Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/11/23

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Squares and sabotage
From: Eric Welch <ewelch@neteze.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 19:18:12 -0800

At 02:41 PM 11/23/1999 -0500, Dan Cardish wrote:
>Huh.....no one ever mentioned this before.   Can you recommend some good
>photojournalism schools?  How soon can I get started?  And to think of all
>that time I've wasted taking those damn, boring portraits!

Well, let's see. My boss once said "Every photo editor I know wants to do a 
story on the life of a stripper." At the time I was thinking of assigning 
one on the local strip place, because the women who worked there were sort 
of unusual for their profession. They were more than unusually ugly, old, 
wrinkled up, and one even had a lame leg! She had a terrible time doing the 
old two-step. :-P

There was one of the whole bunch who was sort of presentable. But they did 
put on a food drive for the homeless at the strip joint that raised 
something like $5,000 for the local food bank around Christmas.

Mizzou will do you fine. There's a nudie place in town. I knew a 
photographer who did a photo essay on the life of one of it's strippers. He 
went on to work in Tulsa and then Jackson Hole, WY. He actually was using a 
Minolta CLE for most of it.

But he couldn't figure out how to get into the place where she plied her 
trade, so another photographer, Miguel Fairbanks, who now shoots for 
National Geographic off and on, offered to do it for him. With the help of 
the teacher, Len Lehman - who works for the San Jose Mercury News when he's 
not teaching - and a woman walked into the place before the photographer 
and pretended to have a fight while the photographer snuck in while 
everyone was watching the argument.

He had an M4P and 35 Summilux under his coat, so he wasn't obvious. He had 
a cable release that he had in his pocket, and threaded it down through his 
pants and into his coat and connected to his camera. Good thing it was dark 
in there, or people might have thought he was doing more than pushing the 
plunger on a cable release! :-)

He got the picture, and the essay was saved. Maybe we ARE a bit voyeuristic 
after all. :-)

Eric Welch
Carlsbad, CA

http://www.neteze.com/ewelch

Logic: The art of being wrong with confidence...