Interview with Myself

November, 2005

I: Why do you photograph?

CC: Because I have to. It's a kind of obsession. To paraphrase the painter Robert Rauschenberg, I take pictures because it's the best way I've found to get along with myself. I have found that there is something very powerful, very invigorating about using a camera. It helps to validate my idea of the world, offering up evidence of my journey, in a way.

I: What attracted you to photography?

CC: When I was a boy, I had two surgeries to correct my vision. The first was successful and the second probably would have been if I'd followed through and done the post-op exercises, which involved wearing a patch over my good eye to strengthen my weak one. I hated the patch. My friends called me "the pirate," which I didn't interpret as a term of endearment. As a result, my vision with glasses and without is very different. With glasses, the world is sharp and clear; without it's blurry, soft.

My father bought one of the first Minox cameras when I was a boy. For a kid fascinated with spies and spying (I grew up in the late 40s and early 50s), this was a seductive piece of equipment. It was magical, although the pictures it made were tiny and became almost unfathomable when enlarged. When he was away at work, I'd take the camera on my adventures, though I never actually used it. But it was in my hand and gave me magical powers. As I grew older, I purchased cheap miniature cameras that were labor intensive and yielded dreadful results, but they pleased me nonetheless. When I was sixteen, my parents sent me on a chaperoned camping trip to Europe with fifteen other boys from boarding schools like the one I was attending. Our parents gave each of us a modest amount of spending money for incidentals. When we got to Germany, many of us bought cameras. It was 1958. The SLR was still in its infancy. I bought a Voigtlander, I think it was called a "Vitoret." It had a fixed 45mm lens and took amazingly sharp pictures. That summer I must have shot two hundred or more pictures, which seemed a lot at the time. They were all landscapes and random shots of people and I haven't got a single one of them anymore, but I did get a lot of pleasure from having them developed into slides. I put my sisters and my parents to sleep very quickly the night I showed them.

I: Was that the drum roll for serious photography?

CC: Not quite. I kept my interest in photography, but not enough to join the school's photo club or learn anything about photography other than the basics. By that time my mother had one of Kodak's new "Instamatic" cameras and insisted on shooting my sisters and me whenever we were home. I quickly became camera-shy and did everything I could to avoid her lens. But I was intrigued by the line of Instamatic cameras and eventually bought one that you'd wind-up and then shoot. It spooled through the film on its own, which was pretty neat at the time. Again, I have none of those pictures, but I did feel empowered by that little machine. A few years later, I was a junior in college and for some reason I was motivated to get a more serious camera. I bought my first SLR-- a Pentax with screw-mount lenses. I think I had a 50mm and a 135mm lens. The following year I married a girl I'd met in college. We spent our honeymoon in Mexico and the Yucatan. While there I shot a lot of film. One day we were being driven to one of the Mayan ruins in Yucatan and we passed a small stone arch under which a young bull was tethered. The driver explained that it was soon to be slaughtered. I asked him to stop and I got out of the car and shot a few frames. It was the first time I remember actually spending time framing a shot. When we got back to America, I had the pictures developed. There was one of the bull that I had enlarged. I still have it somewhere. It was my "decisive moment." The photo looked like a professional shot in my eyes, and many of our friends commented on its quality.

Soon after returning from our wedding trip, I accepted a teaching job in western Pennsylvania. We moved east from Denver, where we'd been living. One of my fellow teachers was an avid amateur photographer. He offered to help me build a darkroom in the basement of the house my wife and I were renting, and I took him up on the offer. It was a mistake in some ways, because I soon became a slave to my photography, spending up to twelve hours a weekend in that confined, chemically-stifling space, bending over my enlarger board. My wife was an artist herself, a very gifted painter, and she understood my need to express myself—at first. But I got my priorities pretty screwed up and couldn't pull myself away from my hobby. By then I had traded my Pentax for a Nikon, one of the F-Photomic series. I shot everything I could find. My wife became my live model and I shot a lot of film of her.

I: Did that lead you into photography full-time?

