Photographer Monte Kruse’s new series of Hummel Park images is featured in the November exhibit at Connect Gallery. His ‘Incredilble Likeness of Being’ seen above focuse on his theme of mankind’s collision with nature.
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Television, the Hamer Way: Father-son tandem of Dave Hamer and Roger Hamer own combined 76 years in the TV news industry
May 27, 2019
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Television, the Hamer Way
Father-son tandem of Dave Hamer and Roger Hamer own combined 76 years in the TV news industry
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in the June 2019 edition of the New Horizons
Outside of Mike and Chris Wallace, there may not be another father-son tandem in broadcast journalism history with the pedigree and longevity of Omaha’s own Dave and Roger Hamer.
Retired television newsman Dave Hamer. 89. enjoyed a 1953 to 1991 career distinguished by many firsts. He was the first journalist to work at all three major Omaha network affiliates. He was America’s first local TV journalist to file stories from Vietnam. He was the first civilian reporter to fly a mission with the U.S. Air Force’s airborne command and control center, Looking Glass.
He covered the horror and hysteria of the Starkweather murder spree. As a street reporter-photographer, he covered storms, accidents, riots, political rallies and athletic events. He wrote-produced newscasts and documentaries, He captured the return to Omaha Beach of a Heartland veteran who survived D-Day. He gave back to his profession as president of the Omaha Press Club, the Nebraska News Photographers Association and the National Press Photographers Association. He taught TV news at UNO and co-chaired the annual News Video Workshop at the University of Oklahoma.
He’s been honored for his contributions to the field as an inductee in the Omaha Press Club’s Journalists of Excellence Hall of Fame and the Nebraska Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.
Roger Hamer, 61, never intended following the family trade yet his 38-year TV news career now equals that of his father, Roger creates packages that see him do photography, reporting, editing. He also produces. He succeeded his father as a teacher at UNO. He, too..has earned much peer recognition for his work, including an Edward R. Murrow Award. He is well on his way to joining his father as a lifetime achievement honoree.
They have a combined 76 years in the business. Their professional paths formally intersected once, in 1991, when Roger, who began at KMTV, joined WOWT, where Dave worked his final decade. Roger is still there today.
“I kind of backed into the business. He never pressured me,” Roger said of his father.
“I don’t think I ever tried to talk you out of it either,” Dave told hm. “No, you never did,” Roger replied.
“i’ve been fortunate to always be surrounded by smart people very good at what they do. Of course, this guy,” Roger said, indicating his father, “helped me a lot when I was starting out. We would have lunch breaks in the edit booths at 3 (KMTV) and 6 (WOWT). I’d show him tapes and he’d critique them. We’d talk how to do stories. I learned a lot that way. He let me pick his brain. He was always generous in dealing with me.”
Then there came the workshop his father put on for newcomers and veterans.
“You don’t know how you’re going to act when your dad pops your videotape in and plays it in front of all these people and comments on it,” Roger recalled. “I hoped he was going to be as nice as he was when we were alone in the edit booths. But it was something along the lines of, ‘If this guy came in and wanted a job, I’d tell him to sell shoes,’ It was like the air in a balloon going out.
“But that was the best thing that could have happened because you need a kick in the pants now and then. The effort wasn’t there that he expected and that inspired me. It gave me a clue I could do better.”
By the time Roger established himself, TV technology transitioned from film to video. It’s since gone to satellite uplinks and digital streaming.
“Now he’s shooting live shots alone with a tiny camera,” Dave marveled.
“No truck, no cables, no nothing,” Roger confirmed.
“As long as you’re in range of a cell tower, you can send a live picture anywhere,” Dave said, “It staggers my imagination.”
“There’s an app on my phone called TVU Anywhere,” Roger said. “All I have to do is to call into the station. They pull me up – and we’re on. It’s instantaneous.”
“I try to avoid saying, I wish we had that back when I was in TV,” Dave said, “but I do wish we had that. But what goes along with this is that you’re under more pressure.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, “the technology is phenomenal, but it’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is you can be live in a moment. The curse is the technology far exceeds our human capability of gathering information.”
Then there’s the rabbit hole of Google search results.
“With this avalanche of information you have access to, it can be overwhelming,” Roger said. “You have to determine when to stop because information overload can set in. There comes a point when you have to pull back and say, Okay, I know what I need to know.”
Roger’s grateful to have learned from a master like his father. “He’s a pioneer.”
A Wayne, Nebraska native, Dave Hamer segued from taking still photos in his hometown to stringing for KVTV in Sioux City. The eye he developed for composing portraits helped him transition to moving images.
A generation later his son Roger went from taking photos for the UNO Gateway and Papillion Times to breaking in at KMTV.
“The difficult part of going into motion (photography) was coming up with a closer,” Dave said. “You’ve told the story, but you have to have something at the end to cap it. You need the exclamation point.”
“Even now I struggle with closes.” Roger acknowledged.
They both love storytelling
“Every story’s got to have a beginning, middle and end. That’s utmost in television news,” Dave said. “You don’t just leave it hanging out there. I don’t think anybody ever told me how to do that. I just naturally fell into it.”
Both learned to cut in the camera.
Telling a story you pitched is preferred. “I had, and I think Roger has, the freedom to go to the front office and say, ‘Hey, this is a helluva story, We ought to do it.'”
Any excuse to get out of the newsroom.
“The daily routines never appealed that much to me,” Dave said. Same for Roger, who likes being “free from a desk” and “someone looking over my shoulder.”
Creativity and ineginuity come in handy on assignment.
“You run into situations you didn’t expect,” Dave said, “and you have to think on your feet, improvise and go with the flow. We always used to say, Have in mind where the story’s going to go but don’t be locked in because things will change. You’ll find better stuff than you imagined.”
When revisiting perennials, such as the winter’s first snowfall or spring flooding, Roger said, “the challenge is to make it different from the story before or different from what your competition’s doing.”
“That’s the fun part of it.”
Then there’s following your instincts and, as Dave said, “making your own luck” by being where the action’s at and seeing-capturing what’s happening around you.
The year Roger was born, 1957, his father helped launch Omaha’s KETV on the air.
“I had been there only a week,” Dave said. “There were only four of us in the news department. Six days a week were the norm. Sometimes Sunday, too, It was a challenge and great responsibility, but also fun. You had to do everything – shoot it, write it, maybe voice it.”
He left KETV for KMTV, where he worked the bulk of his career and where his colleagues included future network stars Floyd Kalber and Tom Brokaw.
“What his generation did set the groundwork for what we do today,” Roger said admiringly. “The whole idea of visual storytelling – of stories that are concise, make sense, have impact, elicit emotion and are accurate.
“Today, I think we’ve lost a little bit of that desire to find out as much as we can and make it as accurate as possible. In the rush to get things on the air NOW, we don’t always have the information to back it up exactly.”
“That’s a helluva challenge.” said Dave.
Adding to it is an ever more competitive environment.
“Now,” Roger said, “it’s Channel 7 tweeted this or Channel 3 tweeted that. Personally, I don’t care because I live by what I learned from old pros Steve Murphy and Mark Gautier – ‘I don’t care about being first, I care about being right.’ That doesn’t seem to exist like it used to.
“It’s a matter of feeding the beast” – otherwise known as the 24/7 news cycle. “You have to do all this social media stuff my father’s generation didn’t have to worry about or deal with.”
When Dave Hamer started, there were just two newscasts per day. “and even with that and the technology being so much slower,” he recalled, “we were still pressed for time.” “I wrote for nine years the six and ten o’clock newscasts on Channel 3. You barely got six o’clock on the air before you started writing the ten o’clock. You were always up to the wire.”
Early news pioneers didn’t have access to the vast amounts of video-on-demand content Roger Hamer and his colleagues have at the ready on devices.
“It would take us three or four days,” Dave said.
Today’s constant content demands and deadlines can be exhausting.
“You just don’t have the longevity of people in the field anymore,” Roger said. “People get burned out.”
Professionals with his equivalent experience in the biz, are “getting fewer and fewer,” he said, “and it bothers me because I don’t see the next wave of lifers coming up – and I wonder about that.”
Oddities and happy accidents are bound to happen over careers as long as the Hamers. Once. Roger shot news footage of a pileup on an ice-covered section of Leavenworth Street south of downtown. “We sent it out to NBC,” he said. A couple weeks later the video showed up in an SNL skit.
“‘They pirated my video for entertainment purposes. It took a couple months, but I got 750 bucks out of them and gave them a tongue-lashing. How do you know people didn’t die in that crash? That blurring of the line between entertainment and news shouldn’t happen. Once you send video somewhere you don’t have any control over what happens to it. But even if i don’t send it, somebody else will. Many different people have access to my video than ever before.”
Standard protocol is for networks to ask local affiliates to provide video.
“Sometimes it was a bother because I’d be working on my piece for the six o’clock and they’d want something right now,” Dave said. “You would do everything you could to get it there.”
