Take a Picture -- It Lasts Longer

Photo of Manzanar resident by Ansel Adams

Photography is fundamental to the motion picture medium, which is why the recent loss of the veteran cinematographers Haskell Wexler (on December 27) and Vilmos Zsigmond (on January 1) hit Hollywood so hard. But still-photography is important too. Every movie set has its official still photographer chronicling the action, and actors use artful headshots to help them find work. There’s also the value of shocking news photographs, which can inspire moviemakers into telling the story behind the photo. The real Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker liked to photograph themselves posing with their weapons, and director Arthur Penn (whose brother was the great photographer Irving Penn) used photography as a leitmotif throughout his masterpiece, Bonnie and Clyde.

I’ve been thinking about photography a lot lately, partly because of a disturbing report I heard on my favorite Public Radio station. It seems some nursing home attendants have developed the nasty habit of photographing elderly residents (many in the throes of dementia) with their cell phone cameras, and then posting the often-grotesque pictures to social media outlets. Though their shots are clearly mean-spirited, they often can’t be called to account because photos on sites like Snapchat quickly vanish, leaving behind no evidence of wrong-doing. As hateful as this practice is, what intrigues me is the possibility that a photo can leave no trace. After all, the whole point of photography was once the fact that it created a permanent record out of a fleeting moment. I once saw a highly moving exhibit of the photo-portraits of Civil War soldiers. Before marching off to battle, soldiers on both sides of the conflict often posed for stiff photographs of themselves in uniform, then sent these to their loved ones back home. In many cases, the photo was all the family had left to remember a husband or a son who didn’t return.

For those Civil War soldiers, having a photo taken was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. By the mid-twentieth century, we were all used to being photographed, at least on special occasions. Most people owned simple cameras, but the shots they took generally didn’t stand the test of time. Still, in the right hands, a camera could be a potent weapon. That’s what occurred to me when I saw an important exhibit on the photos shot at Manzanar by one of America’s most admired photographers, Ansel Adams.

Manzanar, of course, was one of the internment camps to which 120,000 Japanese-Americans (most of them U.S. citizens) were consigned after the attack on Pearl Harbor made the U.S. government paranoid about possible sabotage within American borders. Located in California’s high desert at the foot of Mt. Whitney, the Manzanar site was starkly beautiful, but also desolate and unforgiving. The U.S. government sent Dorothea Lange, well-known for her photos of the Dust Bowl, to chronicle camp life, but forbade her to show such realities as guard towers and barbed wire. When her photos were deemed too sympathetic to the camp’s inhabitants, they were suppressed. Fortunately for history, Ansel Adams befriended the camp’s director and from 1943 through 1944 set about shooting memorable black-and-white portraits (of children, adults, elders) for a book he later called Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans. 

   

There was one more chronicler of Manzanar. Toyo Miyatake, a studio photographer by trade, was interred along with his family. He managed to smuggle in a camera lens, built a crude camera body, and at first covertly (and later with permission) captured invaluable images of Manzanar life. It was a harsh life, but one that revealed the stoic nobility of people who didn’t deserve their fate. 

Musings from the Mojave: Ridgecrest, Lone Pine, and Manzanar

Ever hear of Ridgecrest? It’s a small, friendly town in the Upper Mojave Desert, 2 ½ hours and a world away from Los Angeles. Still, Ridgecrest is glad to be considered an outpost of Movieland.

Last week I spent several days in Ridgecrest, as guest of the East Sierra Branch of the California Writers Club. The pleasant, attentive people to whom I spoke – many of them authors themselves – seemed fascinated by my stories about what it took to write, publish, and promote my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers. Ridge Writers, as they call themselves, have had their share of Hollywood experiences. Among the movies filmed in their desert community are Jurassic Park, Holes, Tremors, and Land of the Lost.

Up the road a piece from Ridgecrest is Lone Pine, population 2,035. It’s at a higher elevation than Ridgecrest (3,727 feet, to be exact), and its location – nestled against the rugged Alabama Hills, which abut the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas – makes it particularly picturesque. Which means, of course, that Hollywood discovered it long ago. Since the days of silent movies, Lone Pine has been the location of choice for shooting cowboy movies. Every he-man from Gary Cooper to Clark Gable to Humphrey Bogart has strapped on his six-guns in this vicinity. It’s also been the locale where Roy Rogers and William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd filmed most of their western adventures, and where the Lone Ranger roamed, with the faithful Tonto in tow.

Which is why Lone Pine boasts a dandy little attraction. Avid collectors Beverly and Jim Rogers display their collection of western memorabilia in Lone Pine’s Film History Museum, which bills itself as the place “where the real west becomes the reel west.”  Visitors generally start out watching a short documentary, which reveals that in the days before overseas location shooting, the region also supplied exotic desert terrain for Gunga Din and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.  But the doc’s real focus, of course, is on westerns, and we learn that the town’s citizenry often helped out by supplying horses and props. At the fadeout, we hear the Statler Brothers singing their ode to a vanishing breed, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?”

Among the museum’s treasures are a case devoted to movie bad guys and a fascinating assortment of gear worn by the late stuntman Richard Farnsworth.  (You can see a protective vest made for a guy who’s stuck being struck by an arrow, and another used by someone who needs to be dragged by a galloping horse.) The eldest of Roy Rogers’ nine children has contributed a slide show of family photos. Though the autographed celebrity headshots on the walls of the town’s best restaurant are mostly quite dated (Dale Evans, Ernest Borgnine, Sally Struthers), I also discovered that as a filming location Lone Pine has not yet gone out of style. Bits of Iron Man were shot here, along with Gladiator and Star Wars. Only two years ago, Quentin Tarantino brought some of his cast to Lone Pine for Django Unchained.

But to me the most remarkable location is to be found a few miles further north. Manzanar was once a “relocation” camp where 11,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated by their own government from 1942 to 1945. Today, it’s being preserved as a national monument. For visitors it’s an eerie place, especially at sunset, when the wind blows lonesome and  the old Japanese cemetery stands out starkly against the Sierras.  Lest we forget the cruelties of which we as a people are capable, someone really needs to make a great movie.