And that’s the way it was.
Maybe you heard, Walter Cronkite died this last Friday. Maybe you missed it as I did due to the endless Micheal Jackson…er..coverage. I was a huge fan of Walter Cronkite. I grew up watching him on the CBS nightly news. In the early 70s father used to teach ROTC at a near by high school. On the weekends my dad would bring home a 16mm projector and reels (Yes, this was before DVDs and even before video tape!) of the old documentary TV series called Air Power hosted by Walter himself. My two best buddies, Steve Gray and Steve Rees used to come over and we would spend endless hours watching those old shows. It was one of those air battles in an Air Power show that I actually photographed off the projector screen and later did a little old fashioned darkroom magic on. I stained the the paper with coffee grounds, then while it was wet I bent the edges and cracked the emulsion. Later, as my writing was never good, I had my mom write appropriate captions on the back with bogus dates. It was a good thing I had her do it, as the photos were so convincing, so realistic that my when I showed my dad the photos and I told him I had made them he though I was lying. He was sure I had bought them in some old junk store or army surplus store.
I was also reminded by the death of Walter Cronkite that the greats from the 30s, 40s and 50s are almost all gone. Walter Cronkite was 92. The great news men and women, the great actors and of course the great photographers are all passing. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Cornell Capa and Carl Mydans have all passed away in the past 5 year (with the exception of Eisenstaedt who died in 1994). I feel like I just missed them. Wouldn’t you have like to have met them? Talked with them over a cup of coffee and heard their stories? You can see the list of greats at a wonderful website by Sid and Michelle Monroe called aptly enough, the Monroe Gallery. I ran across the gallery while reading a bog post this week by Joe McNally. By the way, Joe is in the gallery as well and is very open to interacting with folks over twitter and his blog. So, thanks to the Monroes we have a place where all these greats live on. In fact, you can even buy prints of some of the the great images of our time over their website. Not sure how they do that or how costly these prints are, but wouldn’t it be cool to own an Alfred Eisenstaedt print on Gelatin Silver paper of “V-J Day in Times Square”?