“It just may not be right now,” Roger said. “I’m not going to send it to them until we air it. My obligation is to my station first.”
Dave once fielded an NBC request for footage of a blizzard raging in Nebraska. They needed about a minute’s worth. He dutifully shot the storm.
“The network’s Huntley-Brinkley newscast switched to Omaha live. I was on the phone with the producer from New York. He told us when to roll the film. We’d built it logically to show the storm getting worse and worse. Well, the last shot came up and the film broke. We were on live coast-to-coast and I was like, Oh, my God. The producer comes on and says, ‘Great job, Omaha, Man. what a storm – I couldn’t see anything in that last shot.’ We never told him.”
Memorably, Dave Hamer scooped the networks with his 1962 Vietnam reporting.
“The French had been kicked out in 1954. There was very little American involvement until about ’61 when we sent military advisers over. In April ’62 the first Nebraskan was killed in Vietnam – Army Special Forces Sergeant Wayne Marchand from Plattsmouth. He was wounded and captured in a firelight with the Viet Cong, then taken off and killed.
“We ran the wire story on the air. That was all we knew. Our general manager said, ‘What the hell was that all about? How come we’ve got people in – where is that place again? Within a month I was there because the front office said this is a story that should be told.”
Hamer and writer-producer Bob Fuller went as a two-man team.
“We did Marchand’s story, but while we were there we covered everything else we could find. We even did stories on Vietnam’s agricultural economy.”
The reporters stuck to a strategy.
“The first thing we did when we got in Saigon was check the overnight police reports for bombings, rocket fire at the airport and such to know what the hell was going on.
“We carried Department of Defense clearance paperwork that we never had to show. We had orders that allowed us to travel on military transport. If we couldn’t get military transport, we did what we could, even going by pedicab for God’s sake. Several times we hired a car with a driver. Sometimes we hired an interpreter. We could go anywhere we wanted. We checked in with the press office in Saigon when we got there and checked out when we left, They didn’t know where we were those three weeks. We were all over the country enmeshed in what was going on every day.”
Hamer and Fuller quickly learned U.S. involvement was larger than reported.
“There were 5,000 Americans in-country.. We went on helicopter support missions. Americans were flying planes and helicopters carrying South Vietnamese troops. The rule was fire only if fired upon,”
The entire western press corps in Vietnam then, he said, consisted of New York Times, AP and UPI correspondents, “and two guys from Omaha.”
“We had the whole story to ourselves. We did four half-hour documentary segments.”
The series was cited for special commendation by the Radio Television Council.
Fast forward three decades when Dave’s last major assignment took him to another war zone to cover Nebraska military personnel in Saudi Arabia.
Over time, he had offers to join the network in Washington DC, New York and Paris, but he and his wife Verla deferred each time. They liked Omaha.
Roger Hamer “tested the waters” in other markets but stayed put.
Father and son “competed” when Dave was at WOWT and Roger at KMTV. They were briefly at WOWT at the same time but never covered a story together.
Roger said there’s much they share in common. “One thing we share is we’re not the story – the people are the story. Nobody wants to see us. They want to see the people living the experience.” They each derive satisfaction, he said, “just knowing that we did a good job and put a good story together.” “You get those four, five, six stories a year where you go, I nailed it. That’s what keeps you going.”
“We show up with a camera and people stop what they’re doing because they know you’re going to tell their story. It’s important to them,” Dave said.
“You have to be genuinely curious and caring and want to be involved in your community, and in telling the stories of its people,” said Roger, who, like his father, is grateful for the many fine collaborators he’s worked with. “It’s wonderful to work with people as passionate as you are and who are dedicated to their craft.”
A love for teaching is something else they share. “I found teaching very rewarding,” Dave said. “The satisfaction of sharing what you know and seeing the light bulb go off is a big part of it,” Roger said.
Not to be forgotten, Roger added, “We’ve both been blessed being married to very strong, supportive women that understood what we do and tolerated it.”
Dave and his late wife Verla were married 61 years. “Verla was interested in what we did and was our best promoter,” he said. The couple lost their other son, Dennis, to a coronary occlusion in 2002.
The quiet-spoken, TV news trailblazer gets choked up talking about family. “I’m very proud of this guy,” he said, clasping Roger’s knee. “Roger is his own man, has made his own reputation. and lives it every day on every story. He earned the Edward R. Murrow Award. I was never even close.”
Roger appreciates what his father’s given him – from leading Scouts canoe trips to being “a great mentor.” “He taught me that if I’m not trying, if I’m not pushing myself, if I’m not putting product out I’m happy with, then it’s time to walk away.”
There may not be a third-generation Hamer in the field “Never say never,” cautioned Dave, a grandfather of two. Meanwhile, Dave writes a newsletter, Window on 53rd Street. he shares with family and friends. Like the man, it’s a warm, witty, sincere, humble take on a life well-lived and a career well-earned.
Though louder and more outspoken than his father, Roger is a mensch among newsmen just like his old man. A passing of the torch has occurred in another way. Where Roger used to be asked, Are you any relation to Dave Hamer?, now Dave is asked, Are you related to Roger Hamer?
“Roger and me reversed roles.” Dave said. “I’m very proud to be asked if I’m related to Roger.”
“I’ve always been proud of my dad, ” Roger said. “He’s my hero.”
Read more of Leo Adam Biga’s work at leoadambiga.com.
Categories: Broadcast Journalism, Dave Hamer, Journalism, Media, Omaha, Photographer, Photojournalism, Reporting, Roger Hamer, Television, Television News, Writing
Broadcast Journalism, Dave Hsmer, KMTV Channel 3, Media, Omaha Television News, Photographer, Photojournalism, Reporting, Roger Hamer, WOWT Channel 6
Life Itself: VIII: A quarter century of stories about photographers
June 16, 2018
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Life Itself: VIII:
A quarter century of stories about photographers
Photographer Jim Scholz and his lifelong mission to honor beauty
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/04/27/photographer-jim…-to-honor-beauty
Nature photographer Joel Sartore taking cue from Noah for his National Geographic Photo Ark
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/04/24/nature-photograp…raphic-photo-ark/
Paul Johnsgard: A birder’s road less traveled
Natural imagery: Tom Mangelsen travels far and wide to where the wild things are for his iconic photography, but always comes back home to Nebraska
Master of many mediums Jason Fischer
For Omaha Film Festival guru Marc Longbrake, cinema is no passing fancy
Creative couple: Bob and Connie Spittler and their shared creative life 60 years in the making
Feeding the world, nourishing our neighbors, far and near: Howard G. Buffett Foundation and Omaha nonprofits take on hunger and food insecurity
Matinee marriage: Omaha couple Mauro and Christine Fiore forge union based on film and family
Run DMC, ©Janette Beckman
Rock photographer Janette Beckman keeps it real: Her hip-hop and biker images showing at Carver Bank as part of Bemis residency
The panoramic world of Patrick Drickey
Master of light, Mauro Fiore, Oscar-winning director of photography for “Avatar”
A brief history of Omaha’s civil rights struggle distilled in black and white by photographer Rudy Smith
To Doha and back with love:
Local journalists reflect on their fear, loathing and everything surreal adventure in the Gulf
Exhibit by photographer Jim Krantz and his artist grandfather, the late David Bialac, engages in an art conversation through the generations
A very young Jim Krantz with an iconic mentor, Ansel Adams, ©photo Jim Krantz
Photographer Monte Kruse works close to the edge
From wars to Olympics, world-class photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke shoots it all, and now his discerning eye is trained on Husker football
Photographer Larry Ferguson’s work is meditation on the nature of views and viewing
Jesuit photojournalist Don Doll of Creighton University documents the global human condition – one person, one image at a time
Imagemaking celebrated at Joslyn Art Museum: “The Misfits” and Magnum Cinema
Forever Marilyn: Gail Levin’s new film frames the “Monroe doctrine”
Combat sniper-turned-art photographer Jim Hendrickson on his vagabond life and enigmatic work
Photographer Monte Kruse pushes boundaries
Bejing Rose, ©photo by Kenneth Jarecke
Golf shots: Patrick Drickey lives dream photographing the world’s great golf courses
My Omaha Fashion Magazine Work:
Omaha Fashion Week may be showcase for the next big thing out of Omaha
Buffett’s newspaper man, Stanford Lipsey
The tail-gunner’s grandson: Ben Drickey revisits World War II experiences on foot and film
Matter of the heart: Pamela Jo Berry’s love for community brings art fest to North Omaha
Omaha’s Northwest Radial Highway’s small box businesses fight the good fight by being themselves
Nobuko Oyabu
Photojournalist Nobuko Oyabu’s own journey of recovery sheds light on survivors of rape and sexual abuse through her Project STAND
Artist Vera Mercer’s coming out party
Intrepid photojournalist Don Doll reinvents himself by adding video to repertoire of making images that matter
Hidden In plain view: Rudy Smith’s camera and memory fix on critical time in struggle for equality
Three old wise men of journalism – Hlavacek, Michaels and Desfor – recall their foreign correspondent careers and reflect on the world today
Former Omaha television photojournalist Don Chapman’s adventures in imagemaking keep him on the move
Rudy Smith, ©photo by Chris Machian, Omaha World-Herald
Categories: Don Doll, Images of Nature, Jim Scholz, Joel Sartore, Ken Jarecke, Larry Ferguson, Monte Kruse, Pat Drickey, Paul Johnsgard, Photographer, Photography, Tom Mangelsen, Writing
Photographer, Photographer Stories, Photographers, Photography, Photojournalism, Photojournalists, Still Photography, Video Photography
Photographer Jim Scholz and his lifelong mission to honor beauty
April 27, 2018
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Photographer Jim Scholz and his lifelong mission to honor beauty
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in the May 2018 issue of the New Horizons
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Photographer Jim Scholz of Omaha finds beauty wherever life takes him. The 73-year-old former Roman Catholic priest began making images growing up in the St. Cecilia Cathedral neighborhood.
