This Day In History, 1992

Fourteen years ago I was living in Brooklyn, in an artist-soaked neighborhood called Park Slope. There are quite a few photographers in the Slope, including one of my very best pals, Jimmy Rudnick.

Jimmy and I lived on Union Street, about a block and a half apart. We could each walk to the corner of Seventh Avenue (from opposite directions) and meet for lunch if we weren't shooting, and we could do little stock shoots together.

Though we'd be in the same place at the same time, we always managed to make significantly different images... only on extremely rare occasions would we exactly duplicate each other's picture. It was a great arrangement. One day I'd drive, the next time Jimmy would (depended largely on who had a good spot as far as alternate side parking was concerned); we'd have company and interesting, though sometimes moronic, conversation (he knows I'm joking!); smoke cigars, whatever.

We were two guys with cameras on the loose in New York City. Prowling the waterfront, slinking along rooftops, climbing bridges, we did it all... and we made some great pictures while making fun of ourselves and each other.

We'd cultivated a relationship with a guy who managed several Manhattan-facing, riverfront properties and had access to a number of DUMBO* rooftops. One had an vacant floor at the top where we could shoot from an inside space, very sheltered, with windows that opened to shoot through. That spot was a gold mine for us: not only great views, but in winter we were warm and out of the wind, in summer we were shaded from the hot sun in air-conditioned comfort, it was clean and had a bathroom. We hit it often.

One evening, July 24, 1992, we were on-location in the clock tower when the ferry "Spirit Of New York" passed our spot, motoring up the East River (North) on a counter-clockwise sunset cruise around Manhattan. As it passed our location I quickly changed lenses and began shooting as she went by. Rudnick started laughing hysterically. I got off a roll of film, rather casually; and when Jimmy recovered enough composure to speak, he chided me good-naturedly for making the cliche photo of the year....

Jimmy looks like a cross between a longshoreman and Gene Shalit, but thin (unlike Shalit, though it would be fun to see which of them has the larger moustache!). He had this big grin on his unshaven face, a cigar poking out from beneath the largest brush on the east coast and he chuckles: "You idiot, don't you know that's the biggest cliche in the world?"

"So what," I shot back.

"Hey handsome, you're a fool! What a waste of film," he said dismissively, but with a big grin and a bigger chuckle.

I admit it is a cliche. I mean, it says Spirit Of New York in HUGE letters on the side of the boat, it's under the Manhattan Bridge in front of the Empire State Building & the whole Manhattan skyline. I was really being literal, nothing clever about this picture... nothing at all!

But it wasn't a waste of film... I've licensed that cliche 18 times since then for a very high four-figure sum, cost me $13.75. Better than a poke in the eye, eh Jimbo? ;-)


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*DUMBO: a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and, you guessed it, it's near the Manhattan Bridge)

Life's A Beach?

Sunny, hot, humid, about 85F. I spent the better part of my day shooting a job that's partly challenging but largely boring. A lot of driving, window open with the air conditioning on, a lot of getting in and out, unbuckling and rebuckling my safety belt. Record keeping, a log for each frame. Wish I'd chucked it all and gone to the beach with the kids (not professional!).

Also... I'm kind of tired today. Spent a couple of hours last night faxing letters to my congressman as well as members of the House Judiciary Committee, who are considering an amendment to the Copyright Act which would eliminate penalties for infringers of "Orphaned Works." What's an Orphaned Work? Glad you asked.

In a highly simplified scenario: let's say you notice the image to the right, footprints in the sand, and you think it would make a great illustration for your ad or a poster or web site. You click on it and drag it to your computer's desktop or save it to your hard drive, intending to use the image. Maybe you'd like to ask permission but you don't know who the creator/copyright-holder is (pretend I hadn't made it obvious), and let's suppose that it's been a while since you snagged the image and can't remember which web site you stole it from. What should you do?

Under the current law, you should delete it and find an image you can license properly for your intended use. Under the Orphaned Works provision you could do a google (yahoo!, MSN, whatever) search for an image of footprints in the sand and, assuming the image you stole isn't there in the search results. You are therefore immune from prosecution under copyright law, having made a good faith effort to find the rightsholder, and you publish the image.

If I see it and contact you about it, you can negotiate a fee for the use with me, and maybe you'll pay me... but you won't be subject to statutory damages (could be as much as $150,000 per infringement). In other words, if a work is found to be "orphaned," it's origin unknown to the user, then it's fair game. Again, that's a highly simplified example but the gist of it is correct.

