Joe McNally

Jul 23

This One Goes to Eleven!

In Lighting, On Location at 10:31am

This Is Spinal Tap

Actually, this one goes to 200. And we’re not talking decibels here, we’re talking millimeters. Zoom throw. The SB900 goes to 200 millimeters. You know, on the back of the SB800, you push the selector button for the little trees to the big trees, and you zoom to 105? Well, the big trees just got bigger.

Now to some folks this may matter as much as a single, silly, fictitious, click on the old amp. (You know, all those other blokes are at 10, and where can you go from there? We can go to eleven!) In other words, it might not matter at all. But for the rest of us who mess around with small strobe units, it matters a lot. The ability to control and shape the output of a small hot shoe flash unit is a big deal. It means you get a longer throw, more concentration of light, and perhaps a bit more of a defined edge between highlights and shadows. I told the folks at Nikon that now that you can zoom a 900 all the way to 200, they should do something jazzy to announce it, like program the unit to go off like a Vegas slot machine every time you hit 200. I don’t think they’re gonna do it.

I’ve also been experimenting a bit with the feature that controls the spread of light right at the source. You can input standard, center weighted and even. I’ve opted for even in the early going, hoping that edge to edge spread of even illumination might be handy for a portrait. To play with this feature, I hired a well known, demanding NY super model…….

Brad! Cut it out!

Actually, my friend Vanessa who is one of the more beautiful ballerinas I have ever worked with, came and helped us out. She is not only a lovely dancer, but she has a face that is right out of 1940’s Hollywood glamour. She is posing here at the Red Hat bistro in Irvington, NY, which is a truly wonderful eatery right on the Hudson River and serves food to match the setting.

We did this really simply. There is a 900 on a boomed, shoot through umbrella (Lastolite all-in-one) camera right, just out of frame. And the background is lit with one 900, gelled with a full CTO, again camera right, flying into the area behind Vanessa and giving it some warm glow. That light is zoomed to 200, and has no diffusion. Another thing I am liking is the filter holder that comes with the unit. It is designed to hold the filters that are embedded with chips that communicate color temp information to the camera. (Example: With the camera in auto white balance, you can take the CTO gel and slip it into this filter holder and slap it on the 900. It will communicate to the camera that the light has been shifted to a tungsten balance and the camera will shift accordingly. Camera must be in auto, and it appears to me the light must be on the hot shoe for this to occur. More on this in the future.)

But the fancy filter holder also functions straight up and simple as, well, a filter holder. Cool! Means my flash units don’t have to all gummed up at that end with scotch tape residue and bits of gaffer anymore.

Here’s our basic set.

(Note: The gold reflector material on the bar is from a 3×3 Lastolite kit has a SB200 close up strobe, again with a full CTO, sitting on it. I experimented briefly with putting a little bar glow off to the side of Vanessa but then decided the room had a daylight feel to it and killed it. It was also creating shadows I ran out of time to wrangle. In the grand tradition of all photographers who are outta quarters and whose location meter is about to expire, I just shut it down. (Uh! Light cause problem. Mongo kill light.)

To make sure the far light saw my SU800 signal I ran the SC29 cord off to the right and we clamped it to a stand.

Then, quickly, to take advantage of Vanessa’s amazing red hair (she basically has never had it cut) framing her face, we moved in a hand held SB800, low and camera right, coming through a Lastolite tri-grip diffuser. Instant beauty light combo.

Funny, even with nice light like this, I don’t think Brad would look as good. WAG on my part.

Shot these with my 200 at f2. The background 900 fills the restaurant with glow, which translates to her hair. Limited depth of field emphasizes that. (I mean, Vanessa would look great even if I was using flash powder.) Both up front lights are dialed down a touch, running around minus one EV, and the background 900, again at 200 mm and throwing light a good distance, is dialed up just a tic. Minimal set up, which was great cause the restaurant was starting to jump and we hadda get going quickly.

After that, we hit my favorite desolate corner in Manhattan with a D700 and an SB900.

We ran against type here, shooting wide but zooming the flash to 200. It hits Vanessa’s face with a street quality of light, and then sharply gradates down her body.

