John Loengard (1934-2020)

Archives – May 26, 2020

John Loengard is useless.

He was one of many final myths of the golden age of pictures from 1950 to 1990. He was the nice director of pictures for Life and a unprecedented photographer.

I nonetheless stay fascinated at present by his picture of Henri Cartier-Bresson taking part in with a kite within the Luberon.

For pleasure, John collaborated for a very long time to the Eye of Photography and we held our editorial conferences on the bar of The Carlyle, the lodge on East 76th road. We typically talked about his dream, the one one he had by no means realized: a set of books on all of Life’s photographers! Imagine!

Look by way of John’s archives within the Eye: these are pure marvels.

Goodbye John!

Jean-Jacques Naudet

AN APPRECIATION OF JOHN LOENGARD

By David Friend

John Loengard, the esteemed Life journal photographer and director of pictures handed away as a consequence of medical problems on May 24. This homage is customized from the preface to Loengard’s 2011 ebook, Age of Silver: Encounters With Great Photographers (PowerHouse).

In 1956, John Loengard was a precocious younger man, a senior at Harvard, with a knack for making photos. Life journal took discover. Its editors started providing him assignments. And, in brief order, he’d landed a coveted spot as a employees photographer, carving out a path as a resident artiste—a contemplative, brainy, self-possessed kind who preferred to work alone within the area, typically for months at time. (His friends at Life tended to do their assignments within the firm of a reporter, who would normally double as an assistant, toting the requisite tripod, the digital camera bag, the espresso.)

In time, Loengard would turn into one of many masters of the black-and-white photo-essay. His most enduring tales—on the final surviving Shaker communities, on artist Georgia O’Keefe, and on his household’s summer time residence in Maine—are benchmarks of the style. And he would excel at environmental portraits that had been trustworthy, sleek, and succinct, generally spartan; his research of O’Keefe, author Allen Ginsberg, and comic Bill Cosby, amongst many others, are acknowledged classics. Indeed, throughout Life’s tumultuous final decade as a weekly publication, American Photographer would model Loengard the journal’s “most influential photographer.”

By the Nineteen Seventies, he had turn into Life’s image editor for a sequence of particular editions, after which, after a stint at People, served as director of photographer when Life began its month-to-month incarnation, in 1978. In that position he would give watershed assignments to lots of pictures’s giants and helped form the careers of scores of newcomers. Annie Leibovitz, in actual fact, has talked about that it was whereas taking pictures a chunk on poets for Loengard, in 1980—significantly a picture of Tess Gallagher, in costume, atop a white horse—that she reached a conceptual watershed in her work. “The Tess Gallagher portrait,” she has written, marks “the beginning of placing my subject in the middle of an idea.”

During that interval, I used to be a younger reporter at Life. Much of my time was spent studying methods to produce what had been known as image tales or photo-essays. Now a fairly anachronistic mode of storytelling—the journal equal of novellas or sonnets or mime—image tales consisted of sequences of juxtaposed pictures, laid out over a sequence of double-page journal spreads, and supplemented by quick textual content blocks and captions. This interweaving of images and textual content was supposed to narrate a compelling linear narrative. To that finish, I might journey the globe looking for scoops, all the time paired with a world-class photojournalist. If you might {photograph} a topic and if it had some newsworthy facet plus relevance plus shock, you had a narrative. And off I might go—all the time within the firm of a photographer chosen by Loengard—to locations like Oman and Tunisia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, Israel and the West Bank, Poland underneath martial regulation, Newfoundland throughout a oil-rig catastrophe, Lebanon and Afghanistan throughout wartime.

Soon, I developed a ritual. Most nights at 6:30—within the days earlier than 24/7 cable information, the Internet, or cellular gadgets—I might be a part of a number of reporters to look at the night information for half an hour, attempting to remain on prime of occasions we is likely to be masking within the weeks or months forward. Then I might wander over to the darkish hall of the picture division and plop down on the sofa in John Loengard’s spacious, if raveled, workplace.

