max s. gerber(the latest shot)

sometimes taking pictures of the boss at a big firm can be nerve wracking. most of the time you encounter very busy subjects who don’t have much patience for sitting in front of a camera and usually aren’t particularly good at it anyway. almost always you encounter a handful of people under the boss who are nervous or just plain terrified of upsetting them in any way. these people always have good intentions, and always come with warnings. sometimes it’s general non-information, as in “he really doesn’t like having his picture taken” and sometimes it’s specific, as in “don’t ask him about vietnam” or “don’t mention his glass eye”. (okay i made those up)

often there’s a tremendous amount of scheduling that goes into these photo shoots which result in countless phone calls, several hours of waiting and about ten minutes of actual time with the boss in front of the camera. by the time we actually get to the ten minute picture-taking part everybody has a tendency to be a bit rattled. at this point, though, i’ve taken so many pictures of so many suits in so many conference rooms that i remain mostly unfazed.

ron olson is the boss at a big law firm in downtown LA called munger, tolles & olson. we set up early. he was our cover subject, so the shot was important. we were duly warned that he might not have much patience. we were prepared for the worst case scenario. out the window of the conference room we could see the helipad on the roof of the building across the street. i desperately wanted to shoot on the helipad, just because it seems like a fun thing to do. of course, that was out of the question. in fact, leaving the conference room was out of the question.

i took just a couple of frames before i stopped to look at the LCD display. it’s amazing how things can look different when you stop time just a little. i was prepared for just another guy in a tie, but it’s quite a gift when you see a subject that can raise the bar a little just by their presence. very few people are actually photogenic, but you couldn’t seem to take a bad picture of ron olson. he just looked great in pictures, and filled the frame with charisma. he’s the paul newman of lawyers.

every once in a while you get lucky, and you get the head honcho to show up and be in a great mood. true, he didn’t care much for having his picture taken, but begrudgingly agreed that it beat working. it seems ron olson had just gotten back from mountain biking in italy. this probably contributed to his good mood, and definitely contributed to my self-esteem issues. the guy’s like forty years older than me and i’d have a hard time mountain biking across the street.

some people confront the camera very directly and i think this contributes a lot to the feeling of charisma or presence in the finished picture. there is a great quote in the norman seef book which i’ll paraphrase since i’m too lazy at the moment to go downstairs to look it up. essentially it boils down to the idea that when you look at a picture of a person it feels as much like they’re looking at you than it is you looking at them. i try to remind nervous subjects of this and when you get someone who really knows how to do the looking it makes a big difference.

one day maybe i’ll be distinguished enough to do that. but for now i just look weird.

thanks as always to corporal bennett for assisting, and thanks to maggie at ALM for all her help in setting this up.

i just received an email from my old college saying that the dorm i lived in as a freshman is about to be demolished and rebuilt elsewhere. it’s kind of funny to me that this notice would come on this particular day, july 2nd, because i have very clear memories of that dorm, mostly of the first few weeks of my freshman year. of course, all the freshmen get to school a week or two before everyone else and undergo orientation to ease into being there so that maybe by the time class starts they won’t be so scared out of their minds and confused. those first couple weeks you end up with a lot of 18 year olds walking around nervous as can be, trying to act cool, and that was certainly us.

that first year of college i shared a wall with amy macwilliamson. our dorm rooms were right next to each other, and we hit it off right away. strangely, our room-mates ended up being good friends, too. sometimes i’d knock on the wall and amy would knock back. for some reason this pleased me very much, and i remember feeling that that simple act was an indication to me that i was somewhere else - both in place and in life - and even being as resistant to change as i was, i felt it was a good thing. i won’t embarrass amy and say publicly what i used to call her as a nickname. i will embarrass myself and say that i sometimes still call her that, even all these years later. that first year, after being fast friends for a few weeks, we had a falling out and took a couple years to come back around.

of course, this was all before either of us knew anything about photography, before either of us had ever considered taking a photo class, let alone taking pictures for our lives. in fact, i think we became friends again in the school’s small, poorly equipped darkroom. i was knee deep in trying to figure out how a rolleiflex worked and if i was crazy to be doing any of this, and amy was just starting to make quietly powerful and thoroughly humanistic pictures. while i was busy filling horse feeding troughs with fixer and bolting enlargers to tables trying to make giant prints, getting distracted by the toys and science of it all, amy was there, inadvertently teaching me important lessons: slow down. don’t be so flashy. look at people evenly and quietly. if you want someone to be real in your pictures, be real to them in person.