“I started shooting pictures in high school for the yearbook and ever since it’s been a real passion and interest for me,” he said
He recalls “the magic of that first print when I put the white piece paper in the developer and an image actually came up on it.” It happened in the Cathedral High darkroom. From that moment on, he said, “I was forever hooked by the magic that this is more than just reality. It’s a powerful thing.”
“I started off with a 35-millimeter camera because everybody had one. You could buy the film pretty inexpensively. You could develop the film in your own darkroom. I shot with that for a long time.”
He was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming during the Second World War. His father saw U.S. Army duty in the Pacific. After WWII, his father was offered a job with an Omaha company. Jim was 5 when his family moved here. His father worked management jobs at various Omaha firms. His stay-at-home mom eventually went back to work in her chosen field, dietetics, at area hospitals.
Serving a higher purpose
Scholz kept right on developing his photographic eye at seminary in Denver, Colorado, doing graduate work at Creighton University and serving metro parishes as an Archdiocesan priest.
“It was always a hobby.”
He doesn’t say it, but there’s a sacred dimension to capturing the essence of humanity and nature. As a priest ministering to his flock, he was called to mirror Christ’s unconditional love and to share the liturgy’s sublime peace. As a photographer, he reflects back what people project or see. Sometimes, he shows what they’ve never seen before. Surely, there’s something inspirational, perhaps even spiritual in that.
Omaha fashion designer Mary Anne Vaccaro admires his fidelity to beauty.
“Jim is very grounded and spiritual. As a photographer he embraces his creative gift with love, discipline and respect. He sees beauty in unexpected and unlikely places. His attention to detail and quality is amazing. His passion for his work drives him to excellence.”v
Tom Sitzman, owner of Connect Gallery in Omaha, sees in Scholz’s photography the same sensitivity and compassion that infused his ministry.
“I first knew Jim as my pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Omaha. His homilies were conversations, not lectures, filled with examples of everyday people living everyday lives. Those sitting in the pews could see themselves in those situations of the human condition – funny, sad, enlightening, tragic and giving – knowing he understood. His photography is deeply rooted and grounded in Jim the man and priest. They depict everyday events we too often take for granted. A moon rise over the city. Dark, foreboding storm clouds moving across a still sun-lit hay meadow, An old timber building. Jim knows where to stand to get the feel of size and distance as well as where the light is coming from. They are the works of a well-trained eye that knows how to compose a scene with his camera the way he did with words in a homily.”
Scholz ministered in Elgin, Nebraska and at St. Bernards, St. Cecilia and St. Leo in Omaha. The parish he served longest at was Sacred Heart in North Omaha, where he helped found Heart Ministry, which has grown to serve residents needs in the city’s most poverty-stricken neighborhood.
“I feel lucky to have been not only in that space but other parishes where I served or other jobs that I worked at. When you’re around someplace for awhile you’re hopefully going to make a contribution and I feel good about when I look back at something that helped people and continues to help people.”
Scholz received the 1995 Omaha Archdiocese Sheehan Award (then-the Presidential Citation) recognizing clergy as outstanding leaders in their communities.
Sacred Heart years
During his 1981 to 1998 Sacred Heart tenure, he took over an integrated parish in decline, its ranks thinned by white flight. Mass attendance was abysmal. Gospel already had a hold there, thanks to Father Tom Furlong introducing it in the ‘late ’60s-early ’70s.
“It was a very conservative, quiet little neighborhood parish,” Scholz recalled. “Most of the members were longtime parishioners, many of them quite elderly. Physically, the place was dilapidated. I felt we had to do something dramatic.”
He got the idea for more spirited, gospel music-based “uplifting liturgies” from an inner city parishes conference in Detroit. He was by impressed how churches in similar circumstances turned things around with the help of gospel. He saw the music as a homage to black heritage and a magnet for new members.
“What the music said was we are reaching out to your traditions and we’re trying to make you feel comfortable to come to our church,”
Scholz found a first-rate choir director in Glenn Burleigh, under whom the church’s full-blown entry into gospel began at the Saturday night Mass. The 10:30 Sunday liturgy remained ultra-traditional and sparsely attended.
“Six months later we’d gone from a Saturday service with 30 to 35 people, with hardly any music, to standing in the aisles full with a wonderful ensemble,
“Glenn wrote special music almost weekly for the service. People started to come out of the woodwork once the word got out. It was such a refreshing thing.
“We didn’t grow exponentially in black membership, although we did grow some. What we grew in was white membership.”
When Burleigh was hired away by a mega-Baptist church in Houston, Scholz tapped his assistant, William Tate, to take over. Scholz recruited a new choir director, Mary Kay Mueller, to energize the 10:30 Sunday service. For inspiration, he referred her to The Blues Brothers. So it came to pass the movie’s Triple Rock Church became a model for the expressive Sacred Heart liturgy. No, Scholz weren’t interested in “people doing somersaults down the front aisle. But he wanted “to come up with that spirit.” Unbridled. Joyous. Free. “We really need to come alive here,” he told Mueller. Thus, the Freedom Choir was born. The rest is history as that rollicking Sunday service began packing the pews and still does three decades later.
An abiding passion for photography
All the while Sacred Heart grew its base, Scholz made photographs.
“When I had a little time off, an afternoon, or before I’d go to bed at night I’d probably spend the last half hour of my waking life that day by reading about photography or studying photographers like Ansel Adams and all these heroes of mine.
“The more you get into it then you start studying other people’s work and you try to emulate what they do and improve what you do. Ansel Adams wrote a series of books on the camera, the lens, photo development and so on. I checked them out of the library a number of times and studied these things to learn how he developed film and how he arrived at his vision.”
Other photographers Scholz has admired and studied include Wynn Bullock and Edward Weston.
Scholz followed his cleric calling for 27 years. After much deliberation and prayer, he shed the collar in 1999. He is still Catholic and regularly attends Mass. Now, he’s nearing 20 years in his second career as a full-time architecture, portrait and fine art photographer.
He describes his own aesthetic this way: “Probably at the baseline is a sense of beauty, whether color or color harmony or composition or subject. That would be the underlining thing. I love landscapes. I love abstracts, I love people, you name it.” He finds beauty in it all. “There are certain patterns hardwired into the fabric of our beings that produce pleasure, and we declare them beautiful. This is also true of music and other art forms. We are better because of what Michelangelo and Beethoven created and left to us;”
Ideas for projects are not hard to come by.
“I probably have more imagination than time. Every now and then I’ll get cranked up about a certain theme or methodology. I started a project photographing Omaha and Nebraska artists a few years ago. I just wanted to do that. I know a number of artistsand i started taking their picturesI’m about half way through that and hopefully I’ll have a show.
He envisions an exhibition in which each of his artist portraits is displayed next to a work by the artist, whether a sculpture or painting or whatever it might be.
“I’ve talked with a couple gallery owners about it. It might also be a book. We’ll see what happens.”
Catherine Ferguson is among the artists Scholz has photographed. He’s also photographed her work.
“Jim and I worked together to produce photographs of my stacked glass series,” Ferguson said. “He is a generous artist ready to help another artist see their vision realized. Jim is a patient, calm, gentle perfectionist. He gives me all the time necessary to have the prints exactly as I want them, no hurry, no pressure. I feel he is under-recognized as an artist in our community.”
Another artist friend is Shelly Bartek.
“I’ve known Jim from the time he was a priest at Sacred Heart to now where he is a successful national photographer,” Bartek said. “He is an authentic, all-around photographer serving to bring his clients the best quality images that represent their brand. His personal
passion to create art in his work has inspired us all through his concept and technical perfection.
“Best of all, he’s a great friend.”
About a decade ago, Scholz collaborated with writer Leslie Little on a museum quality book about Paris.
“I made the Paris Icons book images during two short visits to the city in 2007,” Scholz said. “It then took several months to edit, layout and in general prepare for print. The result was well received and we were awarded three international awards for the publication.
