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Rangefinder
Magazine Profile: Jack Dykinga by Lou Jacobs Jr. There are a few large format photographers whose images of landscapes and seascapes are incredibly beautiful, and Jack Dykinga is one of them. His book, Large Format Nature Photography (Amphoto), is his ninth, and all of them celebrate the great mountains, deserts and other fantastic features of Western states. In addition, like Ansel Adams, who wrote well about photographic techniques, in this book Jack also instructs in words and pictures in a clear, quite readable way. I’m a veteran how-to photography book author, and can cheerfully say that Jack’s latest book is a lovely short course about composition, light, lenses, exposure, etc. It’s also a glorious gallery of Dykinga’s images.
Jack’s life and early work are in unusual contrast with his becoming an artist with a view camera. He grew up in a Chicago suburb, took pictures for his high school newspaper, and “even won a Look Magazine photo contest in his junior year,” he says, adding, “I think that award and the school’s regular field trips into county forest preserves and the Brookfield Zoo helped shape my feelings toward the wilderness, and the power of images.” Jack had reading problems, later diagnosed as dyslexia, of which he says, “It could have been a handicap that pushed me to visual communication and images.” Because of the Look award in 1963, Jack got a job as a photographer at O’Hare International Airport shooting celebrities, arriving and departing. Gradually his work was picked up by local newspapers, and recognition landed him a job at the Chicago Tribune. He applied for a darkroom job, but based on his published work, he got a staff photographer position “at the tender age of 20,” he recalls. Of his plan to return to college during the day, and work at the Trib at night, Jack says, “St. Procopius College accepted me, even with a poor grade point average, and the faculty there helped me eventually make the dean’s list.” In 1965 he married Margaret, a nurse also returning to college for a psychology degree.
Meanwhile, he states, “I was covering major news events for the Trib, and bucking the system by using Nikons and Leicas instead of medium or large format. More portable cameras gave me an advantage covering fast moving events like civil rights marches. It’s ironic that I’m now a large format proponent, but it’s a matter of the right tool for the job. Recently, Dave Harvey and I were on the faculty in Jackson Hole, and seeing his presentation, all with the Leica M6, reminded me how much I used to love working that way.” Jack’s stint at the Chicago Tribune ended after two years when he switched to the Chicago Sun-Times, where 35mm was accepted. “Their chief photographer gave me a series of challenging assignments in the era of civil rights and political excitement, all in a city with four dailies trying to outdo each other. It was there in 1971 that I won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in a series taken for the Sun-Times, documenting conditions in Illinois state hospital schools for the mentally retarded. I worked with a writer and officials were eager to expose their problems. Though the governor was going to cut school funds, after the story ran, funding was increased.”
An opportunity as an assistant photo editor influenced him to move back to the Trib in 1974, and that led to moving west in 1976 to the Arizona Daily Star as picture editor. “I stayed there five years, assembling a staff of young talented shooters,” he reflects. While a newsman, Jack studied on the job, and mingled with “an incredible congregation of talented photographers,” he states. “Each day was a classroom with fierce competition in day-to-day coverage. As a result those years produced four or five Photographers of the Year (from the University of Missouri and Nikon), three Pulitzers and countless state, AP and Chicago awards.” Asked how the Pulitzer influenced his life, Jack explains, “It’s kind of a ‘union card’ in that it opens doors and allows a degree of freedom.” In 1981 Jack left the newspaper business to freelance. He is certain that it was “Margaret’s constant support, both moral and financial, that really allowed me to be self-employed.” Jack Dykinga had become an admirer of Ansel Adams, and was particularly taken by the work of Phil Hyde, because their work focused on wilderness advocacy and was published in a series of books during the Sierra Club’s heyday. Jack, who thought of himself as someone who told stories with a camera, shifted to nature photography. “Now I’m telling the story of the environment,” he explains. “I became disillusioned with the photojournalism field, where young photographers tried to duplicate stories that had won awards in the past. When I judged contests for the NPPA, I’d see picture stories involving homeless people, handicapped athletes and personality profiles with leather-faced guys. Too little was original. I remember a book by Bill Owens called Suburbia and that was original in the way it looked at the ‘normal’ middle class American consumer.
