One of the great joys of the recent kindling of interest in our photographic history is that we have an excuse, if one were needed, to listen to and learn from those who are now the ancients of the craft. It is open season on the men and women who have worked in the medium for the last 50 years.

The excuse in this case is Ralph Steiner whose autobiography, A Point of View, was published in 1978 by Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Ct.). Steiner has written a unique photography book, rich in the authentic personality of the man and his craft. Photographer and writer David Vestal comments that the book deserves special attention. He adds, "It is refreshingly perceptive and free from anxious egotism. How rare that is--a worth while, totally unpretentious photo-autobiography."

Vestal ought to know: He was once Steiner's assistant and has remained a friend ever since. The book is affectionately and effectively introduced by Steiner's colleague and friend of more than 50 years, Willard Van Dyke, and he covers Steiner's photographing years from the 1920s to the present time. It is illustrated with over 100 exceptionally well-produced photographs, is simply and clearly designed, and is really readable!

As if it were not enough for Steiner (who turns 80 this year) to have written memoirs, there have been two one-man exhibits recently: at the Witkin Gallery in New York, and in the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. And his alma mater, Dartmouth College, presented a huge show in January, 1978, which is traveling to museums in the United States and Europe. Over the years he has been included in group shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. His move from New York to Thetford Hill, Vt., in 1969 produced a blaze of creative energy in the making of new photographs that have a whole new direction from his earlier work, plus eight films. The filmmaking was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Vermont Council for the Arts.

Steiner's photographic career includes not only filmmaking and personal still photography, but also the more commercial side of the photographic field such as advertising, publication, and public-relations photography. His photographic style has been described as "crisp, wiry, and witty" (Thomas Arbright, San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1978), with a kind of wit that is gently human instead of acid or destructive. It is as if through his eyes we can laugh at ourselves.

In his work and in his conversation, Steiner is a humorist; he considers humor an essential lubricant in a world which all too often rubs us the wrong way. But Steiner's work shows a subtle sensitivity to !ight and a consistent strength of design, always in a rhythm of energy appropriate to the subject matter. Whether portraying the light and shadow on a city building or in rows of sheets drying on a clothesline, Steiner has his own style of seeing, although he openly acknowledges his inspiration in other photographers over the long years of his career.

Steiner refers to himself as a "seeing eye man," but he is also a good talker. Even in the Steiner autobiography, his written prose is "spoken." He has a string of well-worn anecdotes and great punch lines. (Perhaps in his next life he'll preach--meanwhile we are lucky that he is a photographer.)

For this conversation Ralph Steiner tells his story, salted with straight observations of everybody in the history of American photography, and peppered with a personal manner that gives a contemporary flavor to his memories. Cover the spicy anecdotes with a sauce of good advice from a master of living, loving, seeing, and laughing, and you have a nourishing meal to last a life time--one that feeds the heart as well as the mind.

The actual circumstances of the interview could not have been more delightful--a soft, summer afternoon in a comfortable, old, white frame house just off the green in Thetford Hill. All I will tell you is that Ralph Steiner was born in 1899 and escaped from Cleveland and the brewery business of the rich side of his family, run by his uncle, his great-uncle, and his second cousin. They were not three separate people but one single person. It was a complicated family, and something to escape from. He went to, of all places, Dartmouth College. From there I'll leave the page and let Steiner take over:

"In those days--1917 to 1921--to be at Dartmouth, Jewish, neurotic, and shy was like being a Martian with a green head and four eyes. I was a skinny little guy, afraid of the world, and couldn't very well be captain of the football team, so I took up photography. There must be something about shyness and the darkroom, something in all that hiding in the gloom. There was a camera club--a place where you developed and printed, but there was no discussion because there weren't enough people interested in photography. I made pretty, arty photographs for a literary magazine. From the photographs I made of Dartmouth came my first book, which was published in 1922, the year after I graduated. A professor of biolo gy who made nature photographs took me under his wing, and I took a course with him: I was his only student. The course met in his kitchen over gigantic servings of strawberry shortcake. He'd say, 'Well, you know more about photography than I do, so why don't we just talk about what you've been doing?' I needed a lot of A's, and he gave me two.

"In those days I had no idea what photography was all about nor what I was all about. I couldn't have answered the question, 'What is a photographer doing when he makes a photograph?' I was too young and very naive. Now, 50 years later, as I see much of what is done with a camera, I wonder how many photographers could give good answers to that question.

