumented.
A: The same with books -- even the paper is not going to last.
Q: For people who are interested and need information from old books, what if those books aren't around for people to find?
A: The thing is that a lot of the old ones have been reprinted.
Q: The new interest tends to bring back old books. Only recently, as far as I know, have courses been offered in the history of photography.
A: To find the information on collotypes and gum printing or anything like that, used to be very hard. The collotype information I got was from a book published in 1878. That book, which Betty found in a second-hand store in Hollywood was a precious thing. Arno Press has re-printed that, so anybody can now get a microfilm copy. Peter Bunnell did a recent facsimile book on photo aquatint, which is gum printing. So those things are around more now than they were ten years ago. Ten years ago in L.A., I was the only one who remembered how to do a blue print. The only reason I knew how to do that was because I had a book from 1940 that I hadn't thrown away like everybody else had.
Q: Which book was that?
A: Wall and Jordan's Photographic Facts and Formulas, which has all you'll ever need on old processes. The only problem was that it only had formulae and not the explanations on how to do anything, so you had to re-invent those things.
Q: Did you find that because you were reaching for things and doing other things, that this made you more creative and more involved in your work?
A: Yes. One thing I noticed was that most of the people who were beginning to deal with those processes were looking at them for their historical value to find out what had been done before, rather than looking at the processes to see what else they could do. In 1969, I went up to the S.P.E. (Society for Photographic Education) meeting in Oakland. There were two people up there who had worked with Henry Holmes Smith. They had done research papers on gum printing. They had looked at photographs by Robert Demachy and studied the people who were working at the turn of the century. Then they tried to make the gum prints themselves. They weren't trying to make new prints but trying to see the process historically. I had started out with the idea of trying to make color prints. I found out immediately that I couldn't do it in one printing because then it didn't have the delicate gradations I wanted. You have to print and print and print--which is what they were doing at the turn of the century.
I sat on the steps of some house in San Francisco and, by the light of a street lamp, opened the portfolio of my gum prints. These two people nearly fell off the steps -- they never knew a gum print could be so rich! They hadn't seen a print except the old prints and they had no idea how the process could come to that. Actually, Demachy's prints are not that rich. I decided I was going to make it look like a silver print, so I was printing ten, fifteen, eighteen times and getting this incredible depth and gradation. That was only because I went at it in my own way, having something I wanted to do with it and trying to make the process do that. I had come from the tradition of being a California photographer to whom the perfect print is what it is about. So I tried to do that with whatever process I used.
In working with the Photographic Facts and Formulas , I found I had to make slight variations. In order to get some of the colors to work out, I weighed out some of the colors and tried to set some standards. With the silkscreen process, I read somewhere that people like Ben Shahn and others were using Ulano material or one of the other methods. That seemed far too expensive to use for multiple images. So I decided to try the gelatin and it worked. I had the experience with collotype so I knew if I took this and this and put them together, something would happen. If you know it is going to work, if you read somewhere that it is going to work, you just experiment until it does. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I was interested in chemistry to a certain extent. When I first started you couldn't buy developers the way you wanted them so you mixed your own. You began to get a feeling for how to devise what you need. If you've always gotten materials out of a can, you don't have that trust in your own possibilities. But if you know somebody else can do it, you can figure it out too. If you don't have a mental barrier, you can do just about whatever you want. Part of the problem now is that everybody gets food out of a can, so they figure there is no way they can plant a seed and have it grow unless the seed comes in a package.
You have to be inventive. It's like when I was mixing colors at the studio. There was a man who mixed all the colors for RKO named Axel Peterson. He would go with the art director who would show Axel a swatch of the color he wanted and Axel would mix it up. Then the art director would give his okay. Nobody could match Axel Peterson's colors. One night, one of the foremen realized that we were out of a certain color and sent me to go and try to mix up the color since the set had to be finished the next day. So, I went down and mixed the color like I always did. You throw in the color you think it should be and take the two wet samples and put them side by side. As soon as you do that, the interaction of color tells you which one is missing. If you see these two side by side, the missing color becomes obvious. It turned out that Axel always put in a little chrome green. When I had the colors side by side, I could see that.
Usually the manufacturers tell you only as little as they possibly can. That avoids responsibility if it doesn't work correctly. I don't know if they are really that vicious or not, but I suspect they are. All the dealings I ever had with Kodak were that I'd go to the technical representative if I had a problem. He'd pick up the instructions and tell me that if I do this and this and this, that this will happen. If you get him without the instructions, which he has memorized, he'll say the same thing anyway.
In 1947 when Kodak came out with Ektachrome, motion picture studios had to make duplicate transparencies. Always before that, the only film they had was Kodachrome which had to be processed by Kodak, so you couldn't mess it up in the process. As soon as I got the first kit for Ektachrome, I figured out that if you do this and this and this, that you could mess up the contrast and you could make it softer than necessary. So I went to a friend of mine who was a good salesman for films and told him I could make duplicate transparencies that were as good as originals. He went to Selznick Studios and borrowed some transparencies and I made duplicates of them that were pretty good. I was able to do twelve copies of a transparency of Jennifer Jones, so they could send them off to twelve different newspapers and magazines. Then Eastman changed the materials slightly, so I called up the technical representative, had him come out and showed him what I had been doing. He said that it was a non-recommended procedure so he couldn't help me. I said, "What do you mean you can't help me? You're the technical representative. Aren't you there to deal with the material?" He said he could only help me with what's in the literature. I've never believed anything Kodak said from 1947 on.
Q: What do you think about showing in New York? Is that important to you?
A: Well, I don't think so. I'd rather just go ahead and do the work. I'd like people to see it, but I'd rather have it be seen by a lot of people. That is why I think the book is important.
Q: Are you going to think about going through any particular publishers?
A: No, because as soon as I start doing that they say, well, this doesn't sell so -- why don't you try this? So I'm going to publish my own stuff.
Q: Do you have any words of wisdom for closing? Something that will make everybody feel they got their money's worth when they get to the end of this interview?
A: I wonder what art is about and I'm not sure that what I do is art because I'm a photographer, not an artist. But whatever you do, the secret is to do what you think you ought to do, and do the hell out of it!
Interview Obituary Self-portraits WWII Pilot Resume Commercial Photography Off-site Images
Nonsilver Gallery Photo-silkscreen Gum Prints Van Dyke & Kallitype Reversal Processing Blueprints
Inko Dyes Litho Film TW Scholarship UA Collections Portraits Off-site links Ancestry HOME
If you'd like to comment on this page or contribute information to this website about Todd Walker's life and work, please email Jerry Ferrin.
This page was created March 30th, Y2K.