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Rangefinder
Magazine Profile: Woody Walters by Kirsten Mortensen The trade-offs between commerce and art are so often repeated we tend to accept them as irrefutable truths. Artists, we believe, have to choose between starving or giving up their art to make a decent living.
Then along comes an artist like Woody Walters who turns that entire equation inside out. Throughout the 1980s, Walters worked as a commercial photographer, specializing in lifestyle images for high-end resorts, while pursuing his fine art photography in his spare time. He might have continued splitting his time this way indefinitely, but an apparent disaster intervened: Walters discovered the two-person agency representing his commercial work had defrauded him (along with several other photographers) of thousands of dollars in fees. As he contemplated what to do next, a friend suggested Walters try the art show circuit. Intrigued, Walters rented a booth at the Sunfest Art Festival, a weekend show held every late summer in West Palm Beach, Florida. He displayed framed examples of his art photography, primarily black-and-white landscapes, and soon found himself accepting cash payments from excited customers. “I realized I could easily make $40–50,000 an image,” Walters says, “and I never looked back.” The numbers spoke for themselves. Instead of getting paid, one image at a time, for photographs that someone else had told him what, when, and how to shoot, Walters could shoot the photographs he wanted, and sell the same images over and over again. Walters’ first foray into photography had little to do with aesthetics, however. His father, who had worked briefly as a professional portrait photographer himself, gave Walters a Super 8 movie camera when he was in junior high. Walters was taking karate lessons (he eventually advanced to black belt, second degree), and immediately set out to make “karate movies.”
Then, when he was a high school sophomore, a local gallery hosted a show of Ansel Adams photography. “The minute I saw those images, I knew that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.” Adams became Walters’ inspiration and, later, friend. After Walters completed Hawkeye Community College’s professional photography program, he wrote to Adams. “I sent Ansel one of my prints with a letter telling him how his work had influenced me.” This letter led to a correspondence that continued until Adams’ death in 1984. Adams’ influence on Walters spans both subject matter and film format. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Walters concentrated on black-and-white landscapes, including his signature images of lightning-split cumulus clouds, taken off the Florida coast. Nearly all of his work has been captured on medium- and large-format film. His cameras include a 4x5 Wisner technical field camera, a handmade wooden field 4x5 view camera. “I’ve had the wooden camera for 11 years,” he says. “I love the romance of shooting with a handcrafted, wood camera, and with a name like Woody, I guess I had to have a wooden camera.” Walters shows similar loyalty in his choice of film. He’s been using Kodak Professional Technical Pan Film for years. He says, “It’s by far the sharpest film out there. There’s nothing that compares in terms of resolution.” He also uses Kodak paper exclusively for his prints: Kodak Professional Polymax Fine-Art Paper for his black-and-white and Kodak Professional Supra Endura Paper for his color prints. “It’s a great paper. I love the tonality and contrast, and in particular the color saturation.” Adams also gave Walters tips on technique. “Ansel’s greatest secret is that it’s the background that makes or breaks an image,” Walters says. “Anything can be a subject as long as you frame it against the right background.” In Walters’ landscape work, he learned to let the weather “perform the background.” He says, “You have to go out in the worst kind of weather. Ninety percent of good landscape photography is letting the weather dictate when you shoot.”
For his Florida lightning photographs, Walters benefited by the predictability of the local weather patterns. “You can almost set your watch by the thunderstorms in that part of the country,” he says. “The clouds start building about 2:00 in the afternoon. By 4:00 the thunderheads are forming. Then around dusk, you can start capturing lightning as the sunlight fades.” Walters’ kinship with Adams includes a similar love for nature and its beauties. He goes camping frequently, and considers “getting out into the woods” every two or three weeks essential to his mental health. “The natural world is full of miracles,” he says. “But you have to have ears to see them. You have to be ready when they whisper to you.” Today, Walters lives in Iowa. The primary reason is Hawkeye: Walters now teaches at his old alma mater. But another consideration in choosing Iowa was his desire to live in the central United States. “I can get anywhere easily from here.” Not that Walters feels a strong need to revisit any of the country’s well-photographed landmarks. “I’ve been to the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, The Everglades,” he says, “but there are portfolio shots everywhere. One of my most collected prints is an old woman in a rocking chair in front of a barn. It could have been taken anywhere around here in the Midwest. “In Yosemite, everything screams to be photographed. But there are images all around, if you’re sensitive enough to emotionally respond to them.” Walters also finds himself spending more time, these days, in the studio, as he explores new ways to create photographic art digitally. He refers to his more recent work as more illustrative than photographic in nature: elaboratecollages laden with symbolic, often religious, imagery, some of which take months or even years to create. The result is painterly images, so it’s no surprise that Walters attributes their look to Renaissance artists. “Lately, I study painters more than I do photographers,” he says. “I look at the way Michelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Dali do their paintings, and try to bring that into my work.”
Walters’ illustrative imagery has also led him to explore digital imaging, including digital photography. “The quality of digital cameras has improved so much in the past few years,” he says. “Would I use digital for a landscape photograph, something that I would like to print at 40x50 inches? No. But for portrait photography, or for shooting small elements for use in collages, I’ve been very pleased. Plus, I love being able to see the images right away, instead of having to wait for them to be processed.” Digital has also given Walters the tools to move into color photography. “I once swore I’d never do color,” he says. “And my primary love will always be black and white. But with digital imaging, with the kind of control Photoshop gives me, I find I can use color more deliberately to make a viewer respond emotionally to the image.” Although his illustrative photography takes up much of his attention, Walters isn’t completely finished with to his landscape portfolio. He has yet to photograph in Alaska or Hawaii, but intends to one day.
In the meantime, Walters also enjoys his other love: teaching. Perhaps because his relationship with Adams meant so much to him, Walters cares deeply about passing the baton to the next generation of photographers. Teaching helps him do that. “It may be harder today for photographers than when I was starting out,” he says. “There are so many artists out there. How many good photographers are never discovered? Ansel used to say he knew photographers that were better than him, but he was in the right place, at the right time, and seen by the right people. “You have to be true to your heart, true to your vision. But it’s also a numbers game. The more you get your work out, the more people see it, respond to it.” Marketing over the Internet is useful—Walters has a web site for selling his prints—but he doubts he could have made his reputation from a web site alone. “There are art shows attended by two and a half million people over a weekend,” he says. “These are opportunities that can make a photographer.” It’s also important, he adds, for young photographers to build their portfolios—and that comes down to numbers. “What many young photographers don’t understand, at first, is that good photographers take hundreds or thousands of shots nobody ever sees. They’re not good enough to show anyone. Of the images I’ve captured, I have thousands and thousands I never show anybody. I have about 200 that sell inconsistently. And I have about 50 that do extremely well. “But I do have 50 images that have given me my reputation and the financial freedom, today, to follow my art wherever it takes me.” Kirsten Mortensen is a writer based in Rochester, N.Y., specializing in photography-related topics.
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