“It is always a joy to produce something of beauty that people appreciate.”
By choice, he’s not little documentary work on the gritty margins of life. “That’s a whole journalistic approach I respect greatly – it’s just not me. I like to show the best of people.” That includes showcasing the works of makers’ hands. Then there’s the joy he takes in picturing the natural splendor of God’s handiwork.
Expanding and honing his vision
Shooting Opera Omaha rehearsals and productions has deepened a long-held appreciation for music.
“What it’s done is it’s really stretched me in terms of my knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the whole operatic canon. My vision has been broadened.”
Photography has opened new vistas for him.
“If I never made another photograph, if I never went click again, I still think my life would be much richer because as I look at the world I see things that before I would never have noticed. The angle of the light or the color or whatever. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I would never have paid attention to, but the discipline of seeing as a camera sees forces you to see these things.
“I can sit an airport waiting for a plane for two hours and not be bored at all because I’m looking all around, seeing a grandma with little kids, the light coming in the windows, the big airplane rolling up on the tarmac outside. All this stuff.”
Cultivating a vision of what he wants to shoot and executing that vision, he said, is “a process.”
“It’s a lot more the work you put into it then the gizmo that goes click. The ultimate satisfaction is the process itself – getting to see things maybe in a little bit unique way and presenting them so that people say, ‘Oh, look at that, I never noticed that, I walked by this every day and never saw it.’ It’s finding what’s interesting.
“You’re expressing it from your perspective. You bring a whole life history and all kinds of things to color that.”
Photographers like him prefer to say they “make” rather than take photos.
“There’s a distinction.” Scholz said/ “You see something and you have a vision of how you want to present it.”
He saw in his mind’s eye what he wanted to achieve with his portrait of the late sculptor John Walz before ever shooting anything. “I had a vision of what I wanted to present, so I exposed the film to achieve that and I printed the print to achieve that.”
Walz turned a former Burlington Railroad Station power plant into his home-studio.
“I did the photo shoot with him part way through the remodel,” Scholz said. “I wanted to show him in his art creation, but we wanted a little mystery, so that’s why his face is a little in shadow.”
Contrasting elements can communicate mystery, energy, texture, whimsy, depth of perception, the passage of time, et cetera.
“I like to work with the idea of the human figure and the natural world,” Scholz said,
For an image he made of footprints in the sand at Canon Beach on the Oregon coast, he explained, “I wanted it to convey the essence of nature and humanity. The ocean is kind of symbolic of the timeless and I had to wait for somebody to walk along the beach to produce footprints, which get washed out with the next wave or two. That’s a story about how nature is constantly washing over us.
“As humans, we think we’re so important but in the big picture we’re real new on the scene and we probably won’t last all that long either. We’re just a little part of that from the beginning-to-the-end scenario.”
For a picture he made of a nude young woman lying on a fallen redwood tree in a Big Sur Coast grove, he wanted the contrast of “the old rugged, hard-edged woods and the softness of the young human figure.”
“That was done very deliberately to hopefully make the image strong.”
On a trip to Chatterbox Falls, British Columbia, he captured for posterity a sublime setting he awoke to,
“My friends, Ron and Judy Parks, rented a Nordic Tug for the summer to explore the coast and invited me to join them for a few days. We docked there for the night and in the morning I liked the reflections from the rain on the dock and the movement of the water. I made the picture with the falls in the background.”
During a Colorado sojourn he set out to photograph one of the state’s most prominent mountains, Longs Peak.
“Since the Forest Service does not allow camping there we had to leave the parking lot at midnight and climb all night to get there just before dawn. It was cloudy at sunrise but just for a moment the clouds partially broke and I was able to get the shot.”
Intuitive and intentional
Sometimes, the opportunity for a picture appears as he’s driving to or from an assignment.
“I was coming from Kansas City and I took the back roads and just about sunset I saw this partially plowed wheat field with terraced ridges in a pattern. So I stopped and took a picture. But the sky was very dull – there was nothing. Driving back, I was thinking, what can I do with this? Then I decided to put a woman’s flowing hair in the sky.”
He secured a model for the shoot at his studio. He made the image and overlaid it in the picture of the field.
“That was fun. I think that sort of thing makes the image richer.”
Manipulating images on a computer or in the darkroom, he said, “is just a creative tool.”
“People have the idea that in an earlier era of photography, working in the darkroom was somehow pure. Okay, it wasn’t, it never was. As long as I can darken this part and lighten that part (or crop or burn or do any number of things to manipulate an image), it’s a subjective, editorial process.
“Just the act of making a picture, you choose what to include in the frame and what not. My act of putting a frame around that image begins to edit right there.”
He embraces today’s digital tools.
“What I love about PhotoShop is that now I can do things that even in my wildest dreams in the darkroom I couldn’t achieve. For instance, I have an image of an abandoned ore processing plant high in the Colorado back country that’s been a favorite in galleries. I made it with an eight by ten camera and black and white film. I worked and worked in the darkroom to get all the various tonalities but it was hard because the inside of the building was kind of dark.
“Well, you can only burn an edge so much in the darkroom.”
For this oversized image, he placed his developing tray on the floor and angled the enlarger on the print.
“I’m crawling down there, lightening this part and darkening that part, but you could only go so far and you couldn’t change the focal contrast. With PhotoShop you can adjust the tonality and contrast. The nice thing is once you get done, two years or 20 years from now when you hit print it’s still going to come out the same.Or you can change it.”
“I had an early ’90s show of my work in Omaha. One of the prints was very successful in terms of sales. It also happened to be a print that involved six different negatives at various exposures in the enlarger. The original print probably took me six evenings from seven to midnight and now I suddenly had orders for 10 more. By the time I got done with that whole thing, I was spent and none of the prints were exactly the same because you couldn’t exactly get it the same.”
Whether intuitive or intentional, he’s after the same result – to distill beauty and endow permanence to an ephemeral moment.
Finding a niche
Scholz depends on what he earns photographing for his living. He started his own business, Scholz Images, in 1999. He works from a high-ceilinged downtown studio with ample natural light. It’s outfitted with lights, tents, screens, filters, cases and framed prints.
Most of his time is spent not on making photographs but scheduling. marketing, billing and other business matters. Finding and juggling projects isn’t easy.
“If you’re doing it on your own, you’re always kind of dancing between jobs. It’s a constant changing. When I first started the business I wanted to mostly go in the fine art direction. What i found is that in order to really make a living at it I had to have an additional niche and architecture became the thing I gravitated toward. I realized it was something I could do and it’s a good market. The architecture puts bread on the table and allows me to pay the mortgage and that sort of thing.”
He’s shot for Omaha firms Holland Basham Architects and HDR, for Lincoln-based Clark Enersen Partners and for Denver-based Fentress and Ruggles Mabe.
Fentress flew him to Quantico, Virginia for a week’s shoot at the National Museum of the Marine Corps and to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for an even longer shoot of the Central Terminal Expansion.
Traveling for his work brings it’s own challenges.
“When you travel a lot you get to sleep on airport floors, have bears come into your camp in the middle of the night, have flat tires on cactus in the back country, be in the center of a bison herd, have foreign police order you to not use your tripod. Just the usual stuff.”
When not flying, he travels to assignments via his trusty Chevy Silverado.
“I find I make my best photos when I have my camera and tripod with me. It can be anywhere that the moment presents itself.”
For most clients, he’ captures objective reality, though he sometimes heightens things via filters and strobes.
“With the commercial work I do, I’m called to record what’s there. Architects like to see all the bricks and everything the way it is. I then like to think of it the way a filmmaker does – how’s this going to look when the sun goes down and there’s still some light in the sky. You’re alway working with light.”
Another major commercial client is J & J Flooring Group, which has sent him on various assignments.
“It’s very challenging to get really interesting pictures of carpet.”
Buildings are easier. For his architectural work, he used to shoot with four by five film.
“In those days if you could get eight pictures a day you were doing really good, especially with color because you had to use several different filters.”
Though there’s little call for it now, he’s fond of large format film photography because he can attain certain qualities with it he can’t in smaller formats or digitially. He first moved to the bigger format in 1980.
“My father built a wooden kit for my four-by-five inch camera. I used that for years. Then I thought, well, if four-by-five is good, then eight-by-ten must be better, so I eventually bought an eight-by-ten.”
He admits he’s “a gear-head” like most photographers when it comes to camera gadgets.
What the large format offers in quality it sacrifices in efficiency.
“The tradeoff is, if you get the image perfectly you’ve got great quality to work with, but you can only make a small number of images, whereas with a smaller camera you might be able to get a hundred images in the same amount of time. So you have to pick your tool for what you want to do
“The larger format allows for more clarity and tonality. You can make increasingly large enlargements that still look good. But it comes at a great cost. The equipment is expensive but the really big cost is hauling it around because it’s heavy and awkward. It’s really tough flying. I much prefer to drive – that way I can load up the truck with lighting gear and I don’t have to worry about it being broken or arriving late or getting lost. When I fly, it really has to get edited down to the very essentials, plus backup. You cant check it – it will end up broken or lost. I carry it on board and stow it overhead.”
