Rowland Scherman: the fine art of camera wielding through history

2016 is nine days away from ending. I am glad. I don’t want to think, talk or write about it. One thing all that public ugliness has done is make me look way back. Auld acquaintance. PBS has helped me in that endeavor:

John Lennon. Martin Luther King. Robert and John Kennedy. I can’t even type these names without tearing up. And I didn’t even know these people.
I only felt them. Rowland Scherman plied his verbal skills and self-effacing manner to the banter that made him friends with these people. And then he took their pictures.

“Vibrationally serene.” Those are words he used in the PBS documentary that traces his chosen life in photography. He was there in the ‘60’s – big time. Everywhere in the ‘60’s. At least everywhere I wanted to be, or avoided being because of my aversion to huge crowds, which were popular then. He said that the Beatles gave the world a ray of sunshine during those warred up, awakening years. The first and brightest ray of hope after so many assassinations and even as the Mansons were doing their thing and even after “Something Is Happening Here.” At least we had Beatles. Rowland met, befriended and photographed them. For Life Magazine and for all of us.

He photographed Woodstock. He said that the number of people there made it one of the biggest cities in NY State for those few days. When he went back last year to the farm where it all happened, he used those words when he described that place as having grown into being “vibrationally serene.” He had been there in 1969 when it was anything but serene. He had felt the vibe, photographed it, preserved it for all of us. Time has turned that place that had been born of anger, fear and upheaval that became enshrouded in loud music, into a memorable pleasantry.

He calls his photos “snaps”. He thinks digital photography is super, describing the chips inside today’s cameras as “Ansel Adams’ brain.”
Suite Judy Blue Eyes herself, Judy Collins, extols Rowland’s skills and the resulting imagery: “He isn’t dependent on the equipment. He just sees the picture and freezes it.”

Such a sweet, garrulous charming bub-a-lah, that Rowland Scherman. And that is what he gets reflected back at him when he takes pictures. That, and stunning art that only he can see until after he snaps, captures what he sees, and prints it for the rest of us to see.

I feel so lucky to have lived during the time he was photographing. He snapped the context of those times, and those pictures have become my memories. He considers himself the luckiest of people to have spent his life taking pictures. WE’RE the lucky ones.

Thanks for keeping the diary I didn’t keep, Rowland. And thanks, PBS, for that warm and winning documentary. It filled me with knowing and with memories that, at this distance, are dear. Which is exactly the way I want to feel as I say good-bye to this year of auld lang syne. My fervent wish is for next year’s truthful photos to become my fond memories, like stepping stones that help us skip to the other side of the stream, even if they are slippery. Next year at this time, I hope we all feel vibrationally serene.

[Top photo by Rowland is Bob Dylan, which became the cover of Dylan’s Greatest Hits album. People bought the album for the cover. I do that a lot myself. And I ALWAYS judge a book by its cover: I’m a designer!
[Bottom photo is of Arthur Ashe doing his laundry at a laundromat in Queens, looking immaculate and elegant as always.