Michael East stman: The Artist Behind the Camer mera By Kim Brady Since graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, Michael Eastman has dedicated his life to creating fine art with the camera. He taught himself the craft, beginning with a 35mm camera in the early 70 s and graduating to medium format in 1974. Two years later, he learned to work with a view camera. During the 70s, Eastman supported himself with commercial photography and began to show his fine art work in galleries. Today he makes a living selling his art prints, occasionally doing commercial work for high-profile companies. I like to say that I ve had a foot planted firmly in both worlds fine art and commercial, says Eastman, who just finished photographing wild horses for Marlboro. I have prints hanging in approximately 10 galleries around the world and they ve been selling pretty consistently over the last seven years. Eastman makes limited edition prints ranging in size from 16x20 inches to 4x9 feet. I believe that fine art photography should not be ubiquitous, he says. The size of your edition should be a little scarce. As a colleague once told me, it should hurt a little bit every time you part with a print. Eastman s first big success was a series called Horses, in which he captured the grace, power, and beauty of these magnificent animals from every perspective statuesque as though on a marble pedestal and racing like a blur across the landscape. His prints were so successful, Alfred Knopf published a fine art book of horses in 2003, which is now in its third edition. It s a great way to get my portfolio into people s hands, he says. I receive requests for those prints every week. Another of Eastman s very successful exhibitions has been Cuba, a series of interiors he photographed over a period of four years in the old aristocratic estates fading away along Havana s Ambassador Row. I ve sold out of some of the limited Cuba prints already, he says. Some were available for only two or three years. It s wonderful on one hand and awful on the other. You make a great print and at some point you can t sell it anymore. But I always keep a print for myself. The Cuba exhibition has been traveling for two years and has appeared in seven galleries. It s now on display at the Joseph Bellows Gallery in San Diego. Eastman made the photographs while attending Cuba s Film Festival in 1999, 2000, and 2002. He developed a rapport with the Cuban citizens and they invited him into their homes. I ve often been accused of being more of a painter than a photographer. I used to think it was a criticism, but I have recently realized that is who I am. Michael Eastman The more people I met in Cuba, the more access I had to their homes, says Eastman. These were very poor families, living in the last of the grand old houses from the aristocratic era. They loved their homes, but they couldn t afford to keep them up. The only other option was to sell them for nothing to the government, condemning these grand old houses to being split up into multi-family apartments. Many families try to hang onto them as long as they can. They sacrifice everything to stay in their ancestral homes. He returned to some of the houses each time he visited Cuba, because he wanted to record the changes that occurred with time. I photographed Isabella s home in 1999 and 2000, he says. When I went back in 2002, it was so far gone I didn t have the heart to photograph it. Isabella, who was just a young woman, had died. Eastman photographs all of his interiors with a Sinar p 4x5 Field camera and an f/5.6 90mm Schneider Super- Angulon lens. He uses Fujicolor NPS 160 Professional color negative film with available light. He edits his images in Adobe Photoshop and exposes Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper with a Cymbolic Sciences LightJet digital printer. Eastman is based in St. Louis, where he s lived his entire life. The beauty of St. Louis is that it is the middle of the middle, he says. I can be anywhere in the country within a day or two s drive. It s the perfect location for Eastman to launch his search for his newest series, Vanishing America a photographic study of small-town theaters, side-of-the-road motels, and other unique architecture that is rapidly disappearing from the American landscape. Artists have many jobs, but photographers have a specific purpose, says Eastman. Regardless of our intent, we record history we document the world around us and try to illuminate things that our audience usually does not see. It s a photographer s purpose to elevate people s aesthetic, to help them see the world in different ways. The biggest complement I can receive is when someone tells me they saw a wall with an old worn poster, covered in graffiti, and they thought of me. It means that I have, as a photographer, changed one person s way of seeing the world. The Vanishing America project is primarily about 14 MARCH/APRIL 2005