"After Dartmouth, I headed for New York and Clarence White's School of Photography. He was one of the nicest, kindest people, but it wasn't a school, and Clarence wasn't a teacher; he did it to earn a living. He was certainly no go getter as a businessman, and it was very hard for him to make a living. We had criticism of our week's work from Mr. White on Friday afternoons, but Mr. White was too kind and too generous to have enough bite as a critic. What we mostly got was a push toward composition, composition, and more composition, and some help toward a decent technique.

"We had to do one gum print, one platinum print, one palladium print, one of everything; when it was over, with them all checked off, you graduated from the White School. We didn't get questions like, 'Who are you? Your whole life is to be spent using your photography to find out who you are and to try more and more to put yourself into your prints!'

"I say to young photographers, 'What in God's name are you doing, taking a picture of a tree or a mountain? That's crazy! What you should do is to take a person by the hand and show him the tree or the mountain itself. Why show him a stupid picture? It's flat and it's tiny compared to the mountain. The mountain is magnificent and has power. . .' They look at me as if I'm nuts. They don't know what to say back to me. So I go on to say that the reason you show someone a photograph is because a photograph is part of a human being--you--and as people we're more interested in human beings than we are in mountains. By showing a picture, you're showing an X-ray of your heart. The very silent, marvelous American painter, Edward Hopper, put it very simply. He said, 'The work's the man. You can't get something out of nothing.'

"I met Stieglitz at the Clarence White School in 1921. He gave a lecture and roared at us in his usual Stieglitz manner, saying that a photograph had to be an affirmation. Clarence White never said anything like that; he taught us about developers and composition. I'd heard the word 'affirmation' before, but I didn't see how that told you whether or not to elevate your tripod or get down low or move to the right or left. So after class, I went up to him and said, 'Mr. Stieglitz, I don't know what that meant exactly--about affirmation. I would like to come and talk to you and ask some questions.' He drew him self up and said, 'I am not interested in helping individuals!'. . . That was true--I was an individual--no getting around that, but Stieglitz was an individual to the 10th degree--a super something.

"These days I know what 'affirmation' means, and I say to young photographers what Stieglitz said way back then. That's because I think the world can use affirmation of what's good and useful. I'm not very much for the present-day 'inner-state-of-being photography.' As some critic said of present-day writing, 'Some keyholes are not worth looking through.'

"A number of people thought Stieg litz close to God, but the majority was less than enchanted by him. The least enchanted was Walker Evans, who loathed the romanticism of Stieglitz's work and bore a grudge against him after their first meeting. Walker had shown his work to the old man, who said only, 'Keep working, young man.'

"I knew Walker well over many years; in fact, he once saved my life. I'd come back from years in Hollywood to find my portfolio old hat. Walker got me the job of photographing the heads of the big industries for Fortune, where he was an editor. In John Szarkowski's Museum of Modern Art book on Walker he says that Walker grudgingly admitted that my early work had an influence on him. I don't think it was that as much as my giving him cameras and lenses when we were both poor, but he was poorer than I. Walker was a great photographer because in his person and in his work he was so much himself.

"Really, my advice to students is that you must be intensely yourself. I tell them not to try to be outstanding, or to try to be a success, or to try to do pictures for others to look at--just to please themselves. The great photographers the Olympians--did what they did because they wanted it that way. When the head of the Paris Conservatory asked Hector Berlioz what principle he used in composing, the answer was, 'Mon plaisir.'

"Walker hated Steichen because he thought he was too commercial. Steichen photographed hundreds of portraits for Vanity Fair beautifully and entertainingly, and he did entertaining fashions for Vogue because he was by nature an entertainer.

"Another man, one of the greatest of the greats, Paul Strand, reached the heights because he was so intensely himself. Most of his life's work was granitic--Puritan--just as he was, through most of his life, a Puritan of granite. I knew him well over many years. What a backbone of steel was in him! Until toward the end of his life when he did his lyrical book on the Hebrides, his work was truest and best when he photographed grim and hard material. When he departed from what he was, as in his book on Italy, he left out the very essence of the Italian people: their overflowing energy.

"But Paul certainly knew who he was, and also could tell you what he believed, and how that related to his photography. Many of the young photographers who come to show me their work either can't say what the intent of their work is, or talk mush-talk. There seems to be a present vogue for obscurity. I've been told by a teacher of film that a student asked him, 'How do I get more of that ambiguity into my work?' Photographers and nonphotographers need lots of things, but ambiguity is not one of them. But I guess photographers merely reflect the times they live in. Today you can see a lot of technique for its own sake, but you can't see the photographer's feeling about the world.