Then I just let the camera drive the train on this, auto white balance under street lamps and the result was really clean. Jeez, I just remember being out there with some sort of funky Ektachrome and a stack up of wratten filters of so many different increments and colors I felt like Dumbledore.

And then of course….the ongoing mystery man. Kman. What is he doing out there? Nefarious things about to occur. No doubt….

This is two SB900 units…on the floor stands that come in the kit. No gels. On the street, camera right, aimed up. White light, tungsten balance in the camera. Find two busted up wood pallets and stand them in front of the lights and let fly……more tk…

Note and news: The 700 and the 900 are hot items right now….got this from Jeff Snyder (jsnyder@adorama.com) the other day…

Good morning-
If you are an NPS Member and have not placed your order for the new
D700 and/or SB900 Speedlight, now is the time. Deliveries will begin
within the next 10 days, and being a member of NPS gets you a priority
delivery.

If you have already placed your order, and have not notified NPS (NPS@nikon.net
), then you should email them, and let them know that you have an
order in with ADORAMA/JEFF SNYDER so that your priority can be entered
into their system.

If you have NOT placed your order yet, there is still time….contact
me as soon as you can.

15    comments

Jul 16

Da Bet

In Seminars & Workshops, Travels at 12:04am

Jerry Courvoisier is a good guy. He’s also a terrific shooter, a great Photoshop/Lightroom guy, and a gifted teacher. I love to teach with him cause he’s down to earth and easygoing about everything. We get along, in short. We often teach the National Geographic Expeditions workshop courses offered via the Santa Fe Workshops, and it’s always fun, even when he gets the entire class to pick up buckeyes in the park and pitch them at me when I start a lecture. When we teach an NGS class in Santa Fe for instance, we often assign the class to go to the town square and be adventurous with their camera. We go to one of the benches in the square and sit there, ostensibly to be a resource to the class, but in truth we just talk and toot, doing our own version of Grumpy Old Men.

But boy, did he screw up. Last time I was in Santa Fe, he proposed a bet. We calculate our weight (vetted by our wives, who are scrupulous and honest about this stuff, something Jerry and I would never be) and whoever lost more weight by the time I got back to SF wins. Loser buys dinner at Geronimo, a really tony restaurant on Canyon Road, the heart of the gallery district, a street where a lot of rich folks go to buy really bad art.

I arrive in Santa Fe on Saturday, and man, is he in trouble.

Jerry sent me an email after we made the bet, noting his weight, again, with Julie’s stamp of approval. He evidently has got one of these fancy pants scales at home cause he sent his weight (won’t tell you exactly, but it was north of a deuce), his body mass indicator, his muscle to fat ratio, his shoe size, his favorite cologne, and whether he wears boxers or briefs. This machine calculates all that stuff in one shot. We ain’t got one of those, so Annie and I jumped in the car and headed out on Interstate 95, where Annie pulled off at an inspection station and threw my sorry ass on a truck scale, where I clocked out at an eye popping 211.

Jeez. Who knew. I fell off the gym wagon about 3 years ago, when work kinda sorta took over my life. I got real busy, and real lazy, at the same time. Another unfortunate trend intersected with this development. I tied on the feed bag, big time. There wasn’t a plate of pasta out there I didn’t like, from straight up spaghetti with meatballs to expense account truffle ravioli soaked in squid urine. Not good. I was like a hot air balloon, and 211 wasn’t even my low/high point. I remember after one really bad, excruciating job consoling myself with a beer and a Baby Watson cheesecake. I topped out at 215.

Leave it to Jerry to motivate me. (Geronimo is a really expensive restaurant, and their truffle ravioli in squid pee is excellent.) I’ve been working my ass off, kinda the way I used to. I figure this is a good time to attack, cause I know Jerry’s been working on this book he can’t talk about much, but it will be all about post production, workflow, digital asset management, you name it. Given the depth of his knowledge of these areas, it’s gonna be one of those go-to, gotta-have books that will stay by your computer for a long time. Pretty sure it’s out very soon, like this summer. Track it and sign up now, is my advice.

