I was sitting in the front room of Max’s Kansas City late one July day in 1973, reviewing a photo shoot that just had wrapped, when I was introduced to Eric Meola. A few minutes later, I happened to notice a somewhat familiar figure walk by the table and head into the back room; it was Bruce Springsteen. Eric excused himself and also went into the back room, because as it turned out that night Bob Marley and The Wailers, in their first New York City appearance, was the opening act for Bruce Springsteen in what would be a legendary six-night stand. I was already a Bruce fan and decided then and there to stay for the show, which was a great one, and the first of many I attended.

Subsequently, as I got to know Eric, I visited his studio and viewed his commercial assignment work and published his photography over the years editorially. When I first saw the Born To Run album cover, with its bold black-and-white photograph and elegant, yet simple design, I knew it would become an instantly recognizable classic.

A few weeks ago, while sitting with Eric in his Long Island home on the day he received the first printed copy of the book, Born To Run: The Unseen Photos, we chatted as we paged through it together and I couldn’t help but ooh and aah over a number of these never before published images, presented so beautifully in the quadratone printing.

You’re known for your color imagery — a lot of which is centered on primitive cultures. How did you come to photograph Bruce?

I had heard some of Bruce’s songs in the spring of 1973. I have this vivid recollection of standing on 18th Street near Gramercy Park, later that year, and a guy rolled down the window of his car and “New York City Serenade” was on his radio. And it hit me. That fast.

I lived around the corner from Max’s Kansas City and one afternoon I walked by and saw that he would be playing there that night, so I went. And that was it. … The show was the usual early Seventies “take no prisoners” Bruce. So I started going to Bruce shows in New Jersey, and ran into him one day. I started photographing the stage shows, and got to know Clarence. … At that time, I was, for all intents and purposes, a groupie. But I wanted more than anything to get the message out, that there was this guy and you just had to go and see him.

What was Springsteen like to photograph more than 30 years ago?

At the time I didn’t think he knew much about being photographed — at least not on his first two albums. But Born to Run was different. Looking back, I realize he had given it a lot of thought, and that he had a sense of projecting a persona that went along with the songs and the lyrics for that album. But he didn’t know how to communicate that to me — what it was he was after. There was so much else going on for him — writing the music, the lyrics, getting the sound right in the studio. If you look at the covers of the first two albums there’s no sense of who he was or who he was about to become. He was searching, but so was I.

And, somehow, it all came together on that one hot June day in 1975.

This is a book about 2 1/2 hours in your life. Looking at the pictures, it seems it was a very busy 2 1/2 hours. How much did you “plan” the shoot, and how much just happened? And why did you shoot in black-and-white?

I was very much influenced by Dan Kramer’s images of Bob Dylan; and by Bruce’s on-stage moves. I kept reading over and over about how there was such a disparity between the stage shows and the albums. … I couldn’t do anything about that. But what I could do was try to put on film — still pictures — what I personally felt in my gut about his performances. That’s what I wanted to capture — the interplay between him and Clarence, the sense of a brooding, street-wise poet who held an audience in the palm of his hands, and kept them spellbound with his music.

So I planned to shoot in black-and-white, because I thought it would help to simplify the images and to me, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll was always about — the contrast, the shadows, black leather, white light.

Most of these photographs have never been seen before? Why not?

I’ve always held them back. Part of the reason was that within a few months after the shoot, Bruce was in a lawsuit with his first manager. And then, there was the “hype” — the covers of Time and Newsweek. And I was just glad to get the cover of Born to Run, not to mention that I had taken quite a diversion from my own career to follow Bruce, and that I was starting to go off on long assignments. … Around the time of Born to Run I did my first huge advertising campaign, photographing coffee plantations around the world.

And I always had a sense of history about these images; not because I happened to photograph Bruce at that moment in time, but that all of it — the lyrics, the album cover, the other photographs — captured a moment of change, a moment of innocence suspended in time.

