A Life in Photography

A Canadian friend sent me a link to a 2008 video biography of Ted Grant, a photojournalist who was very well known to our northern neighbors, though not to most of us in the U.S.  Grant died recently at the age of 90.  The Video, Ted Grant; The Art of Observation is excellent in its portrayal of a personality ideally suited to a photo career, as well as in its exploration of his photographic technique.

Ted Grant - The Art of Observation

Grant's interest in photography was initially nurtured by his father who, though apparently confined to using just a box camera, was nevertheless a careful craftsman and a good teacher.  In early adulthood Grant decided he wanted a camera for his birthday, so his wife bought one for him in 1949, a 35mm Argus.  Looking at the pictures of Grant with that first camera, it looks to me to be a postwar Argus A2B with a coated lens and simple two-position focusing. That model is pretty similar to my prewar A2F which lacks the coated lens, but has a full-focusing lens mount.  Grant appears to have sold some stock car racing pictures from the A2B to a local newspaper which got his career started.

My prewar Argus A2F

By the 1950s Grant was working for a large photo agency.  At that time photojournalists were nearly all still using Speed Graphics, and the pictures tended to be setup shots of newlyweds and businessmen in corny poses.  Grant, with a couple friends, then started his own photo group and he graduated to using 35mm equipment and shooting feature stories that were much more sophisticated in regard to concepts and techniques.  Grant says in the video that his important sources of inspiration from that period were the big photo magazines like Life and Stern and Steichen's The Family of Man.

What makes Grant's story particularly compelling for me is that his career spanned nearly my own whole involvement with photography.  I grew up in a world that was portrayed for people primarily by the big news magazines like Life, and that period lasted until I was in my 30s and getting serious about being a photographer. Like Grant, my photo heroes were people like Eisenstaedt, Cartier-Bresson, Gene Smith and Gordon Parks.

Photography, in fact for me in that period, was nearly synonymous with photojournalism. I attended a commercial photo school in Manhattan in the 1960s and managed to sell a few pictures to newspapers and wire services like AP and UPI.  One of my pictures found its way into Life's back page, but that was by then close to the end of the the big photo magazine era, as well as to my ambition to be a photojournalist. I took a long break from photography and really only got back to it as a hobby after I had retired.