Keeping Up Appearances

Styling, 2009

I once knew a guy, a bank manager, who lived in a small Southern town. Joe was far from the smartest guy at the bank. But he was earnest, worked hard on behalf of the bank and was a conscientious husband, father and member of the community.

One year when Joe went in for his annual performance review, his boss did not take issue with Joe’s performance, for which there was, in truth, all manner of reason to take Joe to task. In fact, Joe’s boss had no comments about his mediocre job performance. Rather, the entire hour-long review involved the color of Joe’s dress shirts.

It had been noticed, Joe’s boss observed, that Joe occasionally wore yellow dress shirts to work in the summer. Perfectly crisp and starched Oxford cloth dress shirts, to be sure, but yellow nonetheless. And once, it had not escaped the bank president’s eye that Joe had gone so far as to wear a pink dress shirt to work under his tan poplin summer suit.

Yellow and pink would not do at the bank, it was clear. But that was not all.

“I don’t recall seeing you and Mary Beth and the kids at church recently,” Joe’s boss added. “I’m not sure how I should interpret this absence. But if you value your tenure with this financial institution, you’ll want to give more attention to your family’s walk with Christ.”

I Return to Photography

Vanderbilt Avenue, 2003

Photography became my medium of choice during high school in the late 1960s. I transitioned quickly from an old Brownie to an Instamatic to a Polaroid to a used manual Kodak to, finally, a brand new Nikkormat SLR ($269 1968 dollars, including 50mm lens). During those years I shot miles of Tri-X film, which could be purchased inexpensively in bulk and developed in either the school darkroom or the bathroom of our apartment.

As college, career and family occupied more of my time, photography fell aside. When I returned to photography in 2002, black-and-white film prices had skyrocketed. Color was the new norm. Digital was the new thing. And who wanted to mess with chemicals when you could have greater versatility in processing on the computer? This is one of the first images I took with an early point-and-click digital camera and liked. The scene is the southwest corner outside Grand Central Terminal in New York. We see the hustle and bustle of street life.

Unlike tourists, New Yorkers don't linger around Grand Central. They go about their business. The man in the foreground is purposely out of focus (though I didn't intend the crown of his head to be so blown out) to highlight his motion and let us know that there's more story to this picture than just him. His tussled hair, the profile of his face and his coat, though, tell us that he's probably not a tycoon, just a working man. He could be our father, our brother, our friend, our co-worker.

I like the way the curve of the corner entrance of Grand Central leads the eye into this photograph and down Vanderbilt Avenue.

I'm naturally shy when it comes to photographing people. This represented an attempt, however feeble, to get "close."