CC: No. I had an eye for landscapes and still lives, though, and one of my photos won "honorable mention" in a local show. That immediately went to my head and I envisioned becoming a full-time photographer. It was a short-lived fantasy. I stayed with teaching for three more years and then quit to pursue a career in acting, which was something I'd always found enticing. That was also a fantasy, given the odds against success in that business. But I got lucky. After a summer as an apprentice in a popular theater in Ohio, I was able to join one of the actor's unions. We moved to my wife's home in San Francisco, where I got a little stage work. While in San Francisco, I found an old Zeiss Super Ikonta 111, a small folding camera that took 120 film and turned out a 2 1/4 x 1 5/8 negative. It had a very sharp Tessar lens and became my constant companion. I built a darkroom in the basement of my mother-in-law's townhouse and spent most of my time roaming the streets looking for images. It was the mid-sixties, the age of "Flower Power," and there was no shortage of photo-ops. I made a small amount of money shooting head shots for actors, but I was really at the bottom of the ladder as an artist. I thought my pictures were great, but there was very little interest in them from the few galleries I visited. In the meantime, our marriage was floundering. My wife was painting, I was acting and pursuing photography. Our lives began to drift apart, and we agreed that a divorce was the best course to follow.

I returned to my parents' home in Connecticut for want of a place to figure out my life at that point. They were about to leave for three weeks on an African safari with my brother and another couple. At the last minute, they asked me to join them. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. At that time I had the Zeiss Ikon, a Leica M4, and a Nikon. With the 35mm cameras slung over my shoulders, I boarded the plane in New York. It took me a while to forget my personal problems at the time and connect with the amazing landscape around me. Over the next three weeks I saw miracles and marvels as we followed the game on its yearly counter-clockwise migration through Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Sadly, I have only a handful of images from that exotic trip.

On our return home, I made the rounds in New York seeking a theatrical agent and once again I got very lucky. I signed with a man who represented several highly respected actors. Nine months later, with his deft guidance, I landed a contract to a major Hollywood studio and moved to Los Angeles.

I kept active my interest in photography, shooting often but not regularly. Then I landed the role of a photo-journalist in a major film that was shooting in South America. It happened that the cameraman was Sven Nyquist, Ingmar Bergman's incredibly talented collaborator and a man who truly defined cinematography. I spent nearly a month on that film, in Panama, Equador and the Galapagos Islands. All the while, I hung around Sven and his three-man crew from Sweden, watching him work and peppering him with technical questions. He was gracious and indulgent and I learned more about lighting and film through that experience than I have since. In any event, I returned with several very interesting shots, both black & white and color. But I was still an amateur, very interested in photography, but hardly ready to stake my future on it.

I: When and why did you move to the Northwest?

CC: I was in my second marriage, this time to an actress. My wife and I had two young daughters. We'd both enjoyed some success in our careers, but we were anxious that our children grow up in a healthier environment than the one we were experiencing in Los Angeles. We looked at various possible venues in which to settle, and we chose Seattle. We moved here in the fall of 1988, with no contacts and very little to guide us other than the fact that we'd found good schools for our children. I had been on a soap opera before we moved to the northwest and my character was revived. So, I commuted periodically for the next nine months. In addition, I landed a steady commercial job locally, and that gave us financial freedom for the time being. Nine months later, my character was written off the soap. I still had the commercial job, which lasted another six years, and I was hired, out of the blue, as co-host for a local morning talk show. That job lasted until the first Gulf War turned everything at the studio upside down.

With the commercials providing us a comfortable living, I had more time to pursue my photography. By then I had become actively engaged in the environmental movement in the northwest. I joined one of the local environmental organizations and began traveling all over the state and south into Oregon in pursuit of big trees and intact old-growth forests. This was the beginning of the spotted owl wars, and I felt a compulsion to find and photograph clearcuts and other such apparent devastations of the land. The more I traveled and spoke with people on the ground, the more I understood the frustrations of each side in the burgeoning drama. I read as much as I could on the subject and wanted to use my time and talents to help both sides reach some kind of satisfactory agreement. It proved to be a fantasy.

