GREIG CRANNA • PHOTOGRAPHER

[greigcranna]

      It seems impossible that a year has passed since I last wrote about Victory Programs and Mother’s Day, but it has, and here I am back at it. Last year, in an attempt to bring a moment of special attention to women living in Victory Program’s shelters, my daughter and I set up a studio in one of their Roxbury shelters and shot as many women as we could over 3 days. My daughter Molly Cranna, an accomplished professional photographer in her own right, served as tech support as we shot tethered to a computer and cranked out disks like mad for all the women who sat for us.

      It was such a success that we set out to do it again this year, adding videographer Erwins Cazeau , and putting a little more effort into the fundraising that seemed to be a natural fit with such an enterprise. It goes without saying that life in a shelter can be a demoralizing, soul-crushing existence, and it takes a special person to rise above it and retain dreams and aspirations. These amazing women brought great energy and beautiful children to our little DIY studio. I think you’ll agree from these photographs that we succeeded in showing the beauty and dignity they all possess, despite the difficult circumstances in which they’ve found themselves.

     Special thanks to everyone who saw fit to honor their own mothers with a donation to Victory Programs.

[greigcranna]

        All it takes is one trip to Eastern Europe, where you’re often smothered by brutalist architecture, to make you appreciate good architecture and how it can put a little shine in your day-to-day life and business. People usually associate architecture with buildings, but increasingly our environments are being transformed by architects who have turned to making infrastructure beautiful. I’ve been fortunate to spend a lot of time in remote areas in my life, but I, like the vast majority of us, live where we need a sea of infrastructure to function. Roads, tunnels, bridges and dams are all vital parts of our lives and our commerce, but historically, designed elegance was not foremost in the minds of the people designing them. Obviously, there are exceptions; The Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, California immediately comes to mind......

       But, there’s something very interesting going on across the world.  Increasingly, cities are not just embracing design to make their infrastructure attractive, but actually branding themselves around signature structures. No where is this more obvious than in the revolution in bridge design and construction. Having a cable stayed bridge in your city is like living near a mountain, where changing angle, light and weather conditions make it a dynamic object in the landscape. Savvy cities are learning to incorporate these phenomenal structures into their tourism marketing, and to foster civic pride amongst their residents. The Golden State Warriors use the new Bay Bridge in San Francisco in their logo. In the city of Charleston, S.C., the Ravenal Bridge adorns every tourist item imaginable ( Incidentally, both designed by my cousin Donald MacDonald ).

       As I’ve gotten more entranced by these structures, and embarked on a project to photograph as many as possible, my attention is constantly being dragged towards pedestrian bridges. The most successful big bridges seem to be those that enable people to interact personally with them. The constant flow of bikes, runners and pedestrians on the Ravenal Bridge is a testament to how important it is in the community. Pedestrian bridges take that interaction to another level. No longer sharing the structure with an endless flow of traffic, people are more likely to make the bridge not just a conveyance, but an actual attraction in of itself. Santiago Calatravas’ Sundial Bridge in Redding, California, connects a park on one side of the Sacramento River to a museum on the other. Beautifully lit at night, it’s a magnet for walkers, runners, dog walkers, and skaters. The Harbor Walk Bridge in San Diego, California, spans light rail tracks and six lanes of traffic, and now enables unfettered access to the waterfront for pedestrians coming from the northern part of the harbor. Also beautifully lit, it begs for, and receives attention, and has played an important role in the  transformation of the downtown harbor front....

[greigcranna]

      So, that big Hockney-like montage I wrote about in my last post was just the beginning of a 15 year relationship with this piece of property and the incredible redemption story that is still going on. The first couple of years were taken up with acquiring all the existing buildings and properties, and gradually removing a century or more of industrial detritus. The fact that 3 cities shared  the property was complication enough, but the Malden River was under control of the Army Corps of Engineers adding many more layers of permitting and bureaucracy. But, the buildings gradually came down and countless tons of debris were removed. Next came the restoration of the river edge. Hard hat divers worked for hundreds of hours cutting apart a huge sunken barge in almost total underwater darkness. Cranes lifted the massive, cut pieces of steel out of the river, while up and downstream heavy equipment tore out all the invasive species of plants and prepared it for restoration. Around this time Tufts University built a new boathouse on the site and moved their rowing program to the Malden River soon after. 

      Native vegetation was reintroduced and quickly took hold as Shadley Associates took over the design of the park and started in earnest to implement its creation. Remarkably, the developer’s vision was to build this beautiful park before  building his first building. Many times in that period I would drive a big, orange JLG lift around the site on the weekends, rising to scary heights, hanging a tape measure over the side of the cage getting a measurement. This way I could simulate the view from each floor of the building that would eventually be there. Not knowing that business, I thought it was a pretty radical way of marketing; to use location,visuals, and outside amenities to sell a place in a building that wasn’t even built yet.

