Wanna See My Marketing Wound?

Mr. Kilpatrick lived two houses down from my boyhood home. He must have been 20 when they sent him off to World War 1. At 90 he'd fearlessly assault my gang. "Wanna see my war wound?" I think he got it in France. Before the leather-jacketed teens could scamper away en masse he'd hike up his trouser leg and show us a long gash on his white, spindly old leg. It was horrendous... and it was fascinating. No, the wound was cool. Mostly it was horrendous because he was so old. And drunk. And incoherent. Mostly it was fascinating because he was so fascinated with it.

Really, really sad when someone is trapped in their era.

How has marketing and advertising fundamentally changed since the 1980s?

I've somehow survived "everyone" becoming "experts" about "everything." For instance, I have a huge library. It's the legacy of my entire life. I once bought a huge home that actually had library shelves and reading rooms and an unabridged dictionary on a stand... but books? Google it, bra. Or I learned music recording when recording was an art. Today any teen with Audacity on a laptop thinks they know the score. Photography was once a true profession. Physics of light. Reciprocity failure. Monochrome photos from Time and Life can still make us cry. The one-shot Crown Graphic with the single flashbulb that the photographer pre-focused and waited and waited and waited and waited to push the button of the knockout punch or the burning building framed by the two firemen. Today, little digital snapshots flood the world... capturing and portraying nothing of value, and many from our cell phones. Graphic arts? Naw... break open Photoshop. Change this, change that, and it's tweaked. Don't like it, do it again.

I saw the professions of marketing, advertising, copywriting, and design industries change over 30 years, too. Was it for the better? Are we producing ads for those who do not read, or reading ads from those who cannot produce properly?

Or, like Mr. Kilpatrick, do the ghosts of my memories haunt old marketing battlefields where the gains were measured by little inch-dollars? Seventy years of his moments of glory after Cambrai were exchanged for the pocketchange of teen titters and scornful guffaws, mostly caused by our insensitivity, but also because he clung so steadfastly to them.

Wanna see my war wound?

Cheers
Lee

Goodbye, Old Friend

Last night I killed a part of me: I buried my Nikon F2 camera system.

I then threw into the trash five new cans of Kodak film. It was sad to see it all go.

Despite having two photo books published (1975 and 1984), and decades of experience as a professional commercial photographer, an era has officially ended. I hoped for some use for the dozens of rare Nikkor lenses, scientific bellows, special finders, focusing screens, esoteric filters and other accessories I'd collected during four decades, but alas... I couldn't even recall when I'd purchased those rolls of Kodak film.

I hadn't used the camera for perhaps five years. Film cost, processing cost, slide costs, print costs, archival page cost, scanning costs... in the end, all proved to be unnecessary.

To be sure, I'm still shooting photographs. My most recent, "Perseverance," won an award and is slated to be published soon. But I shoot digital for all my advertising and publishing work.

My latest Sony S70 with Zeiss-licensed optics has accounted for nearly 50,000 photographs. I'm hoping to buy the Leica D-LUX or Leica M8 digital camera soon, although I must admit I'm deeply smitten with the beauty and functionality of the Leica M7 or MP rangefinders... which models still use film, however.

So I guess my memories come full circle. I can recall the pure pleasure shooting all over Japan with my Leica IIIf (shown below)-- as flawless and indestructable a machine as man ever made. I recall making a living photographing stage and movie sets with my whisper-quiet Leica M3, and recall how I shot virtually all my children's pictures with my Nikon F2 system. But it's all a bygone era.

What matters is not which machine I used, but the fact that I used it at all. I am grateful that my life story is now copiously preserved in many tens of thousands of photographs. Deep nostalgia extends an hundredfold to life depicted in their rectangular frame, but I always will remember the feeling of a fine machine in my hands... and the sound of the tight "snick" of a finely attuned shutter.

Goodbye, old friend. I will not forget your uncommon service. I also will not forget the hands that made you.

May mankind seen through future lenses be as skilled as the hands that made your parts from raw ore and sand.