The story of this photo shoot almost seems like a fairly tale: “Photographer assigns himself to photograph the cover of one of the most important rock ‘n’ roll album ever.” Do you have any advice for young photographers who will read this and think, “OK. But, just how did Eric REALLY get to take these pictures?”
I’ll answer that metaphorically, because the mechanics of how it happened are documented in the book.

Jon Landau, who now manages Bruce, wrote a review after seeing Bruce for the first time. And he’s always quoted as saying “I saw rock ‘n’ roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” But his piece starts out with him saying, “On a night when I needed to feel young….” And that was it for all of us. Bruce talks to that thought in “Thunder Road”: “…so you’re scared and you’re thinkin’ we ain’t that young anymore…'”

There’s this point where you’re about to grow up and you don’t want to — you fight it with everything you’ve got. I wanted to photograph this guy because I believed in his music and what he had to say. The truth is, I vacillated between thinking I was nuts and knowing I was lucky to be in on a moment in time I would never forget.

You’re donating all of your earnings to the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. Why?

I guess at a certain time you measure yourself and say, “What have I done?” Or, more likely, “What haven’t I done?”

The lyrics and the spirit of Born to Run have always meant a lot to me. A few months before we sent the book out to be printed, Bruce called me and wanted to know if I was doing this because I thought he wanted me to. And of course I said “no.” But that summer of 1975 will always be magical for me, and the two least quoted lines of “Thunder Road” are probably the most important lines of the song:

…with a chance to make it good somehow,
Hey what else can we do now?

Doing this is cool — I’ve never felt better about anything in my life. One day in the studio Clarence turned to me and said, “Someday, 30 years from now, there will be books about this.” Well, he was right. I just didn’t know that one of them would be mine.

— Born To Run: The Unseen Photos (Insight Editions), with over 100 black-and white quadratone printed images, introduction by Daniel Wolff, and foreword and notes on the photos by Eric Meola, will be available in two editions, hardcover for $39.95 and a signed and numbered limited edition of 1,350 with a signed print for $195.

The post Born to Run: The Unseen Photos appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Photographers like to say that their medium’s closest artistic equivalent is music. That assertion has more to do with their fondness for tunes — many of them are frustrated musicians — than with any critical rationale. But if any photographer’s work bears comparison to music, the most abstract of all the arts, it is Pete Turner’s. In Turner’s highly graphic, supersaturated images, color and form are analogous to pitch and meter, and almost disembodied from physical substance — like music, pure wavelengths of energy.

So it’s no surprise that early in Turner’s remarkable five-decade career, he made such a meaningful connection with the musical world. It began with the photographer’s habit of searching New York City record bins for jazz albums. The cover art he saw was unremarkable, and he was determined to show his portfolio to jazz producer Creed Taylor, whose name always seemed to be associated with the most interesting recordings. The two met in 1958, and with that pivotal encounter began a long-term collaboration that produced more than 100 jazz albums known for both their music and their artwork. Many of these albums are now highly collectible.

The best of Turner’s classic album photographs are gathered in his third monograph, The Color of Jazz (Rizzoli, $45), which includes a foreword by music legend Quincy Jones and an afterword by Creed Taylor, who recorded jazz greats from Charles Mingus to Wes Montgomery. Concurrent with the book’s publication, the George Eastman House museum in Rochester, New York, will be the venue for an extraordinary retrospective, “Pete Turner: Empowered by Color,” running through February 4, 2007. The show will feature specially made Epson inkjet prints lighted with a unique system that gives them all the intensity that Turner envisioned. (More about that later.)

Pete Turner was creating his highly manipulated images long before the advent of digital capture and image-editing software. In 1957, while in the Army, he was assigned to run the newly developed Type-C color lab that had just been installed in a New York military facility. Turner spent his off hours trolling Manhattan’s environs and photographing projects that he devised for himself. These ranged from the reflections of neon signage on wet pavement to the clusters of balloons that vendors sold in Central Park. “I was a vacuum for color,” Turner recalls, “and I built up my portfolio this way.

