PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Big-City Shooter
Cleveland is Mike Levy's kind of town
When the wind comes from the south, airplanes approach Hopkins International Airport from the east, right over downtown Cleveland. When six or seven stack up they form the pattern Mike Levy wants to photograph. He had shot tests so he’d be ready when the wind shifted.
“I use a long exposure,” he explains, “and the aircraft will create a line of lights passing over the city.’’
With that image, Levy expected to complete his essay on how planes have been perceived since they were used to destroy the World Trade Center. Levy was also finishing an essay on Cleveland billboards, all the while keeping an eye out for different views of his city’s cherished churches. He had a list of projects to get to.
Levy works for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, which is changing the status quo by using pictures to tell, and not just supplement, the story. “I am a hometown boy,” he says. “I’m connected here and these are stories I can tell as a documentary photographer.’’
A compact man at once quiet and anxious to share his thoughts,
Levy has a knack for pinpointing the crucial, sometimes awful,
moments associated with the news. On one occasion, his front-page
photo of a woman first seeing the body of her son, who had been
killed by a train, triggered an outcry and an editor’s note
of explanation. Levy appreciates news, but were he just reacting,
instead of initiating stories, he would probably no longer be
at a newspaper.
“News or sports or portraits, I can do those, and I like to,” he says. “But my essays are my art."
Many newsrooms would not provide the open canvas a photojournalist like Levy needs for his work, a hybrid of news and personal insight. But Levy, who was warned in college that he would not fit in at newspapers, has found a workplace that has made room rather than asking him to fit in.
He has been with the 362,000-circulation Plain Dealer since 1991,
coming home after stints with The Seattle Times and The Arizona
Republic. He has been Ohio News Photographer of the Year four
times. Kent State University Press will soon publish a book of
his Cleveland landscapes. In his eleven years at the paper, Levy
has been sent to South Africa, Russia, Israel, and France. He
covered two World Series. His three daughters have grown to adolescence.
Levy divorced, took up in-line skating, shaved his head, and began
the mural of tattoos that now take up most of both arms. Always,
he watched his city.
Here, as at most newspapers, film gave way to electronic images
during this period. New management, led by editor Douglas Clifton,
began using photos without letting words get in the way. “The
newspaper was very dense, very type heavy. It did not seem to
value the visual side of storytelling,’’ says Clifton,
who came three years ago from the Miami Herald. “It was not
a matter of hiring eighteen hotshots. What we did was awaken the
talent we had.’’ Clifton redesigned the paper. He hired
an assistant managing editor exclusively for visuals, David Kordalski,
who supervises a staff that includes thirty photographers, picture
editors, and technicians.
Plain Dealer photographers generate visual essays and multi-part series to which writers might or might not contribute. Reporters sometimes tighten stories to make room for more or bigger photographs. Occasionally, photos run but not the story initially assigned. Weekend stories can include eight or more images; Sunday magazine essays still more. In this new climate, reporters have heard lectures on the difference between ‘‘informational’’ and ‘‘intimate’’ pictures. “Talking head’’ photos are discouraged, as are reporters who refer to the person with the camera as “my’’ photographer.
“It was tough for the reporters who think they’re the real journalists in the paper,” says Connie Schultz, a feature writer who collaborates closely with photographers on lengthy series.
At the Plain Dealer, photographers are assigned according to their strengths. For Mike Levy it means plenty of time between daily assignments to comb the neighborhoods, and even the sky, for the views he wants to recreate. “It’s such a great situation,’’ he says. “Every day I wake up and I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this.’’
Photographs became a fixture of American newspapers in the 1920s. At first, they were studio portraits, often hand-tinted to look decorative. During Prohibition, photographers outfitted with big box cameras were dispatched late at night to catch gangland violence. “They had no journalism training,” says Kenny Irby, a photographer and visual group leader with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “They came from the service department and someone from the newsroom told them what they wanted.’’
The documentary style that found its way into picture magazines during the Depression largely missed newspapers, which stuck to single images. Irby says even the legendary newspaper photos of World War II caught decisive moments, but did not aim to tell a broader story. By the 1950s, a few regional papers in the South began to run photo pages documenting the early civil rights movement. Others followed, but Irby says newspapers continued to use pictures largely to amplify words.
