The Real into Story

When I was a child, my father, Donald Crews, turned a closet in our Greenwich Village apartment into a darkroom where he developed and printed black & white 35mm film. He was a dedicated documentarian of my sister and I and introduced me to photography. In the early 1970’s, he created photographic illustrations for Harry Milgrom’s book, The ABC of Ecology (1972.) My sister and I posed for some of the pictures. The book has a limited color palette and the backgrounds of each page alternate between black and tan. The film processing and printing was done in that darkroom. That book and the stunning collection of books included in CLICK!: Photographers Make Picture Books reflect a century of changes in our world and in the technology used to tell stories about it. 

My father’s decision to use black and white photographs was primarily an aesthetic choice, but most photographic picture books back then were black and white—quite different from today’s bright, colorful pages. Color printing was expensive. For much of the twentieth century, a limited color palette and pre-separated artwork were used to keep costs in line. (For more on pre-separated art, take a look at this excellent series of blog posts on the University of Minnesota’s website.) When I published my first book, One Hot Summer Day (1995,) I wanted my city scenes to feel playful and joyous, not gritty, as black and white tended to feel. Color photography was the right choice. Luckily for me, digitization had revolutionized print production by that time. My collages could be electronically scanned and turned into digital color separations which brought full color printing costs way down.

My entry in this exhibit, The Neighborhood Mother Goose (2004) was created midway through photography’s evolution from analog to digital. I photographed with a Nikon 35mm SLR camera using color negative film. The children (and adults) are family and friends. I wanted each scene to feel natural and unposed, 35mm gave me the speed and flexibility that I wanted when I photographed my models. I’d always been drawn to street/snapshot photography and the mid 20th century photographers like Helen Levitt, Andre Kertesz, and Roy DeCarava. My Mother Goose collection was envisioned as a 21st century take on traditional nursery rhymes that would reflect the diversity of my neighborhood and our world. I included favorite shop signs and community gardens. I looked for scenes that children would find familiar and relatable and only included rhymes that I felt could plausibly be experienced in an urban environment. I made rough sketches for each page/rhyme. While they are not much to look at, they helped keep me on track. Almost every child photographed appears on multiple pages in the book and it was important to have a clear idea of what I needed from each photo session.

The collages for the book were created digitally. While digital SLRs were just coming on to the market in the early 2000’s, many experts considered them inferior to film and the best film sensors recorded images at a resolution suitable for printing at 8 x 10” (which was smaller than I needed for a double page spread). A combination of analog and digital processes would allow me to use the best of both worlds. After getting my negatives developed, I scanned my selections and used Adobe Photoshop, a powerful photo editing program, to refine and manipulate my images. It’s a very ‘artist’ friendly program with familiar darkroom tools to color correct, burn and dodge. Changes are seen immediately. Elements of a collage can be kept in layers, allowing for endless tonal adjustments, rearrangements, and resizing. Images can be combined as overlays or masked, techniques that would have been used in camera or in the darkroom in an earlier era. 

Despite the huge array of digital tools available in this program, the collages for this book are pretty straightforward. In the illustration for “Hey Diddle Diddle,” the boy, cat, dish, spoon… are layers added to the photograph of a Brooklyn street. I chose that particular spot for the beautiful red fence and the bit of sky that could be seen between the buildings. I added a dappled shadow layer over the figures to match the background of the scene. The moon is also slightly transparent. 

Looking at the images now, I feel nostalgic for the slight graininess of the images and the quality of light captured by photosensitive film. Since 2008, I have been photographing with a digital SLR. The freedom of an almost unlimited number of frames, the ability to immediately review images, and sensors that can capture images at a very high resolution made the switch worthwhile. I download my photographs within hours of my photo shoots and get right to work. Faster computers with bigger hard drives mean that there’s almost no limit to the layers and effects I can use. This has encouraged me to create more ambitious, multilayered compositions. 

Photography has become central to almost everyone’s everyday communication in our increasingly digital world. Given the number of films being shot on iPhones, I expect they may soon be used for book illustration, too. At the heart of every photograph is an encounter with real people, places, things in the world. Regardless of the tools used, a photograph is a combination of those things that happen before the click of the shutter—the lighting, setting, exposure, and camera and those that follow—the tone and color correction, cropping, dodging, burning, and even collaging. The photographer’s refinement of the real into story.