i always use the word quiet when talking about amy’s pictures. i’ve used it so much in talking to her that it probably annoys her now. but i keep repeating this because a sense of quiet (without being boring or mundane or plain) is such a difficult thing to achieve in a picture, and when it works i find it to be more impactful than almost anything. amy’s so good at this, and i’m jealous every time i see her photos. sometimes i think amy’s photos are like mountain goats songs, or raymond carver stories. that is, they all seem to me to be about that moment in someone’s life when everything has changed, but nothing has happened yet. there’s always a sense in her pictures that something really momentous is just about to happen to these people, and it’s a really beautiful thing.

anyway, today, july 2nd, i learned that the wall we used to knock on is being knocked down, and today, july 2nd, is amy macwilliamson’s birthday. i’m even prouder today to call her my friend than i was many years ago. happy birthday, amy. thanks for being so awesome for so long.

it’s always really nice when i stumble across a flattering mention on someone else’s site - in this case, thanks to neil at wonderful machine i found caitlin ravin’s blog, an art producer’s perspective. caitlin was kind enough to post something about the hearts book, and i’m much obliged.

mark just sent me this link, to a contraption with a funny name. the image fulgurator. it’s a crazy thing designed to mess with tourists vacation snapshots.

it senses other cameras flashes and projects it’s own image onto whatever they’re shooting. of course, they don’t find out about it ’til later. for more understandable info, look at gizmodo. or just look at youtube.

late last night paul sent me a link to a story about the marines involved in the haditha massacre. it seems they have all been cleared, except for one.

as a bit of background, this is from the NPR website:

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the leader of a Marine squad that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha, faces a military hearing Thursday at Camp Pendleton. He is charged with 18 counts of unpremeditated murder in the largest criminal case to emerge from the war in Iraq.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, as Sgt. Wuterich’s squad approached Haditha, a roadside bomb killed a fellow marine. Wuterich said the dismembered body is a sight he will never forget.

About 100 yards away, Wuterich, who had never been in combat before, saw a taxi with five young men in it. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Wuterich said the men were ordered out of the car and “as they were coming around, they started to take off. So I shot at them.”

this is staff sergeant frank wuterich, with his daughter, talia, at their home in camp pendleton, california. it was shot on september 5th, 2006, and was one of the strangest and most interesting assignments i’d ever been involved in. the story was for TIME magazine, and they seemed to have an exclusive on it. the assignment was strange because of the exclusive - i found out about the shoot maybe a week before it happened, and was instructed to tell no one any details about it whatsoever. it was a big story, and breaking news, and the more excited i got about it the harder it was to refrain from talking about it. i started to feel like i was in a spy movie. i couldn’t tell my friends or family or my girlfriend anything about where i was going or what i was doing, not until it was published. when i was processing the pictures after the shoot i had to hide them from people so no one could know the subject matter until the magazine came out. we were sneaking into the base, so i couldn’t even bring an assistant on the shoot.

i drove down to san diego, picked up the writer at a hotel and went over to camp pendleton. we had a cover, in case the security guard at the gate stopped us. we were officially going to see someone else. the military wasn’t too keen on wuterich talking to the press. but i drove up to the gate and even though i had a big car full of gear they just waved us on through. i guess we got lucky. he was living in a house on base, with his wife, marisol, and two daughters. marisol was pregnant at the time. frank was supposed to be out of the military at that point, but they were keeping him in just until they figured out what to do with him. i guess two years later it’s still ongoing.

i was really surprised to find a relatively normal looking house, and even more surprised to see that it was just frank and his family there to talk to us. no lawyer, no official military liaison. still, he was expressly forbidden by his lawyer to discuss specifics of that day in haditha, so instead we got to talk to him as a human being, not as a soldier. it’s difficult to reconcile any of the details of what happened in iraq with this guy i saw sitting on the couch in front of me. he looked like any normal, clean cut guy in his mid twenties. he played guitar. he liked rock and jazz, he was an honor student in high school. he loved his wife and his kids. he joined the military in part, he said, because he wanted to be in the band.

