© Michael Heller

A PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

A Brief Biography

How did this happen? How did I become a photographer?

Looking back over the thousands of images I have accumulated to date I have selected these four as my early turning points. As individual images, there is really nothing very special about any of them. But as mileposts in time, they are, in a way, decisive moments.

The navy ships picture was one of numerous images I made while still in my teens. In the 1950s I traveled with my family. We had a Zeiss Contaflex camera and it was my job to carry it. I remember\ early on discovering the difference between Kodachrome and Ektachrome. Kodachrome was colorful but Ektachrome was somehow "sharp." Much later I would find that the sharpness came from the faster shutter speeds it afforded.

In the early 60's, living in New York, I often carried the old Zeiss Camera and found myself becoming a street photographer. A photographer friend had a below-street-level apartment, in the East Village, and in the evenings we would develop film in his kitchen sink. I remember using the textured surface Agfa Brovira 119 paper to make our crude prints. Terms like "archival permanence" were unknown to us. Yellowing prints and purple negatives were not.

By the late 1960s I had moved west to southern California. I lived in a small house half a block from the beach in Santa Monica. I set up a darkroom in the garage out back. I bought a Nikon and four lenses: 28mm, 50mm, 85mm and 200mm. I shot kids, modeling portfolios, products, produce, whatever I could, to make a living with my camera. The Santa Monica Evening Outlook was the local newspaper. From time to time I sold them pictures of the growing social unrest that was occurring. Then one day I went into the local dry cleaners to pick up my laundry.

On the counter was a display of handguns, with a sign that offered the guns for sale. The dry cleaner also just happened to clean the uniforms for the local police department. I surmised that the guns had been confiscated by the police and that the cleaner was selling them illegally. I took the idea for a story to the Outlook and went back to the dry cleaners with my camera hidden in a shoebox. The paper sent a reporter to buy a gun, and when the story ran on the front page the cleaner wound up being arrested and several policemen left the force.

I endured a lot of traffic stops in Santa Monica during the next year, but I've been a photojournalist ever since.

A Little more History or go to Kids in Trouble