So I gotta figure Jerry’s been up at night, stressing about this book, writing actions and workflow plans and scarfing Freihoffer’s. Too bad for him, cause I’ve lost 25 pounds, and I’m around 190, cruising for 180. Annie’s been helping, cause she’s super healthy, and a great cook. She’s been preparing all this stuff that probably lives on the underside of mushrooms but tastes like a Delmonico steak the way she spices it. (How does a man get this lucky?) Jerry will get off easy at Geronimo’s though, cause I pretty much consume only rainwater, bark and sprouts now.

Poor Jer. i think he proposed the bet to get back at me cause when we teach together I demonstrate flash by using his head as a fill card. He never gets ruffled, though. That’s why it’s great teaching with him. I always say, he’s got good bedside manner. We’ll have a workshop participant positively melting down, I mean just spritzing about some thing or another, like I lost my files, or where did my pictures go, or I turned on my computer and it’s making a noise like a thirty horsepower milking machine, and I’m ready to go for the defibillator and shout CLEAR! when Jerry walks up and says okay, well, let’s take a look, maybe you have them behind that other file on your desktop, the one with the pictures of the family trip to Niagara Falls and those other almost certainly personal pictures, and, ahh, there they are, underneath everything, just around the corner and down the hallway inside this monster Dell that causes a brownout in most of Santa Fe every time you turn it on. There they are!

He’s calm, in word. Knowledgeable. Along with Reid Callanan and Renie Haiduk, he’s helped build Santa Fe into a powerhouse workshop center, especially in the realm of digital and workflow. It’ll be good to see him. All 200 plus pounds of him.

19    comments

Jul 14

Many, Many Thanks

In Lighting, Stories, Thoughts at 11:12am

To everyone who read last week’s blog, and to those who have commented so graciously. As I mentioned, the greatest reward of doing that project has been meeting a very special group of people, and the lasting friendships that have resulted.

Lots of folks asked about contributions. I mentioned Ellen Price, who is the curator, and she can be reached at epriceinc@earthlink.net. She has worked incredibly hard at keeping the pictures on people’s minds, and putting it forward, especially to the folks making decisions down at the Memorial Museum. She also has obtained NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) status for the collection. If you email her, she can give you a link to the Foundation. Any funds accrued there would go to the care and feeding of the pictures. No money comes to my studio. For me, for now, thanks to the partnership at Adorama, the collection and the storage will remain stable for some time to come. Hoping of course, that they actually start building the memorial, which is an emotionally charged, tortuous process. Getting everybody on the same page in NY is a long haul, to be sure.

SIXTIETH AT 5.6? OLD HABITS DIE HARD!

The above pix from the bad old days in NY, when I started at the New York Daily News….

Dudley and a couple folks were inquiring on Flickr about recent settings I used in a Kelby Training Video, specifically using 1/60th @ f5.6 as a kind of middle of the road starting point. Speculation was that using a sixtieth could introduce camera shake, and why wouldn’t I go to a higher sync? I think that was kind of the basis of the thread.

There was some further thinking along the lines that I’m an old newspaper dog, and that’s what I grew up with, and…they’re right. Youse guys got it knocked! Sixtieth used to be top end for shutter sync when I first took a camera in my hands. Old habits die hard, what can I say? I’ve always felt comfortable there, hand holding a camera when using flash, especially when I am dominating the exposure with that flash. (Pretty much figure I could throw the camera in the air at a sixtieth with flash and come away with something sharp. Come to think of it, most of my better pictures were made that way:-)

There’s more of course, just a bit of personal history. The Daily News was a real union shop. You went from being a boy on the newsroom floor, a copy boy, specifically, to being a boy in the studio, as what they called a studio apprentice. You weren’t a man until you went on the street as a shooter. Apprentices would do jobs like maintain the Versamats (70’s style processors, sort of like throwing your film into a wood chipper), captioning, filing, all the boring studio stuff. I was running the machines one day and the “Inquiring Photographer” came in with his roll of 20 exposure Tri-x. He was the guy who would ask people questions on the street, like, nowadays it might be, “How do you feel about the Governor playing grab ass with high priced call girls while running the business of the state?” He would write down their comments, take their head shot, and that was that. He had been doing this for, oh, about 75 years.

