Scene on the Road

It's cliché that most clichés are true. But just because it’s true that kids play in open fire hydrants and the Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square during heat waves, I don’t think newspaper photographers should head there every time the temperature hits ninety degrees.

Animals are another definite photo cliché (Especially polar bears or penguins in a heat wave) so as I am always talking here all the time about trying to see fresh ways to shoot old photos and not rely on clichés, I try to avoid them (both animals and clichés) I don’t think I take that many pictures of animals, but a quick review of my Daily Photos shows that’s not necessarily true.

Former Inquirer editor Gene Roberts, who is always described as “legendary editor,” was the man responsible for bringing serious photojournalism to the now-discontinued Inquirer Sunday Magazine. I was the photo projects editor there for three years, when along with picture editor Bert Fox, we produced photo essays every week by the excellent photographers on our staff, as well as freelancers like David H. Wells, Stephen Shames, Christopher Morris, Burk Uzzle, Peter Turnley, Donna Ferrato, Anthony Suau and Pete Souza. Even after winning awards for telling visual stories of domestic violence, the fall of Communism, child poverty and homelessness, at least once a year Roberts would run into me in the hallway, and in a voice that is always described as either a “Southern, low and languid, slow, North Carolina or thick” drawl, would say to me: “You know, Tom, what people really like to see are animals. How about some more pictures of animals.”

People do like looking at animals. And photographers like taking pictures of both people and animals, so we so end up at zoos a lot, because that's where they both happen to come together, often in delightfully photographic ways.

Garry Winogrand photographed at the Bronx and Central Park zoos during the 1960’s. When “The Animals” series of photos debuted at The Museum of Modern Art, Director of Photography John Szarkowski said the pictures showed both humans and the caged animals “exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments.”

I haven’t been to a zoo in a long time. So after the reporter, zoo director and public relations person left me alone after an assignment at the Cape May County Zoo, I wandered around trying to channel the spirit of Winogrand and that other famous zoological park photographer Elliot Erwitt as I tried to find moms with feather plumed hats or dads in leopard spotted leisure suits.