You can try looking him up on the internet. Ain't a lot on there, died before the big computer could submit his data into 1's and 0's.
A couple things recently got me thinking about him.
Alan gave me this old vise somewhere in the 80's. It's a Reed model 403 1/2. One day he asked if I wanted it. No fanfare, just "Want this?" It was a mean old ornery thing that I cursed at every time I used it. Alan could be a mean old ornery thing himself. Recently, I said "Basta!" Enough. Put it on Craigslist in the free section with two stipulations.
The person taking it had to make me believe I was giving it to the right person. It was going to be used and not turned around and sold.
And that the end of the ownership, that person needs to give it away as well.
After getting out of photography school, I moved to San Francisco and got a full time job assisting a photographer that was a true 100% asshole despicable man. Ten months. I've only hated one person in my life and it was him. He shall be nameless.
In the middle of a huge job, he and I got into a scream fight with clients right there. I walked out.
Alan, whom I thought was the best studio shooter on the West Coast interviewed me while sitting on his full sized billiard table on the top floor of a building that overlooked the corner of 2nd and Howard St in downtown SF. Ok, for the purests, SOMA, South of Market. Linkedin HQ is directly across the street today, back then it was a parking lot. He hired me on the spot, I think less for my photography portfolio and more on the fact that I had been a carpenter for twelve years.
He said at the end of the interview that if I didn't have anything to do during the day, that I was to play pool. He wanted me to become good enough so he could have a built in opponent. He even bought me my own cue stick. Worked for him for five years and I could win maybe one out of 25 games.
Very first job I worked on with him was a wine job. We were supposed to chisel a bottle of Almaden into a 300 pound block of clear ice. First thing Alan taught me was on that job and he said
"Always look like you know what you're doing."
Alan was a different photographer He worked like no one else I've ever heard of in the business. It was left up to me (and his assistants before me and after me) to basically shoot the job. Oh, it was his shot, but mechanically everything else was up to me. Light it, determine exposure, focus it, clean the set, expose the film, determine how to process the film.
First time clients often could not believe what was going on. If toward the end of the shot we were working on, if the polaroid looked ok, Alan would leave and go home.
First time clients would say, what's happening? we're paying 2-3 thousand dollars for this shot and your assistant is going to shoot it?
And Alan would say, "Yes, Paul is going to shoot it. I trust him." And out the door he went to tend to his greenhouse.
He said when he gave that responsibility to his assistants they would bear the weight and make the shot better for it.
Now you people reading this in 2020 and not having any idea of what was involved in shooting 8x10 sheets of film are probably shrugging your shoulders. But like I've always said, there are (were) an infinite number of things that could go wrong and you will encounter each one, the trick is not to screw up on the same one more than once.
There was no Photoshop that you could remove a hair that happened to fall on the set, or to correct lighting or fix a million other things. Everything had to be done in the camera and everything had to right.
Opening the box of processed film always always gave me a knot in the stomach. It was right or it was a reshoot.
We shot two-three-four jobs a week. Major ad campaigns, pushing thousands of sheets of film through the camera each year.
Shot everything there was to shoot, Alan had already shot it and everything he knew, he taught me.
On one location job up in wine country, we loaded the 8x10 and all the lights we needed into his Porsche. Not sure how everything fit, but I remember the client's face when we blasted into the parking lot.
I learned 10% in school, Alan gave me the other 90%. Worked with every ad agency in the city, every art director.
I owe him more than I can say.
Alan also one day walked in and gave me a box of machinist step blocks.
They have been in the same box, sitting on a leg of the camera stand since. Use them on almost every job and I think of Alan when I pick one of them up. The box was starting to give way, so I put some rebar wire around to reinforce.
Just today, I used them to block out a glass, so I could take it off set and return it to the same spot.
Film days it would be way more important to determine focus, remove and replace, now with digital, not so much.
I've been meaning to put my 1's and 0's about Alan into the great computer for some time. He could be the gruffest of farts, yelling at you if you screwed up, telling you do something over. But like just out of a Hollywood movie, he was this warm intelligent marshmallow of a man.
During the first dot com boom time in San Francisco and greedy landlords were cashing in on the seemingly endless amount of money in the city, the rent on Alan's studio went from a couple thousand to twelve thousand. I said why not share my space Alan til you find something else.
I walked in one day and he had a personal shot halfway set up. He was good about personal shooting. It's hard to keep that up after 30 years in the business. He wasn't there, he had left for day. On his way home, he died.
I miss you Alan.