So he gives me the roll, and I stuff it into the machine, and it comes out blank. (That wasn’t an uncommon result for some of the guys at the News.) I brought it to him and he naturally blamed me, and started ranting and raving. “What did you do to my film?!!” I told him there had to be a problem with his camera, or he had made a mistake. He looked at me and said he couldn’t have made a mistake, he had shot it at a sixtieth @ 5.6!

And then it dawned on me. This guy had been on the streets for a major metro daily for years, and he thought the entire world was set at 1/60th @ f5.6. Okey dokey! That’s what I thought, too!

As boys back in the studio, we never took any of this shit particularly seriously. We would just roll our eyes, and try to have some fun. Passing the time could include inserting old style flash bulbs into the sockets of the boss’ office desk lamp, or tormenting some of the more colorful members of the staff. DJ was still on the street back then, even though his eyes were fading. He was a true NY original, and a dirty old man. Vain to a fault, he also wore a wig. This presented possibilities.

John Roca, still a terrific shooter, still at the News, and I got a small picture out of a girly magazine and taped it to the work desk just below the air intake for the pneumatic tubes that would powerfully suck the plexi containers filled with deadline pictures out to the photo desk. It made a big hissing sound, and you would insert the container, and with a big Thwock! it shot out to editors in the massive newsroom.

The picture was small, as I say, and taped down. Yo, D! Hey take a look at this! He can’t see shit of course until he bends his head over about 6 inches from the image of this young lady, and thus right in the firing line of the tube. BOOM! Roca and I hit the switch. This hairpiece just lifted right off Danny’s head and started traveling to the news room when, Danny managed to slap the top of his head and catch a couple of strands. Those strands held, and he hung onto his rug. All for the best, really, cause out in the newsroom they were waiting on page one, and not a wig to come flying out of the tube.

Anyway, I sort of have this background emotional attachment to that f-stop/shutter combo. Silly, really. I do embrace the faster syncs we have now, for sure. One of the most powerful tools in our bags. Gives us enormous control over difficult lighting situations and moving subjects. Another thing that I should really let go of, is the fact that in the days of radio triggers not being anywhere near as sophisticated as they are now, there was always a danger of clipping the radio signal at higher shutters. For instance, at SI, historically, whenever we would light a court or an arena, we used to drop a hard wire out of the ceiling (they might still do it as backup, dunno) so we could hard sync via zip wire to the Speedos in the rafters. Using a radio to trigger at 250th would often fail, cause the signal would have to travel too far to the packs, and by the time they triggered, your shutter would be closed. Never a problem in the studio, cause the radio signal doesn’t have to go far, but that sort of history lingers in my head, so I’m cautious, I guess you would say.

K-MAN ON THE STREETS OF NY……

Friday night in the meat district…..SB900 on the background, SB200 for the portrait. What is this man doing? More tk.

22    comments

Jul 9

From Brad…

In Uncategorized at 2:35am

First off, I just want to thank everyone for the overwhelmingly great response to Joe’s post yesterday.  It’s always great to see a community of people (no matter how far apart we are from one another) join together for a singular cause.

I also want to thank Adorama once again for their gracious support of both Joe and the Faces of Ground Zero project.  Can’t say enough about how great you folks are!

I want to take a second and point out a new addition to the blog for those of you who may not have noticed it… The Equipment Page!  As you’ll see, this is a complete listing of the equipment that Joe uses.  Believe me, it’s as much stuff as it seems.  Even more since we have multiples of a lot of those items.  When we load up the Suburban to go to a shoot, it’s filled from top to bottom and front to back.  Joe and I usually have enough room left for ourselves and a couple of coffees (or lattes, if it’s a highfalutin’ gig!)

For those of you who get the blog in an email or reader, you’ll always find a link to the equipment page at the end of the post, just above all of the “sharing” links.  For those who visit the blog directly, you’ll find a link on the sidebar, along with the link at the end of each post.  Depending on what Joe is talking about (and what kind of mood he’s in), he’ll put specific gear links directly in the post as well (i.e. “So I sparked the fnugy with a pepper, then had him re-adjust the c-stand with the Elinchrom Octa, which produced a beautiful quality of light.”)

To be honest, this is something we’ve had in mind for a while, but just now got around to doing.  I would say that the number one question we get when Joe teaches is some variation of either, “What’s that?” or,”Who makes this?”  Now we can tell them, then point them to this page in case they forget!

