Darkrooms
"We go to them for light."
Immediately a contradiction, or wisecrack to get your, the reader's, attention. Don't be silly. I'm serious
here. I'm writing here.
The first darkroom I knew was our attic. You had to pull stairs down and go up
that way. It's where my father developed the pictures he shot of old barns and weathered fences, or a nude woman on
top of a piano drinking a martini. The enlarger was huge, towering above me like a guillotine. I dreaded it, was
afraid to touch it. Instead of working with the equipment, I helped my father mix chemicals, and it was there in
the darkroom that I saw the light. Faintly at first, images ghosted themselves onto paper and soon there were clouds
and trees and people, all the elements of the day swimming up from what he called "the soup." Photography and what it
held had found its way to my heart.
There were other darkrooms in other places. He always had one, no matter where
we were, where we moved. The one in the closet was too small, and I didn't like the smelly basement one on Western Avenue
in Hollywood where he rented space. But I loved the new darkroom on the Sunset Strip, under his studio and across the
driveway from the old Trocadero moldering behind bolted doors. "Eva Gardner and Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor
and Betty Grable used to go to the Troc," he told me, bringing in a fresh case of hypo, taking it through the light trap and
into the darkroom, just next door but really thousands of miles from where the Hollywood elite used to play in their night
clubs. Macombo, still open then, was right up the street. So was Ciro's. But Las Vegas, that low-rent utopia,
had done its number on them and they were on the way out.
In the darkroom's red safe light I knew where I was, where everything for making the
photograph was kept, nothing ever out of place. I knew each chemical's scent, and the tick of the timer,
and how to hang sheet negatives to dry. I still have his Kodak clock and film clips and enameled measuring cup, the
wooden film holders, flashbulbs unfired and new after 60 years. And the cameras, oh, the cameras. That Speed
Graphic with its Schnieder lenses and wire sport finder. The heavy Graflex D with its bellows and odd perfume of decay.
But the big view cameras, his 8x10s with their focus knobs and rails, are gone. Gone, too, is the Leica M3 and Rolleiflex.
And those darkrooms, now places of the past. I'm all digital now, with pixels galore. No more chemicals or dryers.
No more dark sanctums where light fades onto paper as you move it back and forth in acrid fluids.
Now the scanner hums and light pops onto my screen. Darkrooms are
just memories in their whispery fashion, as in a reverse of those images on wet emulsion paper that appeared magically
from nowhere. I'm so glad I can still find them. It's all in knowing just where to look.
Making Contact: John Bishop
"Every time I write an article I find myself in conversation with men
and women whose names define the history of sports car racing." It's an amazing process, this bringing to the
fore again what is on their minds, what they know about the sport and its players, what incredible insight they offer this
present generation of readers and enthusiasts. Take, for example, John Bishop.
I caught John at home recently while I was writing a piece for Vintage Motorsport
magazine about the life of Jim Busby, the IMSA California hotshoe who first made a real name for himself in Brumos Porsche
935 Turbos. Bishop, of course, was founder of IMSA and superbly ran it for twenty years during that period in American
racing when the IMSA series was The Show, the best of the best. Today Bishop is Commissioner of the Grand
American Racing Series, while at the same time a more private man living with his wife Peggy on an air ranch in Florida,
where John, years ago an aeronautical designer at Sikorsky, flies his own Bonanza and aerobatic biplane.
What is so great about talking with Bishop is participating in his thorough
respect for the history of sports car racing in the United States. Long before he became president of
SCCA and developed Trans-Am and Can-Am, John Bishop came fresh to the sport while enjoying the ARCA era and the attributes
of its president, George Rand, described by Bishop as "the perfect gentleman racer." For all that followed in sports
car racing in this country, "Rand kind of set the pattern, how this should be handled and how that should be handled."
While a fair amount has been written about George Rand, "there's a lot more to be told," says Bishop. "He was prominent
in shaping racing after the war." Which leads us to the SCCA and all that has sprouted from it.
There are moments in our pasts that beam like bright stars at midnight.
One for John Bishop, lover of aircraft and flying, was at Elkhart Lake and had to do with Carroll Shelby. "Shelby had
a French Paris business jet," Bishop tells me, his voice filled with the essence of that time, "and he came up the straight
at Road America and made a perfect slow roll over the crowd there at about a thousand feet or less." Oh, yes, yes, yes.
It was a wonderful half hour I spent on the phone with John Bishop, talking about
IMSA and Busby and Jack McAfee and Rene Dreyfus and David Hobbs and George Rand and Watkins Glen's Bill Green and Jim Kimberly
and Luigi Chinetti and Phil Hill and Ol' Shel, indelible names and shared moments from our lives in racing and what this whole car
thing is all about. Just the best.
The Eye
"When you have it, the world knows."
The Great Alfreds, Steigletz and Eisenstadt, have it. And Edward Weston. Ansel Adams. That they
are gone doesn't deprive them of present tense. The perfect photograph capturing the split second, that moment of decision,
lives in its presence forever. Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose modesty urges him to say, "I have a camera and sometimes
I use it," has it. George Silk, one of the best of the LIFE photographers during WWII, characterized his aesthetic sensibility
at the time he left school at age 14: "I had no knowledge of the classics or how painters used light and things like
that. Maybe it was already in me." Silk has the eye, there from the start. In our world of grand prix racing, Paul-Henri
Cahier certainly has the eye. His color images of Formula One sweep us into a gallery open to but few photographers.
See his blurs, pans, burning centers of focus, those caught instants of victory, despair, doubt, revelation.
In our sport, when in action, Louis Klemantaski and Tom
Burnside and Jesse Alexander and Kieth Sutton have the eye. In his studio under massive softlights, Don Heiny creates
salon masterpieces, having it. The eye. Walter Baumer has the eye. Kyle Burt's got it. So does Winston
Goodfellow. Bernard Cahier, father of Paul-Henri and guide for so many young Americans first coming to Europe in the
50s and 60s to drive, gives us that realm of men who raced through his Leica's lens, through his eye, Bernard's. Of
course, there are many more. It's not my intention here to list all with The Eye.
I don't know what it really is or isn't, or how you get
it. My father, a large-format studio photographer before being absorbed with his sports car team, said it was something
not many have; he thought that, perhaps, you are born with it. Maybe. Sometimes I have it, but it's fickle.
The Eye isn't permanent, not something to rely on; it comes and goes. If you want to keep it, don't think it's easy.
Exercise it. Still, it can let you down, destroy dreams, ruin lives, make you think of yourself a fool, useless.
And some might say photographs, after all, are only pictures, images on paper, leaves in the wind. Most are.
The best, those not just leaves, are what life is, and the
eye that sees it this way is the one we remember. It's the one that remains present, never being past.
Overture
"I'm thinking it's time to log some of
my thoughts here." Too often we just list and lable and let it go at that. And so my idea today is this: If you
have that urge to find and get back into, say, the saddle of a 1948 hardtail Triumph Tiger 100 running half gas, half
Benzol, maybe now's the time to do it.
When I first started riding motors in 1948, I just wanted
to go fast. But in the going-fastness of that initiation, I found a slowness. While the mph stayed high, my levels of
awareness smoothed out, mellowed, became less rushed. It's what Sam Posey told me once about racing, coming into
the pits after a string of hard, fast laps. Stopped is when everything actually speeds up.
There is order and sense in what appears to be hyper motion,
and often a whirlwind of confusion in being still, inactive, unmoved.
So move it!
