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Transcription below by: Brad Baker (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Working for Kodak

What kind of assignments did you do for them?

I had a Speed Graphic [camera] and a huge battery pack. That was the way it started. I would take a picture of Vice President B handing citation A to employee C, the 'grip and grin' photographs. It was terrible work but there were some interesting things that happened. Kodak was, do you want to hear all this detail?

I think it's interesting to hear what kind of assignments you did.

Kodak, at that time, had taken over The Ed Sullivan Show lock, stock, and barrel. So Ed Sullivan was going to visit Eastman Kodak and tour the plant. This was a big, big deal for Kodak. The celebrity photographers were the studio photographers who made these exquisite pictures of cans of film and things like that. I was at the bottom of the heap. I was the kid with the Speed Graphic. So they decided that they were going to do something unprecedented. They were going to cover the Sullivan visit in color. It had never been done before. We all shot black and white. I, of course, had to cover it for the Kodakery. I decided that a Speed Graphic was totally out of the question. I had a Rollei so I decided to shoot it with a Rollei

The great day arrived and the man made his tour. We're all rushing around and I'm very focused on what I'm doing. Out of the corner of my eye, I sort of get a sense of these studio guys falling flat on their face, with equipment all over the floor and rushing around. I'm getting to peer through little clusters of flash cameras and do stuff like that. At the end of the time I turned in my take. They published it and then I noticed that people were treating me differently. Nobody ever said this directly to me. It turned out that I was the only person on the block who got any pictures at all. The other guys totally blew it. And so Kodak was using my pictures for the Ed Sullivan event. They [the celebrity photographers] were saying, "How did he do this and we couldn't do it?" At any rate, that was one of many stories of my illustrious career as a corporate photographer.

Working with Minor White

Let's take it up then to how you ended up becoming involved as a photographer for SNCC .

There's another piece of this, if you want to know my life history, which I really should talk about. I spent six months working as a private student of Minor White's. Do you know Minor White?

I do not.

Minor White is kind of a legendary teacher and also highly respected as a fine art photographer.

Where was he teaching?

At that time he was teaching at RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester. I would go to his studio at 72 North Union Street every morning. We had one child at the time. My wife had gotten a job as a secretary at the Liberty Tool and Dye Corporation. We called it, "Liberty Tool or Die." We kept our one-year old son in a cardboard box that we'd cut out in the shape of a cradle. She would take him one day and I would take him another day. Minor gave me a job as Subscription Manager of Aperture so that I had a little bit of money. I worked with him. I kept his dark room. I kept his chemicals going, and I absorbed his philosophy of photography, but not his approach. He was a fine art photographer, using a 4" by 5" view camera. I knew that wasn't my direction, and to Minor's credit, he never tried to force me in his direction. But I did see that photography was more than a way to make a living. It was a way to explore the world. It was a way to reflect the world to other people. It was a way to explore yourself.

Transcription below by Elizabeth Lowman (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Minor was a student of Zen. So we used meditation among other things. He taught me how to turn on my visual synapses, how to get my mind into a frame to photograph so that I was actually seeing what was out there, rather than just kind of recording it. He certainly focused my whole life. He was in every sense my photographic mentor. Everything I did from that point on, in some way, referenced Minor.

Could you just say more about, you mentioned his philosophy, the basic philosophy but not his approach? What was it about his philosophy that resonated with you?

Minor looked upon photography as a spiritual quest. He was always trying to photograph what he called spirit. I don't think I ever totally got that. I don't think that I went in that direction quite, but I saw that this could be a deep, personal expression. And that it could change the world and it could change people. Minor was not socially aware, or socially active in the same way that I was. But I think I began to fuse Minor's dedication, his life dedication to photography, with my own social instincts, my own social goals, and awareness. What came out of that was a sense that I wanted to work in movements of social change. This was my motivating force for taking pictures—it was never to make money. I needed the money. I shot to make money. I sometimes did assignments I wasn't all that entranced with to make money, but it was never my focus. When I went south, I knew that I was participating in history. When I strapped cameras on, I strapped them on, sort of as a social historian. That gave me the courage to walk into situations that I wouldn't have been able to walk into and do things that I wouldn't have been able to do, if I hadn't been carrying cameras.