And, if I may take a second to make a shameless plug, I would like to point out that I too have a blog.  I’m not as consistent as Joe, but I try to share nuggets of assistant-wisdom when I can.  Be on the lookout for continued stories in my “Mistakes” series, including a multiple-part saga that occurred at the beginning of my stint with Joe.  Part of it involves me in a Mexican ER at 1 a.m. the night before the Baja 1000 (my mom loved getting that text message in the middle of the night!)

Seriously, thanks again to everyone for all of your support.  And, in keeping with Joe’s ending, more tk…

12    comments

Jul 8

Welcome Adorama!

In Thoughts at 12:41pm

Long blog. Apologies. This is a history that doesn’t sum up in a couple of grafs. What I am celebrating here is the resiliency of the photo community, and the welcome partnership of Adorama Camera here in NY. They have stepped up to help me shepherd a collection of pictures stemming from the events of 9/11, and we will collaborate via this blog, education and lectures. Please read on…..

Back in 2001, things weren’t great in the photo biz, I tell ya. It was heavy sledding, trying to get work, staying afloat, keeping the studio running. Little did I know that just around the corner the jalopy known as McNally Photography, a sleek machine with a couple of flats, transmission trouble and a top end of oh, about 22mph, was going to get bulldozed by this event called 9/11, which changed all of our lives, forever. Everything after that day became, “the new normal,” a phrase that grew out of just how thoroughly, absolutely, and irretrievably everything was now different.

Like many NY shooters, I had a love affair with those towers, those twin exclamation points at the end of Manhattan. They were in lots of my pix over the years.

In a moment of youthful exuberance, I actually climbed the antenna on the North Tower.

Then they were gone, replaced by this giant dust cloud of destruction that floated out and settled on all of our shoulders, hearts, minds and spirits. “What to do now?” was the oft repeated question. How to deal with the sadness, the rage, the confusion, the uncertainty? How to make a contribution? On some level, no matter how miniscule?

I’m a photographer. Pictures are what I have to offer. (It’s the only thing I really know how to do.) But I did not go to the streets, like so many of my colleagues. Quite a number of them were already at it, in heroic fashion. I could add very little to what they were doing. I stayed at home, hung with the kids a bit, and stewed. First time out with a camera after the day was to shoot Mike Piazza, then the Mets catcher. SI was doing a piece on how athletes played a role in lifting our hearts and minds.

In 2000, I was assigned to shoot pictures for a very small story (which was never published) on a unique photographic instrument called Moby C, which at the time lived on the lower East Side of NY. Moby after the whale, not the musician. (His birthday is Sept. 11th, l965, by the way. Sept. 11th is also my dad’s birthday, back in 1912.) This camera is the world’s only Giant Polaroid camera, invented at the behest of Dr. Land himself. It is the size of a one car garage. Its lens came from a U2 spy plane, according to legend. At f/45, you have about an inch of depth of field. You cannot focus the lens–you have to focus your subject by moving them back and forth in tiny increments. There is no shutter, you have to work camera obscura at the moment of exposure. I used about 25,000 watt seconds of strobe, mostly run through a 12×12 silk. The strobe system was wired to a Mamiya RZ 6×7 camera, bore sighted under the Polaroid lens. We would pose the subject, then wait for the interior workings of the Polaroid to spool up (there are two technicians inside the camera when you shoot, and they have to prepare things, like switch on a Black and Decker wet dry vac to suck the Polaroid film to the giant backplate of the camera). Then I would go dark in the studio, pull the cap of the Polaroid lens, fire the Mamiya and thus render an instantaneous dupe, one a huge positive, and the other a 6×7 transparency.

Huge indeed. What results after the exposure is a life sized image, 40″x 80″. You lay it out on the floor of the camera, wait 90 seconds (it’s the same Polaroid paper that comes in your over the counter cameras) and then peel the chemical backing off. There you have it.

I had convinced the elegant and easy going Jennifer Ringer, a principal with the NYC Ballet, to come and work with me during this first, experimental day with the camera. We made some nice, big pictures of her. (I was chuckling inside during this shoot, harking back to our old philosophy at LIFE magazine: “If ya can’t make ‘em good, make ‘em big and in color!”)

