There’s Something
Wrong: Some
Soul Searching

You have to believe in yourself, you have to be a believer in
what you are doing, and foremost you have to be able
to defend and articulate what you are all about.
—Ryszard Horowitz

In chapter 1, we read that the Recognition stage of Transition Analysis is the first stage, because it is the awareness phase. There is a challenge to the status quo that requires a personal, direct, and sometimes immediate response. “Awareness” is a powerful word. In order to have awareness, you have to be able to step outside your mundane conditions and look at yourself with a sense of objectivity. Not an easy thing to do, because emotions get in the way. If everything is moving along apparently smoothly, then why upset the apple cart? From time to time, we have to have the wherewithal to shake things up and learn the reach of our potential. Sometimes the signs that it is time to move on are all around us, but we refuse to acknowledge them because we don’t want to rock the boat. We would rather not admit that we will actually have to put forward the effort necessary to swim to shore before the sinking ship ultimately goes down.

Reading the Handwriting on the Wall

There are usually telltale signs that something is not right, if we bother to heed them. Say you are a freelancer, and you pick up the phone one day to call an old and loyal client. After repeated calls, you realize that client isn’t going to return your calls any more. Or you buy the newspaper and find out that a company you do freelance jobs for has merged with another company. Where there once were two companies, each with an art staff of twenty, the merger will mean the combined company will restructure and reduce the total art staff. The others will be let go. Chances are some of those people are clients you have developed over the years who you counted on to send you work. The prospect of retracing your steps is daunting.

Or you start hearing rumors of layoffs and cutbacks at the company you work for. You notice co-workers whispering among themselves and then openly discussing what if scenarios. Conversations abruptly change the moment you walk in the room. You start seeing “How to Write a Resume” manuals left around on co-workers desks; or worse yet, you go to the office printer and see a resume that has been left on the printer tray.

These feelings of betrayal, abandonment, and corporate-versus-individual priorities are all too common. I hear these stories over and over again with slight variations, but always with the same results. They come from normal people who are beginning to feel paranoid. They may even come from people who are, by all outward appearances, doing well but are missing something in their lives, something vibrant that came when the work they were doing had meaning.

If you have chosen the life of a creative person, you signed on (whether you did so consciously or not) to the idea that sometimes you have to fix it before it is broken. Let me ask you something. Have you ever worked tirelessly at your art, and while you were doing it, experienced this overwhelming feeling that this was the best work you had ever done, only to wake up the next morning, take a look at it and wonder why you had spent so much time on that worthless piece of wrongminded junk? Sure you have. We all have. If we were happy with every piece we ever executed, we would never push ourselves to do more. The creative process demands it of us. This is just another reminder of how change is at the very core of the creative experience, whether that project is your latest piece of art or your own career path.

Now think of your career as another one of your works of art. The path you have chosen has been constructed from an exquisite mixture of talent, background, dreams, and luck. But most importantly, it was your awareness at that moment of decision that allowed you to make the choice that changed your life, for better or worse. When we look back at our lives, it is those decisive moments that jump out as the reasons why we are where we are right now. Those are the “decisive moments” that Henri Cartier-Bresson caught so eloquently on film—the points at which we had to make a choice, even though we may not be certain of the outcome, but the best choice we had at our disposal. We don’t remember every breakfast, every commute, every meeting, but we remember every consequential referral, every successful achievement, every painful disappointment, and every happenstance that turned out to be life-altering. It’s as though we can stand next to ourselves and watch as we went through the motions that took us to another level.

Let me give you a personal example. I remember clearly a cold September evening in 1965 when I was standing in a line with a bunch of new soldiers—we had all just gotten our orders to report for Basic Training, for boot camp. I started talking to the guy standing next to me, and it turned out he and I were headed to Fort Ord, California, to report for duty on the same day. In a spontaneous moment we decided to go to Fort Ord together, maybe because we could save some travel money, mostly because it seemed like a good idea to have a buddy to share the experience. The ironic thing is, that buddy I just happened to meet that evening is a man I have been friends with ever since, and we have been in business together for over thirty years. I can remember the smallest details of that first meeting, but I mostly think of what might have happened if I had decided to go to Basic Training alone.

