 CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF JAY DICKMAN'S IMAGES
All Images © Jay Dickman
Jay
Dickman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who has covered
stories as diverse as the war in El Salvador, the Super Bowl, the
Olympics, national political conventions, and the 40th Anniversary of
the Bombing of Hiroshima. He’s done over 25 assignments for National Geographic, and his images have also appeared in Life, Conde Nast Traveler, TIME, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and GEO, among many others. His work has also appeared in 15 “Day in the Life” books, and he has co-authored the book, Perfect Digital Photography with Adobe expert Jay King.
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| Fisherman Silhouette on Aeolian Boat |
Dickman
is the founder of FirstLight Workshops, and has hosted digital photo
workshops in such diverse locations as the Mid-Pyrenees of France,
Dubois, Wyoming, and Maryland. Recently, he has been the official National Geographic photographer on board the Endeavour ship in conjunction with Lindblad Expeditions. He has also worked with National Geographic’s Photo Camp, where he has worked with young photographers from underserved communities.
When
asked how he first became interested in photography—and photojournalism
in particular—Jay Dickman replies, “I think a lot of it was the product
of growing up in the 1950s and ’60s when we had LIFE and National Geographic
as our ‘windows’ to the world; they were our TVs.” This brought
coverage of the Vietnam War, moon missions, civil rights issues and
world stories into people’s living rooms. “Looking back, I didn’t
realize how this was forming my direction and energy.”
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Janis Joplin, Texas Pop Music Festival |
The Magic of Discovery
When
he was in high school in Dallas, Texas, a woman at a local camera store
where he got his film developed praised Dickman’s photography. “I
thought I was so cool with a telephoto attachment on my instamatic,” he
remembers. “The woman said, ‘if you think that’s cool, wait until you
see this camera’—it was a Honeywell Pentax H1A that cost around $139.”
His 16th birthday was approaching, and his dad offered to “bite the
bullet” and get his son something really nice. Although it represented
a lot of money, his dad bought him the camera for his birthday. Dickman
saved some money and bought a small darkroom kit. “I remember talking
to my girlfriend on the phone,” he recalls, “and was working with my
little 5x7-inch developing tray. I remember when the image came up and
I dropped the phone. I thought, ‘this is magic!’”
When he was in
college, Dickman decided to pursue photography as a career, much to the
chagrin of his father. “I wasn’t smart enough to listen to him,” he
chuckles. “I didn’t realize just how tough this business was.” He
discovered that he loved images of life, particularly those that
captured the human condition. After just a few days of perusing
newspaper want ads in the Dallas area, he found a job with a small
sports agency shooting Southwest Conference Football and other sports.
“I got paid $5 a game to go photograph this stuff,” he says. This also
gave him the opportunity to build his portfolio.
Going International
He
decided it was time to begin approaching newspapers and news services.
“I didn’t know that my book really wasn’t at that level,” he says. “I
approached AP (Associated Press), and they said, ‘this is interesting;
keep shooting.” Then he approached both newspapers in Dallas, which
included the Times-Herald.
The Director of Photography, John Mazziotta, saw promise in the young
man’s work. Soon he got a call from Mazziotto after one of the Herald’s
staff photographers quit. “On Friday he told me, ‘the job is yours,’
and it scared the hell out of me,” Dickman recalls. One of the staff
photographers at the time was Bob Jackson, who had received a Pulitzer
Prize in 1964 for his image of the slaying of Lee Harvey Oswald.
It
was the early 1970s, and Dickman found the Herald to be a bit
intimidating at first, but soon realized that it was an awesome
learning environment with a stable of talented photographers. He began
shooting 2–4 assignments a day. Shortly thereafter, the Los
Angeles-based Times Mirror Corporation bought the Herald
and brought in a new editor and staff. They expanded the paper’s
coverage of local news and it went from being an afternoon paper to
becoming a morning newspaper. “We started off slowly covering
stories around Texas and across the U.S.,” he says. “And then we
started moving into international news. It was an amazing education for
me.” The formerly sleepy Herald
became one of the major photographic papers in the U.S., and assigned
Dickman to major news events of the day, such as the Santa Fe Prison
riots, a volcano in South America, and the anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima. And depending on where the event was taking place, says
Dickman, “the paper would sometimes hire a Lear jet to get us there.”
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Gentoo Penguin Feet, Antarctic Peninsula |
“The
paper really gave you the stage to produce your work,” Dickman states.
In 1982, the Herald sent Dickman on the first of three excursions to
cover the war in El Salvador. Altogether, he spent three months in this
war-torn environment. “The body of work I did down there won the 1983
Pulitzer Prize,” he says. “Newspaper photography has always been an
amazing world for me.”
