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From the Vault of Art Shay: Avoiding Cliche

By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 16, 2011 8:15PM

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art explains how he spent a lifetime trying to avoid taking stock photography.)

"The camera," Alfred Stieglitz said to an elite bunch of acolytes hanging on his every word and picture (and to several nude models everyone was using for one thing or another). "No one has come close to exploring its range."

It was a time, like now, for young people... a turning time, a learning time. He was holding up a WWI-era box camera which, he was fond of saying, was inexhaustible. He let that sink in. His wife, the passionate artist Georgia O'Keefe, 23 years younger than he, sat near a window that gave on Fifth Avenue, writing love letters to her man, born 15 months before Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Georgia had an ongoing lover, but everyone did. She wrote her husband about how much the young stud meant to her.

Such early photo giants as Paul Strand and Minor White flocked to see the hip couple defy the convention of aging. Photo collectors sent flunkies to bid on everything not pinned down, even Steichen's advertising pictures and Man Ray's fake glass teardrops... still worth their weight in the real gold market for masterpieces and pictures believed to be masterpieces.

Long before I became a Life photog, I served a 3-year apprenticeship (1947-50) as a schlepper: literally a carrier of lights, lenses, spare film and tripods for rachitic, ancient photographers or prima donnas of 42. I was so deep into these arrangements that I was quixotically called "De Mille" at first by Life's unsung staffers Francis Reeve Miller and George Skadding, with whom I worked perhaps 40 stories from counting the birds in the old Smithsonian Tower in DC; to talking Gypsy Rose Lee to pose on the "bally stand" in front of the Royal American Show at the Cotton Carnival in Memphis; to innumerable stakeouts of Mafia capos in Chicago, New York, LA and New Orleans. The magazine, via legendary crime writer Sandy Smith, noted that "Shay has the guts of a second storey man."

I never, in person, heard the pearls that Steichen and the others dropped, but having worked with perhaps 20 of the great ones - including several women giants - I have carefully studied most of the cliches that great photographers dispense, and am here to yawn for you. Along the route, I've become a maven of amateur and other photographers' cliches. I mean, you work with classic editors like Ed Thompson, Hugh Moffett, Ralph Graves and even George Hunt, and watch their fury as they reject lousy pictures; it stays with you.

Thompson's favorite bugaboo was closeups of old couples? "Whaddya gonna caption it- wed 50 years?" Moffett used to say of cat photos, "It's a cute pussy, but Life readers like to look at their pussies privately." After I became a famous picture-snapper, I still lost a full page to somebody else's cliche. My picture showed a kindly Arab carrying and then putting a baby camel down in a ditch. "Sunken ship of the desert," I captioned it.

It looked too much like a Life picture someone remembered involving a farmer and a calf. Come to think of it, in 1947 when my transport plane crashed in the snows of Newfoundland and I photographed it from the chopper that rescued us, someone on the staff remembered Life had used a similar picture from Europe of a Swiss crash on a mountain not far from the Jungfrau. He, too, had waved to his rescue chopper. Cliche, don't you know! (I sold my plane crash to Look.)

You may have noticed by now my ocular desperation at avoiding simple cliches. At first I used to make fun of wedding takes on wedding cakes. The photographers invariably entwine bride's and groom's arms so that the first conjugal slice is shown going down. For a while I was an insufferable wedding guest. My wife would refuse to sit with me unless I stopped criticizing the hard-working, underpaid photogs. The champagne sipped from a Manolo Blahnik shoe comes to mind. The first dance of the married couple. The first dance with her father. The grandma's
dance to great applause with whichever of her old lovers is still living and dancing.

Having wrecked my share of weddings with 8mm amateur flood lighting, I bear the shame of it forever. I cringe when I see someone else's production coming on. The greatest praise I ever got was from a family bride suspicious that my kid brother Stu had hired me from having worked on 18 Life stories, instead of a wedding pro with a gaudy storefront and a 4x5 Speed Graphic working two flashes because one alone could not be depended upon. When I presented my new sister-in-law Sandy with a set of wallet-sized cliches, she said, "Oh I'm so relieved Arty. They're just like a professional's."

The above pictures for my souvenir book were all made to fight the intrusive cliche. That was my objective in rescuing actress Jessica Lange; in "teaching" Karl Wallenda how to go off the high platform; to "teach" Kathy Johnson (and her husband) Olympic workouts; and to "teach" great actor Alfred Lunt how to emote properly. And Jack Nicklaus, plus a then-unknown Time writer named Massie (biographer of Catherine of Russia) how to putt.

It still disturbs my wife Florence that I used that picture in my golf instruction book. "A woman buying it for her husband will think some chubby clown taught Jack Nicklaus how to putt while grinning in front of Jack's modest house in Columbus, Ohio."

When you're paid to shoot something like the above, you should try to keep from shooting the same-old, same-old. Time based their cover on one of my close-up slides.

A cliche, alas.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.