I also clearly remember several years later when he asked me if I’d like to work with him. As I said before, I was working at a job I knew was a dead-end but which paid fairly well, had exceptionally good benefits, and didn’t require much of me. When I asked a wise old co-worker at my civil service job if I should go off to work with my friend the photographer he said, “Well, look at it this way. You are twentysix now. You have been working for the County Probation Department for five years. That means that in fifteen years you’ll be forty-one, you can retire with a pension and then you can do what you want to do.” Those words shook me to the very foundations of my being. I would have to wait for fifteen years to do what I wanted to do. Why not start now doing what I wanted to do? Was a pension at forty-one a big enough incentive to defer my chances to see a bigger side of life for a decade and a half? I immediately knew my answer. That was a moment of recognition that required very little debate.

Sometimes the decision is made for us. We are fired, lose a major account, or get injured or ill and can’t do the things we used to do. But the future presents itself to us in many ways, and we have to be open to the probabilities that come along with the possibilities.

Some Pivotal Events

The first photographic job I brought in for Dan Wolfe Studio was a local editorial assignment for the Los Angeles Times Sunday supplement, HOME magazine. When I took in the transparencies for the first job Dan had shot for them (photos of roses for their special January Rose edition), I overheard the managing editor and the senior art director mention they needed someone to shoot food for an upcoming issue. While spreading out the rose photos on the light box, I casually slipped into the conversation that Dan loved to shoot food. They looked at each other knowingly and whispered, “He shoots food, very interesting.” I walked out of their offices with our first food assignment. Eventually he shot a cover and a spread nearly every week. Dan shot lots of other types of local editorial and collateral jobs, but the food work kept coming in and gave us something to build a business on.

After a year or so we wanted to reach a larger audience, so we contacted Sunset, and another year or so later we pitched Meredith Publishing and began working for Better Homes and Gardens and Meredith’s other publications, doing editorial on a national scale. Then a real coup occurred when a small publication named Bon Appétit made its way onto the national scene, and the people in charge decided to have Dan shoot their covers and feature stories. It was a great match, because they wanted food preparations that looked elegant but were relatively easy to make. Over the next two years, Bon Appétit became the fastest growing publication in the United States with a readership that seemed to grow exponentially.

Eventually, ad agencies that ran ads in national consumer magazines started to call, because they saw that Dan’s work was a new approach to food photography. He used a 35mm camera, which produced more intimate results than the largeformat cameras our competitors used. So the national consumer magazines began sending layouts for national food ads. While Dan shot, I repped and produced the shots for him. We had a steady clientele of some of the biggest food and liquor purveyors nationally and, eventually, internationally.

Then, one day, a creative director at J. Walter Thompson, Barry Wetmore, called and made an astonishing proposal. JWT had the Kawasaki Motorcycle account in the United States, and Barry was looking for a food shooter to photograph his motorcycles! It seemed he wanted a different look than the usual “bike shooters” were producing. He was looking for a photographer who could capture that soft, sculptural, overall light that food shooters were fond of. Barry recognized that one of the most important things motorcycle buyers looked at in a motorcycle ad was the detail of the motor and other mechanical components, and lighting for detail would get their attention. That acknowledgment and leap of faith—he had to sell the idea to the skeptical hierarchy at J. Walter Thompson and to Kawasaki—opened up a whole new direction for our business. Dan began shooting motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, and jet skis for the major players in that advertising arena.

But that’s not the half of it. While shooting bikes and other sheet metal for several years, and after logging a lot of miles between L.A. and other parts of the world, we got an intriguing call from a small, aggressive, up-and-coming ad agency in Los Angeles. They had a new personal-computer account and wanted to produce ads in which the products had a friendly yet professional presence. The creative director for this agency, Chiat/Day, was a long-haired visionary named Lee Clow, and the product was the brand-new Apple Macintosh. The year was 1984. The agency hired Dan to shoot the print ad campaign, which was launched in a big way: the agency bought all of the ad space in a special edition of Newsweek. Only Apple ads appeared in the publication. Dan had the opportunity to work with some of the most innovative art directors and creative staff at Chiat/Day. It is one of only a handful of times that I know of where an ad agency bought the entire advertising space in an international publication.