   However, by the time the building was started, the entire park had reached a point of establishment that was down-right remarkable. When the first tenants moved in they were greeted with views of tree-lined pathways, rowers on the river and the giant weeping willow tree that was the only standing survivor of the prior years. I’ve seen many remarkable things there myself over the years; I started a bird list 5 or 6 years ago and am currently at 77 species. A pair of Bald Eagles flew up the river while I was eating lunch there in April. Last winter I saw a Fisher on the ice (with the skyline of Boston in the background). And, of course, at least one coyote is still around. It’s become a place that’s a pleasure to photograph; exceptional morning light, equally good afternoon light, and impeccable and unrelenting groundskeeping.....

[greigcranna]

       Fifteen years ago I rented a Nikon D1x and shot my first digital job. After over 30 years of shooting film it was exhilarating in its immediacy. but tinged with sadness. It was instantly apparent that everything we knew about making photographs was about to change, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to throw my lot in with the new world. 

       For this job, though, it was the perfect tool and enabled me to pull off a job that would not have been unthinkable on film, but would have been astronomically more difficult and expensive. My client, PreotleLane+Associates, had just been named the developers of a vast brownfield site along the banks of the Malden River a few miles north of Boston. The site was an industrial wasteland containing derelict buildings, contaminated soil, mammoth piles of tires, a sunken barge and a family of coyotes. The plan was to build an incredible park along the river that would be the home of the Tufts University rowing team, an office park, and a handful of large residential buildings. Before the long process began of knocking down buildings, removing the barge and waste, and restoring the riverfront, the developers wanted a “before” picture. Numerous aerial photographs had been taken already, but none really captured the derelict feel of the long straight half mile of the frontage road that would be transformed by the project. 

      Flummoxed by the problem of capturing all this in one photograph, I turned to David Hockney for inspiration and the D1x for execution. Years before, Hockney had used  Polaroid SX-70 film to shoot hundreds of individual photographs before assembling them, like a mosaic, into fabulous finished composites ( he called them joiners). They were angular and quirky. Bits of sky here, the ground there, often incorporating his own feet.

     So this is what I set out to do with the D1x. I started at the far left end of the site and shot a dozen frames from my feet to the sky, turning the camera constantly to fill the frame vertically, horizontally and diagonally. I then took ten steps to the right and repeated the process. I continued to do this over the next hour or more, stopping to change memory cards and batteries as needed. It was a cold day in December and battery technology was not what it is now. My greatest fear was that I’d get half way through and run out of replacement batteries. I had 2 or 3 spares with me and I made it to the end, but by this time the light had changed dramatically. Between the changing light and the 4000+ images I had on memory cards I knew I had a lot of computer hours ahead of me to put this whole thing together.

    But, with a little tech help I pulled it off, creating a single photograph that was composed of 1000+ individual frames.  The creation of the finished print is a story in itself. Each print was 3 1/2  x 8 feet, coated with UV protection and mounted on custom-made frames that floated off the wall. Bolted together in place and hung on giant Z clips the final print was 32 feet long. Two years ago we made a 25 foot long version using newer technologies. Archival pigment prints were face mounted on plexiglass, then mounted on aluminum and floated off the wall. This version now hangs in one of the completed office buildings at what is now called River’s Edge.

[greigcranna]

     Once again, the obituary of another creative giant has sent me spinning back through time and into my archives. This week Hermann Zapf, arguably the world’s greatest type designer, died in Germany at the age of 96. Creator of some of the world’s most famous and enduring typefaces, his work is subliminally etched into the minds of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. His Optima face is etched into both the Vietnam memorial in Washington and the 911 memorial in New York. His Palatino face ships with Microsoft Word and his sweeping calligraphic face Zapfino ships with every Mac. He was the reigning giant of a world that few outside the graphic arts industry knew, but his influence is felt everywhere the printed word occurs.

      Like most of the world, when I shot my first job for the International Typeface Corporation, I was pretty oblivious to type design. I had been obsessively studying the work of all the great photographers, but had paid scant attention to how their work was being used in print and the type that surrounded them.

    That all changed sometime around 1980 when I was hired to photograph Herb Lubalin for the ITC. I can’t remember how the job came my way, but it was a life changer. Herb Lubalin, along with Aaron Burns and Ed Rondthaler, had founded the ITC in 1970, and was himself, a huge presence in the type and graphic design world. He had designed the famous PBS logo that’s still in use, as well as the ground breaking typeface Avant Garde. He had also been responsible for the creation and design of the seminal type and graphic arts magazine known as U+lc (Upper and lower case). I shot him first in the converted fire station that was his studio, and again not long before his death in 1981.

