When I was seventeen and photography was a lot younger I would sometimes see pictures of by a man named William Mortensen in the photography magazines I read. There was nothing else like them…nothing. They looked like paintings but not, and they were like illustrations but not and they were beautiful but made in a way I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I loved them. After a while they disappeared from the publications and I forgot about them but I guess not really because when I saw one again fifty years later, the surge of emotion that came with recognition took me totally by surprise. I loved them again as strongly as I had as a teenager. I was able to learn, the internet told me parts of the Mortenson’s story , his successes, his fights with Ansel Adams in Camera Craft magazine, his disappearance from photographic history at the hands of Adams and Beaumont Newhall and now a slow reemergence of him and his work as books were written and his work was republished. I was fascinated by the mysterious gaps in his story:, why did he leave a career in Hollywood to live and work in sleepy Laguna Beach? what made Fay Wray’s mother so angry she destroyed almost every picture he ever made of Fay and most important, how had he made those luminous images? The thought that those answers were lost in the past, like details you forget to ask your family members before they go,saddened me. and I missed knowing what I might have known.
Then I saw a book called Mortensen and Me. Written by a man named Robert Balcomb it promised to answer some of my questions. I bought it and discovered there was that and more. Balcomb had studied with Mortensen in the fifties and they had become friends. Then Balcomb had gone on to practice portrait photography for fifty plus years using exactly the methods Mortensen had taught him. His book was a reminisce, a memorial to his friend, a tutorial and demonstration of the techniques Mortensen had used, and finally a portfolio of the beautiful portraits he had made using Mortensen’s techniques.
When I saw the book had been published in 2013 I became excited. I wondered if Balcomb was still around and if I could speak first hand with a man who had spent time with Mortensen, As it turned out he was around and I could speak with him so in June of 2014 I travelled up to Seattle to connect first hand with a touchstone from an early photographic love of my youth.
At 88 years, Robert Balcomb is full of life. To sit with him and speculate on how things Mortensen came to be and to talk about what and how he learned from Mortensen was an intense pleasure. Most of what we talked about was in fact already covered in his book. If you care about pictorial photography or beautiful portraits or analog processes you have to have it. I did learn a few new things talking with Balcomb that afternoon, the depth and venom of Ansel Adams’ distaste for Mortenson’s style, the simplicity of Mortensen’s portrait posing technique, Balcomb and Mortenson’s shared deep devotion to perfecting a process and then using it. They were not afraid to stay with a good thing even when the styles around them were changing. Mainly I got to connect to a passion that had informed my work for years, even if I don’t work in the same way.
Robert Balcomb has written a beautiful book, filled with beautiful images. They are a testament to what can be achieved by finding something you connect to and staying connected to it. They are also a tribute to the richness of analog processes and the beauty of hand-made images.
In the end, the answers to all my questions were not revealed but…in the end, they were not as important as what I learned.
BOOK
Me and Mortensen – Photography with the Master
Robert Balcomb
Available at Amphora Press www.amphoraeditions.com
Story by Andy Romanoff – [email protected]
Website — www.andyromanoff.zenfolio.com