If you're a photographer, illustrator, writer, textile designer, or other visual or recording artist, please fax a letter to your congressman as well as members of the committee and let them know that you oppose the "Orphaned Works" legislation that they're now considering. And don't take your sweet time about it either, time is running out as it's on the House floor NOW.

Here's a couple of web resources to help you.....

If you don't know your local Representative’s name, visit http://www.house.gov/writerep/ and enter your state and zip code.

Once you know who your Representative is, go to http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml to find the Representative’s home page using the alphabetic list. The home page will have a “contact” link for fax numbers and other info.

Names & fax numbers of key Representatives (again, not Senators) are here http://tinyurl.com/qb8ok

ASMP has an automated tool to make this as easy as possible and you'll find it here http://tinyurl.com/s5emk

Let's get out there and defeat this bill. You could just chuck it all and go to the beach, but that's not professional!

Yes, Mister Peabody!

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for May 18th, 1980.

It was a beautiful, clear, sunny Sunday about 26 years ago. I was fast asleep in a motel astride Route 20, The North Cascade Pass. I was, at that time, First Assistant to Klaus Lucka (heard of him before, have you? See This Could Be The Start Of Something Big) and we'd been on the road about two weeks as he was shooting an ad campaign for Raleigh Lights cigarettes.

This was a big shoot. We had a large crew including a stylist, two models, another assistant/location scout (Mark Scott out of Los Angeles), a truck driver, a brand new custom painted Kenworth tractor and Freuhoff trailer, three cars, the art director, a couple of account people, a couple of guys from Raleigh, Klaus and myself..... and we were all sleeping in that morning, or so we thought.

I was rudely awakened by a loud knock on my motel room door, sounded urgent. Mark and I woke up (I was sharing a room with Mark) and I went to the door and opened it. I honestly expected to see Klaus there to inform me that 8:00 AM was sleeping in enough but instead I was standing there in the open doorway, in my underwear, looking at a parking lot devoid of life. I went back to bed.

A couple of minutes later we were again awakened by the same knocking. This time we both jumped up and went to the door as the knocking was louder and more urgent sounding. This time Mark and I were both standing in the open doorway in our underwear looking at the parking lot but this time, so was everyone else!

Well, something was obviously happening so we got dressed and went to the restaurant for breakfast (I guess 8:00 AM is late when you're used to waking up at 4:00) and that's when we learned that Mt. St. Helens had blown her top... about 300 miles west of our position. We woke the rest of the crew and had a quick meeting over blueberry pancakes to decide what to do. The plan was to head west but that was certainly out of the question, so we drove east instead as Mark had scouted some good alternate locations near Spokane.

Well, we didn't get very far, only to Grand Coulee where the Washington State Police had closed the highway, it was snowing gray volcanic ash. We found another motel with some vacant rooms and checked-in for an unscheduled stopover (funny, two weeks earlier we got snowed in at the Government Lodge atop Mt. Hood in Oregon).

The game of the day was collecting ash in empty film cans along Route 20. An occasional truck would blow by us as we did our thing in the middle of the road (top picture). It was inconvenient as far as the shoot was concerned but we were collecting the coolest souvenirs to bring back home.

I don't know about Mark, but later on I was giving away little cans of volcanic ash left and right. We spent a few weeks in Los Angeles after the Raleigh shoot to work another cigarette campaign and my cousin Mo and his wife Barb were living in Westwood at the time, so they got the first can. It really was a popular souvenir and I was bummed because I inadvertently misplaced a vial I'd saved for myself. Fourteen years later I was married with a child and I told him about Mt. St. Helens and also that I had a vial of ash around here somewhere.....

Fortunately for me, Mo is better at holding on to things than I am because twenty years later I was in his living room in Maine (he moved) with my seven year old and three year old boys and finally I could prove that I wasn't daft: I had saved some ash... here, look at Mo's!!

Yesterday, in the clean-up, Alex found my vial of ash in the shoebox with the aforementioned SX70 pictures. Vindicated at last!

“Summertime, And The Livin’ Is Easy”

I actually don’t know if that’s a quote from someone famous, it’s just something my friend Jake always says... and so I associate it with him. As far as I know, Jake coined the phrase.

Essentially he was saying that now that summer’s here, it’s time to take it easy. Don’t work too hard (as if that’s possible, summer is always a slow season for guys like us), no need to feel guilty, just go to the beach and chill. Or, if there’s no work and you can’t hang around doing nothing, work on a personal project or go travel and shoot or whatever.

