Portraits of the Artist as a Young (and Old) Man
Two old photos unexpectedly appeared in my inbox the other day, triggering a flood of memory and reflection
The other day David, a friend and classmate from long, long ago and far away, unexpectedly sent me these photos he took of me the summer we graduated high school — 1968, fifty-six years ago! I turned 17 that summer.
Neither of us can quite remember where we were when he shot them. The Rolleicord camera in my hand in the photo below, though, dates them certainly to that summer, after I had answered an ad in the LA Times for “portrait photographer, no experience necessary” and ended up shooting baby portraits door to door all over the LA metro area for an outfit called Vistacolor Studios of Hollywood.
The Vistacolor business plan worked like this: A sales crew would canvass an area in the suburbs, going door to door and selling certificates for an 8-by-10 color glossy portrait of you and your child for just $4.95.
The sales guys would book appointments in the neighborhood every 15 minutes for the following day. Vistacolor’s money was made by a second sales crew that would, a few days later, show the finished portraits to the customers, encouraging them to order prints anywhere from wallet size to 20 by 30, ready for framing.
So first thing each morning I would drive to Hollywood, pick up a stack of appointment slips and about a dozen rolls of 35mm Kodachrome slide film and head off to Lakewood or Costa Mesa or whatever was the neighborhood du jour and start ringing doorbells.
From the time I pressed that doorbell I’d have exactly 15 minutes to say hello to the customer, hang a backdrop from a door frame, plug in the clunky strobe lights — one on the camera, one on the floor behind the subject — pose mother, child, and sometimes a dog or cat, and take six frames, no more or less, tell the mom how cute her child was, note on the sales slip what the subject was wearing, pack up my gear and drive to the next address.
Most days I was booked solid from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. or later. I got paid $1.25 per session, later in the summer raised to $1.50. That meant I was making $6 an hour, out of which I paid for my own gas. Minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60 an hour; gasoline sold for 34 cents a gallon. I made good money until, rushing between appointments one day at summer’s end, I missed a stop sign and wrecked the car, putting a stop to my pro portrait career.
Back to that Rollei camera* in David’s picture: It was on loan to me, along with the portable backdrop and clunky lights, the entire summer I worked for Vistacolor. That was a great fringe benefit; the Rollei had wonderful heft and presence, and I loved shooting with it. I didn’t handle one again until my first newspaper job, seven years later, when I once again had a Rollei and strobe on long-term loan from my employer, the now-defunct Delano Record.
One of the virtues of photography is this: Like good wine, photographs always seem to improve with age. Naturally, they evoke nostalgia — looking at those two old photos that arrived in the email the other day, I hear the music of 1968, from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” to Blue Cheer’s then-astonishing heavy-metal version of “Summertime Blues.”
I smell the smog of L.A. and feel the summer heat of the city that enveloped me as I drove home from each day’s last assignment.
Those old pictures also, of course, remind me of the power of black and white photography. And, naturally, they capture a moment that seems like only yesterday. It was yesterday, wasn’t it? You can tell from the photo below, taken this morning outside our house, that I haven’t aged. Not one bit.
* Observant photo geeks might wonder why and how I was shooting 35mm film in a medium-format Rollei, which takes much-wider 120 roll film. The Rollei I used each day was fitted with a removable 35mm film adapter, which made the Rollei’s 80mm lens a perfect focal length for traditional portraits.