I felt the only way to tell the story of Babe retiring was from the back. The number three was the thing I was interested in. “They retired the uniform that day so no other player would ever wear it again,” explains Nat Fein who had joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1934 when he was 20 years old.
“The picture editor told me never to use flashbulbs, if I could help it, so I handled my 4 x 5 inch Speed Graphic like a small candid camera. That day there was an Associated Press photographer standing next to me, but he held his camera vertically. He also popped a flash, so the foreground is light and the background goes dark. It didn’t work nearly as well.” Fein’s photograph won a Pulitzer Prize.
“It was a wonderful way of working at the Trib. We all printed our own negatives and kept them in our own files. When the paper folded in 1966, I could just take them with me.”
John Loengard, Celebrating the Negative is available to museums as a touring exhibition from Curatorial Assistance.
http://www.curatorial.com/john-loengard
BOOK
Celebrating the Negative
by John Loengard
Release in 1994
Published by Arcade Publishing
http://www.johnloengard.com
http://www.creativephotography.org
