Interview with a Photographer from the American Magazine "Life" - Part Two

Author: (USA) John Loengard / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Hart Preston (hereinafter referred to as Preston): I was studying at Stanford University, and Charles Steinheimer was also there. At that time, I was interested in theater and wanted to become a director. Rex Hardie was the theater manager at Stanford then, and under his guidance, I directed a musical. The script was written by Waldo Salt, who later won an Oscar for the screenplay of Midnight Cowboy. Another person who helped me write the script was Bill Rogers, the son of a humorist.
John Loengard (hereinafter referred to as John): You were interested in theater and film back then, but why did you end up becoming a photographer?
Preston: The appearance of Life magazine in 1936 was an extremely exciting event. In San Francisco, I roomed with Steinheimer. There was also another Stanford classmate, Jack Allen, who worked at the Time-Life magazine office. We went to see him and showed him some photos we had taken. He gave us a couple of assignments. By 1938, I signed a contract with Life and began working for them. We Americanized America, providing photos to the public. We had weekly deadlines, and by Thursday, the new issue would be on shelves across the country. At that time, you could say we were like Walter Cronkite (an American television journalist and news program host in the 1990s). When I signed the contract with Life to work for them, I had never been to New York, and I couldn’t think of a reason to go either. Carl Mydans did a story on United Airlines that flew across the entire country; Peter Stackpole did a story on the railroad’s "Super Chief" train from Chicago to Los Angeles; another person did a story on a long-distance bus trip. So I suggested to Life that we do a story on a hiker. They agreed. I found a college student who was planning to go to Bennington, and I sent him on his way. I followed him across America. That story ran on seven pages in Life. When I went to New York to see photo editor Wilson Hicks, he said to send the film to our darkroom for processing, which was on the fourth floor of a hotel on 48th Street. There, I met Dmitri Kessel and Bob Capa, along with someone else whose name I don’t remember, but the atmosphere of like-minded people was great. The darkroom was on the fourth floor, and the bar was on the first floor—everything was in place. They developed the film I’d shot, and I selected the frames I wanted to enlarge. Of course, I had no say in the final layout. Life usually sent photographers to cover five stories, but only one would be chosen for each issue, so it was very difficult for your photos to make it into a particular issue.
John: How do you feel about the stories you’ve covered?
Preston: Recently, I went through my scrapbook and looked at all the stories I’d shot. From a photographic perspective, I found only a few that made me feel proud. You might say I’m just a reporter, a photographer. From a photographic aesthetic standpoint, I really can’t say how exciting they were. They were just stories—each with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like written news reports. I was just reporting with photos. At that time, Life often said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." That wasn’t necessarily true. A writer at Life might say, "A word is worth a thousand pictures." The management of Life always said we were the best photographers in the world, but in reality, I think they just saw us as skilled but uneducated people. That was also one of the reasons I switched from photography to writing.
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