Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the “cool photojournalist” type. Another aspect of “career” I never acted on in any serious way.
Except the work. I loved the work. The images were all. (I’d read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors. He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said “Pop, it’s just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times” and he said “No, I don’t” and quit. Part of me thought I’d gotten the jump on that kind of scene by not even taking the job in the first place, but at the end of the day I was just a stupid kid who didn’t do the work to find out how to do the work.) I was very serious about the work itself. I’d stay up late in my darkroom, music playing, working in oversized trays.
I didn’t pay nearly as much attention to the color side as maybe I should. I did a lot of it, but I never took the same time to learn how to print color as I did black & white. Now I’m going through these old transparencies and thinking, hmm, not terrible.
Example, from Soulard’s Market.
Antoine Soulard was a refugee from the French Revolution who settled in St. Louis and became the first “official” surveyor for the village and surrounding lands. The section of the city now occupied by this open farmer’s market was once owned by him. Later his widow “gifted” it to the city when they tried to make her fix the streets in her area. She didn’t want to pay for that, so she turned it over the the town, who then had to do the repairs out of general revenue. (Republican thinking even before the city was even part of the country!)
Soulard’s Market is on Broadway and part of the heritage of old St. Louis, even though it is still some distance beyond the borders of the original 1763 village.
I’ve worked this image over a bit to make it more, oh, photojournalistic.