The life and times of William Herbert Mortensen: United States, 1897-1965.

I first became interested in photography at a very young age and just had to have a 35mm camera. The year was 1941 and I lived in a small town in Nebraska on the edge of the sand hills. Little did I realize how this small, primitive, inexpensive machine would motivate me into a career in photography that has now spanned well over 50 years.

By 1943 I had acquired a darkroom, in a closet, complete with three 5 x 7 trays and a printing frame for contact printing. I soon realized that if I was going to do anything with photography I would have to make bigger prints than 35mm contact prints, so I found a very old 5 x 7 view camera with a brass barrel lens, tripod, and three film holders. I fumbled with this camera for some time and finally enrolled in the Ray School of Photography in Chicago where I learned the finer points of the view camera, portrait lighting, and the proper way to develop film and make enlargements.

Back home in Nebraska, I set up a studio in the basement of my folks' home. Before I knew it I had customers knocking on my door. I soon made enough money to buy a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inch Speed Graphic. It was a used one but a good one. This was the time of World War II and new cameras and film were very difficult to buy because all the photographic equipment and supplies were going to the armed services.

My photography was very ordinary and looked quite a bit like the work being done by the old photographer in town who had been in business for many years. I read every photographic magazine I could find, viewing many beautiful photographs in these publications, finding I was desirous to make great photographs like the ones published in these magazines. Many of the beautiful pictures I saw were done by a man by the name of William Mortensen. I had to learn how he did them, so off I went to Laguna Beach, California, to his School of Photography. I couldn't have dreamed how he would influence my life.

Let me tell you what I know about the most creative photographer of his time.

As you might guess from his name, Mortensen was of Danish extraction. His parents came from the old country in the 1880s and settled in Utah where their son was born January 27,1897. As a boy he worked in the family grocery store and began to show talent for drawing and painting. So, between stints behind the counter, he was allowed to take some instruction from one J. T. Harwood, an elderly artist of the Barbizon School, who lived in town. A little later, when he was about 18, a mural artist came to Salt Lake City to do decorations in the Cathedral. William Mortensen became an apprentice.

1915--Graduated from East Side High School, Salt Lake City, Utah.

He served as Private in Company D of the 13th Regiment of the United States Army during World War I and was mustered out at Camp Merritt, New Jersey, late in 1918. He immediately went to New York City where he enrolled in the classes of the Art Students League where he studied with George Bellows, Robert Henri and George Bridgmann. Between classes he practically lived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art--looking, copying, and looking some more at the great works of art. After two years at the Art Students League he was declared to have "no talent for drawing."

Undeterred by this verdict he borrowed money and took off for Greece, to make etchings of monuments of ancient Attica. Unfortunately, his financial arrangements had neglected to provide him with moneys for eating; so, instead of doing great art he found himself painting posters for a brand of cognac. When the demand for these was exhausted he borrowed money from the American Council and returned to New York.

Back in America, an artist and a man of the world, he accepted a position teaching art in the Eastside High School back in his home town of Salt Lake City, Utah. He tried bringing the message of the Old Masters to sixty seductive young Mormons. During this time he started to experiment with photography. His first camera was a 5 x 7 view and his models were girls from the classes who posed for him after school hours--to the great distress of the janitor. On Saturdays he would load his camera, his model and a yard of crepe de chine into the side car of his motorcycle and seek alfresco settings in the adjoining countryside. Unfortunately, the Dean of Women followed him on one occasion and it was agreed that it would be best for all concerned if he resigned.

1921--At this time there were rumors of big happenings in Hollywood so he loaded his motorcycle side car with camera, costumes, a large collection of masks he had made, his yard of crepe de chine and with forty dollars in his pocket, he headed west.

It remains a secret as to how he survived the first months in Hollywood but he found himself working for Ferdinand Pinney Earle, designing sets and costumes for his spectacular production of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayamm. This picture made great use of trick camera work and he learned a lot about showmanship and outlandish imagination.

1924--Married Courtney Crawford.

Through the influence of Theodore Kosloff of the Russian Ballet he got a job with Cecil B. DeMille and worked on nearly every DeMille production for the next six years. During this time he was still photographer for the film King of Kings and instead of using the big 8 x 10 inch camera he would crawl around the set with a small camera and take pictures during the actual filming. This had never been done before and the photographs were so successful that DeMille had albums of these magnificent stills made up and had them sent to libraries around the world. One was accepted by the Vatican.

