I mentioned before when I lived in Canada I wanted to return to the US to finish my high school. I had an agreement with my parents that I would work to help pay for my return. My first job was as a stock boy in a grocery store and then I found a better paying job at a camera store. My boss was a professional photographer. He had done an amazing amount of different things in photography. He had started out during World War II handling reconnaissance photos taken over occupied Europe. He was moving from what you consider normal professional photographer’s fields such as food ads into architectural photography when I knew him. He was very kind to me and let me use his darkroom and taught me many things. Charlie was a perfectionist. I would see him work on a print and he would reject prints that I could not see were any different than the final one. This led to a discussion of what is beauty. If you’re old enough you may remember a Hush Puppies ad of a man and a woman dancing. In the ad, they were only shown from the knees down. I don’t remember what the copy was in the ad but the photograph looked pretty standard to me. Charlie pointed out many little details I had never thought about. He pointed out those little details made the photograph “beautiful.”
Every year Charlie would enter a contest for photographers in the area of what was called “Salon Nudes.” This led to discussions about what is beauty. I’m sure it was difficult for Charlie to get me to concentrate on what he was telling me because as an 18-year-old male I was just fascinated by the nude pictures of women and the nude models. Slowly over time I began to see what he was talking about. An example would be that the woman’s figure should always flow and be smooth in texture. If a photographer asks a woman to pose sitting and leaning to one side then only one side of her body will be smooth. That is the side from which the photograph should be taken. Because of the nature of the human body the other side will naturally have to have a fold of skin in it. It would be better for the photographer to ask the woman to pose in a way where there would be no folds or wrinkles. If you think back to the old Playboy photos, you will see most of the photographers never posed a model that violated the rule of flow and smoothness. I think the more important lesson that Charlie taught me was to pay attention to the small details to produce the very best result. That fundamental idea can be applied to everything we do. .