Old habits die hard.
“I sometimes think about getting rid of the four-by-five and eight-by-ten but occasionally I do have a client that comes along that wants something in large format film and I’m one of the few guys left that can do it.”
In order to stay current, he’s adapted to digital cameras.
He’s remained true to certain brands.
“I settled in on Nikon for whatever reason and have stayed with it because once you invest in a bunch of lenses then you can use them forever. I can still shoot with the Nikon lenses I got back in the 1960s. I don’t use them all that often anymore, but I can still use them on the camera because they never changed the lens body.”
Standing out from the crowd
For portraits, he uses whatever best serves the subject. A favorite portrait is of a corporate CEO whom Scholz wisely took out of the stuffed shirt, sterile office setting for something more fun and authentic.
“The guy needed a picture for an annual report. I could see in talking to him he just wasn’t into it at all, so I asked, ‘What do you like to do? ‘ He said, ‘I just bought a motorcycle and I like to ride it Sunday afternoons. I said, ‘Okay, let’s do that.” I sat in the back of a pickup with my camera and his wife drove. We were over in Iowa and we drove maybe 30-40 miles down the highway with his hair blowing in the wind. I made lots of pictures in black and white. The whole thing was stronger to me in black and white.
“Later, I decided I wanted a little more drama, so I put the clouds in. The only parts of the image that are in color is the burnt orange gas tank and front fender. It was a custom color designed just for that particular motorcycle. I like black and white because color sometimes is so pretty people stop there without looking deeper, where with black and white you’re reduced to light and dark contests that make your image pop.”
After decades making pictures for public display, Scholz is a fixture on the local photographic scene.
“In general, I think the photographic community here is pretty open and receptive. Most people like each other and get along.”
He counts as peers such well known shooters as Larry Ferguson, Andrew Baran, Monte Kruse. Patrick Drickey, Kat Moser and Sandy Aquila.
He’s talked shop with Omaha native Jim Krantz, who now enjoys a national and international reputation based out of Chicago.
“One of the local people I really admire is Vera Mercer,” Scholz said, “Her work to me is outstanding. I really love what she does.”
His work has shown at Gallery 1516 and Connect in Omaha, at the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney and at galleries in Kansas City, Missouri, Santa Fe, New Mexico and other locales.
His work is in public and private collections around the nation and even in in other countries.
Photography equals opportunity
He makes images to be seen. Naturally, he likes it when people respond favorably to his work. Another fringe benefit of shooting for hire is gaining entree to people and places he’d otherwise not get.
“Being a photographer often times opens doors to things. You get admitted to a lot of places and things you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. For instance, maybe 15 years ago I got a call from a company here in town sponsoring ex-president Bill Clinton to give a keynote talk at an event in Aspen, Colorado. They wanted a lot of pictures of bill involved with people, so they flew me out to Aspen to do that. I spent three days with Bill. Hilary (Clinton) was there. I made all the pictures. Well, this repeated itself in Miami, once here in Omaha, and several times in Aspen.
“That’s not a world I would normally have access to at all, but it was really fun. I remember once in Aspen Bill got there in the afternoon. He was pretty tired having been on the road a lot. He checked into the hotel and decided he wanted to go for a walk downtown. He didn’t get more than a block when he was surrounded in this park by a hundred mothers with little kids. You could see him getting energized. It was fun to see over the course of several events how he would wk with crowds. He had a magic about him
“I remember prior to a cocktail party and dinner he was keynoting there were some guys waiting for his arrival and they were talking about how when they saw Bill Clinton they’re going to give him a piece of their mind. Well, Bill shows up and if by magic those guys are the first people he walks up to. He’s got his hand around one guy telling him a joke and within 10 minutes he totally won them over. I saw that hundreds of times.”
Being a photographer also means forever chasing perfection that can’t be attained.
“My photographer friends and I all know there are certain images meant to tease us into spending a lot of time and effort but we never quite get them. They’re always just a little beyond us.”
Scholz feels it’s good to have something to chase just beyond your grasp in order to stay sharp and hungry. “If you could roll a 300 game every time you bowl, you wouldn’t bowl. It wouldn’t be any fun. It’s the same thing with golf and shooting par.”
The same when making pictures.
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Hits and misses come with any creative art. There are times where from start to finish you work it right through and, boy, the whole thing just comes out great.”
The magic of first seeing an image he’s just made still enthralls him. Hooked for life.
Visit http://www.scholzimages.com.
The panoramic world of Patrick Drickey
June 8, 2012
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Pat Drickey has been a fine art, architectural, and landscape photographer and he’s combined all of those talents and disciplines in a niche today that finds him making sumptuous and collectible panoramic images of the world’s great golf courses. This short profile should whet your appetite for the much longer piece I did on him, which can also be found on this blog.
The panoramic world of Patrick Drickey
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in Omaha Magazine
Omaha commercial photographer Pat Drickey knew he was onto something big when panoramic images he was commissioned to shoot of Pebble Beach Golf Course struck a chord in people. What began as an irrigation company ad campaign gig, flying him to elite courses around the world, became his own niche enterprise when the prints sold out and the Professional Golfers Association took note.
“That’s when I knew this could be a business,” said Drickey, an Omaha native whose Stonehouse Publishing company, 1508 Leavenworth St., specializes in producing iconic landscape images of premier golf courses around the world. Drickey, who takes the vast majority of the photographs himself and personally supervises the production of every single print, estimates more than 300,000 Stonehouse prints are now in circulation.
“We have branded the panoramic format for golf,” said Drickey, whose business operates out of a century-old red-brick building on the Old Market’s fringe.
In addition to being licensed by major courses, the United States Golf Association and the PGA, he has the endorsement of living legends like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, giving him access to virtually any green. From Pebble Beach to Pinehurst to Medinah to St. Andrews to many other championship courses with rich histories, Stonehouse and Drickey are recognized names with carte blanche access.
“Which is a significant deal,” he said, ”because we are becoming that embedded in the lore of golf.”
Drickey’s neither the first nor only photographer to capture links in a panoramic way. But he believes what separates his work from others is the photo-illustration approach he uses in creating crystal-clear images of striking detail and depth. Employing all-digital equipment in the field and the studio Drickey brings exacting standards to his imagemaking not possible with film. Digital enhancements bring clarity from shadows and achieve truer, more balanced colors, he said. Even a sand trap can be digitally raked.
“It’s just incredible what you can do — the control you have,” he said.
He said Stonehouse has adopted the fine art Giclee process to its own printmaking methods, which entails using expensive pigmented archival inks on acid free watercolor paper to ensure prints of high quality that last.
“I want to produce a product that’s going to be around for a long time. The color hits that paper and stays with it — it will not fade. And that’s significant,” he said.
He feels another reason for Stonehouse’s success is its images portray the timeless characteristics that distinguish a scenic hole or course. He strives to indelibly fix each scene into a commemorative frieze that expresses the design, the physical beauty, the tradition. The clubhouse is often featured. Getting the composition just how he wants it means “waiting for the right light,” which can mean hours or days. Much care and research go into finding the one idyllic, golden-hued shot that speaks to golf aficionados. That’s who Stonehouse prints are marketed to.
Building-updating Stonehouse’s image collection keeps Drickey on the road several days a month. He’s half-way to his goal of photographing the world’s top 100 courses. One he’s still waiting to shoot is Augusta, home to the Masters.
“That’s one of America’s crown jewels. We are present at the other majors and we’d like to have a presence there. It’s just a matter of time. Those introductions have been made,” Drickey said.
Stonehouse prints grace golf books-periodicals. Drickey’s collaborating on a book project for Nebraska’s Sand Hills Golf Club course. He has more book ideas in mind.
His golf niche is an extension of the architectural photography he once specialized in. It’s all a far cry from the images he made with a Brownie as a boy. He still has that camera. A reminder of how far he’s come.
Related articles
- How to: Create panoramic photos in Adobe Photoshop (onsoftware.en.softonic.com)
Photojournalist Nobuko Oyabu’s own journey of recovery sheds light on survivors of rape and sexual abuse through her Project STAND
April 16, 2012
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Photojournalist Nobuko Oyabu has dedicated herself to a lifetime project portraying the individual hunanity of persons who have suffered rape or sexual abuse. Her intent is to beyond the label of victim to show who these people are. The work is dear to her for many reasons, not the least of which is her own recovery from rape. She delivers a message to the world in her pictures and in her words that the hurt survivors feel is real and profound but that healing is possible. She lets survivors, their families and friends, and the public know that the assault or the abuse and its aftermath need not define women. She delivers this message through a support organization she formed, through photographs she takes of survivors, through educational presentations she gives, and through writing she does on the subject, including her autobiography (Stand, published in Japan). She has been much honored for her work. I wrote the following profile of Nobuko several years ago, when she still lived in Omaha, Neb., where she’d come to work for the Omaha World-Herald. She and her family have since moved on elsewhere but her work continues, as does the praise for her efforts.