Typically, the imposing, stone-faced Loengard can be leaning again in his chair, his tie askew like his wiry hair. He can be sporting rumpled grey slacks and oxblood wingtips. And he can be holding—simply inches from his face, like a paper masks—a black-and-white contact sheet, contemporary from the picture lab. Each contact sheet contained a single roll of 36-exposure, 35-mm unfavourable movie that had been developed, minimize into strips, then printed in constructive format in rows of thumbnail-size pictures. (Loengard hated the phrase “images” and would wince each time somebody utilized the phrase to {a photograph}.)

With his face obscured and his head tilted upward, the higher to make the most of the fluorescent lights overhead, he would grunt acknowledgment. (He was liable to the halting mumble, to muffled responses, to pauses that will prolong into interminable, Sphinx-like silence.) And whereas listening to me blather in regards to the information or an upcoming project or a specific image I’d just lately admired, he would proceed sitting, contact sheet over his face, rapidly shifting his model of a loupe—truly a Leica lens he used as a magnifying glass—down and up and down the sheet, image by image. Occasionally, he would repair me together with his piercing steel-gray stare, his sagebrush eyebrows as unruly as actor Milo O’Shea’s. Then he’s nod or grimace or go on enhancing.

After digesting every contact sheet, he would take a grease pencil and examine off the actual frames that is likely to be worthy of enlarging as work prints. Occasionally, he would cease to take an early night cellphone name from a photographer within the area, somebody simply getting again to his lodge room in Europe or calling in after a day shoot in L.A. (In the subsequent workplace down, his deputy, Mel Scott, was normally nonetheless there enhancing, leaning over his light-box as he burrowed by way of tight mounds of transparencies.)

Eventually, Loengard would discuss—enhancing all of the whereas. And I might absorb knowledge. He mentioned the nuances of tales within the pipeline. He would fear by way of the hurdles of upcoming shoots. He would clarify why a narrative hadn’t labored—and the way he’d identified, from the second the piece was assigned, why it had been destined to fail. He was a person who may spot an exquisitely composed {photograph} from fifty yards, and let you know how and why it was fantastic. He valued an image’s shock and spontaneity over its magnificence, its motion and content material over its artistry.

From a cranny of a cast-off contact sheet or deep inside a stack of slides, he was eternally discovering the extraordinary second that will turn into a photo-essay’s cornerstone, the image that informed a deeper, subtler story. During sure structure classes, after remaining mum as different editors debated the picture choice and pacing of an article, he would cease and ferret out an missed print, or flip over a close-by print to put its white underbelly on prime of the primary {photograph} to give you an intriguing new crop, making a contemporary picture nobody had but thought of.

Loengard would pore over dozens of rolls for a single project, recollects Barbara Baker Burrows, the present director of pictures of the Life franchise. [Burrows would pass away in 2018.] “Then he’d take a couple of pictures into the layout room,” she says, “and hand the editors one or two photos and demand, ‘This is it.’ They’d say, ‘John, the photographer’s been taking pictures a whole lot of rolls.’ He’d say, by way of clenched enamel, ‘This is it.’ He was such a superb editor; he knew exactly what ought to—and shouldn’t—be used within the remaining structure.

“There was no uncertainty in any fiber of his body. I remember the posture: he’d walk in with this ‘Al-Haig-I-Know-What-I’m-Doing-Don’t-Question-Me’ bearing. He had backbone and loomed large in any room. If he said something, people would listen. They trusted his story sense, his command, his instincts. He knew it all. And there’s no one in my career I’ve ever learned more from.” Loengard, in actual fact, had been on the market within the area for years and so he understood the hurdles. This expertise, this knowledge, this eye—and the esteem during which the Life hierarchy, in contrast to these at different publications, held the style and expertise of the image editor—gave the photographers, in flip, extra stature, extra energy, extra artistic pressure and license.

Loengard was identified within the enterprise for his scowling oracular presence, a cross between a rabbinical sage and a tough-love soccer coach, a Theban seer and a photographic Bob Fosse who oversaw the choreography of each shoot whereas searching for out and nurturing new expertise. He was a solitary determine who gave off an air of studiousness, even the Aristocracy, and a glint of righteous indignation. He may seem judgmental and abrasive at occasions, and was constitutionally unable to undergo fools. He was a pastiche of opinion and curiosity, instinct and expertise, skepticism and marvel. He was the dictatorial pater familias and the uncooked youth fired by an unquenchable creativeness.

