Baritone Tom Fox - March 2001

In this century of emojification (my coinage) people rarely comment on what they see unless it is a critical one. They post photographs and pictures in social media without explaining why or how the image may have affected their life.

Because the halftone process was not invented until 1873 photographs could never appear in magazines or newspapers. You either held them in your hands or saw them hanging at a gallery. Some appeared as photogravures in the front pieces of books.

The first photograph that appeared in a now long gone NYCity newspaper was of the Steinway Building. The photograph was accompanied by copy (writing). That started a symbiotic relationship between photographs and illustrations with magazines and newspapers.

In this century that is being forgotten and many think that a photograph does not need an explanation. Sometimes photographers who specialize in tight photographs of bald eagles (this activity will disappear with AI) like to explain in great detail the equipment that was used.

For me, since I specialized in magazine and newspaper photography, the explanation for my photograph was the essay or article in the magazine.

Now with all those magazines and newspapers about gone how would anybody judged or comment on the photograph seen here?

It is a portrait that I took of American opera baritone in March 2001. Why is he holding a ship’s wheel? He appeared in Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.

I easily projected with my focusing spotlight a cloud scene using a metal gobo. But what of the ship’s wheel? I went to the Maritime Museum and asked my then friend Jim Delgado if I could bring Fox over for the photograph.But I must add that I had to take a grey background paper (large) to place behind Fox for my cloud projection. Luckily at the time Rosemary and I owned a large Audi.

And that was it.