now it seems that wuterich has filed a lawsuit against congressman murtha for libel and defamation. murtha was instrumental in bringing the haditha massacre to the public consciousness. the charges against wuterich now stand at 12 counts of voluntary manslaughter. this is all brings to my mind the idea of the craziness of war - how it’s all about semantics. it’s okay to kill people, just so long as you do it according to the rules we make up. and if you don’t follow the rules just make sure nobody finds out. then again, i don’t know how these soldiers do it. regardless of your politics, whether you think we should be in this war or not, when you look at the situation it’s hard not to view it as an even tie for last place. is anybody actually winning here? in a situation that’s designed where you have to kill people to progress, is there a way not to come in last? you’re sending kids off into hell, they’re scared out of their minds and miserable, they generally don’t speak the language and everything probably looks like a threat. if ever there was a lose-lose situation, this has got to be it.

when TIME was laying out the original article they were initially going to go with my first select - the B&W shot below. it was to run a full page, no text, and i was really thrilled. it was great space, a great layout and i was really pleased with the picture. it had a quiet that i quite liked. then the editors (not the photo dept.) started second-guessing the picture. the writer said “a marine would never lower his head” and they started worrying that maybe the picture made wuterich seem guilty. maybe it made too strong a statement. i kind of thought that was the point (not an assumption of guilt, but of making a statement of some kind), and tried to argue it, but eventually the photo was swapped out for an alternate of him looking straight ahead. it was okay, but nowhere near as good in my opinion. still, the story got good space in the magazine, which is always satisfying, and it was a unique experience to be involved in. my sincere thanks, as always, go to martha bardach at TIME, a continual champion for photographers.

some relevant links:

the original news story corporal bennett sent me that prompted this post.

the original TIME profile of wuterich in which my pictures appeared.

the wikipedia entry on frank wuterich.

frank wuterich’s home page.

wuterich on 60 minutes - this is long, but it’s really worth it.

an NPR news story on wuterich.

the haditha story broke when an eyewitness to the attacks reported what had happened. this is a youtube video interview with one of the eyewitnesses.

(the opinions expressed in all these links are, of course, not necessarily reflective of our beliefs here at msgphoto.com. if you have a problem with them, blame them, not me.)

i’m a photographer, and i’m from a secular jewish family. this means i love complaining. i love it, i was raised on it, and i excel at it. but every once in a while you meet someone that just shuts you up. the plain fact is that my life is pretty damn good and i don’t really have all that much to complain about. i’m reasonably healthy at this point, i get to take pictures for a living, i can occasionally do things that other people find helpful, i live in a great place, i have the world’s most awesome cat, and i’ve got a lot of good people around me.

erica murray, should she choose to exercise it, has every right to complain. but the thing is, she doesn’t. at least, she didn’t to me and i gave her every opportunity to vent. erica is in her mid twenties and is currently undergoing treatment for her second round of cancer (leukemia). she beat it into remission once, two years ago, and then it came back. these pictures were taken on tax day (even more of a reason to complain), and just a couple days before erica headed back into the hospital for a several-week stay of intense chemo and stem cell treatment. she was agreeable, funny, insightful, beautiful and gracious.

erica keeps a blog (with contributions from her friends and family) detailing the course of her treatment, and it’s a really engrossing thing. you can see her blog here. she’s out of the hospital now and seems to be recovering well.

thanks to dick anderson and jamie murphy for their help in setting up this shoot, and thanks to corporal bennett, as always, for assisting.

but it’s a good joke. new study finds that children are opposed to children’s health care.

yep, that’s me on TV. and that’s really charlie rose. it’s not even a photoshop trick. we were in the same room, with tv cameras and everything.

thanks to everyone who emailed me about the appearance, and most especially thanks to all the heart parents who took time to write. hearing your stories is always a gift, thank you.

as to everyone else. . .well. . . i have eight minutes and twelve seconds of fame remaining. what now?

well, after some delay it looks like the day has come: i’m going to be on TV tonight.

the segment i taped for the charlie rose show in april is airing tonight (wednesday, june 18th, 2008) on PBS. check your local listings. i’ll be hiding somewhere, cursing the fact that my head looks weird and my voice sounds funny.

i’ll post a link to see the segment tomorrow, or whenever they update their website.

in the meantime, this is what my street looks like at sunset. it’s good to be back in california.

i was born three months early, on a day that happened to be my grandmother’s birthday and my parents wedding anniversary. my mother always said i was an anniversary gift to my father. now, almost thirty five years later, i still have my father’s curls, his stubbornness and a mere fraction of his perfectly realized aesthetic. happy father’s day, dad. love you.