That wave of good fortune lasted a few years. Then some of our art director friends suggested Dan start shooting commercials. With the help of some very talented film people, Wolfe and Company Films was launched, and we began shooting both print ads and live-action commercials for our long-time motorcycle clients. We also began to work again for our long-standing food clients.

But even a good thing can get exhausting. The repetition of more than ten years of tabletop food, plus a recession in the early 1990s, caused us to admit it was time to change. This time we both knew it was time to make a big, meaningful move. I remember asking Dan, “What do you love to do most?” His answer, after a period of soul-searching, rocked my world. He said the two things he enjoyed most were taking pictures (still, video, film—it did not matter) and flying. You can imagine my response. How could we just up and go from tabletop food to aerial photography/ cinematography? As usual, in his matter-of-fact style he said, “Well, just tell people I am shooting a bigger tabletop.”

Here we are, in a new era in our business with the development of Wolfe Air Aviation, a division of Wolfe and Company Films. The combination of talents, technology, enthusiastic clientele, and all the experiences that have preceded us has allowed Wolfe Air Aviation to work for clients as diverse as the major motion picture studios, some of the most recognized ad agencies, the United States Air Force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, NASA/JPL (Space Shuttle and Mars Rover research), and a host of other forward-thinking clients. And the prospects for discovering new opportunities continue. A few years ago we worked on a small aerial segment of the Emmy Award–winning documentary The Face: Jesus in Art, which was a two-hour PBS production that focused on images of Jesus Christ as interpreted by various cultures around the world. It was a new adventure that has opened up a new chapter of documentary and feature film making for us.

An Anecdotal Case History

So what are the lessons learned? I have drawn a rough chart based on the story I just recounted, to tell it visually and to make a point. It is a story of challenges, decisions, and growth. The X-axis signifies time, from 1971 to the present, and it shows the types of projects we worked on during that period. Obviously the world has not been as clean and precise as I have drawn it; but, generally speaking, the progress has been toward larger or more visible accounts and new forms of expression. The Y-axis is anecdotal and refers to our growth in income. It isn’t entirely accurate, but it gives us a reference for our progress. The Y-axis could also signify “Fame,” or “Accomplishment,” or “Recognition,” or anything you want it to signify. So the question remains, what can we learn from our personal histories, and how do they provide insights for those of us who are looking to take their careers to a more fulfilling level?

First of all, this journey (like your own unique journey) has not been linear by any means. Of course there were some dead-ends, bad deals, and missed opportunities along the way. I focused, however, on the points of recognition at which new opportunities presented themselves and offered a chance for change. Sometimes those points of change were due to happy coincidences; sometimes they were simply due to a feeling that something was not going the way it was supposed to and something had to be done to move on. Disenchantment is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a warning sign that there’s trouble ahead, and you better take corrective action before you fall into a rut—and find it is harder to get out the longer you stay in.

And so it was that I started knocking on doors early on, and one was answered at the Los Angeles Times. I had no sales experience. I didn’t know that much about photography outside of what I learned assisting my friend. But I knew I had to make a start somewhere, and with each new assignment I gained experience, confidence, and enthusiasm. And I believed in my partner’s ability to deliver the job professionally. Every occupation has its own unique jargon. Learn it and you can sound like a pro. However, being a professional is more than just learning a vocabulary and strutting around acting like you know what you are doing. I often ask my students to define a “professional,” and they usually answer that a professional is a person who gets paid for his work. I tell them that’s only part of the answer—a professional is a person who gets paid for being able to anticipate a problem and take care of it before it becomes a problem. Professionals get that insight through experience, training, and the drive not to make the same mistake twice.