"One of my oldest photographer friends is Willard Van Dyke. He and I are not just close friends. We have worked together, and we both feel deeply about many things in life. Willard is more involved with people and their relationships than I've been. We are both sentimental; that is, we react emotionally to things that matter. As I tell every one, with all the harshness in the world today, we need all the true sentiment anyone can generate.

"A photographer does not have to be a thinker, nor does he have to be able to tell anyone what he is doing in his photography. But in some small but clear way, he should be able to talk to himself about what he does and why he does it in his particular manner. This doesn't have to be philosophical or deep; for example, I know that I am not, these days, much interested in making humorous photographs. Rather I'm interested in what miracles light can perform. Knowing that, I waste less film and time.

"To help students at Sarah Lawrence talk simply about the qualities inherent in things and people, I invented a kind of game. We would discuss a photograph not by what it looked like but what it felt like. For instance, I said, 'What color is Charlie Chaplin?' The girls looked at me as if I were crazy. One girl said finally, 'Blue,' and another girl said, 'Well, he's more like black-and-white polka dots because they're lively and go poof.' I said, 'What kind of music is he?', and they finally said, 'Chopsticks.'

"We used to play games of what we called feel-alikes because I said that's what a poet does part of the time, describing one thing in terms of another. I'd give them problems. We had very simple cameras and no darkrooms then; they had to send their things to a drug store to have them developed and printed. I pasted the picture on one side, and on the other side they could write one or a bunch of feel-alikes of what they were trying to say. Describing feelings is terribly difficult, especially for non verbal people, but as I said to Minor White once, 'What else is there?' I once told Minor about this method of teaching, and he said if you couldn't find words, maybe you could dance your photograph. Sounds crazy, but maybe he's got something. This fall I'll give students assignments based on music and have the kids stand up like conductors and beat time to music. That's as close as I'll come to dancing.

"Recently, I made a film called 'Slow Down.' It's a funny film, but it's terribly serious. An old friend of mine, when we lived in New York, drove across the country and didn't take any pictures. When I asked him why, he said, 'You can't drive in a car across the country and take pictures: You've got to walk. It's part of slowing down.' So by slowing down you can pay attention to what you see. De Maupassant wrote to Flaubert, 'Originality is paying enough attention to something until you see it in a way that no one else has ever seen it before.' That is what is meant by originality. Originality is not the result of sitting in a dark room inventing a brilliant idea for personal publicity--such as photographing your 80-year-old mother, nude, making chicken soup. Public relations, whether useful and good in concept or ugly and stupid is one thing; creative, personal photography another thing, and seldom the twain shall meet. I'm interested in educating people's eyes and hearts to enjoy the world, so when I make a film, if there is something wonderful, I would like to leave it on the screen long enough to be looked at. I think that comes out of being a still photographer, and I'm not worried about whether it's good or bad.

"Young photographers bring me their work along with that terrible question, 'How can I earn a living with my camera?' It was easy when I started in New York about 1923; there may have been five 'creative' commercial photographers in the whole city--no competition. About the best thing I can tell the young is to not think of the editor or art director as the boss. Think of him as a person who needs your help; he has problems too. Whenever I was given an assignment to make a picture I knew wouldn't make sense, I'd do it the way I was told and also six other ways. Often the art director would say I'd saved his life--or at least the job. You want an example? Once I was told to photograph a long row of drill presses. I said that my client's competitors also had long rows of drill presses--undoubtedly made by the same company in Bridgeport, Ct. I said: 'Who cares what you make the product with? Tell me what you do with your drill presses that's better than what your competition does, and I'll photograph that.'

"All my life--whether working for a living or making photographs or films for myself--I've worked with a camera. I am deeply grateful that I've been able to use my eyes and my cameras--it's done a lot for me. Look, I started out being a bowl of cold oatmeal mush, wanting too much to be liked, and now I think I'm a little different because I don't need other people's approval of me as I once did. But I'm saddened by the world and by the way its people treat each other. I believe in the motto of a newspaper I once worked on: 'We are against people who push other people around.' I ended my autobiography by quoting the philosopher George Santayana: 'For birth and death there is no remedy save to enjoy the interval.' "

Popular Photography, June 1979