He was additionally intoxicatingly participating. He was refreshingly—and generally infuriatingly—counterintuitive. His thoughts would bore into the center of an issue, or flip it on its bottom to dissect it, or flip it inside out to discover completely unanticipated aspects. “I always felt when I was in a room with John,” insists photographer Michael O’Brien, “I could feel his mind working. His mental muscle was that powerful.”

“He treated photographers as if they were like him—intelligent—not button-pushers,” says photographer Harry Benson. “He took the photographer’s line, typically in opposition to the [publishing] firm, which was a really uncommon trait. He was an actual photographer’s editor. The editors would all be within the room and agree on one thing and John would smile after which go away and work out the actual method to the story with the photographer. He knew that at Life the photojournalist was king.

“And he was a gentleman. It wasn’t acquired—a manner he’d put on for posh people. It was his natural way of interacting. Even to the crappiest photographer coming in, he’d give some good advice. And he’s always been his own man. He didn’t need other people. He was a lone wolf who went his own way—as a photographer and as an editor.”

Loengard acquired a fame for encouraging younger photographers (often providing an project on the spot if impressed by somebody’s portfolio and resourcefulness) but in addition for driving others to tears as quickly as they left his workplace. A couple of profitable photojournalists, years later, profess to nonetheless being traumatized by their preliminary encounter with the nice, gruff Loengard. And but, I discovered him, down by way of the years, to be a beneficiant and ethical man, a principled soul—kindly and measured, thoughtful and gracious, devoted and distinguished, witty and wry, openhearted and open-minded.

Just earlier than photographers would depart on a narrative, then a few times whereas they had been out within the area, he would goad them, insisting that they try not solely the unbelievable and preposterous, however the unattainable. His intention was to stretch their limits, to pressure them to contemplate each visible risk for a given image scenario. Photographer Brian Lanker as soon as known as me, barely confounded, throughout a shoot on various vitality pioneers. He was in Alaska photographing an modern wheat farmer who additionally occurred to boost buffalo. I used to be a reporter on the time, working in New York and pitching in.

Lanker had simply gotten off the cellphone with Loengard and informed me, “John’s idea is: ‘Why photograph this guy in the wheat field? Why not rent a Cessna and shoot him in the plane, upside down, over the field, while all these buffalo are down below.’ Well, how do you get the guy and the buffalo both in focus? Especially when he’s only got about six buffalo, which’ll appear as tiny specks unless you’re skimming right over the field. But now John’s got me thinking: a plane is surprising. And I sort of like the upside-down too.” So Lanker had me name round to search out the going price for renting prop-planes in Fairbanks.

“It was great because that one conversation opened the doors for me, perceptually,” recalled Lanker, in February 2011, a month earlier than he misplaced his battle with pancreatic most cancers. “I might by no means take a look at an project the identical means once more. I might all the time be on the lookout for: what’s on the market that we’re not considering of? It was life-changing since you realized he was proper. So typically you method an project and you set it in a field. But an project has no lid, no sides. It’s completely open. You exit and take a look at it contemporary.

“John walked the walk, visually. I’d arrive somewhere and say, ‘There’s nothing to photograph here.’ But if Henri Cartier-Bresson or John Loengard were here, they’d have made a fabulous image. So I’ve got to go and find it. It’s there. And I know another thing: If you think it’s not there, you won’t find it.”

With Loengard-as-superego whispering of their ears, Life photographers can be fingering their shutter releases however regularly asking themselves: What’s the story right here? How does this image match into that story? What is that this image saying? Is the story line altering and may I due to this fact be altering my preconceived assumptions? What is that this image saying? What else ought to I be contemplating? How can I push this even additional? Where’s the opener, the nearer, the double-truck?

“He is very demanding, but I like that,” insists photographer Mary Ellen Mark [who would pass away in 2015]. “He demanded a certain kind of perfection. He wasn’t easily pleased. He had serious expectations when you worked for him and you had to meet them. You had to come through for him. Today, everything is formulized. It doesn’t have any soul to it. John loved images that had soul and were really about catching great moments. Look at Harry [Benson]’s work: he’d give Harry an impossible assignment and he’d come back with the goods. It was a challenge to work for John and I’ve always had enormous respect for him because he’s really a great photographer—he’s the real deal. His own photography is very iconic and technically beautiful. He knew what he was asking for.”