     From that point on I became a regular presence at the ITC, shooting their gallery shows and openings, features for U+lc and all manner of special projects. The gallery and the regular shows  there became a magnet for all the great talents of the New York graphics world and I met and photographed many of them over the years : The great cartoonist Lou Myers, the illustrators R.O. Blechman and Seymour Chwast, type designers like Ed Benguiat, Matt Carter and Herman Zapf, and even the royal scribe, Donald Jackson. I was young, and these guys were huge in their fields, and a huge influence on me as well. With the influence of the ITC, type for me was no longer just a field of letters that surrounded my photographs, but an integral part of every design I looked at for the next 35 years.

    Ironically, Matt Carter now lives in my neighborhood and I run into him regularly. A 2010 MacArthur “genius” Grant winner and a major player in the typography world, he was quoted in the N.Y. Times after Herman Zapf’s death:  “Last Thursday, all of us moved up one. That’s my way of saying Herman was on top.”

      A few from that period; mostly 1980′s……

[greigcranna]

      Victory Programs is a Boston-based nonprofit that for 40 years has worked with homeless individuals and families. Many of their clients have issues with substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and mental illness. I’ve had many dealings with them over the years; either covering their programs for other agencies and foundations, or working for them directly. 

    This year, in what I hope will become a yearly tradition, we set out to do something special for all the mothers currently in their shelters and engaged in their programs. Along with my daughter, L.A. based photographer Molly Cranna, we set up a studio in one of their Roxbury shelters and spent 3 days over the Mother’s Day weekend taking portraits of mums and their kids. With me shooting tethered to a laptop, Molly was able to quickly process the raw files, send them wirelessly to another laptop and burn CDs on the spot, enabling each mum to leave with a CD of photographs of her and her children. The staff had rented a bounce house for the back yard and set up barbecues and face painting for the families and made quite an event of the whole affair.

     It was a pretty grueling 3 days for Molly and me, but I think you can see from this sample that the event was a major success. These women are struggling to scrape their way back to some sort of normalcy, and living with kids in shelters can be a pretty grim existence. On this day they all looked proud, radiant, and hopeful. I think it was memorable for them, and I know it was an unforgettable experience for my daughter and me. 

[greigcranna]

      When I started this blog last year, I hoped that occasionally outside events would send me scurrying to my archives for photographs that had a connection, and hopefully an interesting story to boot. Unfortunately, and I guess, inevitably, sometimes those triggers were  obituaries.

    Last week we lost a giant of the music world when B.B. King died at the age of 90, an event that instantly transported me back 30 years to a day I spent photographing him. I had just relocated to Boston from New York City, and Tufts University quickly became a solid client. Over the years I would photograph many people for them; Queen Noor of Jordan, Ted Turner, Helmut Kohl, Peter Jennings, Armand Hammer and countless others. But, the first, and most memorable, was B.B. King. I can’t remember who was responsible for bringing him there, but it was  a day of master classes, interviews, and generally just being an ambassador for the blues. The master classes were basically him cradling his guitar Lucille on his lap, talking about life and music, and occasionally punctuating some thought with a casual, but very sweet little lick. It was basically just a conversation; sometimes with the audience, sometimes with Lucille.

   As I crouched barely 3 feet from him I was taken with his warmth, gentleness and patience with what was a pretty clueless collection of questions from his adoring audience. But at that distance it was hard not to shift attention to his hands. He didn’t have the otherworldly, impossibly long fingers of the 1930′s blues great Robert Johnson, but stubby, thick little numbers. At rest on his knee they didn’t look to me like guitarists hands, but in an instant they could be transformed when he casually moved them to the guitar and tore off some lick.

     I took a lot of photographs of him that day, many of them with his head back enjoying some particularly sweet note, but it is this photograph that’s been on my wall for decades that carries the memory of that day. It’s just a hand at rest; it could be anyone’s, but the ring lets you know it’s a hand that can leap to attention in a nanosecond and make amazing music.   R.I.P.

[greigcranna]

   Last fall I wrote about producing a book for the Franklin Square House Foundation to celebrate five years of grant making to organizations that support women. These grantees run the gamut from child care centers servicing low income areas, to organizations running domestic violence shelters, drug and alcohol detox programs, emergency shelters and transitional housing for pregnant or parenting young women.

    For the sixth year in a row I spent a fair amount of time photographing their grantees, culminating this past week in the foundation's annual meeting. As I have in the past, I put together a large collection of photographs to run throughout the networking and luncheon portion of the meeting. I put up big 6x8 rear projection screens on either side of the room and projected with beautiful 4500 lumen XGA digital projectors. Each projector was connected to a Mac Powerbook running the show with the Bridge function of Photoshop. The Bridge is a great way to run a slideshow; background color, dissolve rate, speed and sequencing are easily programmed and need no attention once you hit play. There's a light table function that enables you to see all the photographs in the folder as if they were on a light table, and you can move them around as if you were laying out color slides. As long as you remember to turn off the energy saving functions in system preferences the show will run uninterrupted until you shut it down.

