Category: Photography

Among the most common types of newspaper photo assignments, I have a least favorite: a portrait of someone being interviewed by a reporter. Or being interviewed by a bunch of reporters. (Don’t worry, this is not a half-empty glass gripe. Keep reading, it’s actually a positive post.)

On TV they’re called “talking heads” and in still photos they’re “headshots.” But they’re not really heads. Their sole purpose is to show viewers/readers what a person looks like. A face.

A while back, possibly while focused on a person standing behind a bank of microphones, my mind wandered and I started to think about different ways of photographing the press conference. Call it an anti-headshot.

That evolved into something I continued, collecting unconventional views of non-faces.

At some point, maybe with more press conference daydreaming, I wondered what if… Say the images ended up on an art gallery wall? A highfalutin critics might say something like “the work is a meditation on our identity and desire to be seen. Gralish turns the idea on its head (no pun intended), showing us images that conspire against the countenance, and therefore, counter the very premise of a portrait.”

If I weren’t having fun with photography I would have stopped doing it decades ago.

My “funnest” assignment this week? My colleague Peter Dobrin’s sweet story of a musical prodigy, and what it takes to get into a top music conservatory while still in elementary school.

As is often the case with businesses and institutions, the public relations department always has ideas of how to pose the picture — usually with their sign, name or logo prominent. After photographing the young pianist playing — with an extender to reach the piano’s pedals — I just watched her as we toured the conservatory.

I prefer letting things unfold in front of me, anticipating what a person might do. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I wondered how Olivia would pass though the security entrance. I guessed correctly — but used too slow a shutter speed. But, my glass was still half full. I had plenty of good photos (even one that likely made Curtis happy — with their name displayed).

Having just one person to focus on is a joy, but I also love photographing when there are lots of people and lots of action at events or gathering. The difficulty for me is just dealing with the visual overstimulation. Sometimes there is just too much going on.

Over the years, I have learned how to cope. I try to find one or two people in the crowd, meet them, and let them get used to me and to being photographed. Then I watch for them throughout the rest of the time I’m there. Sometimes even arriving early.

That way, no matter how distracted I get as my head is spinning around while I keep turning to see things happening all around me and missing other photos while I write down names, I always have those first folks I can return to.

That brings me back to the photo at the very top. I had noticed officials looking out of a window of the district’s bus on its annual Back-to-School Celebration visit to schools all around Philadelphia.

But I knew I had my photo when Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. (at far left in the photo) started to gather everyone together for a group photo outside the bus and the president of the principals union showed up in the window. (She then left the bus to join in the photo.)

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.

This week Philly teachers were prepping for the start of a new school year and I went to Fanny Jackson Coppin School in South Philadelphia to photograph them hanging posters, arranging desks, taking new books out of boxes, and opening packages of supplies,

I walked from classroom to classroom, saying hi and introducing myself. Most were happy to have me come in and show the newspaper’s readers how they spend hours making their room feel welcoming and comfortable.

I was definitely feeling at ease by the time I got to the first grade classroom of teacher Lauren Cucinotta.

Because I wrote just last week about the senses triggering memories I was expecting all morning that what’s known as the “Proust phenomenon” would kick in. But it wasn’t the waxy smell of the crayons.

No, as a visual person it was the sight of a cup full of freshly sharpened pencils.

There is nothing more basic, more ordinary than a pencil — well except maybe for paper. But then we get into a chicken or the egg thing, and I don’t want to go there, so I’m sticking with pencil.

All those little points of graphite evoke a feeling of possibility. More than being ready to make the first marks of a new school year, I see them representing a clean slate (page) or even a new way to look at an annual recurring photo assignment.

You can’t see them in the photos, but for a moment even the erasers at the other end of the pencils evoke memories of my own first days of school and remind me that yesterday’s mistakes do not have to follow me into today, that there is always something new to see and photograph.

That’s enough navel gazing for one column, so let’s talk about this week’s installment of my colleague Elizabeth Wellington’s series highlighting a Philly “first” for the ongoing celebration of America’s 250th birthday. This week celebrated the first selfie still in existence, which was taken in Philadelphia in 1839.

They were first called self-portraits, and before smartphones, they involved putting cameras on tripods or tabletops and using timers or long cable shutter releases. Photographers — especially after small 35mm cameras came along — did use a wide-angle lens with the “extend your arm” technique, and the first I can remember seeing was when our wedding photographer took one of himself with me and my bride.

That’s a cherished selfie, but my all-time favorite selfie is one with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker when I spent time with him in Iowa during his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign. And since then, often on his home turf, in New Jersey. You can see me in the background — right behind the helpful photography tip a supporter’s cell phone offered (he cleared the message before taking the photo).