Three Recurring Phases

Let’s look a little closer and see what the graph can tell us. When you get that first glimpse of the new direction and all the possibilities, you are in a glorious period that I call the Creative Ascent. You have something people want, and you are more than willing to share it with them. You are the “next thing,” “the hot item,” “the person of the hour,” and they want to be associated with you. They all want to claim they discovered you, and your success reinforces their own good judgment. You are the recipient of the adulation of people you know and people you have never met. That adulation is rooted in the positive reinforcement you received when you took your first baby steps, or performed in front of the assembled family when you were a youngster and got applause. Life is good, and success, however you define it—as fame, money, or acclaim—is on the rise with no end in sight.

But after a while (usually years), you are approached by clones of the first wave of clientele and you are asked to do the same type of work that typified your climb to stardom. You use essentially the same setup of lights, the same lenses, the same approach—because it is what everybody wants. Eventually that work is no longer challenging, but you talk yourself out of your lack of enthusiasm because they are still calling on you. This period is the Plateau of Mediocrity. You put up with it, you are good at what you do, and it doesn’t take a lot out of you to repeat the exercise. Still, the more you repeat it, the more of an exercise it is, an act of going through the thoughtless paces, giving them what they want, but leaving you creatively wanting. There’s no doubt about the execution, only a shallow sense of security. Maybe along the way you have made commitments to a larger overhead, or a mortgage, or a growing number of people who now depend on you. You got into this work because you wanted to explore your art, but now you have become a manager and have little time to shoot the work you would like to be shooting. You would like to change, but that would mean you would have to deal with the ordeal of letting people down. It must be the feeling that a young singer has when they have a hit song early in their career, and thirty years later they find themselves singing the same song, the same way they did way back when, but now they are singing that tired song in a bowling alley outside of Las Vegas.

However bad it might seem, the Plateau of Mediocrity is not the worst fate. It could be that, after your short stint in the limelight, your clients desert you for the next “new thing.” The phone doesn’t ring as frequently, the layouts dwindle, competitors who have adopted your style begin to lowball your estimates, your revenues fall, and you slide into the next period, the Valley of Despair. You panic and look around to find a way to climb out of this despair. You are filled with questions. Why did you wait so long to see the reality of the handwriting on the wall? When will you stop beating yourself up over your unwillingness to change? When will you be able to dig yourself out of this morass and start your new creative assent?

Anecdotal Case History: Comparison of Stages

I’ve seen these circumstances too many times. I’ve lived these situations myself. I have talked with hundreds of highly successful artists and they generally agreed that there were times when they didn’t know how they were going to keep going after a setback, but somehow, some way, they made it through.

Empowerment through Retrospection and Visualization

It’s that “somehow, someway” that concerns me. The answer can’t be that nebulous. There has to be a more rational approach one can take to move on, rather than relying on that vague “somehow” to miraculously save one every time and take one to the next level of one’s career. It is obvious to me that if we could put that process into a bottle, we could distribute it to a very hungry market.

See if any of the following stories sound familiar. One of my early contacts on this topic was an automotive shooter who was making a lot of money, traveling all over the world, and was at the top of his game shooting for the most prestigious motorcycle and car companies. But here’s the conflict he faced: he had just missed out on a good deal of his son’s first year of life because his car shooting caused him to travel most of the year. It just didn’t seem right for him to be sacrificing that much. It went against his core values, and he needed an alternative that would allow him to be home, give him financial stability, and also address his artistic desires to use his photographic skills. We will find out more about this remarkable artist in chapter 12.

Another contact told how she worked for a small firm with a handful of employees. The person above her did not appear to show any signs of leaving, and she could not move up the corporate ladder. The company was so small there was nowhere to move laterally. When she asked her boss about advancement, she was told she would be the first one to move up as soon as the person above her left the company. She felt frustrated because she couldn’t grow professionally and the jobs assigned her were not creatively fulfilling. She was young and anxious to move up and felt the need to, in her words, “accelerate” her career.

On another occasion, a friend called me and told the following story. He worked in a very small shop, and his boss had already had several businesses and had no reason to grow the present shop. My friend told the boss he wanted to leave, and the boss said he realized that if the young man wanted to leave, he was free to do so. My friend was torn because the boss was so agreeable and he didn’t want to leave him high and dry, but he also needed to be in a more stimulating environment. He said that his boss was the perfect example of someone who had hit the “Plateau of Mediocrity.”