   But, the show (and the book before it) would never have happened without the help and cooperation of all the incredible women who let me barge into their lives and photograph them. For most, if not all of them, the place where I've found them is just a step up from their nadir. They've often come from addiction, violence, disease and homelessness, yet somehow are willing to let me, a stranger, into their lives. These women are all making valiant efforts to improve their situations, and my mission, more than anything else, is to show that spirit. There are so many sad stories out there, but personally I choose to depict the road back rather than the slide to the bottom. I made hundreds of photographs for the foundation this year, here are a few favorites…...

[greigcranna]

     A busy fall and the complexities of shooting film in a digital age got in the way of my follow up to the Nikon S2 post. Hope to be better in the future, but in the meantime I want to continue where I left off...

       Shooting with the S2 after 12+ years of digital shooting was like working without a net; no meter, no screen on the back to check your progress (or your screw ups). Stripped down, like driving my brother's 1954 VW, a tin can with no seat belts. Vulnerable as hell, but exciting nonetheless.  A little dramatic perhaps, but you get the idea. Just watching your remaining exposures disappearing on the film counter is enough to keep you alert and focus your attention when you shoot.

    My 1955 S2 may be the same vintage as my brother's VW, but it is by no means a tin can.  It's probably a third of the size of my Nikon D4, almost too small for my hands, but possesses an amazing feel of solid, machined precision. The shutter's not as quiet as my old Leica M4, but it still has a wonderful, solid release.

    Like the 54 bug, it attracts attention when you go out with it. I hovered around the front of the stage at The Maverick's show and fielded a lot of questions from curious cell phone shooters....I think Eddie Perez even noticed it; he kept mugging in my direction. Of course, with my precious 36 exposures I couldn't just blithely fire away…I didn't want to be fumblingly changing film just when something good was going on, so I thought a lot about timing and the flow of events. A really interesting exercise...

   So, of course, film in 2014 poses different challenges than 15 years ago. Throughout much of my life I always had a darkroom and would simply go downstairs and process my film on my schedule. I can still get B+W processed in 24 hours, but now I have to drive 20 minutes each way to drop off and pick up. I had no plans to make wet prints, so I loaded the negs and scanned them with my Epson V700 Photo scanner. The first thing that jumps at you is how we've unknowingly gotten used to no grain in our photographs. As wonderful as digital imagery can be, there are times when its unrelenting perfection makes you long for some good old Tri-X grain. There are all kinds of ways to modify digital images, some which make fairly believable "film" looks, but Tri-X will always be the time machine that can transport me….

    That said, a few things from the first 2 rolls...

                    Mavericks Fan, Indian Ranch, Webster, Mass.

                 Eddie Perez, Indian Ranch

               Mavericks Boots, Indian Ranch

                  The great Eddie Perez

              Molly + Friend, Santa Barbara

[greigcranna]

    I was 14 in the summer of 1965, and Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" shared the top of the charts with The Rolling Stone's "Satisfaction" and Sonny and Cher's "I got You Babe." The album it came off, Highway 61 Revisited  transformed Dylan from folkie to rock star overnight. Inspired by the cover, I immediately went out and bought a Triumph motorcycle T shirt and started saving for my own bike.....

        This album got played + studied relentlessly for years, and by the time I was 17 and beginning to shoot photographs my attention shifted from the T shirt to the camera hanging in the background. It was a Nikon SP, introduced in 1957 to compete with the Leica M3. It was the last in a line of Nikon rangefinders that had begun in 1948, and quickly became the darling of working photojournalists. It would compete with Leica until 1959 when Nikon introduced their first single lens reflex (SLR), the Nikon F. Leica would go on to introduce the incomparable M4 in 1967 and dominate the rangefinder world from then on.

     A note on rangefinders....Unlike the now dominant SLR, rangefinders didn't employ a system of mirrors and prisms to allow you to actually view through the lens. Instead, 2 viewing windows, one on either side of the camera combined to give you a close approximation of the lens position. You superimposed the 2 images to focus, and because you weren't viewing through the lens, there was no blackout at the moment of exposure. With a flash exposure there was an almost eerie frozen-in-time sensation and you knew immediately whether you had captured the moment or not. Because there was no prism housing and no mirror to flip up out of the way, they were smaller and quieter than an SLR; hence the attraction to photojournalists.