As far as I’m concerned, when work slows to a trickle, it’s the perfect time to catch up on neglected paperwork or copyright registrations or cleaning up my office... at least until I get antsy and have to shoot something new, something for myself (and I will, don’t worry, I have lots of project ideas). But first I need to be organized, so a good reorganization of the office is a priority.

In the spirit of the old English saw, “Once begun is half done,” I got right into shuffling paper and moving stuff around. And being as I’m taking it easy (remember my friend Jake’s philosophy?) I even let my eight year old, Alex, spend a day with me in my office.

I spent the day with Alex, going through the closets, the cabinets, the space under my desk, everywhere, As I was pulling things out and shuffling them around Alex was getting into all kind of really cool stuff (well, if you're eight, just about everything your dad has in his usually off-limits office is really cool) and eventually we found a shoe box that I’d not looked in since 1978.

“Dad!!” came the cry from across the room, “what’s this???”

“Not now, Alex, I’m busy,” I shot back.

“Dad!!” he shouted again, “are these pictures?”

Now I had to go and see what he was talking about and, sure enough, he had the shoe box open and he also had a handful of my Polaroid SX70 images.

The original Polaroid SX70 was a beautiful tanned leather and brushed aluminum single lens reflex camera (one lens, you viewed and shot with the same lens so what you saw is what you got). It collapsed and folded flat when not in use and it used a flexible rubber "bag" bellows to accomplish that compactness. In the summer of 1978 (and on into the early part of 1979) the Polaroid SX70 was my medium of choice.

One day I was making a portrait and I inadvertently got my thumb stuck in the bellows of the camera. This was one really cool thing I discovered by accident... that if you stuck your thumb in the bellows as you were making an image it would bump the mirror as it moved and you would get a really far-out ghost image. Needless to say, thereafter I purposely stuck my thumb into the bellows at the instant of exposure and shot a whole series of eerie portraits that way. The one above is a favorite. It's my friend, Gene Kurakin, in the turret of his apartment in Brooklyn. Gene was always interested in the mystical whether reincarnation or the power of pyramids, stuff like that. The portrait above really speaks to his personality.

I did some other miscellaneous messing around with the camera, some examples are here. Of course, it was a personal project I did that summer when there was nothing else going on and, as my old friend Jake would say, “the livin’ was easy.”

This Could Be The Start Of Something Big!

I love July! Every July I have to think about paying my business insurance premium for the year. My insurance renews in July because I opened my photography business in July, and that’s no coincidence because I shot my first professional job in July and I needed insurance to be able to do it. Every business needs to have insurance coverage, and I needed it in spades because my first job was a series of ads for the International Gold Corporation and there would be lots of gold (very valuable gold) that I was going to be responsible for... I needed to be insured.

Being that I didn’t want my first gig to also be my last gig it needed to be absolutely perfect, so I hired one of my best friends at the time, Keith Megay, to work as my First Assistant. First Assistant is your right hand man, it’s a rank, like First Lieutenant, I had two other assistants on the shoot. Good thing I hired him too, because we knew each other pretty well and he saved my butt that day.

Listen, I knew what I was doing, I didn’t need tech help or anything like that, but picture it..... there I was in front of the Plaza Hotel. I’ve got two beautiful models wearing thousands of dollars worth of gold jewelry on top of high-fashion clothing that contained gold as well (see that jacket, it’s 24k gold!!), I had a fashion stylist, a hair stylist, a make-up artist, the client’s people and I was surrounded by at least two hundred spectators, maybe more. That’s why there were three assistants, two were simply there to maintain security. If I said I wasn’t just slightly nervous I’d be telling a big story.

Anyway, there I was, in the middle of all this and everyone was finally ready to go to work. I stepped up to the camera and froze. I was lost, out of it, completely discombobulated. I couldn’t even speak. That’s why I needed Keith.

Realizing my mental state at the moment he coolly walked up behind me, leaned into my back and whispered in my ear, “What would Klaus say?”

I had apprenticed with Klaus Lucka who, in the 1980s was the undisputed master of high-end high-style rich-looking lifestyle imagery. Keith said what he said, I said what Klaus would say and that kick-started the shoot. I don’t even remember what I said that Klaus would say, but it did the trick. I was myself again and in control (maybe Keith remembers, I don’t know)... and I was in business as a photographer, no looking back.

I love July!