“ The problem with photojournalism is that you’re snipping out a section of peoples’ lives on film, and offering it as a story. Yet that’s only part of the story because we’re limited by time and space. When you show only selected material, the message can become sensational and flawed. That’s why books are a much better way to examine issues in detail.” As a freelancer Jack got assignments from Time, National Geographic, Geo, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. News and World Report. But after Wes Holden, managing editor of Arizona Highways magazine, suggested using a 4x5 for an assignment in 1981, Jack had an epiphany. “Seeing those transparencies on the light table was all it took,” he says. “I knew this was the right tool for landscape detail.” In the introduction to Large Format Nature Photography Jack writes that when he’s carrying 50 pounds of cam-era gear on a long hike, he asks himself, “Why large format?” The answer comes when he’s editing, and “several images are breathtaking. The detail is amazing.” It took him three years to feel “semi-confident” with a 4x5, he says. “Decisive moments in large format require more planning, composing, and often a break in the wind,” Jack admits, “but going slowly isn’t all that bad. It allows me to pay more attention to subtleties of form and light.” After each Arizona Highways job, Jack says he upgraded his equipment, and took care to learn what each lens could do. He admits making lots of mistakes, and new opportunities soon turned him to shooting for a series of landscape books. The pictures also appeared in Audubon and Sierra Club calendars and occasionally some found their way into print advertising.
His excellent photographs make it evident that Jack is part of a small group that includes David Muench, Pat O’Hara, Galen Rowell and some others, and I wondered if the mystique of large format and nature have been spiritually as well as commercially rewarding to him? My query reached him while he was on a trek in southern Arizona, and he wrote, “I’m sitting here with my laptop in the middle of the Sonoran Desert I love, on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Several of us from Tucson are trying to make this land into a new national park. It’s 95 degrees in the shade and my spirit is soaring! Projects I work on are motivated by a passion to preserve the wild land. In this I consider myself most fortunate. Commercially, it’s a different story. You’ll never get rich doing wilderness advocacy books, but you’ll sleep well with a smile on your face.” I agree with him. Seeing nature on a 4x5 groundglass, even upside down, is a kind of luxury, though it takes a special discipline that is indigenous to shooting everything on a tripod. So where did Jack study? “I’ve had no formal training,” he says, “though my high school art department was very good. But I’m able to see very intensely, and I notice juxtapositions, textures, colors and biological anomalies. I previsualize pictures everywhere. Then I commit to a subject and wait for the best light. When I place the dark cloth over my head, I’m in a different world. The 4x5 format is slow and deliberate, and my eyes bore into the subject until I have a composition that works for me.
“ Earlier in life I paid attention to composition in works of people like Georgia O’Keefe. Josef Muench and his son David really led me to the Southwest. Pat O’Hara is also a great photographer and great friend. His images are quite sublime with selective focus creating a dream-like quality. Carr Clifton’s technically perfect work really moves me, and Larry Ulrich’s images that he and Donna produce are incomparable.” On Jack’s web site (http://www.dykinga.com/biography/index.html) is information about his equipment. He uses both Arca Swiss and Wista cameras with a variety of Schneider lenses. His film choices are Fuji Velvia and Provia 4x5, and Horseman 6x12 format. “Schneider changed things with their aspherical lenses,” he notes. “They’re lighter, contrastier, sharper and the color is warmer than with my Super-Angulons.” A few years ago Jack and others helped push the creation of the Esca-lante Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah. “However,” he told me, “the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance has been in the trenches for years pushing in the same direction. Maybe ours was the needed extra push.” He paused, and added, “The fight for Utah wilderness continues to this day. Even now, conservatives are trying to undo some protections and allow mining and oil drilling in the Monument.”
Advocates of nature who shoot memorable pictures must also be hardy hikers, which explains why the average enthusiastic photographer, myself included, rarely comes across many grand pictorial opportunities. “If you want to record and document an area thoroughly, you must sweat blood,” Jack asserts. “At one point during the Stone Canyons project [one of Jack’s books], I developed a very painful inflammation of tendons in one foot, and I was taking as many as 12 aspirins a day just to complete extended backpack trips. Some were 40 miles long.” Fortunately, Jack Dykinga knows the value of carefully filing and preserving his photographs, and he uses a software program called Agave Stock Photography System that he says, “is fine tuned to managing stock sales, and in particular, managing dupes with multiple usage granted to many clients. Bar-coded submissions take only minutes, and we can track every image, and add complete captions.” Agave is in use by top landscape and wildlife photographers. No matter what format you shoot, if you’re doing scenic pictures, in color or black and white, and you want visual stimulation, Large Format Nature Photography offers a complete, if specialized, course in seeing and shooting. Don’t leave home without it. Lou Jacobs Jr. is the author of 25 how-to photography books, the latest of which, PHOTOG-RAPHER’S LIGHTING HANDBOOK (Amherst Media) was recently published. He has taught at UCLA and Brooks, is a longtime member of ASMP, and enjoys shooting stock during his travels in the U.S. and abroad. |
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