Changing Times
In
1979, a woman who Dickman would eventually marry was hired as a lab
tech for the Herald and eventually became a staff photographer. American Photo
magazine once included her as one of the top five upcoming
photographers in the U.S. Becky quit her job at the paper during the
early ‘80s before the couple married, and Dickman says, “She’s been one
my biggest supporters and editor.” Eventually, he and Becky decided to
move out of Texas. Dickman called one of his friends at the Denver Post. “Again, it was a great amount of synchronicity and timing,” he says. The Post
had just brought in Jim Preston as the head of photography, and they
created a position for Dickman as a special-projects photographer who
would propose major story ideas.
The Dickmans made Denver,
Colorado their home in 1986, but the timing was bad. After they moved
to Denver, a major department store chain went out of business because
of the declining economy—one that had provided huge advertising revenue
for the Post. The newspaper
immediately imposed a hiring freeze and it suffered cutbacks and
layoffs. “The whole plan of being a Special Projects photographer just
disappeared,” he says. “They no longer had the budget to send me on
these big assignments.” He became a staff photographer, and the people
who hired him began leaving the paper as well. “I started doing more
free-lance work on the outside,” he says. He remained a full-time
employee of the Post for the time being, but soon met a woman named
Barbara Sadick, who founded Matrix, a new photo agency that assigned
photographers to news-based stories. The photo editor at the Post
was very supportive, but Dickman found that holding down two jobs was
“very intense.” After some exhausting travel between Denver and New
York, he quit the newspaper and free-lanced fulltime.
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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Image from the War in El Salvador |
Scaling New Heights
Dickman had considered working for National Geographic,
but thought that the long travel and time commitment on their
assignments would take him away from his family too often. Then he was
invited to the World Press Photographer’s 30th Anniversary celebration
as a spokesperson at the International Center for Photography in New
York. He and Becky attended a dinner at this event where they sat at
the same table as Tom Kennedy, the director of photography at Geographic,
who said that he’d love to have Dickman do some work for the
magazine. He had gotten a taste of this in 1979, when Dickman and
photographer Skeeter Hagler photographed a story about Peter Jenkins,
the man who walked across the U.S. After Jenkins had shot his own
pictures for the first half of the walk, Geographic assigned the two photographers to complete the story.
Several months after the dinner, Geographic
gave Dickman his first assignment—shooting the Yellowstone fires in
1988—which opened the door for a long relationship with the magazine.
Almost immediately thereafter, he was assigned to a story on Papua New
Guinea, which involved living for three months in a village in a
remote, stone-age rain forest. During this time, Becky was pregnant
with their daughter and had the baby shortly after he came home. “She
was always supportive,” he acknowledges, “but still, three months away
from home is a long time.” Then Kennedy called him to cover the breakup
of the Soviet Union, which was guaranteed to be a huge cover story. “He
wasn’t really even asking me to do it; they were anointing me with this
one.”
After talking it over with Becky, Dickman made the tough
decision to call Kennedy back and turn the assignment down, thinking it
might be the end of his relationship with the magazine. “He couldn’t
believe it,” says Dickman. “But he wound up calling me back later,
saying he really respected my decision.” He has continued working for
them, and to date, he has photographed about 25 stories for Geographic,
many of which are multiple week- or month-long assignments. “There’s
been a lot of time spent and immersion working with these wonderful
people,” Dickman muses. “But there is no one I like better working with
than them.”
The year 2001 rolled around and the entire photo
industry was impacted by the events of 9/11, when a lot of assignment
photography was cut back. “Magazines were reacting to the Internet boom
as well,” Dickman points out, “and the reformation of the published
piece.” Then in 2002, he was asked to contribute to A Day in the Life of Africa,
and he traveled to Paris, France, where the book was headquartered.
Olympus was the major sponsor of this project and the contributing
photographers were asked to shoot with their new E-20 digital SLR.
Dickman
and several other Colorado photographers did some training with an
Olympus tech person in Denver after the cameras were shipped. “We went
to Paris and did a few more training sessions,” he says. “About 85–90%
of these photographers said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to give up my
film camera.’ But about the same number of photographers came out of
this photo shoot with the epiphany that digital imaging was the
future.” He was impressed with Olympus because their design team from
Tokyo was in Paris as well, actively seeking the pro’s input on the
camera. Soon thereafter, Dickman was asked to participate in the
Olympus Visionaries program, and is one of their sponsored
photographers.