In the early 1980s, when newspapers were both prosperous and in the mood to experiment, photography finally began to gain recognition as a mode of storytelling in daily journalism. The Detroit Free Press and other heartland papers published picture stories. The Associated Press introduced computer picture transmission, which allowed news editors to quickly view a variety of photographs. Newspapers invested in better cameras and long lenses. They distributed them to photographers increasingly coming out of journalism and art schools.
Among them was Mike Levy, who graduated in 1982 from Ohio University with a bachelor’s in fine arts in visual communication. A native of the Cleveland suburb of University Heights, he had made money taking pictures since high school, when his father, who worked in public relations, paid him to take portraits of potato chip industry executives. Levy also shot sports for The Associated Press. He expected to pursue sports photography until learning in college about Dorothea Lang, Walker Evans, and Lewis Hines. He was moved by how powerfully the camera captured humanity.
He worked for the Olathe (Kansas) Daily News and several other small papers before moving on to Phoenix and Seattle. But Levy always felt most comfortable in Cleveland.
By the 1990s, the national enthusiasm for photographic reporting had cooled, replaced by attention to the bottom line and a preoccupation with the new color presses and packaging.
“That was the trend nationally, and we felt it in Cleveland,’’ Levy says. “We had this brand new toy, these color presses. We had to show it to the world and lost sight of what’s important.’’
At the Plain Dealer a visual technology editor, David Petkiewicz, was brought in as a liaison between the photographers and the production team. Details down to the amount of ink laid on the page were carefully checked. New digital cameras provided greater color range. Technical staff people were taught why they needed to work hard on a difficult picture to bring out the nuances the photographer intended.
Earlier this year, digital cameras replaced traditional cameras altogether, allowing photographers to quickly transmit work from the field on the laptop computers.
The filmless world appeals to Levy, who like many photographers appreciates the autonomy it brings. He has one of the rare jobs in newspapers. Irby says that in spite of the strides made twenty years ago, newspapers, largely corporate-owned and rigid, do not free up photographers to go out and look for stories. “There’s a small minority out there I can count with two hands that uses photography for more than informational purposes,’’ he says. “There are so few opportunities right now.’’
There was no apparent reason to turn in at the public housing project off Woodlawn, on Cleveland’s east side. No story per se. Levy simply wanted to photograph the steeple of St. Edward’s Church poking over the vinyl-sided apartments. He walked into a field and quietly dispatched his task, catching two worlds that nearly touch and yet seem to have nothing to do with one another.
Many of Levy’s images are about Cleveland’s new layers pressing against its older ones. He shows the community the buildings they might have forgotten about and neighborhoods they might never have never seen. He is concerned about the interplay between spiritual beliefs and material wants. His photographs show this, and so do his tattoos. One design is a snake wrapped around a coy fish. The fish, he explains, is swimming toward enlightenment, which the snake is disrupting. He rarely conceals his arms.
“The attitude today seems to be ‘I’ve got mine, I’ve got mine.’ It’s very selfish,’’ he says. “These photographs, particularly the ones that involve sacred landmarks, show the spiritual world, believing in something larger than yourself.’’ He can identify not only Cleveland’s churches but also many of its endless string of storefront ministries. In one essay, he shows all of this by night; in another he documents sacred buildings by placing them somewhere in the frame of a busy urban scene, rarely in the center and never by themselves. “These are more than pretty pictures,’’ says the Plain Dealer’s photography director, Bill Gugliotta. “It is almost like looking at an abstract painting.’’
Other times, Levy is like an old-time documentary photographer, telling the story for a year of the homeless man he saw sleeping in the same alley week after week. Levy takes pictures he is interested in while on unrelated assignments and archives them in his computer. When he gets enough images, sometimes after years, he begins to consider them as an essay or story. On long projects, he updates editors on his progress. They don’t always get it immediately.
This is clearly the case with Levy’s September 11 idea. Since Cleveland has no physical scars from the terrorist attacks, Levy is searching for a conceptual story. Airplanes, he says, once largely ignored, seem scarier in the past year. Gugliotta couldn’t see how this would work as a picture story. “But I know Mike,” he says, “and if he’s interested, he’ll make a pictures that will knock you out.’’
Levy’s dedication made a reporter, Connie Schultz, nervous
when she was asked to write a story recently to go with Levy’s
photographs of a neighborhood adjoining the LTV steel plant after
it had declared bankruptcy. “We just drove and drove around
the neighborhood he shot so I could get a feel for it,’’
says Schultz. “I had to live up to the quality of the photographs,
and that’s scary for a writer."
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