Made seven successful images that day, which is a lot of production for this behemoth of a camera, and found I had a bit of an affinity for working it. (Try anything once, right? Just have faith and remember the Lord looks after a fool.)

Hmmm. Things stick with you, right? A week after 9/11, I sent an email to the only guy I knew who had a bunch of cash and would give me a quick decision; the editorial director of Time Warner, John Huey. John’s basically an old Southern newspaper man who kind of looks at you sideways, lets you babble, and then tells you what he thinks. He’s smart as a whip, quick off the mark, and does not suffer fools or photographers gladly.

I sent him the email on a Thursday night. He gave me money for the project Monday morning. The pressure was on. He was taking a huge gamble with his company’s dough, $100,000, to be direct about it. He looked me in the eye and drawled, “Joe, you spend $20,000 and get me no pitchahs, that’s okay. You spend $100,000 and get me no pitchahs, we got a problem.” He kind of drew out the word, “prrroblem.” I gulped and left his office.

My notion was that this camera was made for people of stature, a heroic instrument, if you will. You have to literally stand for your portrait. You collect yourself in the dark, holding still, waiting for the strobe explosion. And then you are done. One shot. (90% of our subjects we did in one exposure. Each sheet of Polaroid cost $300. I dreaded blinkers.)

It became a document known as Faces of Ground Zero. It toured through seven stops, opening at Grand Central Station, and coming back to NY a year later. For the anniversary show they threw a huge tent over where they usually put the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. It was seen by lots of people. The Polaroids and the resultant book(s) helped the sponsors, Time Warner and Morgan Stanley, to donate close to $2 million dollars to the relief of downtown public education. In the tent at the Rock Center show, we sold about $40,000 worth of books in 3 weeks. All of it went to the downtown PTA’s.

It also acquainted me with an extraordinary group of people, many of whom I stay in touch with to this day.

Danny and Joanne Foley. The Foley’s are one of the most giving, decent, loving families I have ever met. A firefighting family. Danny promised his folks he would bring his brother, Tommy, home. Tommy was on Rescue 3, one of the first responders. Eight men were on that truck. None came back. Danny stood for this picture a few days after finding Tommy’s body. In the year after 9/11, he stepped up and took his brother’s place at Rescue 3, in the Bronx.

Joanne, about a year later, at the family farm, with Tommy’s cowboy hat.

Jan Demczur, a Polish window washer who scraped through 6 inches of sheet rock with his squeegee blade and thus saved the 4 people he was trapped in an elevator with. His squeegee is in the Smithsonian.

About a year after, Jan didn’t go outside much, and was living very quietly.

Mike Wernick, who survived the 93 bombing, and 9/11, now retired. His story of the day is powerful and moving. When he came into the Polaroid studio, the shock of it was still on his face.

Mike and his wife Nuri are one of the most loving couples I know. They survived that day quite simply because of that love. Together they run a motorcycle garage in Manhattan called Rising Wolf (one of the only bike garages in NY) and I managed to shoot this from the back of my assistant’s Jeep a couple years ago.

My good friend, Louie Cacchioli. Louie saved a lot of people that day by keeping his head and telling them to follow his light. Out on West St., running from the second collapse, he was overtaken by the cloud of ash and soot. Blinded by the smoke, he felt along the ground and stumbled onto a discarded oxygen mask. He clapped it to his face. He estimates he had about 30 seconds left.

Later that year, he looked at the skyline from the Staten Island ferry.

Years later, he posed for the prototype D3.

I always describe Louie as a firefighting Robert DeNiro. He tends to make women swoon. He’s retired now, and gives lectures and tours at the WTC site. He was the cover of the book (go figure) and it is one of the blessings of my life that having a camera in my hand enabled me to meet this man.

Joe Hodges. A veteran firefighter who could have easily retired after 9/11, but chose to stay on. “The older guys have to stick around and show the younger guys the way,” was how he put it.

Joe works now at at the Governor’s Island house, and I shot this on July 4th a couple of years ago.