During this time he set up shop on Hollywood Boulevard and had lots of models from the dancing classes of Theodore Kosloff, Marion Morgan and Ruth St. Denis. During this period he took thousands of nudes. Of them, a mere halt dozen survived because some time later, in a self-critical frenzy, he destroyed the lot.

He developed a strange facility for attracting all sorts of odd characters. His studio swarmed with midgets, giants, fat ladies, pinheads, dog-faced boys, and bearded women. He said, "These strange folks fascinated me with their pictorial possibilities."

The entire floor of the Western Costume Company was turned over to him as a studio. There he had access to at least ten thousand costumes and an infinite amount of properties such as jewelry, armor, swords, and other items of decoration. As models, he had almost any screen star that came in for a fitting. During that time he photographed such names as Rudolph Valentino, Alla Nazimova, Norma Shearer, Ramon Navarro, Norma Talmage, Lon Chaney, Warren Baxter, Clara Bow and Jean Harlow.

As the Twenties ended and the depression began, action in Hollywood came almost to a stop. So, one fine day in the spring of 1931, he loaded his stuff into the back of his car and headed down the coast to Laguna Beach, where he remained until his death. A few months after his arrival he recruited a couple of students and he gave them photographic instruction. So began the Mortensen School of Photography. From this modest beginning, in something over 30 years, he brought individual instruction to some 3,000 students.

1933--Married Myrdith Monaghan.

1935--Perfected Metalchrome, a process for rendering black and white photographs in color through locally applied chemicals.

Between 1933 and 1955 Mortensen produced (with the collaboration of George Dunhan) over a hundred articles for most of the important photographic publications on subjects relating to his methods. They also wrote the following nine books: Projection

Control (1934), Pictorial Lighting (1935), Monsters and Madonnas (1936), The Command to Look (1937), The Model (1937), Print Finishing (1938), Mortensen on the Negative (1940), Outdoor Portraiture (1940), Flash in Modern Photography (1941).

Most of these books passed through several editions and various revisions.

1944--World War II was raging and things didn't look too good for the United States. I wasn't old enough to go into the service. Here I was going to Laguna Beach to study photography with the great William Mortensen. This one man had photographed every movie star of any importance and he was going to teach me how it was done.

This man who had been called "radical, shocking, unorthodox," even "subversive," had shocked the photographic world with his image of Christ on the cross along with a buzzard. I had no idea of how my experiences with him would change my entire life.

To gain admission to his school I had to have 300 exposures of film and 300 sheets of 11 x 14 paper. I was lucky my Speed Graphic was a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 and not a 4 x 5. All of the 4 x 5 cameras and film were going to the military. I learned that if I would order twenty 25-sheet boxes of film from the mail order companies, they would usually send me two boxes and tell me to reorder next month. By ordering from 20 different mail order companies I finally got my 300 sheets of film. Of course I never knew what kind they would send, so I had quite a variety of brands and speeds of film. Paper was a bit easier to buy.

The second day of school we had a model- and she was naked! Plus, I was supposed to photograph her. Here I was a kid from Nebraska, only 16 years old, and had never before seen a naked lady. This had to be the most difficult day of my young life. Looking back, I guess the gods were on my side that day because it was also the first time this model had ever appeared naked before a camera.

Mr. Mortensen realized the difficulty and the uncomfortable position we were both in and explained that nakedness is an awkward situation. It is like being in a dark room without any clothes and suddenly the lights come on and there is a stranger of the opposite sex looking at you. Nudity on the other hand is a beautiful situation. It's like skinny-dipping with your friends on a beautiful summer day at your favorite swimming hole. We talked at great length about the beautiful nudes done by the great artists of the world. Before long, the model and I were very comfortable with our newfound situations.

Yes, I was just a kid. But I had been to the Ray School of Photography in Chicago, had taken the correspondence course from the New York Institute of Photography and had learned a lot about photography. I knew that there were three types of lighting--the Loop, Butterfly and the Triangle. Now, this man Mortensen was telling me there are five types and they are called the Basic, Plastic, Semi-Silhouette, Dynamic, and the Contour. He also said we expose for the highlights and develop for the shadows. He talked about Gamma Infinity. Hey! Wait a minute! What's going on? Was he playing with my mind? Then he showed me how it all works.