Those pictures were the starting point for Turner’s collaboration with Creed, and the album covers they graced broke with the custom of a static portrait of the featured musician. “Photography was pretty straight then,” says Turner. “Even using a polarizer to pump up the color was a big deal.” Inspired by Creed’s assignments, the photographer developed a style that included the use of color to create mood, shooting from low angles, selective focus, blurry extreme close-ups, and in-camera double exposures. Yet Turner’s work for Taylor wasn’t the usual strict assignment photography; he was only given a proposed album title, and rarely heard the music before shooting. That meant he could be as interpretive as he liked.

In addition to the assignments, Turner and Taylor pored through Turner’s image archive for album cover material. They had images with incredible color to choose from, due in part to a technique that Turner had devised out of necessity. “My original slides were always being returned from the likes of Look and Esquire magazines all scratched and beat up,” he recalls. In order to preserve the originals, Turner began making copies with a slide duplicator. He realized that when he duped his Kodachrome originals back onto Kodachrome, and added filtration to change their hues, the copy slides had higher contrast and the intense color he wanted. “The results were so exciting,” says Turner. “The photos looked better and the response to my work kept growing.

Today’s digital imaging technology seems made to order for Turner’s purposes, and he has embraced it fully. He shoots with a Nikon D2X digital SLR on Lexar Professional CompactFlash cards. He has been using the Beta version of Adobe’s Lightroom software to manage and manipulate his images. “Lightroom is an electronic darkroom, pure and simple,” he says. “It’s a virtual stripped-down Photoshop that’s easy to use, works well on my PowerBook, and creates an excellent workflow.

Turner is making his prints on Epson Stylus Pro printers. As with many photographers who once depended on photo labs to process and print their color work, digital output has given Turner an unprecedented level of creative control. “I don’t have to outsource my printing anymore,” states Turner. “Though I consider myself a perfectionist, I’m always amazed at the first test print results. And if necessary, I can quickly tweak anything in a matter of minutes.” Turner is particularly impressed with Epson’s pigment-based UltraChrome inks. “In addition to their incredible longevity, they have a vibrancy and the most liquid color I’ve ever seen. In the past, pigments blocked up across the board, but these have a transparency to them. It’s as if these inks pour light onto the paper.” Turner finds that Epson’s Premium Luster Photo Paper is perfectly suited to the K3 inks. “It’s the closest I’ve seen to the dye transfer paper of the past. I’m very excited about the prints I’m producing today.”

To do justice to the more than 50 large-scale prints that will appear in Turner’s Eastman House show, Turner and the team of Sean Corcoran, the museum’s assistant curator of Photographs, Rick Hock, director of exhibitions, and Dan Steinhardt, photographic marketing manager of Epson America, chose 4100K SoLux bulbs that are considered ideal for lighting color photographs in display settings. “Each print will be dramatically spotlit like a gem,” says the photographer. “I couldn’t ask for a better presentation.”

As always, Turner seeks photographic inspiration wherever he happens to be, whether in the studio or on the road. “People are assaulted with visual distractions,” he says. “My job is to intensify the experience of color for them. I’m just happy to know that people like what I’ve done, and what I’m still doing.

Turner on color: “Color takes my work into another dimension. It’s the way I see. I’ve always been drawn to the colors of nature, and nature is a wonderful teacher. Look at the color coding of a bee — yellow and black stripes — or of a cardinal with its different shades of red. It is rare that nature is not in color harmony. Go out there and look. Although a lot of my pictures are not taken from nature, I use nature as a color source.

On controlling color: “Make color work for you, and keep it simple. I always look at my subject and work at incorporating mood. An example is the blue mood of dawn with the traffic light and Empire State Building [page 39]. All the light is in balance. If the cheetah [page 38] had a red area in it, your eye would land ?on that distraction and the mood would fail. The color integration of the cheetah and the bamboo simplifies the image and makes it work.”

The post Master Class: Pete Turner appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.