I’ve always been convinced the project worked quite simply because it was photographs of a bunch of really, really good people. We had luck, to be sure. The camera never broke down. Good thing, as it really has no spare parts, and is finicky to work at best. Most guest shooters would make, maybe, 5 images or so (you rent the camera on a daily basis, at that time $2000 per day, plus $300 per sheet). There were days (and nights) we pulled over 40 images out the machine. It kept working.

So we kept working. Our last subject was Rudy Giuliani. He finally came on the last night. We were out of money, out of time. We shot 2 Polaroids of hizzoner, and closed the doors.

Things you don’t think about while you are in the throes of a project like this, are, what happens next? When the Rock Center show closed, I became the owner, lock, stock and metal framework, of about 10 tons of photography. (The framed pieces, which form the traveling core of the show, are 4′x9′ and weigh about 300 pounds.) They reside currently in museum quality, climate controlled storage in a warehouse in New Jersey.

That’s a lot of pictures.

That’s also a pretty sizable storage bill every month, which I have handled pretty much on my own for the last 7 years. Sometimes I just shrug and think of it as a second mortgage. Other times, when there has been no work and less grace in this business, it has veered close to breaking the studio. There have been nights I have woken up and simply thought, well, I’ll just get a permit from my buds in the fire department and set the whole thing ablaze and be done with it.

Together with Ellen Price (epriceinc@earthlink.net), who is the curator of the collection, and has worked more pro bono hours on its behalf than I can remember, we have plied the hallways of corporations and spoken to many about its survival as an important record of that time. Jan Ramirez, now the Chief Curator & Director of Collections at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, has been a champion of the collection since early on, when she was at the NY Historical Society. Along with Alice Greenwald, the Director of the Museum, they have issued a letter of intent to acquire, which has been a huge blessing. It means that sometime down the road, these pictures will find an appropriate home.

Many powerful people came and spoke powerful words while standing in front of these pictures in the days after 9/11. So powerful, they are not the kind that return the phone calls of a freelance photographer. No surprise there. (Or, I’m sure to any who have made their living over any period of time with a camera. I write occasionally to my alumni magazine at Syracuse, to the section which details the comings, goings and achievements of past graduates. I simply say, “After 35 years, Joe McNally is still jobless, and living around New York City.”) Funny, they’ve never published that.

This was impressed on me even further at the 5th Anniversary of 9/11. We staged the Polaroids again, this time at the NYC Fire Museum. We had no money… not a dime. We made entreaties, asked around as best we could. Nothing. I have a loose affiliation with Getty Pictures, so I wrote to my editor at the time, David Laidler, a good guy, who’s no longer there. Came back with a no. Alright. I’m nothing if not tenacious. I wrote again, more, shall we say, pointedly. Getty coughed up $10k. I chipped in five grand of my own dough, and we had enough to pull off a show.

The crates weigh about 2,000 pounds, and we had no funds for a forklift. So groups of off duty firefighters would come in shifts to pull and haul. I tried helping, but Keith Johnson of Ladder 6 just turned to me and said, “Joe, stay away from the crates. We’re firefighters. We’ve got lifetime disability. What happens if you throw your back out? You’re a freelance photographer. Nobody gives a shit about you.” True enough.

So, they sit now in crates, once again. I spoke recently at Adorama, and had a great, fun audience. I presented a few of the Ground Zero images. Memories of that time are still powerful. Jeff Snyder, who came to Adorama from Penn Camera, and I have been friends a long time. We started talking. He set up a meeting with the administration of the store, which was not held over a conference table the size of a football field on the 60th floor of a midtown tower. We sat in a small room over a camera store. It was like meeting the family. In fact, it was meeting the family. We shook hands. There were no lawyers, no contracts, no clauses with subsections 1 through 17, paragraphs D, E and F.

Adorama now is a partner in helping me keep this collection together and finding it a safe harbor. The people in these pictures trusted me with their images, thoughts and feelings in those tortuous days after 9/11. They made the effort to come to a camera that sounds strange, despite best efforts to describe it over the phone. They have formed their own, informal, emotionally connected community. I owe it to them to see this through. Adorama, will now help me do that.

There’s a reason they call it “the photo community.” Because it is.

Again, many thanks to Jeff Snyder, Monica Cipnic, and all the folks at Adorama.

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