Profile: Frank Jackson by Lou Jacobs Jr.
A Different View

In a mini-bio on Frank Jackson’s web site, Gordon Lewis jokes about Frank’s being born in Jacksonville, FL, and says he left there in his teens for Sacramento, CA. According to Gordon, Frank “eventually developed an interest in photography after discovering that no matter how skilled he became at drawing, art supplies looked less attractive hanging from his neck than a camera.” There are other droll comments on www.fotographz.com plus selections of Frank’s unique imagery.

”Hips”

Frank is a versatile, self-taught photographer who prefers black and white but shoots color on request. “I’m partial to black and white,” he says, “because it forces the viewer to look at the essence of an image—its form, tone, light and shadow—instead of being distracted by the decorative effects of color. And black-and-white film also costs less. If I were a full-time color shooter, I would feel wanting because I cherish black and white.

Black and white versus color is often a topic of dispute—but not as life-threatening as discussing politics.”

After a stint in Sacramento, Frank landed in Huntsville, AL, where he spent a year at Oakwood College, which had no photography courses. “They suggested I study to be a doctor, a lawyer or a preacher,” he says. “I was already very involved exploring the possibilities I could conceive with a camera, so after a year I went to New York and lived with my uncle.” When Frank was hired by the city to photograph students doing summer work in a special program, he enjoyed the black-and-white challenge. When that job expired, Frank moved to L.A.

	”Hands”

There he lived with his father, worked part-time at Sears in the hardware department, and was offered tuition at Art Center or Brooks by IBM, his father’s employer, but in the fall of 1975 there were no openings. IBM also offered him a job where he could make “real money” and he added a 4x5 Sinar and Durst enlarger to the new Leica M5 and one lens he already owned.

He worked at IBM almost four years, and says, “When I left, I shot houses in 4x5 for an architect. After that, Transamerica hired me to repair IBM equipment, and when they discovered I was a photographer, they gave me freelance corporate work, such as advertising, meetings and editorial shoots. They liked my work and created a permanent photography position. For six years I photographed in and out of the U.S.”

Eventually, Frank began to do free-lance commercial photography for clients such as Epson and Xerox, but, he declares, “A clairvoyant would have told me ‘follow your heart,’ which I did and began focusing primarily on fine art work. In the mid-1990s I was disillusioned with the superficiality I found in the commercial world and came up with the name: fotographz, always in lower case. The term represented feeling and mood, along with light, and less of what it is that makes an image. Sometimes a photograph discovers me, and sometimes I discover it. To me fotographz equals constant visual evolution.

Uffizi Shadow

“ A few years earlier I had met Ernst Wildi at one of his seminars, and we hit it off. I showed him some of my prints, and he sent them to Hasselblad in Sweden. They used my photography of a feather on the cover of Hasselblad Forum magazine and an image of a floating egg inside (see left). I was delighted that Ernst had submitted my pictures, and in 2000 I visited Hasselblad in Stockholm and the Forum in Göteborg. I’ve been in touch with their activities since.”

Rewinding time, Frank owned and experienced numerous camera formats on his way to becoming a fine art photographer, including 4x5 and 8x10. He explains, “I knew someone who made lightweight view cameras, and I ordered an 8x10 camera fitted for Sinar lens boards.

JW

“ I experimented with large formats, but as I slowly moved away from commercial work, I needed something that offered mobility, flexibility and sharp negatives. I had owned an old Hassy 500C when I was 18, and I recalled how much I liked the square format. For my personal work I always shoot full-frame, so in the late ’80s I got back into the Hasselblad system, and there’s not a day I don’t take my 503 camera with me. It’s a basic manual model, which suits my style of work just fine.”

Frank continues, “In the late summer of 2000 I got curious about the Hasselblad XPan panoramic camera. It looked to me like you take a Leica M6, marry it to a Widelux, and you have a rangefinder camera that shoots incredibly sharp 24x65mm images on 35mm film. Now I have three lenses for the Xpan: 30mm, 45mm and 90mm. As I love the square format of the 500 series, I’ve found I also enjoy the cinematic view of the panoramic. It’s everything the square is not, the two formats complement each other very well. So I carry the XPan system as my other ‘point and shoot’ camera.”

	Behind Notre Dame

Nowadays Frank Jackson lives and works out of a loft studio in downtown Los Angeles. He uses a Durst enlarger with a diffusion head that provides stepless black-and-white contrast control for variable-contrast papers—of which Frank likes Ilford. He’s graduated to a Jobo rotary processor, which simplifies life. When he mentioned that he hardly ever dodges or burns-in while printing, I asked how he managed that. He responded, “I’ve used various black-and-white films and developers and years ago switched to T-Max 100 films. I eventually discovered a Kodak XTOL Developer for them. I also use it with Fuji Neopan 1600 black and white.

Metro Paris

“ I once used a spot meter and gave it up because my incident meter worked fine by itself. To get negatives with a full range of tones that print at contrast levels from one to four with a minimum of burning- in or dodging, I meter carefully and don’t overexpose. I develop in Xtol, which has a citric acid base and is used 1:2. It keeps for months. Xtol and T-Max are synergistic. As I learned the nuances of exposure, processing and printing my own black- and-white photos, I’ve also learned to understand lights better, and I’m also shooting better color photographs.”

	Pacific Coast Highway

As involved in black-and-white film techniques as Frank seems to be, I hesitated to ask about his adventures with digital shooting and scanning. “It’s great,” he says, “and it’s a lot more convenient for commercial work. If you have a calibrated monitor on your laptop, you can preview accurate images. I scan negatives on an Epson 3200 Pro that comes with a powerful program called Silverfast. I’m also using the ConeTech Piezography black-and-white, archival, carbon-pigment ink printing system. But for fine photography there are no full frame digital medium format cameras, so I stay with film.”

Balance

Frank’s unusual images have been exhibited at various galleries, most recently at the Open Shutter Gallery in Durango, CO. He made more than 60 prints for that exhibition that weighed 100 pounds when he sent them. The show was in two sections. The larger one was titled “Pursuit of Balance,” and the smaller one, all from the XPan Hasselblad, was called “Waiting.”

A few other things I learned about Frank Jackson:
• He did an eight-hour shoot with singer Stevie Wonder. Frank says Stevie has his own concept of time, so during a lot of the assignment, Frank waited for his subject.
• Frank has several 4x6-inch and 5x7-inch 36-print portfolios that he shows clients or gallery personnel. Some of these images are on the Hasselblad web site. Most creative art directors, buyers and gallery people find the miniature portfolios a pleasant surprise.

	Sand

• Though Frank seemed somewhat other-worldly to me at first, I was de-lighted to learn that for Arelli, a client that makes high-end tire rims, he rented a 6000-square-foot studio and high-wattage Mole-Richardson lights to do ad pictures for them. He shot Kodak E6 tungsten film and remarks, “Those were the days that I had a color temperature meter.”
• Frank still owns a Nikon FM2 but doesn’t shoot 35mm often. He’s in love with his Nikon 28TI, a small, sophisticated, point-and-shoot camera that Nikon no longer makes.

Frank Jackson is versatile, his jobs come up with happy endings, and his unique fine art images can be seen on www.fotographz.com/.

Lou Jacobs Jr. is the author of 25 how-to photography books, the latest of which, Photographer’s Lighting Handbook (Amherst Media) was recently published. He has taught at UCLA and Brooks, is a longtime member of ASMP, and enjoys shooting stock during his travels in the U.S. and abroad.