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Black Sand Dune in Iceland with Green Lichen |
Sharing Knowledge
Dickman’s
FirstLight workshop series began after some of his neighborhood friends
started an arts foundation in Auvillar, France. Becky inquired as to
whether they would like to have Dickman give a photographic workshop,
and they were very receptive to the idea. He created a proposal for
Olympus, who agreed to sponsor his workshops, and Dickman held his
initial FirstLight Workshop in Auvillar, France in 2003. “We had 17
students and five instructors,” he says. “It was a photo boot
camp—mayhem, but it was wonderful.” In the past, he says that some
communities that hosted workshops have been somewhat frustrated with
the results. All too often, photographers would step into their
lives and photograph them without giving much in return. “Usually all
they ask is that you send them prints, but photographers might do this
less than 20% of the time.” Dickman decided that he wanted to create an
entire document to send to the community, and to create a magazine of
the students’ work. “First of all, we get the workshop attendees
published,” he says. “These are people with a passion for photography
on up to professionals; people working within the industry who wanted
to hone their books.”
Dickman says they’ve been able to keep
the number of workshop participants to instructors at about a 4-to-1
ratio. “Usually I’d bring Bert Fox, a former National Geographic
photo editor, myself, another photographer preferably with knowledge of
that particular area, and very quickly, I started bringing in Jay
Kinghorn, my co-author of Perfect Digital Photography.”
Kinghorn is an Adobe certified expert who teaches digital darkroom
techniques and workflow. “With this workshop window of five days, you
want to be shooting,” Dickman points out. “I decided to create
assignments for our students, something I would want to photograph.”
These assignments fit into the fabric of the community, like
photographing life on a farm in France.
For the students, one
of the most important parts of the workshop is being edited, Dickman
points out. “I suggest that while students are waiting for their edit
time, they should gather around the computer, because this is a very
important instructive time in the workshop. They can go back out with
that new, fresh knowledge and visual redirection and continue
shooting.” He emphasizes that if one is taking more than two
photographs, they’re dealing with a visual narrative and telling a
story. “You’ve got to create a sense of place through environmental
portraits,” he says. Dickman selects transitional communities as
workshop locations; communities that are transitioning from being a
small town to becoming a larger, more homogenized place. “Dubois,
Wyoming is a perfect example of a little cowboy town in the Wind River
Valley,” Dickman comments. Located about a mile outside the gates of
Yellowstone, this small town is starting to grow.
FirstLight Workshops does a short run of magazines of the students’ work, and Bert Fox, the former Geographic
photo editor, also does the layout and design. “We have it printed
digitally,” Dickman points out, “and we send copies to those people who
were gracious enough to let us step into their lives.” Additionally, he
sends about 40–50 copies of the magazine to the town’s community
center, as it can be an important document for the archives of that
particular area. Students and workshop sponsors also get a copy of the
publication. Generally, they create 4 – 6 large prints of each
student’s work, says Dickman, which are displayed in local galleries in
the communities they shoot in. FirstLight also invites the community to
view the work. “We give people prints of themselves that are around
13x19 inches, while the students go home with 18x24 prints,” he says.
Dubois really opened their doors to FirstLight workshops. They didn’t
expect a large turnout at the 2006 gallery showing, but about 450 wound
up attending—about half the town’s population of 900. Hewlett Packard,
Adobe and Olympus are major sponsors of the FirstLight Workshops.
“Everyone has been amazingly supportive,” he says.
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Yupik Hunter on the Yukon River |
The Passion Endures
In addition to his workshop series, Dickman has been working with Geographic
again in partnership with Lindblad Expeditions, one of the premier
ocean travel companies who were the first to travel to the Antarctic.
Their ship, the Endeavour, travels to various exotic locations, and
Dickman is on board as the Geographic expert. “This ship is traveling year-round now, pole to pole, and they have a Geographic
photographer aboard every sailing,” he explains. “These photographers
are available to provide information and shooting ideas, and can shoot
stock images for themselves.” Dickman has just completed two trips in
the Antarctic on the Endeavour, and will take two trips to the Baja for
whale migration. “This is a whole new part of my life that’s opened up,
and I can bring my wife and/or kids with me.”
Dickman maintains
that he still loves being a photographer. As much as he hates spending
time away from home, his family understands that it’s part of their
familial dynamic, and they have the opportunity to travel with him from
time to time. “Just when I think I’m sick of being away and would
rather be working at McDonald’s, I do my drill—which means picking up
that camera and the magic flows through me. I can’t believe I get to do
this; it’s unbelievable to be paid to be the eyes of a story.”
See more of Jay Dickman’s work at www.jaydickman.net and view his workshop schedule at www.firstlightworkshops.com.
Learn more about Hewlett Packard at www.hp.com, Olympus America at www.olympusamerica.com, and Adobe at www.adobe.com.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF JAY DICKMAN'S IMAGES
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Last Updated: Mar 17th, 2010 - 19:57:22
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