And then there was the referral who worked for a large military-industrial corporation. He started working there shortly after leaving art school. Because he had worked there for a long time he had gotten to the top of his pay grade and had acquired a top-level security clearance. One problem he faced was that most of the artwork he had produced was of a highly sensitive nature, and it could not be seen by anyone other than government officials. He wanted to share his art but that was impossible under the strict security circumstances. On top of that frustration was the recent but now constant pressure of budgetary cutbacks by the government, coupled with no room for advancement. When he started the job, he had a sense that his work meant something and that he was part of a very important team. But now that same sense of loyalty he experienced in the beginning was gone, especially with the other employees paranoid and protective of their jobs. In the process, he felt he was just an ID number and a line on a budget sheet, and that nobody cared about him or his work. The good feelings he had when he started had soured, and now he was looking for a way back to the joy he used to have when he was creating his art back when he first left school.

Yet another contact had taken a good job with a solid graphic-design firm shortly after college graduation. She had worked there for a few years, until she got married and decided to leave it to raise her family. Now, twenty-plus years later, her children are grown and starting their own lives, and she has been experiencing what she calls an “aching in my heart to be creative.” She said she had gotten off her creative path and was ready to get back on. She summed it up beautifully: “When I do my art is when I feel at home.”

Factors That Caused a Change of Direction

Change takes on many diverse appearances, sometimes due to technology, sometimes due to the people we meet and how they affect our lives. In an interview with Douglas Kirkland I asked him, “What are some of the events that have caused you to change your artistic directions during your career?” He answered:

Well, one major one was in the early days, Type C printing. When I was in Buffalo, the year would be late 1958 or early1959, one of the studios was one of the first to have a Type C line. So I learned the color wheel and the whole business of making color prints and dealing with them. Each print in those days took an hour and a half to process.

Another major element for me was in 1991. I was in Camden, Maine, at a seminar Kodak had set up for digital learning, and that was a big turn in my life. It was during the earliest versions of Photoshop. I had used computers for the ten years previous, but with not with my pictures. And suddenly computers coming in made a very major change, which obviously we are seeing today.

Working with Irving Penn was clearly another one, being in that world. I also worked briefly in another studio in New York called Photography Place and I rotated between photographers. It was an associate’s studio. It gave me an enormous amount of learning, because, to go from one photographer to another, maybe two or three different ones in the same day, you learned how they worked.

Now how do you adapt yourself to change? You have to constantly be living it, questioning it, asking yourself what is interesting to explore? The other thing is when you have a quiet period—as I did, a lot of people did in the early 1990s—you realize there is a turning point when publications like Time and Newsweek, who hired me a lot, simply stopped calling. Almost all publications sort of stalled out for about a year [from around 1990 to say about 1993] and again there was a real rebuilding. What did I do? I really got involved in my digital world, into Photoshop and the computer. I didn’t just sit around. This was not the time to be depressed or go on a holiday or something. You learn and you keep rebuilding, and exploring, and questioning—and that’s what it’s all about. You do not waste time. If you really are a photographer, you are the same as a painter, or a writer, or a musician. You have to live it, breathe it. And you have to find ways of remaining contemporary by exploring and questioning and being sensitive to what is going on—and see how, in your mind, you fit into this, or what you can bring to the table that is better than what’s currently there.

I then asked, “Who has inspired you to change directions?”

There have been people all through my life, going back to my high school teacher—Irving Penn was the most formidable, I mean, with what he had done. But I have an unusual person I’ll mention who was Gordon Parks. I was in New York working at LOOK, and was a member of the ASMP. I went to one of the meetings one night and Gordon was showing some of the work he had done with a boy from Brazil. They eventually showed a film on him, kind of a life story, a boy from the barrio in Rio, and it was a wonderful story, and at the end of it I introduced myself. He had seen my work and he was very flattering. We had lunch and he got an opportunity for me to go to Life. And my bosses at LOOK were very competitive and that idea didn’t please them at all, and, to make a long story short, I was prepared to leave, but, instead, my income that year at LOOK ended up tripling because there was competition for me.