Nobuko Oyabu
Photojournalist Nobuko Oyabu’s own journey of recovery sheds light on survivors of rape and sexual abuse through her Project STAND
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in the Omaha City Weekly
Omaha photojournalist Nobuko Oyabu’s work on rape and sexual abuse first made waves in the States. Now it’s stirring things up in her native Japan. On visits there in the last year she’s exhibited her intimate portraits of survivors and given talks about her own story and her subjects’ stories of survival.
She was raped in 1999.
She’s also returned to her homeland to promote her new book, Stand (Forest Press). Published in October, it’s made best seller lists there. The book reveals the trauma of sexual assault through the prism of her personal odyssey and of the men and women she’s chronicled. Her book’s title is drawn from a national project she launched in Omaha to document survivors from across America and in Canada.
Some survivors want to be photographed at the very site they were abused. It isn’t always possible. When it is, it’s an emotional scene. The survivor seeks to reclaim power and control lost in the attack. It’s about closure. In one image a man weeps in the cabin he was molested in as a boy. Some images reveal artifacts of human suffering. A woman shows scars from cuts she makes on herself. Oyabu said self-mutilation is common among survivors as a way of dealing with post-traumatic stress. Another holds a photo of herself as a child made-up as a whore by her abusive dad. Innocence lost. Others choose places and poses that represent their recovery.
Oyabu said Stand is an expression of “how I stood up to the tragedy that happened to me and also of the stands of other survivors. Part of the meaning as well is that sometimes you can’t do anything but just stand there and wait. You can’t always be brave or do something great.”
The fact she’s openly discussing such traditionally taboo subjects in Japan has made her something of a sensation there. Major media outlets in Tokyo, her hometown of Osaka and other cities have profiled her.
“I think I’m the very first person speaking out” on this issue there, she said. In Oyabu’s view Japan harbors, much like the U.S., dysfunctional attitudes about rape and sexual abuse rooted in denial.
“A lot of women tend to be very quiet about it and just suffer silently. It’s really hard for them to be open about it,” she said.
She said a Japanese columnist questioned in print whether she’s actually a survivor after one of her upbeat presentations. Yes, the subject is sober but that doesn’t mean she has to be.
“This particular writer thought that was not appropriate at all. He wrote, ‘I wonder if it really happened to her?’ I wasn’t what he thought a survivor should look like,” she said. “So how should I look? Do I always have to be depressed? I mean, c’mon, I have a daughter. I have a responsibility to make her happy. I can’t be depressed.”
Oyabu said, “It’s kind of hard to attach faces to the issue” amid such perceptions, “It’s kind of hard to see the reality and people don’t really want to see it. But it’s not like all survivors are in depression, stigmatized and bitter. I certainly don’t see myself that way. I’ve found a lot of people don’t see themselves that way.
“If you have a preconceived idea of how a survivor looks, you can never get the real person in the picture.”
Faces of Rape and Sexual Abuse
©photos of survivors by Nobuko Oyabu
Before her own attack, she said, “I admit I had the same attitude toward rape victims. I thought rape belongs to somebody else. I didn’t know there are so many different kinds of survivors until I met them.”
Oyabu’s black and white images express the full spectrum of survivors in terms of education, occupation, income, race, ethnicity, age, shape, size. She said, “I consciously selected these people” to represent they are not just one thing or another. Sexual assault does not discriminate along demographic lines. “It happens to everyone,” she said. Just as survivors are not all rich or poor, black or white, they are not all grim or mad. Many are content, confident, proud, defiant. Count Oyabu among these. Her self-portrait on her book’s cover shows an assertive, ever curious woman poised with camera in hand.
“My resistance was the key for me,” she said.
While large urban papers in Japan gave her positive coverage, reprinting some of her images, she said smaller rural papers displayed a more close-minded attitude and refused to run her pics. She found that “odd” considering her images are in no way graphic but merely portraits. She thinks such reluctance stems from outdated notions that survivors should not be seen or heard — a byproduct of a larger bias that fixes blame or shame on survivors.
“With sexual assault there’s so much gray area still,” she said. “Too many people think it’s the victim’s fault. In this country as well.”
That the blame game should persist in Japan, she said, is ironic given it “is the capital of pornography in the world. There’s so much human trafficking and child porn going on…and somehow the blame is shifted to the victims.” She said sex is right out front in Japan, as it is here, “and yet when it comes to sexual violence people don’t want to acknowledge it,” much less talk about it. Similarly, she said America and Japan don’t want to examine the implications of sex being so pervasive yet rarely discussed at home or school. “Not talking about it,” she said, results in high rates of sexual assault, sexually transmitted diseases, promiscuity, prostitution. This pregnant silence, she said, explains why most sexual assaults go unreported.
“A lot of people are in denial,” she said, “especially parents who grew up in a home where abuse took place. A lot of people have no idea what to say — they just don’t know how to talk about it. Survivors don’t know who to talk to or where to go.”
In lieu of information, she said, some people suffer abuse not realizing they’ve been victimized. She notes a disturbing trend among young people she speaks with who routinely tell her they’ve been molested or raped but pass it off “as no big deal” — as if it’s a rite of passage. “It’s really sad,” she said.
Then there’s the way rape is historically minimized by society, drawing light sentences for actions that have long lasting effects.
Oyabu noted, “One of the survivors put it like this: ‘The rapist gets three to five years, the victims get life.’ And that’s exactly it. It’s not just a one-time incident. For a lot of people it takes a lifetime to get over it. I find it disturbing that society doesn’t see rapists as high risk criminals.”
The reaction her work’s elicited in Japan is not unlike its reception in the U.S. Her STAND: Faces of Rape and Sexual Abuse Survivors Project has been a traveling exhibition across America. Her work with survivors and her personal identification with them and their trauma has made her a sought-after figure. She’s testified before Congress about the issue. She’s spoken to medical, health and law enforcement professionals. She’s presented at women’s and survivors conferences as well as colleges and universities. She’s served as visiting faculty at the Poynter Institute (Fla.) for a seminar on how the media reports rape. She and her work have been part of national awareness campaigns and a Lifetime documentary. She’s written articles for publications here and abroad.
In 2003 she received the Visionary Award from the DC Rape Crisis Center along with comedian Margaret Cho and poet Alix Olsen.
Still, her work is not always appreciated. She said while on staff at the Omaha World-Herald in 2000-2002 senior editors there nixed her doing a photo-essay series on sexual assault survivors. The material, she was told, was too intense for the paper. She said some journalists criticize her for crossing ethical lines as a reporter who documents fellow survivors like herself.
“But if you can use your personal experience to get an exclusive story,” she asks, “then why not use it as a tool?”
Although she defines herself a photojournalist rather than survivor or advocate, her work’s inextricably linked to her experience. Stand centers on the aftermath of her rape — the turmoil she felt and the healing she found. In this light, she said, the images she makes, the talks she delivers, the testimonies she shares serve an educational purpose. “The work of journalism is educating people,” she said. More than anything, she wishes to give survivors names and faces just like her own.
Oyabu was a young, single, up-and-coming photographer with the Moline (Ill.) Dispatch in 1999 when she was raped. She had come to the States only a few years before to pursue her post-secondary education. She wanted to write but found her niche with a camera at Columbia College in Chicago. She went on to shoot a diverse range of subjects for newspapers in the Quad Cities.
Her life and career were full of bright promise when she suffered the ultimate violation and everything grew dark. The rape occurred far from her family in Osaka, where her father pastors a Christian church and her mother teaches preschool. It would be six years before she told her parents what happened. She said, “I didn’t want to worry them too much…I didn’t have the courage to tell,” In the wake of her revelation, she said, “my family has been very supportive.”
The violent act took place at night in her own home. She was sleeping in the bedroom of her locked apartment when the male perpetrator, a former neighbor she didn’t know, broke in using a crowbar. The petite Oyabu never stood a chance. As soon as the stranger left she ran to neighbors and called 911. The cops that caught the case treated her with care on the scene and at the hospital ER they took her to. The medical staff respectfully collected what they needed for the “rape kit” that police and prosecutors use to help convict rapists.
While treated well, Oyabu said she did overhear a doctor ask a nurse, Why is she crying? As she’s since discovered, the law enforcement and medical communities are not always as sensitive as they could be. At a 2005 University of Nebraska Medical Center presentation she told doctors, nurses and students that most sexual assaults are committed by a relative, friend, acquaintance or colleague, meaning victims “take a huge risk even to come out to the ER. You are among the first to respond to these victims when they reach out for help,” she implored the audience, “so please be compassionate to these people.”
Care must be taken with victims, she said, as the trauma of rape is exacerbated by the trauma of examination and interrogation and the suggestion — intentional or not — that somehow the victim’s at fault.