“John never told a photographer specific pictures to take on an assignment,” says Michael O’Brien. “He was the yogi who gave you one or two traces earlier than going out that will assist establish what you wanted to do. I keep in mind a characteristic story on [the Reverend] Jesse Jackson [who was then running for president]. And in a single sentence, he reframed the entire story for me. He mentioned, ‘If you’ve seen the image earlier than, don’t take it.’ He remark meant: present Jesse Jackson—a much-photographed persona—as you’ve by no means seen him.’

“You always knew where you stood with John. Compliments were very, very few. He was always straightforward. If you went in there [to his office] and he liked one or two pictures, you were on cloud nine. I remember spending three weeks riding on the outside of a tank in Germany, in February, doing a story on a U.S. Army tank sergeant. The film was sent to New York and developed [by the time I returned]. I arrived, hoping for a good word. I thought I’d done something magnificent. Instead, he turned to me with that unnerving gaze and said, ‘Let me put it this way, Michael. If the film had been lost in transit, we would not have lost a thing.’ He was one hundred percent direct. The point is: he never misled me, never padded the bad news.”

Loengard would go on to a profession as an educator, an editor of distinguished volumes on pictures, and a photograph historian and critic. He is taken into account by many to be among the many most astute writers about pictures, revered for his enchantingly crisp, direct, and idiosyncratic type. He has additionally produced a useful archive of videotaped interviews with 43 photographers from the employees of Life, a set that served as the premise of his compendium, Life Photographers: What They Saw.

And by way of all of it—by way of the demise of the weekly image journal and the trusty Leica, the pocket gentle meter and the contact sheet—John Loengard continued making photos.

All alongside, John Loengard acknowledged the approaching transformation from conventional to digital pictures. He understood its implications intellectually and viscerally. He was among the many early business leaders to foresee that the charmed world of silver and paper, given time, would fall away and be no extra, changed by an increasing universe of digits and pixels.

And as this new age dawned, he saved on making photos: photos of his fellow photographers; photos of his fellow picture editors; photos of their photos—of photographers and archivists and heirs holding grasp photographers’ treasured negatives.

His portraits of photographers, a mission he started in earnest in 1989, was self-assigned at first. But as he began taking pictures, he now admits, “I realized it was a very dull topic. When it was me saying to photographers that I wanted to just hang around, the pictures lacked energy.” Soon, nonetheless, he acquired assignments to proceed the endeavor and the images took on a brand new vitality. “When you shot on assignment, you arrive and it’s The New York Times Magazine or Life or People. You become a conduit. Your subjects get charged up. They do more. They really want to visually impress you a bit. They want to make sure you get something good to make them look good. You work off their energy.” The ensuing portraits possess a vigor and a joie de vivre that mirror the life-affirming qualities of the practitioners depicted—and the artwork type they love.

As for Loengard’s research of the guardians of well-known photographic negatives, this physique of labor was accomplished in 1994, simply as a small however more and more influential cadre of photographers was turning into bullish about digital imaging. As quickly as he completed taking pictures this sequence, Loengard says, “I realized that the negative had become an obsolete industrial artifact.”

He had turn into, in impact, an anthropologist, a lyric poet, a prospector in a sivler mine. Since the times of the primary threshing machine, the primary revolver, and the primary telegraph, the medium of pictures had lengthy held the promise of permanence: a sliver of an prompt could possibly be captured on a flat floor, all the time. Recognizing this, Loengard had adopted the position of the alchemist-in-reverse: one who knew the key course of for turning silver right into a easy object that enshrined a timeless second.

But now the bedrock course of upon which that permanence had been based has itself evaporated like quicksilver. In its place, for higher or for worse, now we have a brand new course of—one which tends to worth the fun of the merely instantaneous over the deeper meanings of the cherished prompt. And but on these pages, at the very least, now we have a file, an image story, a chronicle of a dying foretold. As we regard John Loegard’s pictures, we discover magnificence, surprise, and revelation. And we will take solace within the notion that this new golden age of digital imagery has developed, undeniably, from a previous as brilliant as glistering silver.

David Friend