And I have an enormous respect for Gordon because he’s done everything in the world, not only great photography but music and film. This man has no barriers. He has always been a great inspiration. No one was more disadvantaged than Gordon. He was the thirteenth child from a family of thirteen. He had every possibility of things going wrong. He learned to play a piano in a brothel. He was a porter on trains. It goes on and on, but he eventually got to do his art through the Farm Security Administration, and he made the most of it. You have to know your strengths and build on every possibility. Don’t let things slide through your fingers.

Douglas Kirkland: Gordon Parks at the Piano

So there you have it. Douglas pointed out how technology, instinct, planning, and influential and inspirational people like Irving Penn and Gordon Parks all played a role in shaping his career. The Douglas Kirkland that was so energetic taking the photographs of movie stars mid-century is no less vibrant today, and he does more than survive—he thrives on his photography.

Sometimes you get surprisingly unpredictable answers from successful photographers when you ask what were the circumstances that caused them to change career directions. Jay Maisel once told me, “I know I have to change when I have become too successful.” He didn’t come across as arrogant. He was just pointing out that success is a double-edged sword, and we must never get too caught up in what is being said about us. One of the secrets of career longevity is never allowing yourself to buy into excessive praise or an excessive put-down.

Individual Journeys

Eric Meola had a different take on the question when he said, “I don’t think I changed careers as much as accepted that I always wanted to make my own images, not make images for other people.” That kind of rugged individualism is a dominant characteristic among the professionals I spoke with. Eric has been able to recognize that his integrity was the driving force to his success.

Our journeys of self-discovery can take many turns, because the medium is not only the message, it is the means. Here is what Phil Marco had to say when I asked him what were some of the events that caused him to change direction in implementing his work:

Well, I think that film has affected my point of view. That is, motion film. One day I thought of a great visual, and I said to myself, wow that’s a great idea, but how do I get it to move? I knew then that the crossover was complete, and my mental apparatus and everything else was moving in the direction of designing in movement as opposed to stills. It was also clear to me that if I wanted to achieve the expertise and quality that I had attained in print, I had to temporally set it aside, and make a total commitment to film.

From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, I was totally committed to film. During that time I directed well over two thousand commercials, worked on twelve features, won numerous Clio’s and Cannes Lions, and formed a close working relationship with Martin Scorsese, creating graphic visuals and special effects for his films. I also developed a large following in Europe and traveled there for assignments on a bimonthly basis.

In the mid-1990s, because of my print background, a number of agencies encouraged me to shoot the print as well as direct the television commercials for their clients, which gave them a campaign signature with total visual and design continuity. This eventually led to the rekindling of my love affair with print, and I found myself again bridging both print and film.

One big change is the new methods and tools that I learned to efficiently solve and execute design and conceptual problems. For example, when I started my photography career in the 1960s and through the 1970s, I used strobe to light exclusively. As a [director of photography] in film, I learned to use and appreciate tungsten lighting and the infinite variations and control it can bring to a scene or an object. The tools and knowledge of software I gained as a special effects director were extremely helpful as I reentered print photography in the digital age. As a film director I learned the value of collaboration. I feel that my twenty-year hiatus [from still photography] into film was a very auspicious personal decision, because the experience greatly enhanced my visual and conceptual horizons.

So, that’s where I am right now, and I like to think of myself as a work in progress and evolving. I would like very much to get more involved in creating installations, that’s a medium that really fascinates me. My personal print work is moving into the fine-art and gallery venue, and I’m in the midst of publishing two books.

Phil Marco: Blessed Event, 1979

Living Between Two Worlds

Another example of that school of thought is Ryszard Horowitz. Ryszard has known hardships most of us will never imagine, and through it all he has remained true to his artistic vision of creating the work he wanted to create, even in a time when the definition of art itself was being challenged. He explained it like this:

The first reason why I put aside fine arts wasn’t photography. I came to the States in 1959 from a small town in Poland, historically a great cultural center with medieval architecture and art. And I was educated in traditional terms, believing in figurative painting, and drawing from a model and plaster casts. I arrive in New York where abstract expressionism is reigning. Jackson Pollock is the hero. What the hell was I supposed to do?

