Foreword
Jeffrey Heller
I love things visual and technical. Because I have been gifted with a mind that has both bents, I have taken a deep dive in and enjoyed many fully realized interests. I was fascinated from a young age with cars, trains, and planes—not only their external appearance, but their inner workings, as well. I became an amateur astronomer at an early age. I had a strong interest in building and fixing things. I have been drawing at least since I was five, and buildings, art, and design have been with me as long as I can remember. Of these many interests, architecture and photography have been the most immersive and enduring.
My father had a similar love of the visual and the technical. During World War II, he was hired by the Army to photograph secret radar installations. He followed photography as a profession for some years after, with a studio in Manhattan. He gave me my first camera when I was fifteen. I loved taking pictures.
Architecture interested me from an early age, but with the dawning of the space age in the late 1950s my technical bent took hold, and becoming a rocket scientist was my high school obsession. I joined a rocket club sponsored by the Army. I was accepted into MIT, intending to study aeronautics and astronautics, but after a few months I walked into the architecture department and said I wanted to major there, instead. I missed the visual aspect in my studies.
Growing up in New York City and going to college in Boston, I had never been west of anything. After I got my architecture degree, the West beckoned, and I moved to San Francisco in 1966. That summer, I took a workshop with Ansel Adams in Yosemite. He and his wife ran a small shop in Yosemite Village, selling photographs and a variety of things to park visitors, and he gave workshops from time to time. That was quite a remarkable experience, and I learned a lot in that brief time with him. When I returned to MIT for my graduate degree in late 1967, I took a full-year course with Minor White, who had just been invited to start a visual arts program there.
After graduation, I practiced both architecture and photography professionally for about ten years, burning the candle at both ends. I did architectural photography for various clients, and I also did some magazine photography. In my mid-thirties, I took a step back
and realized that, if I was to be truly serious about what I was going to do, I had to choose one or the other. I decided to commit fully to architecture. As a result, my approach to photography changed. I started shooting only for myself, which freed me up to think about images rather than programmed content. Of course, architecture loomed large in the subject matter, but landscapes and interesting people and places became the foundation of what motivated the pictures I took.
I have had the good fortune of being able to travel for both pleasure and work. This book not only has pictures from America, but also Europe, Russia, Cuba, and Asia. My intention has been to select photographs that offer strong images and impressions rather than create a travelogue. I hope I have succeeded in making pictures that stand by themselves visually, while creating a vivid sense of time and place.
All of the images in this book are from my time with film cameras. I stop at the year 2000, when I made the transition to digital. I think there is a difference between what film and digital can do in the rendition of an image. Some pictures were made with a 5 × 7" view camera, some with a 4 × 5". Some were taken with a unique panoramic camera with a rotating lens, using 120 roll film. Most were taken with a Hasselblad in a 2¼"-square format.
My professional instincts stayed with me long after I had stopped doing commercial photography. Working with the Hasselblad, I could easily switch lenses and film-backs from black-and-white to color, choosing the medium that seemed to best convey the subject. Often, though, I would take photographs with both. I kept a darkroom for the black-and-white film for many years and changed to professional processing only towards the end of my film era.
Many of these photographs are fifty years old, the oldest dating from the 1960s. I had them scanned at Photolab in Berkeley and have worked on them in the “magic time machine” of Lightroom, a gift of the digital age to the photographer. The transparencies and negatives have been well preserved but show their age to varying degrees. Lightroom gives the ability to bring them back to what they were like when first taken—and more than that, what they were like in my mind’s eye. My goal here has been to present the images in a strong and realistic way. I have avoided special effects and excessive manipulation. They are all of the real world and are stronger for being presented without embellishment or exaggeration.
The photographs in this section are from my earliest days in San Francisco and the West. To a young Easterner, the country from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean was a revelation. Arriving in San Francisco was like nothing I had ever experienced: crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, going from the summer heat of Marin County into the cool fog of the city, was an indelible moment. The bridges of San Francisco Bay fascinated me and still do.
I arrived in the Summer of Love, which was certainly a draw from the staid East Coast. It was not poetic, but it was intense.
Redevelopment was going on in the middle of town in that era, so there are pictures of displacement and destruction, like the remarkable building that was the backdrop of the climactic scene of the movie Dirty Harry
My first trip down the coast was another revelation. Point Lobos, the Bixby Creek bridge—all of that area had a quiet beauty, which had not yet become iconic. Yosemite Park, Sequoia Redwoods, and Glacier Park in Montana were all powerful to a young man who had spent his early life mostly in urban places.
San Francisco, California and the West
Redevelopment at Convention Center, 1966
Armenia, post-earthquake