At that time, I was writing poetry and I published a small book of poems that reflected my environmental ethic. I called it Seizing Paradise. The cover featured two of my clearcut shots. It was the first time I felt as if I had something to contribute. The book was pretty much a non-seller, although I did manage to place about seventy-five of the two hundred and eighty copies in bookstores in Seattle and Portland. The rest I gave to friends, family, and the occasional fellow-poet I met along the way. Interestingly, the only place I can find copies now is on ebay, and for a higher price than I had sold them!

Another divorce took its toll on me and my family. I was single again, back in the dark cave of depression. My children were grown, the youngest a freshman in college. My ex-wife and eldest daughter moved back to Los Angeles and the world of show business. About that time, a mutual friend connected me with a woman I'd known through the school where we'd sent our children. She shared my interest in poetry and exuded positive energy. With her help, I began to find my way back to the light. She encouraged me to follow my passions, and it soon became clear to me that I'd met the woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life.

My interest in the environment had become a primary focus, though I knew relatively little about the issues at hand. The idea of graduate school began to occupy my thoughts. I did a little research and found an environmental studies program locally that seemed tailor-made for me. For the next two years, I read and wrote papers to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was a sobering and often deeply depressing course of study, and when I graduated, I felt as if I'd been swept away by an avalanche of bad news. But getting that degree was a milestone for me. It gave me the confidence to become a player in the movement.

In the meantime, acting work in Seattle had become almost as endangered as the spotted owl. I managed to land a few jobs, but there was no steady employment to be found. About that time the digital revolution had found its way into photography. Having sworn I'd never touch a digital camera, I was sucked into the vortex and purchased a small digital point-and-shoot.

I: Did that lead you to give up film?

CC: At first it did. By then I'd moved in with my partner and we were planning a trip to Europe that spring. When the time came, I'd learned the basics of digital photography, but still felt a comfort with film. So I packed my new camera and my trusty Nikon FA, which I'd purchased used about six years before, having sold or traded my other equipment. My beloved Zeiss Ikon had been stolen at a car wash in Los Angeles the year before we moved to the northwest.

In Europe I shot both film and digital, increasingly pleased with the results I saw in the viewing screen of the latter. Along the way, I had my film developed and printed, so I could see the results. Until I returned and downloaded my digital images, I had no idea if they were really any good. As it turned out, they were better than I'd anticipated. I bought an HP photo printer and Photoshop Elements, and began working with the two hundred-odd images (film and digital) I'd shot in Europe. The memory of my darkroom days came speeding back to me as I sat at my computer and worked magic with a mouse. No more chemicals, no more back strain! It was a miracle! I produced about fifty digital prints of the trip, most of them superior in my eyes to the film shots. I shared them with a few friends, one of whom responded with an offer to host a show for me. That was an irresistible opportunity, and two months later a few dozen of my images went up on the walls of her dining room, matted and framed and looking very impressive.

I: What was the result?

CC: I think I sold about fifteen of them. It was very gratifying and I began to envision more such events. Since then I have had four shows in Seattle and am looking forward to more. For me, the greatest pleasure in photography is making the print. Once it's up on the wall and others are moved to comment positively, well, that's the icing.

I: Do you think technology has improved photography?

CC: With reference to digital photography and programs like Photoshop, I'd say yes, definitely. I know there are many great photographers out there who disdain the digital revolution, and they have sound reasons for doing so. There is still a visual difference in the print quality of film vs. digital, but I don't know anyone who isn't using digital imaging at some stage between shooting and the final print. Well, I know a few and their darkroom work is sublime. But the vast majority has gone over to the digital side. I recently picked up a vintage Rolleiflex and am thrilled by the pictures it produces, although I have all of them converted to digital for editing and printing.

Unfortunately, the digital revolution has ushered in an "everyone-a-fine art photographer" era, and that bothers me. I consider photography an art form and serious photographers artists, no less than painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers. I think you have to have talent, which is a mysterious, etheric gift from the gods and needs to be treated with respect. Excellence as a photographer requires a sharp eye and a keen sense of design, whether the artist is drawn to chaos, stasis or order. Not everyone has that. The digital darkroom is vast and can render something mundane quite astonishing. But it is much more than a matter of snapping the shutter and opening the image in Photoshop. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer had it right when he observed, The life so short, the craft so long to learn." I hope I can continue to learn until the moment I die.