Peter Adams: Photographers

Eisie was 93 when I photographed him in New York in 1992. He was still working a four day week at Time-Life - a great testimony to both him and the magazine. I asked him when he was going to retire. "Retire!" he almost shouted, "Retire from what? Life? I shall retire when I am dead and buried!" He retired at 93.  He was still working at Time magazine.

We met in ‘Kellys’ an Irish Pub in Wilmington, Delaware - by all accounts a favourite haunt of Al Capone. In a total coincidence, the day happend to be the 25th aniversary of the assasination of Robert Kennedy. Bill Eppridge arrived with a large box of prints under his arm. “We’ll watch the current affairs program first”, he said pointing to a large TV mounted on the wall. The program posed the question that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill Kennedy. Sirhan was using an eight shot 22 calibre pistol. Two bullets entered Kennedy’s body from the front. Sirhan never got closer that six feet away.  But the bullets that killed Kennedy were fired from a few inches behind his left ear - this could be established from the powder burns and some fragments of shattered glass. Bill Eppridge opened his box of prints. He pointed to one of the prints, “What do you make of that?”, he asked. The picture was a frontal shot of Kennedy. Standing behind him was a photographer wearing dark glasses and carrying a Pentax camera with a 200mm telephoto lens. “What photographer do you know, would work inside a small room wearing dark glasses and using a telephoto lens! The photographer dissapeared after the shooting.” Is it possible that the camera had been modified into a hand gun?

The stories surrounding the eccentricities of Elliott Erwitt are endless. Like the time he cut a hole in his gas mask so he could get his cigar through. Or the fact that he answers the phone by saying ‘Speaking’. Once he tried out a new whirlpool film washing technique by tying a roll of freshly developed film to a piece of string and dropping it into a toilet bowl and flushing it every ten minutes – he abandoned this idea when a roll of film got away from him.

John Filo’s iconic picture of the slain student at Kent State University, won him a Pulitzer Prize. His picture was all about death so it seemed important to me that my portrait of him should be all about life. “At first I thought the National Guard was shooting blanks” said John, “until a statue in front of me shattered into a thousand pieces. At that point I just ran.”

Jimmy Forsyth was working as a fitter and turner, in the Newcastle-on-Tyne shipyards, when he lost an eye in an industrial accident and, as no one needed a one-eyed fitter and turner, he was given twenty pounds severence pay and sent home. It was 1943, and social security was very much a thing of the future. On his way home he passed a pawn shop and bought a camera and, for the next 43 years, he recorded in intimate detail, everything that happened on the street he lived. He had two sets of contact prints printed at the local chemist shop. He sold one set to the family for a shilling and kept the second for himself. On the backs of the prints he he retained, he recorded the names of the families and the event in tiny detail. The resulting collection, all neatly stored in photo albums,  is one of the most important records of a working class community ever produced and won an art award in 1989. "The extra shillings were handy too! My pension was only got two pounds a week back then - not enough to live off."

You probably remember the old Panorama Cameras once used to make school photographs – all those tiny faces in a black and white in an elongated print and thousands of names you can’t remember? From a technical perspective, the Panorama Camera was, in reality, photographing the inside of a circle. Freddy Fox was an engineer who designed and built a camera, which is still in use today, that was capable of photographing the outside of a circle. He named it the  Periphery Camera, and one of the first subjects was himself. If you were to roll the resulting picture around a cylinder, the result would be a 360 degree look at the camera’s designer.

Someone once wrote that ‘underneath all the glitter of Hollwood, is real glitter’. Anthony Friedken records the glitter and glitterati of Beverly Hills and Hollywood with a disarming honesty. I photographed him in front of a concrete wall in downtown Hollywood, that had been painted to look like the cliff it was obscuring. It all seemed very Hollywood to me.  

“The whole issue as a journalist,” said Anthony, “is to confront reality. The whole issue is to take risks. The whole issue is not to edit your work before you have photographed it - if you are not recording the truth of the moment, the photograph will have no value.”

'"I am a photographer. I love children" said Anne. "That's what I do."

“You are a marvel” wrote Pablo Cassals. “Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again... and what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work – we must all work – to make the world worthy of its children.”

Sometimes the difference between a photographer’s personality and their work  is an obvious contradiction. At other times it’s more subtle.

This diminutive photographer - who outwardly would seem to be more appropriate working in a flower shop - has covered political situations in some of the toughest hot spots in the world. Winner of four Pulitzer prizes, Guzy bases herself in Washington where she works for the Washington Post.

Mid-winter in New York City can be a bugger. It’s virtually impossible to keep yourself warm at street level, without turning yourself into a Michelin-X man. One ends up with so many layers of jumpers, flack jackets and overcoats it becomes increasingly difficult to bend one’s arms. I stopped outside Greg Heisler’s building and checked the address I had tightly clenched between my lips. The piece of shiny paper was now firmly stuck to my upper lip. I opened and shut my mouth a couple of times and it flapped up and down like Miss Piggie’s false eyelashes. I peeled it off - along with a fair amount of skin. I now looked like Dracula after a gourmet snack – not a good look for an interview, particularly when a very neatly dressed Greg Heisler opened the door to his studio. Many photographers seem to pride themselves in adopting the appearance of the classic urban Guerilla – camouflaged flack jacket, scruffy hair, moth eaten trainers and the inevitable blue jeans. Not so Greg Heisler. Neatly pressed trousers, polished shoes and a natty floral bow tie - one could only describe Greg as dapper. “When I photograph the President of the USA,” said Greg, “I want to make him comfortable, not get arrested!”

Picture Post photographer Slim Hewitt was dying of liver cancer when I made this picture. He died four days later

Picture Post photographer Slim Hewitt was dying of liver cancer when I made this picture. He died four days later

Picture Post photographer Slim Hewitt was dying of liver cancer when I made this picture. He died four days later

Photographers seem to be naturally more observant than the average person. Is this a skill that is environmentally acquired, something they acquire genetically, or does a person’s observational skills become more finely tuned at certain times in their lives?  Paul runs a photography school in Derbyshire called ‘The Photographer’s Eye’.