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| Karen Gerbrecht |
I tell photographers
in this century that they lack the push of pushy art directors and editors from
that past century that made me take photographs in a ways I did not want to
try and invariably they were right.
One of them
Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling (now gone) spent fortunes buying
the best American magazines of the 80s. He would show me a portrait from
Esquire and would tell me, “Alex try doing something like it.”
Few now know that the first published photograph was one of the Steinway Building in 1873 that appeared in a long gone New York City newspaper. It was possible because the halftone process (lots of dots) had been invented. That photograph immediately linked photography with the arts and not long after it began a competition between magazines and newspapers to publish very good original work.
Now with
journalism moribund the only good photographs that I see are in my daily
delivered, hard-copy New York Times.
One of the
words often used by art director Staehling and his successor, Chris Dahl was, “Do
it differently.” This involved complex lighting and cameras of multiple formats
or swivel lens panoramics.
The digital
cameras of this century are like the 19th century Colt .45, the
Peacemaker, that put all the people who used them on the same foot.
It was in
that last century that I met an extraordinary violinist, Karen Kerbrecht who
played the instrument in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. With her we came up
with the idea of avoiding the clichés of a person with their instrument We
called our experiment “the anti-violinist”.
Now that I
have a wide (28 inches) and fabulous Acer monitor I am able to go to any file
and instead of opening I choose browse. I then see all the little pictures in
the file across my screen. When I punched in Karen Gerbrecht I found one that
somehow had escaped my notice. I shot it with a now long gone Polaroid Instant
Negative film. I will perhaps place a couple more.
At a future
date I will do another blog which I will title the Anti-Dancer. I worked with
Lauri Stallings who left Vancouver and has a dance company in Atlanta.