   By the time I started shooting in 1968, SLRs were taking over the world and my first camera was a Nikkormat FTN, soon followed by a Nikon FTN and a long line that included F2, F3, F4, and F5 film cameras. Even as I dabbled in Leicas with my first M4 in 1970, I never forgot that SP. There was something magical about that rangefinder dangling casually behind the ultra hipster Dylan. It belonged to Daniel Kramer, the photographer who shot the cover ( as well as Bringing it all Back Home ), and was being inexpertly handled by Bobby Neuwirth, the scene-ster and Dylan confidant and tour manager throughout the 60s and 70s.

    So... fast forward 46 years; past hundreds of assignments, dozens of cameras, the advent of digital photography and I'm lusting after film and a Nikon rangefinder. After much searching around, I settled on the SP's forerunner, a 1955 S2.  Loaded up with Tri-X, I took it to The Maverick's show at Indian Ranch last week, then on to LA to shoot surfers at Manhattan Beach. I love not obsessively looking at a screen after each shot, working slowly and using my precious 36 exposures carefully. Hopefully I'll have something worthy to post here soon. In the meantime, here's the little jewel…...

[greigcranna]

     It's been a while since I posted here; travel on the west coast and down south, a busy shooting schedule, and a writing assignment have pulled my attention elsewhere. I hope to pick up the pace here, but in the meantime check out the piece I wrote on Vivian Maier at Artsfuse.org. I'll be writing more photography criticism on that site in the coming months....

    I had a shoot in Lawrence, Mass. last week, a down at the heels, former industrial city on the banks of the Merrimack River north of Boston. After I was done shooting, I visited one of my favorite industrial structures in North America; The Great Stone Dam. Built by a consortium of wealthy investors over a 3 year period in the 1840's, it became the literal heart of a planned, but unbuilt city, its canals the arteries that would power the industries to come.

    I first discovered the dam 35 years ago when I was sent up from New York City by Pan Am Clipper magazine to shoot the photographs for a story on the innovative hydroelectric project that was being built on the site. Yes kids, there was a time long ago when all the airlines had glossy high end magazines and they actually assigned real photographers and writers to produce stories. 

     After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, OAPEC, later OPEC, punished all the countries who had supported Israel with an oil embargo. Americans, for the first time, started to pay attention to energy and where their oil came from, and the search for alternative energy sources was on. By the late 70's I was shooting solar, wind and hydro stories for the likes of The Dept. of Energy, US AID, Popular Science Magazine, and publications and organizations of all stripes. Jimmy Carter famously put solar panels on the White House after he was elected, and Ronald Reagan famously removed them after he defeated Carter in 1980. That act, and the mind-set it reflected probably set back alternative energy R+D for at least a couple of decades.

     But I digress.....No big new dams were being built in the U.S., but small scale hydro was enjoying a small boom, mainly with retro fits to existing dams. The thing that made the Lawrence dam so unique was that it was large enough to generate real amounts of electricity, but could not be touched or altered in any way due to its National Historic Register status. The Essex Company, the owners of the dam had come up with an innovative solution; they were carving a gargantuan hole at the far left end of the dam in which would be placed a vertical axis turbine, leaving the dam untouched. Today when you drive by, the only indication of a hydro project is the chain link fence and sign. 

    Composed of gigantic blocks of granite, it's 900 feet long and 35 feet high, a remarkable engineering feat for the time. For me the appeal is in its ever-changing visage. It's like watching how weather changes a mountain. At some times of the year it's a vast wall of damp stone, at others it's a 900 foot waterfall. When you stand at its base under the bridge, surrounded by urban detritus and gang graffiti, spray and mist gradually covering you and your camera, the noise is deafening. When the river is low and no water comes over, it is a huge dark silent presence. Lawrence is a poor city with all the attendant problems, so my threat radar is always turned on when I visit the dam. When bait fish are running up the river, anglers are out in large numbers casting for striped bass below the dam and the area has a near-festive feel. At other times when it's deserted, the graffiti, detritus and thundering roar lends a much more ominous feel to the place. I always try to be as stripped down possession-wise as possible when I visit....

     Last year I rented a helicopter to shoot a project for a developer, and with the door off I had the pilot make a bunch of passes over the dam to get a different perspective on it. Here're a few dam pictures; last week's first....

[greigcranna]

         It was hard not to notice all the GoPro cameras at the Olympics over the past couple of weeks. Mounted mainly on helmets, they seemed to be doing a great job of capturing all kinds of cool footage. So naturally, it made me want to relate my less than wonderful experiences with mine. The web is full of commentary from people like me who have consistently had problems with the camera. Lots of talk of short battery life, but more ominously, a lot of experiences with the camera freezing; sometimes minutes into recording, sometimes hours. So, first I bought an auxiliary battery and started trying to do long time-lapse captures. Sometimes the camera would run for 10 minutes, sometimes 45. Before a show my band was doing, I mounted it in the rafters hoping to make a time lapse of us setting up, playing, and breaking down. Not to be. It froze 10 minutes in although the red light indicated it was still recording.  While in Canada shooting the new Huntsman Aquarium ( see earlier post ), my buddy Pat and I decided to shoot some aerials and this seemed like a good time to try out some of the cool mounting options. I mounted the camera on one of the wing struts using the roll bar bracket, took the door off the plane and took off. We flew for an hour, making some great low passes and extreme turns, all the while that little red light looking at me. Once again she let me down. When we landed and I had the camera in my hands, I found that it had frozen after 10 minutes, missing all the really good stuff. We got the aerial photographs we were after, but only this clip of us flying. Gotta get back to harassing GoPro….