Nobody at the time paid the slightest attention to figurative painting. I had to reeducate myself to find myself in this totally new art environment; which was fine with me because I had the advantage that I appreciated the old and at the same time I was very much open to new things. And when I went to school here, I realized I was a freak. I was unique because some of my colleagues who were interested in art, in design, never had any inclination to go to museums or to study traditional art, study art history. It was very painful to me, but it gave me a phenomenal background, a basis, a point of reference.

Phil Marco: Torso, 2005

So now when I want to get excited, I go to a museum, look through slick photo magazines. A lot of people don’t understand the perceptual difference, because everything you see now has been done in the past, for better or worse, everything has been done already. So why not go to the source? I keep telling people, go look at Caravaggio, look at Picasso, look at things that really excite you, look at the source, see how it evolved, how different people changed the vision and added to it. Everything is one big visual evolution. That was really very important to me.

Then when I met [Alexey] Brodovitch [legendary creative director at Harper’s Bazaar], it was also very important, because I found myself in an incredible environment with people like Arnold Newman, and Penn, and Avedon, and Hiro, and all those people, and a lot of photojournalists, also musicians. He had a wonderful way of talking about creativity, about creative aspects and how important it was for an individual to be able to develop his or her own point of view. To realize that what one does will be appreciated by others—xone day you will be a great hero, the other day you will be kicking your butt. You have to believe in yourself, and foremost you have to be able to defend and articulate what you are all about. Don’t rely on what’s “in,” because it will be “in” today and “out” tomorrow. Be able to think what you believe. That was extremely crucial and educational and valuable to me.

Then later on I had a wonderful experience working for a short period of time with Avedon and with Newman. That was also extremely revealing to me, because I dealt with two giants and two people who represented different styles in photography— but certainly they had their own vision and were masters of the media, and they knew what they were doing.

Also, I studied people. I observed how they worked with their models, how they approached them, how they quickly created their vision. How things happened. It was interesting; I always loved to see documentary movies about how movies are made. I loved to see the mechanics, to see the whole thing.

My experience with Harper’s Bazaar was very important, although it was quite painful at times. It ended my working in Europe and coming here and getting different reaction, understanding early enough that what Brodovitch had told me was so true—that you find a group of people who adore you, and then you turn around and people hate you. You have to build a little shield around yourself and be able to survive through it.

Belief and Trust

In all of the interviews, the three essential elements of talent, timing, and inspirational people recur. You can have one or two, but your chances of moving yourself to the next level requires that all three elements work cooperatively. Barbara Bordnick, whose evocative work I will discuss later, responded to the question, “Who inspired you to change career directions?” in this insightful way: “If not myself, the people who believed in me even more than I.” You have to believe in yourself; but sometimes others see something in you that you cannot see until those you trust bolster your spirits. The key ingredient here is that you have to trust their judgment even over your own sometimes.

And a beautiful thing happens when you have an instinct for what you want to do, and someone shares the vision and has the means to help you bring all the elements together. Pete Turner has had many such experiences, as can be seen by the immense body of travel work he has inspired us with over the years. He told of one such experience that elucidates the point about change of directions:

There was an event that sort of changed my thinking about photography. In 1973, on the island of Heimaey, in Iceland, a volcano erupted in the center of town. A lot of photographers photograph volcanoes and logically so, because they are very colorful, but that wasn’t what turned me on. I was looking at the New York Times—I usually glance through it in the morning—and I saw this little two-column picture of smoke and ash and volcano and all these houses right in front of it. I called up Harold Hayes, who is that fellow who gave me the “sophistication” story [see Pete’s interview in chapter 3], and I said, “Harold, I saw the most amazing picture.” He had the Times too and we were both looking at it, and I said, “I’d love to go over there tonight and shoot this town. To me it’s got to be like science fiction.” And he said, “Let me see if I can make some calls and can get you an editor over in Iceland.” He was that sort of a guy. So he said, “Call me back at lunch time.” That was like 10 A.M. I said, “But I want to fly tonight.” And he said, “Well, find out what time the flights leave and what not.”