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preservation. I love these old buildings and I love how they make me feel and what I remember. I feel a sense of urgency about this project because every time I go to another city, and I explain what I m looking for, someone says, Oh, I wish you had been here a week ago or last year... Then they describe some significant loss of a building that s been torn down or of a renovation that completely stripped a building of what made it historically significant. I need to photograph these places while they are still here. In Europe, they celebrate their history. In America, we tear it down and build a Wal-mart and call it progress. Eastman has been photographing exteriors for years, but he s found that the exteriors he s looking for are becoming more and more rare. You almost have to enter the interiors of these buildings to discover the sense of being frozen in time, he says. These interiors are like portraits without the people. Much is left to the viewer s imagination, says Eastman. The interior objects, furnishings, and artwork all suggest narratives of the inhabitants of the space. Eastman continues to use film for his commercial and fine art photography, but he relies on Photoshop to create the ultimate print. I used to print all of my own work conventionally in the darkroom, says Eastman. Now, I make a high-resolution scan of each image and correct the density and color in Photoshop. I found that I have much more control in the computer using Photoshop. In the darkroom, I was lucky to get a good print 10 percent of the time. Now I get a perfect print every time. After scanning the negatives, Eastman sends a disc to the lab where they make 16x20-inch proofs. He goes over the prints and makes adjustments to his digital files in Photoshop. I send the corrected files to the lab and tell them what size print I need. It comes back perfect every time, he says. It used to be that once you got a negative, your goal was to make the best possible print from what you had in the negative. You could crop a little, burn, dodge, or even spot a little. Now that negative becomes a doorway that you can enter and begin the exploration of the world you ve created on film. You can alter it any way you want. Eastman compares his work on a computer to the work Ansel Adams did with the Zone System through development and exposure. However, he could only work on the two ends of that tonal curve, says Eastman. With Photoshop, I can literally write Ansel Adam s name in that curve. I can make a Zone 4 into a Zone 3 in one particular spot. I can take a highlight down from a Zone 9 to a Zone 6, simply by outlining and darkening it, or changing the color or intensifying the color. I spend more time in front of the computer with an image than I did out in the world with my camera. Recording the scene onto a negative is just the beginning of the creative process. Photoshop also has benefits beyond basic color correction, according to Eastman. I shoot a lot of wide-angle 16 MARCH/APRIL 2005
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with the view camera, he says. I use it to create spaces in an image that don t really exist. While the view camera itself helps prevent distortion, because I work in such tight places, under very low-light conditions, some distortion is almost unavoidable. I can eliminate the remaining distortion in Photoshop, so the mystery of the space is maintained. Once Eastman completes the creative process in Photoshop, he sends his image back to the lab for printing as a conventional photographic print with the Light- Jet. The beauty of the LightJet is that it makes an actual photographic print, on photographic paper, that s processed like any C print, says Eastman. It uses a laser instead of an enlarger to expose the image on Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper. Inkjets make nice prints, but when you re looking at a conventional photograph, there s nothing like it the way it renders color and light. There s nothing like that print hanging on a wall with a light illuminating it. It just glows. Eastman has no plan to convert to digital capture any time soon. I like to shoot with available light. The beauty of photographing interiors with film is that I can make a three- or fourminute exposure with the light from just one window or a 40- or 60-watt light bulb. With a digital camera, you can t do that. It gets noisy under low light, and in highcontrast situations, the highlights will blow out because the digital camera cannot yet capture them accurately. Conventional film under long exposures tends to change the color. Sometimes this works to my advantage. Also, I don t think it s good for me to see the finished product as soon as I take the picture, that s why I never use Polaroid proofs. If I know what I have in the camera, I may not keep trying to get a better shot. It would stop the creative process for me. I d stop looking for a different way to look at the subject. I would stop trying to find other things in the scene to photograph. I prefer to forego the gratification phase until I actually look at the film. I want the process to continue. I ve been a photographer long enough to know that I have the right exposure, and that everything is going to be in focus. I want to keep shooting until I ve exhausted every possible option. Side Bar (use with one of the abstracts ) Meditations: A Microcosm of Our Surroundings VIEW CAMERA 19
own texture and design. Just like Vanishing America, he s been working on it over the last 25 years. When you live in one place as long as I have, you tend to think that you ve photographed everything there is to photograph, says Eastman. Over the years, you ve driven down the same streets, gone into the same neighborhoods, and you think there s nothing left to photograph. It s a terribly frustrating realization, but it s also not true. I ve always photographed abstract surfaces. To me, they represent a small microcosm of the world. When I started to see these surfaces in St. Louis, I became excited about photographing the city again. That s what vision is, Eastman says. The more you can see, the more worlds there are to photograph. That s the beauty of photography. It gives you the opportunity to be in the moment, kind of like meditation. 20 MARCH/APRIL 2005
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