[greigcranna]

     Sometime in the early 80's I decided it was time for me to start to acquaint myself with film formats other than 35mm. and reluctantly traded a couple of prized Leicas for a Swiss-made Sinar 4x5 camera. Tough to part with them, but I had limited resources and needed to push in some new directions. Without getting too technical, the beauty of shooting with this type of camera, apart from that huge piece of film, was that you could swing and tilt both the back and the front of the camera. This meant that when you were shooting  buildings, you could keep the back parallel to the face of the building and simply raise the front standard to capture the top of the building. This way you maintained perspective and didn't get those amateurish leaning backward building photographs. The same thing with shooting interiors. You could put the camera high and lower the front standard to capture the floor. Suddenly, everything had that professional "Architectural Digest" look.

     Of course, there's a back side to everything, and the disadvantages of this camera are numerous. First, the film came in sheets and had to be loaded into light-proof holders in the darkroom, two sheets to a holder. If you were going out for the day you had to have a separate bag filled with these preloaded backs, and if you carried a lot of them they got bulky and heavy. On top of that, the camera itself was huge and required a large, very sturdy tripod. This wasn't a camera for grab shots. Think Matthew Brady under a black cloth photographing the Civil War dead. The Sinar was a beautifully made piece of Swiss technology, but it was only slightly less cumbersome than Brady's. The reason all of his photographs were of the dead was because the cameras and films of the era weren't fast enough to capture the action.

     So....I quickly got the hang of the thing and started getting architectural jobs, which in most cases meant setting up somewhere on the street with this big tripod and what looked like an old fashioned camera. It attracted a lot of attention; most of it harmless, but as my work took me more and more often to rougher parts of rougher cities a lot of the attention I could have done without. Before I'd put my head under the cloth I'd do a quick sweep of the area, duck under, make some adjustments, do another sweep, etc. I felt like a nervous prairie dog popping up continually to assess the danger factor from predators. But, the curiosity factor usually worked to my advantage. Even the toughest gangsta couldn't resist checking it out and I felt oddly safe once that big tripod was parked. Because there is no mirror system to flip and reverse the image like in a conventional 35mm. camera, everything you see on the ground glass is upside down and backwards, which obviously takes some getting used to. I bought a polaroid film holder so I could shoot polaroids to see everything right side up before committing to real film, and also to show to the never-ending curious onlookers.

     One morning I was out really early to catch some pretty light in one of the more dangerous and notorious parts of Boston. I did my prairie dog routine, but frankly, most of the really bad actors aren't up that early so I felt pretty safe. I did my customary sweep and coming towards me is a guy who's had a pretty tough night; he's unsteady on his feet and wearing latex surgical gloves on both hands. It's pretty obvious he's not a surgeon just getting off the overnight shift at one of the city's hospitals, so I give him a big grin and say good morning. He asks what I'm doing and when I tell him, he asks if he can have a look. I say sure, help him negotiate getting the black cloth up over his head and stand back to keep an eye on things. A long time goes by, maybe as much as a minute, and there's no sign of him making any move to emerge. At least another minute or two goes by, and just when I'm thinking it's time to investigate, he lifts up the cloth, turns to me and says: "Man, I am so fucked up, everything is upside down and backwards. I better get home." I figured he wasn't much of a candidate for a camera lesson, so I just grinned and watched him stagger off. 

    A couple of years later I had the big camera parked in a slightly less dangerous part of town when a gunfight broke out across the street between 3 teenagers on bicycles. People were diving under cars and I was cursing that here I was with the wrong tool for the job. A brand new Mini had 4 or 5 bullet holes in it, but nobody got hit and I went back to shooting my building. Not long after I'm in almost the identical spot, pretty occupied with getting my shot and I hear this guy saying, "hey, take my picture!" I don't know how I'd missed this guy, but he's lying on the sidewalk just a few yards from me and he's had a really tough night. No shirt, cuts and bruises everywhere, but a big grin. "Come on man, take my picture." He won't give it up. I keep telling him I've got a job to do, don't have the right camera, etc., but he won't give it up. Finally, he says, " I know how to get you to take my picture." He reaches up to his face and with that big grin takes his eye out. I said "you're darn right I'll take your picture," reached into my bag and grabbed a Nikon, banged off 3 or 4 images and went back to work. Made my day, and his too I think......