So I’m like packing [chuckle] and he called me back and said, “I might be crazy but you’ve got it.” The next thing I know I am out at Kennedy and I land at dawn in Iceland. I had a contact who flew me over to this island. I was only on the island twenty-two hours, I think it was, but the next dawn, this thing spews out this lava, and I knew it was the most incredible picture, and I got it! I didn’t even know if the island was going to blow or what, but I said to myself, this is like a Japanese science fiction movie. It’s like a Godzilla-type thing. I mean, it was hard to believe this was happening in front of me, this was the ultimate trip. I was talking to myself, you know.

I knew I had all the film and I got off the island. I’m flying back home, and I’m thinking how can you ever top something like that? You can shoot volcanoes, but it’s very different when it’s in the center of a town. It was a turning point. I had been doing a lot of realistic type photography, and I decided, well, there’s got to be a place for more surreal things. It sort of opened my mind a bit to change directions.

There are times when our hand is forced by circumstances, and we have to make the most of what we can. Bob Krist offered a candid view of his career moves, including newspaper photography, each of which turned into a new opportunity:

I first picked up a camera when I got a job to go to Europe with a theater company and my primary impetus was I wanted to take beautiful pictures. The newspaper work was a complete and utter deviance from that, but it did teach me to do storytelling pictures. The stories I was telling were a lot rougher around the edges than I wanted to tell. The one thing that did it for me with the newspapers was that I just started to get that crust around me that newspaper guys get when you see so much misery day in and day out.

There was a fire down in a Jersey City ghetto. A guy turned the corner and his brownstone was up in flames, and his wife and four children were in there. It was revenge arson, but a bunch of crackheads bombed the wrong house. And this guy just kept trying run into the burning building to get his kids out, and it took, like, six Jersey City firemen to restrain him because it was too late, and I photographed this whole thing, and won all these awards, and I came back and I said to my wife, “I’m out of here. I’m not doing this anymore; this is not what I want to do.”

At that point I just wanted out of the news and into something a little softer, and then I kind of segued into corporate work for a while, and I did that and it was very lucrative and a lot of fun for a while. After about seven or eight years, I had just had it shooting laboratories and guys in ties talking to each other, and I knew I wanted to travel. I kind of segued out of that into doing more travel editorial.

Every phase that comes, I usually get sick of what I’m doing, or I just get fed up with it, and I try to play to what I want to do next. And a lot of times it’s had a happy coincidence with the market either disappearing or something like that. When I got out of corporate work, I got out about a year or two before the whole bottom fell out of the annual report market. Fortunately I had already jumped over into doing some editorial. It’s like you jump from one lily pad to another just as they are going under, and somehow you make it across the pond.

Sometimes you can use a commercial job to push yourself to the next level creatively, even if that doesn’t entirely jibe with the client’s needs, as long as you stay true to your passion. Pete McArthur gave this insight: “One thing I found to be true was that just doing a good job was one thing, and being passionate about doing a good job takes you to different places. Doing a good job makes it easier to get paid but doesn’t necessarily get your photography to any higher level. At the same time, being passionate about your work actually can piss off a client now and then, but over the long haul has a more positive effect on your portfolio. I had a couple of assignments early in my career that had me shooting pictures that were supposed to look as close as possible to paintings. This started to move my portfolio in a fineart direction even though it was commercial art. How does the saying go? ‘You shoot what’s in your book.’”

There are lots of reasons why and how an artist changes directions. Some of the reasons are subtle, simple things; some of the reasons are huge flashes of insight. However they happen, they can be life-altering. Therefore if you are considering moving in a new direction, you have to create a portfolio that reflects that vision, and you have to get the attention of the people you want to work for—you have to captivate their imaginations. This has to be a gradual building process, one that will help you “segue,” as Bob Krist noted, from one station to the next. This is something we will examine in more detail later in this book.

The initial step of Recognition comes in many forms and at different times for different reasons, but it starts the entire process. We need to be able to realistically see 1) the patterns that we have created, consciously or unconsciously, in our personal growth; and 2) what the circumstances were which led us to choose those patterns. What we need next is a way to honestly assess where we have been, where we are now, and where we need to go.