Which brings me to a few other photos to share from this week:

And a story I wrote this week on viral French singer-songwriter and animal advocate Loris Assadian, known as Plumes, who sang for tortoises at the Philly Zoo.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.

Say you’re delivering packages, pizzas, or people. Or you’re a newspaper photographer out looking for pictures. If you’ve been driving around a city for a few years, the streets might seem ordinary, but then something about an intersection, a store front or a sign gives you that feeling of Déjà vu.

Of all our senses, sound, taste and smell are usually considered the most powerful memory triggers. Like when Sam “Plays it again” in Casablanca or Anton Ego tastes Remy’s ratatouille. Or when any of us open a brand new box of Crayola crayons.

But as a photographer it is the visual reminders that are powerful. Driving in the city I am always taken back to a graduation party I photographed down a particular street, or the sunset I framed. Or how I negotiated a hill in a snowstorm, or covered a shooting on that block.

Sometimes I feel like I have been leaving bread crumbs behind me as I drive everywhere, waiting to be remembered.

Stalled in backed-up traffic for the ongoing construction on Rt. 70 in Cherry Hill last week, I glanced over at a bus shelter. I recalled years ago seeing riders standing in the slim shadow of a utility pole to get just a tiny bit of some shade from the sun while waiting for their bus.

They waited next to a multimillion dollar retail development on the site of the former Garden State Racetrack. The mostly minimum wage workers who rode the bus to their jobs there didn’t even have a bench to sit on — let alone relief from the elements while waiting to go home. Back then I photographed commuters sitting on overturned shopping carts and tried to interest an editorial writer to take up their cause.

Eventually, a bench was put there, and a few years later a shelter was installed. But as I sat in my car the other day, it still didn’t look right. I turned into the shopping center and walked over.

Wayne Peters tells me he’s been taking NJ Transit’s 406 bus to and from Camden for about two years, and says this stop has “gotta be the worst in the state.” He says he always picks up trash when he’s there, and adds more to the piles already in the shopping carts that serve as receptacles.

Fellow rider Bobby White added, “You’d think something in Cherry Hill would be better. How hard would it be to put a trash can here?” Before their bus arrives, Peters, trying to be positive about the shelter, reminds him “They fixed a broken window once.”

Another thing about revisiting so many corners of our region is it becomes easy to think I’ve seen it all. And then I hear about a place I didn’t know anything about.

A semi-retired friend from Bucks County and her friend try to take weekly drives every Thursday they call “Highways of History.” Last week she texted me some photos saying “guess where we are.”

Now in all my years of being like a UPS, DoorDash, or Lyft driver I had never been to the place in her pictures. I could tell from her other stops that she was nearby, which made it even more mysterious. There was a carousel and other things for kids, like a smaller version of the giant covered wooden slide I’d been to at Smith Memorial Playground & Playhouse in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

Just like the well-known Philly playground that is considered a childhood rite of passage, a New Jersey version has been around for well over a century and when she told me it was only twenty minutes from my house I was completely gobsmacked.

Not only had I never even heard of the place as a journalist, but it never even entered my consciousness during those years when my wife and I were constantly googling “things to do with a toddler” finding ways to keep our kids — and ourselves — entertained and out of the house.

She told the me her father took the ferry there from Penn Treaty Park in Fishtown and “spent many a happy day along with hundreds of other poor kids in the 1930s for free soup and crackers and a carefree day.”

It’s called Soupy Island. It was founded in 1877 on an island in the Delaware River by the Sanitarium Association of Philadelphia, a group of doctors who wanted to help sick city kids with tuberculosis recover with fresh air, playtime, and that free soup. When the Delaware was dredged a few years later and the island was wiped out, the camp moved to the mainland, on the Jersey banks of the river.

My love of history was sparked and I could not believe the connections. My own father, growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, was sent away every summer to the “Prev.” He shared many great memories with me of learning how to swim and fish at a preventorium on a lake.

As its name implies, it was designed to halt tuberculosis among children by getting them away from their crowded, mostly immigrant inner-city neighborhoods and out to the country.

I spent the weekend digging around and reading everything I could to learn all about Soupy Island, amazed to see The Inquirer had done a number of stories about it, even in the years I’d lived here (kids were still coming over by ferry from Penn Treaty well into the 1980s.)

Seeing that it was closing up for the summer, I planned to reach out the caretaker on Monday to go make pictures. That’s when I learned my colleague, reporter Sarah Nicell, was visiting on their penultimate day of the season. She grew up in South Jersey, and she had never heard of it before either.

I made sure I got the photo assignment.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.