[greigcranna]

      When I set out to start this blog a couple of months ago I had no real idea of the direction it would take or what kind of things I'd find interesting enough to write about. I knew it would be driven by photographs and the adventures that inevitably arise in the making of photographs. I thought mixing up current jobs and travels with ruminations on, and excursions into, the past would maybe keep it interesting as well as offer glimpses into aspects of my work and past that most of my clients and friends have no idea of.

     Of course, I had no idea what the triggers would be that would actually get me to sit down and write. An interesting job, destination or obvious self promotion was low hanging fruit; other topics were going to be more of a challenge.

     So, it was with great interest that I read of Edgar Bronfman's death last month. Here was the exact trigger I'd been looking for. Edgar Bronfman was, among other things, the man who built the Seagram's brand into what it is today and president of the World Jewish Congress. But, it was the photographs of the younger Edgar Bronfman in the paper that took me back to a much earlier part of my career, because he was a regular at The Council on Foreign Relations.

    I wrote earlier about Kabuki and shooting for The Japan Society in the late 70's, and it was through them and some joint events that I gained entrance into The Council on Foreign Relations and this world I never dreamed existed. Don't get me wrong; I wasn't exactly a rube, but I was 27 or 28 and had not grown up in a world where one regularly rubs shoulders with the rich and powerful. I was moderately well educated at public institutions, my father had a PhD in physics and I considered myself pretty well read, but it was as if someone had opened a secret door and let me into a room of unimaginably exceptional people. 

    I have to laugh a little at the vision I have of myself from those early years and the figure I must have cut there. After my initial shoot for them at the Waldorf-Astoria they starting hiring me to shoot at the mansion they owned at the corner of 68th. St. and Park Ave. I didn't own much for clothes, so I typically showed up in cowboy boots with a very expensive pair of pants and some kind of tweedy sportscoat and tie. The late, and much loved, Grace Darling who ran the programs there, loved my look and everything about me and talked me up to anyone who would listen. She was truly one of the angels that I never could have built a career without...

     The Council on Foreign Relations was then, and still is a non-profit, non-partisan membership organization, publisher and think tank. They had a regular program of forums and talks that were closed to the public and strictly off-the record. Countless times I watched a world leader get out of a limo out front, fend off a press pack and enter the quiet decorum of this beautiful old New York mansion where they would be mine, and mine alone. My job was to casually cruise the scene and make photographs without being obnoxious. I began there in the late 70's; It was the waning days of the Carter presidency when I began, the waning days of the first Reagan presidency when I relocated to Boston and began working for them infrequently.

      Which brings me back around to Edgar Bronfman....Like I said earlier, I was no rube and I knew who the vast majority of the players were at these events. Obviously, as time went by and I learned and read more, the bios of some of these people became even more other- worldly to me, but what began to gradually sink in was the concept of the power elite. Here in this small collection of rooms would be concentrated people at the highest level of their games. Industrialists, politicians, writers, military men, thinkers and doers. At the time, David Rockefeller was chairman and Winston Lord was president. Lord would go on to be ambassador to China, Rockefeller needs no introduction. In conversation around the room would be the likes of Henry Kissinger, Boutros Boutros Ghali, the writers Barbara Tuchman and Francis Fitzgerald, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, David Stockman, Lord Harlech, John Diebold, et. alia. The architects of the post World War II world like John McCloy were mixing it up with Vietnam era heavies like McGeorge and William Bundy and Daniel Ellsberg.

      Through it all I just drifted with purpose, mastering the art of being there without being there, Grace Darling's touch occasionally guiding me to some little vignette I was missing. I don't think my wardrobe ever changed much for the better, but I was never treated with anything less than the utmost respect from everyone I encountered there. And one thing I do remember about Edgar Bronfman....he was always impeccably turned out.

   Moshe Dayan arriving, circa 1979

Daniel Ellsberg. Pentagon Papers were leaked in 1971. This is circa 1980.

   Kissinger always  knew where I was; made my job easier.

David Brinkley and John Chancellor. Amazing to think that people once smoked indoors!

John McCloy was under secretary of war during WWII. Lord Harlech was the British ambassador to the U.S. during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He was killed in a car accident in Wales just a few years after this was taken.

Jimmie Carter on a short walk-about after speaking. That's Richard Helms, former head of the CIA giving me the stink eye from the right side.

