PEOPLE WITH CAMERAS People with cameras live peculiar and magical lives. Sometimes they just fall into things. I met Ali in Miami in the early 1960s. He was working out with Angelo Dundee, his trainer, and with his brother Rudy as his sparring partner. He was Cassius Clay then. He had not done any major fight that I knew of. He was simply an extraordinary looking physical being. Likeable and very funny. And you could talk to him like anyone else. I was wondering if we could film one of his fights. Bill Ray, who was with me, thought filming a fight was going to be difficult because we weren’t in that sort of film business, but still liked the idea. Bill was a Life photographer who had joined our filmmaking operation. He had a ferocious spirit—you couldn’t stop him, and we worked together for as long as I stayed with the magazine. I had worked on Primary, our first documentary, for Robert Drew Associates, which Life magazine sponsored. I learned a lot about shooting with a camera from Bill. He showed me a lot of things photographers know about, things I would never normally think of doing, like changing focus in order to look at different people in a line of faces. The kind of filming we did, you’re always hunting, you’re not even sure for what, and you’re taking pictures of everything that’s going on around you. Later you must turn them into a story, a theatrical event, with characters who tell you what’s going on. By then you’re a different sort of person. You’re a chef and the film you make will be the only one of its kind you will ever make. It will be like a dream remembered for the rest of your life. What Peter did with his camera at Deer Lake in August of 1974 lets us experience Muhammad Ali’s private world in a way not seen before. These photographs preserve the ambience of a time and place and reveal aspects of the character, now world famous, that Bill and I had met in Miami long ago. The camera was an invention of the nineteenth century; it may have existed before but not as a medium for public viewing, and the whole nineteenth century opened up to pictures of itself in many ways. I’ve filmed many times with President Kennedy and I think he may have seen what I was doing as filming a history of the presidency for presidents to come. He once told me that he wished someone had been filming Roosevelt when he declared war on Japan. By the time Peter photographed him at Deer Lake, Ali meant a great deal more to people than as just a famous sports figure. It’s clear from the access Peter had that, like Kennedy, Ali was interested in history and saw value in the creation of a record of his activities at a crucial moment in his life. And with his camera, Peter accomplished that.
D A Pennebaker New York, New York February 2016
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