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Jerry Currier: Found In Translation
By Connor Leighton | Cover Archives |
May 15, 2005
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©Jerry Currier
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If life handed Jerry Currier
lemons, he would most likely take pictures of them––and then make
lemonade, of course. “I’m a photographic opportunist,” Currier says.
“Images come to me and I capture them. Or at least I try.”
But
photography may have been the furthest thing from his mind when he
graduated high school in 1955; a decade after World War II had ended.
With little hope of affording college, the Wyoming native enlisted in
the Air Force, looking forward to learning a marketable trade as an
electrician. Just one problem stood in his way––the Air Force
discovered that he was technically color blind, unable to distinguish
certain shades of browns and greens. “This meant they didn’t want me
working with the wiring in such things as radars, radios, and nuclear
devices,” he remarks facetiously.
Instead, though Currier will
never know why, the military decided photography would be a much more
suitable field for him. At the time, he didn’t exactly concur. “Joy at
the prospect of becoming a photographer wasn’t one of my emotions as I
boarded the Greyhound for my journey to the USAF Photographic Training
School in Denver, Colorado.”
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©Jerry Currier
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Basic Training
His
first weeks consisted of learning the mechanical aspects of the camera,
lenses, film, shutters, diaphragms, etc. and how they were used to
control light. However, none of this could fully prepare him for the
20-pound contraption he would be working with: an 8” x 10” view camera
complete with a wooden tripod.
“The thing used a double-sided
film holder, into which two sheets of 8" x 10” film, a 12 ASA,
orthochromatic emulsion, was loaded by hand, by the student. The choice
of ortho film, which only ‘sees’ blue and green light, was so that the
first attempt of loading film into the holder could be done with a red
safelight. This allowed the student to see what he was doing. Shooting
a single image with this beast was a long and time-consuming situation:
Nowhere near cutting-edge even for the '50s,” Currier says.
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©Jerry Currier
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Choosing
the camera location, the class instructor gave very little creative
latitude to Currier and the other students as they went through the
tedious process of exposing the film. The first two shots he took were
of a dull-looking barracks. “Boring!” he thought.
But like so
many others under photography’s spell, it was the allure and
enchantment of the darkroom that sparked Currier’s profound love for
the art. “We took the film holder with its exposed film into the
darkroom,” he says, “again with red safelights, and proceeded to
develop it. Carefully trying to handle only the edges, we slipped the
sheets into the developer. I have never forgotten the thrill of
watching my first image start to emerge from that red-tinted blankness.
It was pure magic!”
Culture Shock
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©Jerry Currier
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It
was about midway through his four-year enlistment when Currier got
orders to Japan. The day before Christmas Eve, he and several others
departed Travis Air Force Base on a Military Air Transport Service
C-97, not to arrive in Tokyo, Japan (where it was raining) until around
midnight on Christmas Day. Still groggy, exhausted, and nearly deaf
from the 24 hours of roaring piston engines, they boarded an unheated
Air Force bus to be transported to the air base. But Currier was in for
a pleasant shock that would change his life forever.
“The
streets were poorly illuminated with street lights, but ablaze with
neon. I was dazzled by a fairyland of signs, mostly in Japanese but
with an occasional word or phrase in broken English, adding to the
strangeness. Every color of the spectrum seemed to be reflected off the
wet pavement and filtered through the water droplets on the bus
windows. The bus was driving on the ‘wrong side’ of the road, and this
added an element of apprehension to the experience. For the next two
years I spent a major portion of my off-duty time in one of the most
beautiful and intriguing places I had ever seen…. Thus began my love
affair with Japan.”
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©Jerry Currier
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This love affair and the
attendant culture shock also may have forever influenced the direction
Currier took his photography. By this time, he was not only using his
camera for official duties, he was also recording, for his own
satisfaction, the splendorous, perplexing, and sometimes frightening
new world he inhabited. “I spoke little Japanese. I could say things
like ‘Good morning,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ order beer, and ask for
the location of the nearest restroom.”
But with a little help
from his new-found photographic passion, Currier didn’t let anything
deter him from turning potential bad experiences into beautiful ones.
And he never stopped learning from them. “A stroll in the countryside,
through the rice paddies on a hot summer day, was a dreadful olfactory
experience. ‘Night soil’ (human waste) was the prime fertilizer. It was
mixed with the irrigation water, and the stench could be overpowering.