[greigcranna]

       In 1905, a flooding Colorado River blew through a series of dikes and flowed out over the desert south of Palm Springs, California. When the dikes were finally repaired and the flood staunched, the Salton Sea now occupied what had been a mix of desert and agricultural land west of the Imperial Sand Dunes and just north of the Mexican border. Developers dreamt of the next big thing and raced to build towns, marinas and motels only to have their dreams ( and their projects) drowned as the sea continued to grow. Today, the sea is shrinking as agricultural water demands grow, and its current size is around 35 miles long by 15 miles wide. The dreams left a long time ago and what remains are a smattering of occupied houses and a whole lot of derelict, unoccupied structures along both the east and west shores. At the northern end huge date palm nurseries and agricultural operations flourish, and the southern end is thousands of acres of flat, irrigated farm land. Gigantic hay operations sit next to vast fields of flowers, aloe, peppers and just about every crop imaginable. The sea and the irrigated fields have become one of the most important bird areas in North America, where millions of birds of over 400 species winter, or stop through on their way to and from South America. 

    As a birder and an agricultural photographer it has been a magnet for me for 15 years and I've been at least once or twice a year since 1998. The southern end is laid out in a vast grid of dirt roads, every one of them leading to something amazing. It could be 10,000 Snow Geese in a field, workers harvesting flowers, a Burrowing Owl standing on a dirt berm or a Roadrunner eating a bat. It's that kind of a place......

                     So, I was there again a couple of weeks ago with a buddy, driving along the top of one of the berms that borders an irrigation canal looking for birds and photographs. We came over the top of the berm and there in the middle of the dirt road sat a crop duster, big radial engine throbbing, and the pilot standing on the road next to the plane. I'd been trying to shoot one of these guys for awhile, but never seemed to be in the right place, so I jumped out and went over to talk to him. He was waiting for the tanker truck that would load him up and pointed a couple of miles away to where he'd be spraying. He didn't seem to care about me shooting him; just told me to try and avoid the overspray. Wouldn't tell me what he was spraying, but said it would only irritate me a little. We jumped back in the car and raced off to try find the field he'd be spraying. A few minutes later a huge dust plume showed us he was taking off and we followed as best we could to the field he was going to spray. He made about 15 passes then went back to reload. By that time I had myself pretty well positioned and was starting to figure out his pattern and getting some good pictures. These guys fly fast and low, making incredibly steep dives, dropping in around power lines and pulling out just as steep as they came in. When he was done he came right at me 10 feet off the ground, gave me a thumbs up, wagged his wings and pulled up right over my head. Too cool. A minute later another one showed up. This guy was flying a newer plane and was more of a cowboy. He was dropping in and staying no more than 6 feet off the ground, probably doing 100-125 mph. Very impressive. He probably had been communicating with the other pilot and was putting on a show for us, passing by maybe 30 feet from me. I'd shoot on full auto, then cover up as he went blasting past still spraying. When he was done, he wheeled high in the sky, dove straight down and came at me maybe 6 feet off the ground. My auto focus couldn't keep up and when he was filling the frame he pulled up and was gone. Great way to end the day....

[greigcranna]

      In 1964, The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition of Twentieth Century Engineering. In the mid seventies while living in New York, I stumbled on the book that accompanied the show in a used book stall and pounced on it. It was all black and white photography and I was sucked in instantly by the structures, as well as the photography. Since then I have actively pursued my own photographs of structures, with this book always in the back of my mind. One of my favorites in the book was the solar observatory on Kitt Peak in Arizona, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in 1962. Last week I finally found myself on top of Kitt Peak after driving the 12 mile road 7000 feet up from the Sonoran Desert ( almost ran over a Greater Roadrunner at around 6000 feet ). Roaming around is allowed and my buddy and I had a beautiful late afternoon shooting a structure I've been thinking about for over 30 years....

[greigcranna]

      For 35 years I've crisscrossed the Canadian maritime provinces shooting dozens of assignments for industry, foundations, magazines and research institutions. There have been countless adventures and crazy times in those years, many of them while in the company of my old pal Pat Fitzgerald. Guide, boatman, salmon guy, pilot and commercial diver, Pat's just about the best wing man I've ever known. He's just finished overseeing the construction of the new aquarium at The Huntsman Marine Science Center in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, so I headed up there this summer to shoot it for them. St. Andrews is at the end of a peninsula that sticks out into the Bay of Fundy and has been my home away from home for more than 25 years. 

     We wanted to shoot twilight shots, so Pat lit the place up and we hung out with our backs to the St. Croix River and waited for that tiny little window when the light coming out of the building matches  the remaining light in the sky. I can remember in the old days shooting 4x5 color polaroids and tucking them in my armpit for 90 seconds to keep them warm while they processed. Usually you'd do it over and over until you found that window, switch the polaroid back for a film back and bracket your exposures like mad. Almost seems too easy nowadays. Now you just shoot a frame every few minutes and watch on the back of the camera until that perfect ratio is achieved. 

    We had a couple of beautiful nights with a lot of laughs and messing around and came up with some nice stuff....