Oyabu provided police a description of her assailant, who left behind the crowbar, his hand prints, hair and other incriminating details. He was caught after only three days. The fact her rapist was captured at all, much less so swiftly, is atypical, she said. The remainder of that year is a blur of counseling sessions, depositions, trial proceedings and attempts to get on with her life. Due to the overwhelming evidence she was spared having to testify. The repeat offender was given the maximum sentence by the judge — 20 years — and is currently serving his time in an Illinois state pen. Again, she said, that is not the norm.
Even with some closure, Oyabu endured flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety attacks and depression. She lived in fear. She rarely let her guard down around men.
The counselor she was referred to at a Quad Cities family services center helped Oyabu work through her emotions. “She made sure I understood that it (the rape) wasn’t my fault. That’s one of the biggest steps for healing.”
A counselor friend suggested she keep a journal. Oyabu said journaling provided a healthy release. Later, her entries proved a key resource for her book. That same friend asked Oyabu to participate in a project that had victims’ harsh self-portraits and words printed on T-shirts. “All I saw was shame and anger on them,” she said. “These T-shirts were faceless. I didn’t belong there — I have feeling and hope. I’m not just a statistic.” This picture of bitter fruit was not the image she had of herself or other survivors, a term she prefers to victims.
“Well, I don’t want to be bitter forever,” she said. “Survivors don’t want you to feel sorry for them or see them as some kind of damaged goods.”
She’d already discovered survivors could be anyone. After her rape several friends came forward with their own stories. “It was really a shock to me all these close friends from college were rape survivors. I didn’t know it,” she said. “I guess my friends didn’t know how to start the conversation about it. Once I was victimized they felt like they could talk now.”
Four of the five women she served on a panel with at the Poynter Institute turned out to be survivors. Smart, successful professionals like her. They’re everywhere.
Oyabu came to Omaha not just for a job but to escape the place where she was raped. “I couldn’t really stay in the same city,” she said. Also, Omaha had a lower incidence of sex crimes. The thought of it happening again plagued her. She wanted to feel safe. But that took time and work. It came with the help of Dee Miller, a fellow writer and survivor in Council Bluffs, and Pastor William Barlowe, pastor of Omaha’s Grace Apostolic Church, where she met her husband, IT specialist Patrick McNeal. The couple have a 2-year-old daughter, Ellica.
Another turning point came when she wrote a letter to her rapist. “As soon as I dropped the letter in the mailbox,” she said, “I felt a kind of joy I’d never experienced. I started to smile and laugh again. I felt like I was totally set free.” Forgiveness is a work in progress.
The next piece of her recovery was her faces of survivors work. When the Herald balked at doing anything she bolted in frustration and liberation. “I was like, Forget them, I’ll do it on my own. She did, too, largely self-funding what became the Stand project. Fees from speaking engagements and exhibits helped.
She said the project’s been “part of my healing, It’s been healthy for me.” She’s met some survivors who can’t move on or can’t find closure — still mired in their pain. “That’s totally understandable. I was there.” She’s met others who dedicate themselves to the cause — working to make a difference with survivors and first responders. Others lead fulfilling lives and careers outside the issue. She keeps in contact with many. For herself, she said, “sometimes I just can’t believe how far I’ve come and how much I’ve done the past six, seven years. I’m alive.”
The prospect of writing about her survival scared her until she found she could divorce herself from the emotion of that trauma. The process was cathartic. She’s now translating Stand for an English language edition to be published in the U.S. by year’s end. Her photo project lay dormant the past few years as she worked on the book and adjusted to motherhood. This year she may capture new images for the project on two trips she’s making to Japan, where survivors who surfaced after her last appearances there requested to be part of her archive. In the future she may revisit her original portrait subjects to further chart their journey of recovery.
Meanwhile, she’s contemplating her next project. Exploring sexual assault in Asian countries interests her. Whatever she does, she won’t be afraid to take a stand.
Resources:
NATIONAL SEXUAL VIOLENCE RESOURCE CENTER
Nobuko is a honorary board member of NSVRC. NSVRC serves as the nation’s principle information and resource center regarding all aspects of sexual violence.
Clothesline Project of Japan
a project of survivors and their remained families of sexual abuse express their thought in drawing on T-shrits.(in Japanese)
Parents United of the Midlands
a site whose mission to bring light to the darkness of sexual abuse
Advocate Web
free resource for victims and their families
Welcome to Barbados
a Tori Amos inspired website for rape and sexual abuse survivors
Related articles
- Supporting Survivors of Sexual Assault (healthyheels.wordpress.com)
- April Is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) (kcareyinfante.com)
- The Medical Minute: Sexual abuse can have long-term effects (medicalxpress.com)
- Self-esteem, recovery from sexual abuse (gwizlearning.wordpress.com)
- 39 Million Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (livingstonparentjournal.wordpress.com)
Photographer Monte Kruse pushes boundaries
August 22, 2010
4 comments
Image via Wikipedia
I first wrote about Omaha photographer Monte Kruse more than 20 years ago, and even in all the intervening years and stories and personalities I’ve come across, he still rates as one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve ever met. One day I will post that story, as it’s always been one of my favorites — I think because of the subject and for the way I captured the essence of his otherness. Monte definitely marches to his own drummer. Like a lot of creatives, some can find him strange or difficult, but that’s just Monte being Monte. Of his talent, there is no question. When I encountered that first time he was doing great humanistic work and as I recall more or less living out of his car, flitting between places and assignments. He’s come a long way since then. The last time I ran into him, which was for the following story, he had a downtown loft that served as both residence and studio. I believe he’s still there, but I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure is that wherever Monte lands he’ll always find a way to do things his own way.
This blog also contains stories of mine about several other Omaha-based photographers, including Jim Hendrickson and Don Doll, who are friends and mentors of Kruse, as well as Rudy Smith, Larry Ferguson, and David Radler. By the end of the year I will be posting a major piece on 2010 World Photographer of the Year Jim Krantz. Additionally, the blog features pieces on many filmmakers, including Alexander Payne, Nik Fackler, Dana Altman, Jon Jost, John Landis, Joan Micklin Silver, Gail Levin, and Charles Fairbanks.
Photographer Monte Kruse pushes boundaries
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)
When Omaha photographer Monte Kruse muses about his darkly erotic work “pushing the limits” and getting “him noticed” he sounds every bit the impetuous artist that he is. A sensualist in his life and in his art, Kruse makes striking nude images that actually fulfill his expressed intention to “stretch the bounds” with “edgy work” that elicits strong responses from viewers.
The large-format black-and-white images, which explore the male and female body in evocative contexts, have attracted the very attention he seeks via a slate of local gallery showings displaying his work and the recent gift of one of his prints, Debris IV, to the Joslyn Art Museum permanent collection. While holding court at an Old Market bistro one spring night, the enigmatic Kruse discussed what lies behind the improvisational approach and primal effect he has hit upon with his latest series of nudes.
“I was making money shooting standard portraits but I said to myself, ‘I’m not doing anything that stirs interest or makes people think. How can I do that?’ And I thought, ‘Well, the best way to do it is to photograph the nude, but not the classical nudes of beautiful bodies entwined on a beach with the ocean in the background. Instead, I wanted to do something more like snapshots — images that come out of found moments that have some mystery to them.’ So, I looked at a lot of film noir. I liked the darkness and the moodiness of it. The mystery of it. The detective-style quality to it. And that’s what I was searching for,” he said that night above the din of the busy bistro.
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The result, he explained, “is photojournalism, combined with mystery writing, imbued with a mood. It’s the kind of work not typically seen. It’s not real pretty. It’s dark, it’s personal, it’s edgy. It’s not so much about the person as it is the moment — the specific truth of the moment. I don’t want anything posed. I go in without any preconceived ideas, except to bring out a certain element of intrigue. It’s like a diary. It’s my experience with that person in that moment. There’s one like that of me and my girlfriend naked in a hotel room. It just happened. Another time, someone I was with took a shower and, boom, I shot it. Once, in a hotel, a person opened a window across the way and I said, ‘That’s it — I’ve got a photograph.’”
Striving for verisimilitude, Kruse often uses found locations and objects rather than sets or props, relying on available light and “a gut feeling.” When not shooting in a studio, he employs minimal artificial lighting and staging. The idea, he said, is to let the process be as natural and instinctive as possible. “I’m photographing without safety nets. I don’t want to do things that are going to be perfect. I don’t want to have it all sketched out. The more off-handed I get, the better I get. I let the subconscious free. I want to be surprised by my own images. The whole thing is just moving and keeping your energy flow up and shooting different angles and not being afraid to take chances. It’s like jazz — it moves from one thing to another. It’s free-flowing. It just goes.”
Later that same night in the Old Market Kruse retreated to his spacious Bemis loft apartment/studio, where he showed some acquaintances the very pictures he was describing. Upon seeing the pulp-fiction-like images, the assembled agreed the photos capture private, unguarded moments suggestive of any number of storylines or histories.