He introduced me to his Abrasion-Tone process. This is a process where you add many more half tones to your print and then work with an etching knife to remove small defects in the print. Then he introduced me to paper negatives. Both of these processes I still use today. We added texture screens, another of Mortensen's inventions. We were creating images that I never knew were possible.

As I developed my film, we would look at it together. He would pull each negative out of the fixer and say "it is underexposed" or "it's overexposed, the lighting is wrong" or "the pose is wrong" or "the eyes are not looking in the right direction." After I saw my mistake, the film would go in the waste basket. That left me with only 100 negatives. I then made three 11 x 14 prints of each remaining negative and, while they were in the fixer, he would again go through them and show me errors. These too would be discarded.

When he taught me the Abrasion-Tone process, that was a new experience. Learning to use the etching knife on a print is an art, and to learn to do it properly you will destroy quite a few prints. I did my share of damage to my beautiful prints.

When I left the Mortensen School I had three prints for all my work. Mr. Mortensen didn't say they were great or even that they were good. His only comment was, "You are on your way to being a photographer." You should have heard my parents when I got home. They knew that I had been cheated--getting only three good prints out of 300 exposures of film and 300 sheets of paper--and they were pictures of naked ladies! What a waste!

1948 (March)-Mortensen had a one-man show of 44 prints at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

1949--Received the Hood Award from the Royal Photographic Society, London, for "Pouring Milk."

1965 (August 12)-Died of Leukemia. I remember we always called him Mr. Mortensen and he was a very demanding teacher. He would say, "You don't learn by doing it right, but if you are smart you will learn by your mistakes." Today it seems that most of the new generation of photographers perpetuate their bad habits by just pressing the button on the camera and letting some professional lab correct all their mistakes.

Because of Mr. William Mortensen, I will still look at my photographs, dripping wet. still in the fixer and say to myself, "How could I make it better?" Yes, he helped me become a photographer! Not another William Mortensen but a pretty darn good Stephen Gillette. I am grateful for having known him and I will say "Thanks!" I will not forget what he taught me. His techniques cannot be forgotten.

Today, 100 years after the birth of this great genius, we are entering into a new field of digital imaging and we must stop and look back on what photography has accomplished since Louis Jacques Daguerre made his first light tight box. Will this new field of digital imaging be better than the beautiful Mortensen prints or will it just be different? If George Eastman had invented digital imaging, would the silver image be the only way to make pictures better today?

I am now older than Mr. Mortensen was when he died. I am still using his techniques and am trying to teach a new generation of photographers the Mortensen way. I know that his techniques are some of the best ever introduced to photography. We cannot forget how to use texture screens or how to make paper negatives or how to improve our images with abrasion tone.

The world cannot forget the name William Mortensen because his name will go down in history as the Michelangelo of Photography.

The Mortensen Collection of the Photographic Society of America consists of 36 prints made by the Laguna Beach, California, camera artists and teacher from 1926 to 1959. It was given to PSA by Col. Joe E. Kennedy, FPSA, president of PSA (1967-71) who also studied at the Mortensen School of Photography. Mrs. Myrdith Mortensen, widow of the photographer, donated prints to match the number purchased from her for the collection. The pictures were remounted and refurbished by Grey L. Silva, APSA longtime friend of the Mortensens. (Photos and Mortensen Collection information reprinted from the June 1971 PSA Journal.)

J. Stephen Gillette began his study of photography at the age of 14. It was then his prints first appeared in photographic competitions. A year later, he studied at the Ray School of Photography in Chicago. The following year he traveled to Laguna Beach, California, to study with William Mortensen. The New York Institute of Photography in New York City completed his formal education.

Gillette then returned to his native Nebraska and owned and operated portrait studios until he was drafted into the U.S. Army and ended up as photo lab chief for the Second Armored Division in Germany.

Later. he owned Nebraska's first automated professional color laboratory and operated a studio in Omaha where he did photography for the opera? symphony, ballet, and advertising agencies.

For the last 20 years he has owned and operated the Gillette House of Photography and until recently Gillette Color Lab on the beautiful Mendocino Coast in Northern California.