But this was offset by the incredible images that presented themselves
to my eye and my cameras.”
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©Jerry Currier
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Defining Moments
Currier’s visual style is primarily influenced by the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson and his monumental book The Decisive Moment.
After almost fifty years of making pictures, Currier still echoes the
sentiments of the master who, after 25 years of experience, still
regarded himself as an amateur (a word that in Cartier-Bresson’s French
originally meant ‘lover’ or ‘one who loves’).
“[Cartier-Bresson’s] ‘decisive moments’ were so wonderful and alive, as were the images by the great photographers for LIFE, Magnum and the Black Star agency. My dream was to have something published in LIFE.
Around this time the ‘Available Light’ movement was going full blast,
and I got caught up in it. The availability of new films that could
record images in low-level light situations, along with new ‘fast’
lenses and new developers that allowed for ‘forced’ processing while
keeping the grain manageable, gave me tools to record images in
locations and situations that had been impossible before.”
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©Jerry Currier
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After
his discharge in 1959, he worked for a few years as a professional
assistant doing mostly darkroom work for two photography studios in
Salt Lake City, Utah. He gained extensive darkroom experience, from
photofinishing to high-quality portraits and weddings. He’s had photos
published (without credit) for Goodyear Tire and Champion Sparkplug ads
that featured candids of Mickey Thompson’s and Craig Breedlove’s land
speed record attempts at the Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1960s, along
with several album covers for Rosalie Sorrels on the Folkways Label.
Moving
to San Francisco in 1962, Currier found it difficult to get decent work
in the photographic field. “I sold cameras and hi-fi equipment for
awhile, worked as the assistant to a clothing store credit manager and
finally ended up as a combination order desk/buyer for a ship chandler
catering to the steamship industry. I did that for 30 years.”
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©Jerry Currier
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His
retirement in 2004 coincided with his decision to devote more time to
photography. Though he never stopped shooting during all those years,
the expense of setting up a home darkroom was more than he cared to
spend, and he often found himself subject to the whims of commercial
photofinishers. It was his discovery of the digital realm that
rekindled his interest, which eventually led to the purchase of a Canon
EOS Digital Rebel 300D.
Which leads to perhaps one of
Currier’s most recent exhilarating moments, taking third place (People
category) in Canon’s first EOS Digital Rebel contest. “’The Red Bags’
was shot when I was on one of my periodic ‘photo prowls,’" Currier
says. "I have been fascinated with the play of light and shadow and
these patterned sidewalks for some time. I was looking down from a
pedestrian over pass, watching the people walking below. A high fog
created a light that was soft and almost shadow-less--typical San
Francisco.
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©Jerry Currier
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“Suddenly, this man, wearing a
green jacket came into view as he walked under my vantage point. He was
carrying the ubiquitous red bags found in most Oriental markets here. I
only had time to shoot a couple of exposures before the play of color
and pattern was lost," the photographer recalls.
“The original
image was cropped, taking out some tree leaves on the left and a wall
on the right. This tightened the scene and helped focus the eye on the
man with his bags against the repeating pattern of the sidewalk. I also
felt the bags needed to stand out and this was accomplished by careful
digital selection and increasing the saturation very slightly using
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.
“When I found out I had placed in
Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel contest, I was mostly stunned. One thing I
would like to know is how the judges arrived at their decisions. It
would help me grow as a photographer," Currier says.
He is
thankful, however, for photoworkshop.com. "I signed up for the $2.00
trial membership, deciding that this was a place I could advance my
skills, and it has!"
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©Jerry Currier
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Last Thought
Today,
Currier continues to challenge himself and his imagination, often
creating his own projects from commonplace scenes or situations.
“Recently,
I realized that there were a myriad of photographic possibilities in
everywhere,” he says. “Images, visual essays that we all look at every day and yet don’t see:
a handprint in the concrete, the outline of some leaves painted on the
sidewalk by their decay, an abandoned vacuum cleaner. Ordinary things
that are easily overlooked. Cartier-Bresson writes, ‘There is subject
in all that takes place in the world, as well as in our personal
universe.’ A lesson I try to observe every time I take a camera in
hand.”
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Last Updated: Mar 17th, 2010 - 19:57:22
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