Snapped amid such naturalistic settings as bedrooms and bathrooms, the images offer views of nude individuals and couples in intimate, impromptu moments of a post-coital nature, although nothing overtly sexual is revealed: the shape of a voluptuous woman leaning with a nonchalant attitude in a hallway; a half-glimpsed man standing over a woman lying on her back in bed, gently stroking her pelvis; a well-hung man descending a staircase; a woman with a full bush getting dressed. The pictures, both stark and dreamy, offer a post-modernist’s view of the human form and make the viewer acutely aware of his/her role as voyeur and as purveyor of certain attitudes.
Janet Farber, associate curator of 20th century art at Joslyn Art Museum, said, where images of “the traditional nude” focus “on the beauty or the form of the human body in an isolated context,” Kruse’s images explore the nude in “contextual-narrative” ways that imply certain socio-psychological-sexual dynamics. She said his interest in evoking an atmosphere imbued with subtext is achieved in various ways.
“He’s really paying attention to the range of tones and the intensity of black and white. He creates a tension within the image that allows room for the viewer to bring something to it or add something to it in terms of the implied action. One of the ways he does that is by leaving important bits of information out. Quite often his models are anonymous or somehow their identity obscured. I think that’s part of the effect that brings into play the imagination of the viewer.”
Kruse said his increasing output of male nudes, which has included pictures of gay men interacting, compel people to confront things they may rather avoid, such as homophobia. “I’m not necessarily trying to shoot provocative images, but let’s just say the male nude is always something a little bit scarier. Anytime people see the male nude then all of a sudden there’s the assumption that you or the subject is gay, which doesn’t matter. People are going to bring those attitudes. But with my new series I’m trying to evoke some political questions about what love is and isn’t and what’s wrong with viewing the male body and what’s wrong with the gay culture. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
He said by presenting the male nude in different ways, he hopes people see beyond questions of sexual proclivity and instead view the male body as a natural and legitimate subject and one not yet exploited or perverted like the image of the female body. “When people ask, ‘Why are you interested in the male nude?, I say, ‘Well, because it’s beautiful.’ The female nude has been done to death. It’s a cliche. The male body has just as much validity as the female body. It’s just me pushing the parameters a bit. I take these snapshot-like images and blow them up into huge prints that people are forced to confront on a wall, where they’ll love it, hate it, whatever.”
Carol McCabe, who has printed many images by Kruse at her Professional Darkroom Services, said she saw the artist go through a phase where he ratcheted up the emotional tenor of his work to the point of shock value. She said where his work was once “more literal and straightforward” it now displays a “much more formal, sophisticated” and subtle interplay between elements in tension, whether shades of light and dark or moments of action and repose.
She said while “there’s a lot of physical power in the images, a big piece of what he wants to do is create ambiguity, as seen by his interest in androgyny. I think he pushes the envelope with his work more than anyone else I’ve seen in Omaha. He brings a passion and honesty and compassion to his work that makes people respond.” McCabe said Kruse is also meticulous, going to great pains to study how master visual artists have used light and paying close attention to every detail in the darkroom.
During a recent shoot in a side corridor at the Bemis building where he resides, Kruse photographed a nude male in a series of primal, pent-up “action” scenes against the backdrop of a brick wall. Beyond some minimal track lighting overhead, the only fill light Kruse brought to the location was something he calls “my genius light.”
Without any firm idea of what he would shoot, Kruse tried conjuring some compelling image into being out of thin air. He moved everywhere in the tight space, searching for angles, compositions, shadows, texture, depth, mood, feeling. He had the model, Greg, try any number of clinging, crouching stances along the wall, having him insinuate his body like a snake slithering across a rock face. In some cases he had Greg hoist himself up on a lead pipe and then twist his body and turn his face from the lens. In others, he had him make like he was scaling the wall, ala Spider-man, or else like a cat burglar or prowler caught with his pants down.
In a photo session Kruse charms his model like the seducer he is in order to get the results he wants. “You’ve got to be able to read people. You have to become their friend for that moment. You have to develop that trust. You have to be alert. You have to be open. You have to take risks.” he noted. In an almost constant patter, he reassures and directs his subject: “Beautiful, hold it right there. Bring your legs down. Bring ‘em up. Now, a little bit further down. Throw your head back. Yeah, that’s it. It’s gorgeous.” He also exchanges quips. “You kind of look like Jesus up there,” he told Greg, who at the time clung from a wall with his arms splayed out. “I’m feeling a lot like him right now,” answered a flushed Greg.
A frequent model for Kruse is Claudia Einecke, Curator of European Art at the Joslyn. Recently, she dropped over Kruse’s place while he was shooting painter Helen Braugh. After finishing with the petite and politely British brunette Braugh, he turned his attention to the sleek, blond Einecke, a German emigree who oozes a pouty sexuality without trying. As she nonchalantly sat on the arm of an easy chair, hands propped on her knees and long legs opened, Kruse clicked away from the floor with his Canon AE-1 camera. He also favors a Pentax 645.
Einecke described what it’s like being the object of his intense gaze: “Although it looks like he’s just waiting for something to happen,” she said, “there is an energy and a tension there because he’s making those things happen. It’s always impressive and interesting to see Monte at work and the concentration he brings to it. He’s always looking for the unplanned. Usually, his best photos come out of moments he recognizes that you and I would probably not see as photographs. Monte reminds me that at first I thought his new work was just awful, but now that I’ve gotten used to these images there are some that I think are really lyrical, beautiful and gentle.”
In some recent images, Kruse goes for extremities — capturing the taut muscles and bulging veins of, for example, Greg straining to support himself at the Bemis. “Where before I was dealing in found moments,” Kruse said, “now I’m trying to step-up the intensity. I’m after something real urban, real dark, real menacing. I’m pushing the model to the extremes. I’m capturing the pain, the tension, the exertion, the danger. I want to make it real hip, real cool, but not contrived.” In other shoots he’s done along these lines, he achieves ambiguity in images of naked men caught leaping through the air without a familiar context to ground their actions in. The models “are not objects,” Einecke said, “but are subjects in a narrative. You don’t know what’s going on, but you feel something is going on.”
For Kruse, photography is all about the possibilities it affords as a medium of self- expression and personal growth. The life of this former Iowa farm boy was transformed when he turned his back on a promising baseball career while a Creighton University student in the 1970s to pursue photography. With world-renowned photojournalist Don Doll and sculptor Richard Hunt as mentors Kruse developed into a sought-after image maker adept at capturing poetic human scenes for such diverse sources as news publications, galleries, corporations and private clients.
In the photo-journalistic vein, he has documented AIDS patients, homeless individuals, developmentally disabled residents and poverty-stricken natives of foreign lands. For the art market, he has shot a wide variety of stunning nudes. For a personal series of artist portraits, he has photographed such leading lights as author Studs Terkel, the late actor Jason Robards and filmmaker Sydney Pollock.
Ever the iconoclast, Kruse long ago eschewed a mainstream career for independence. His romantic idea of being an artist found him living out of his car between assignments and adventures in Israel, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. He took his obsession with photography to the limit. “If I had a choice between buying film and food, it was generally food, but it was a really close call. I’ll be honest — I stole, I cheated, I lied — I did everything to keep going. And now I’m in a position where I don’t have to do that. I’m not as desperate as I was.”
With age and maturity he now lives a settled life, supporting himself by working as a hotel doorman. This solid foundation actually frees him to experiment more with his work. “Before, I was so desperate to please and to get other jobs that I’d shoot this stereotypical stuff. My photography was based on pictures I’d seen. Now, I’m doing individual images that are uniquely my own. I’m less self-conscious. I’m more confident. If I don’t want to work with you, I can say the two magic words in the English language, ‘F_ _ _ you.’ Plus, I can create here. When I lived in other places, like New York, I couldn’t create because I was so caught up in just surviving and making the rent. Here, I can shoot all day long.”
Finally, Kruse feels photography is what ultimately defines who he is and what his legacy will be. “I pick up the camera, man, every day. I shoot images every day. I’ve shot countless images in my life. My photos are like a diary of my life. I can look back at photos I shot years ago, and it’s like yesterday. They’re proof of my existence on earth. I think the last picture I’ll take, if I can, is of all the people gathered around my bedside.”
Related Articles
- Fashion, photography and the art of the nude (thestar.com)
- ‘Censor This’ erotic photography exhibit in Harrisburg draws critics before it opens (pennlive.com)
- Marie Claire: Nude Is The New Black, If You’re White, That Is [Color Patterns] (jezebel.com)
- Exploring the Female Nude (thelastnoel.blogspot.com)
- Frederick Brown’s Journey Through Art is a Passage Across Form and a Passing On of Legacy (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
- Jesuit Photojournalist Don Doll of Creighton University Documents the Global Human Condition One Person, One Image at a Time (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
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