For over 27 years John Sexton has devoted himself to the study and advancement of photography. While pursuing a course of study that placed him squarely on track for a career in commercial or industrial photography, Sexton had a life-changing experience. In the early 1970s he attended a session of the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshops. During his studies there he was exposed to people who were passionate about doing photography as a personal statement, not just as an assignment-based career.

In 1975 Sexton was invited back to the Ansel Adams Workshops as an assistant. Sexton's job was to clean the floors and work in other menial capacities. Still, he continued to be drawn to the energy and mastery of the dedicated photographers he found at the workshops.

Three years later Sexton got the call that set him squarely on the path that his life would follow. Ansel's assistant at the time, Alan Ross, was "moved up" to instructor for the workshops; this left open a position as Ansel's personal assistant during the workshops. A year later, when Ross left to work in San Francisco, Adams asked John to move up from Southern California to work with him full-time.

As photographic and technical assistant to Adams, Sexton conducted the tests used for new editions of Adams's books The Print and The Negative. For three-and-a-half years Sexton continued to work full-time as Ansel's assistant; then in 1982 he decided it was time to pursue his own photography.

Since setting out on his own career, Sexton has proved himself in the area of fine large-format photography. In addition to conducting a plethora of popular workshops each year, Sexton has produced several books of his own work. His first two books, Quiet Light and Listen to the Trees, achieved great critical and popular success, and his latest outing, Places of Power: The Aesthetics of Technology, promises to expand his reputation even further. Although some will see this new book as a departure, it is firmly rooted in the west-coast tradition of beautifully crafted black-and-white photography.

I had the opportunity to speak with Sexton about that new book, the state of photography, and a great many other things both photographic and philosophical. -- Thomas Harrop

TH: How often are you able to get behind the camera these days?

JS: Every day would be nice. I wish it was every day; I suppose I might get burned out . . . but certainly there are only a handful of days in any given year when I am not doing something photographic. In the darkroom or behind the camera -- it is a balance between those two.

[distantly] Sometimes I wish that I was a color photographer who worked in transparency materials. When I get home I'd send it off to some great color lab, then wait anxiously for the transparencies to come back, then reproduce from them. I only feel that way when I'm buried up to my eyeballs in the darkroom. I see myself as a professional, and my definition of a professional is that you have to do a really good job even on a really bad day. You want your doctor to be really professional [laughs]. You don't want to see their work suffer just because they are having problems with their family or something. I think it is the same thing with photography. There are some days I don't want to go in the darkroom to make a print to fullfill a committment. I would much rather go in and play with a brand-new negative, but I can't because I have to pay the bills and deliver the (probably overdue) print at that point. But on those occasions when I look at the ground glass, or the viewfinder of a smaller format camera, or turn on the white lights , anxiously holding a piece of film against the light, or look at a freshly squeegeed print and see something exciting, that's what brings me back.

TH: What keeps you excited with photography and interested in your work?

JS: Brett Weston used to say that photography is 90% sheer brutal drudgery and 10% inspiration. (Edison's idea seems to apply to every endeavor.) But it's that 10% -- it's that excitement that probably occurs in nearly every beginning photo student. Certainly in the conversations we've had over the years, when you were at Darkroom Photography and later Camera & Darkroom you had that excitement. It's that 10% that I tell my workshop students keeps us coming back. You have to pay the 90% hoping for the 10%.

What would be nice is if for every 9 hours you put in you got that 10th hour of inspiration automatically. Sometimes it seems like 999 hours of stuff going wrong and long dry spells between the inspiration and the excitement, whether behind the camera or in the darkroom.

TH: Where have you been photographing recently?

JS: In May I was in the Southwest and, after a workshop, I spent 10 days making the last of the pictures for the book. I made five during that week-long period. And then I made four others for the book in late March or early April. That's when I went to Kennedy Space Center the last time for the book. Each time I get out to photograph there has been a period of idle time. If I'm teaching workshops and I go out and do a demo on the view camera or the zone system, that kind of gets me back in practice, but there's nothing like really getting out and photographing as if your life depended on it.

It usually takes a few days to get back into the swing of things. You know, you put the wrong lens on the camera or you kick the tripod leg or you stupidly forget to close the shutter and you pull the dark slide -- things that once you're in practice you would hardly ever do. It takes a few days to get the cobwebs out and really get to the point where you are functioning. That's the way it pretty much works these days. I'm in the darkroom a lot now. Right now I am relaxing from the darkroom because every day I've been home this entire year I was either at my computer writing, reviewing material for the book or printing. The last print for the book was made the night before we left for the press check. I hand-carried it down to be scanned when we got there. Give me another week and I would have tried to reprint something else [laughs].

TH: What inspires you most? If you had a day to go out and photograph, is there something more than anything else that you would love to go out and do?

JS: Well, for the last few years it has been Anasazi sites in the Southwest. They are probably the most challenging subject and the one that I have the worst batting average with. If somebody asked, ÒWhat do you want to photograph today?" I wouldn't mind getting on a plane and going to Florida and working with the shuttle. I've got a bunch of pictures in my mind that I still want to make there and that I plan to make.

I am also looking forward to going to Anderson Ranch in a few weeks, where I have the luxury of teaching a 2-week long workshop at Snowmass Village. That workshop also gives me the opportunity to have a weekend to play -- and my idea of playing will be out photographing. I may have one day after the workshop is over to play, but normally, if it wasn't ÒThe Year of The Book," I would stay another week, and, in many instances, a number of weeks, before I'd come back home. I'd use that as the vehicle to get me away from home. I can teach the workshop, then stay out enjoying the landscape, making pictures in places I have worked before, but also looking for new nooks and crannies that I've been meaning to explore or perhaps things I've never seen. Then bringing the negatives home, souping the film and trying to find the time to make prints. Time, I think, is the biggest enemy of most people's lives.

There's always more that could be done if there were more time, or so one imagines. That being said, it's not as though I have a huge backlog of negatives. I think I print my best work, but there are some negatives that I could get more from given a little more darkroom time.c

TH: Do you edit your own negatives, or do you have someone you trust to go through them with you when you get back from a big photo trip? How do you decide what to print?

JS: My girlfriend, Anna Larsen, is an excellent photographer. We look at each other's work and comment on it objectively. Sometimes I can have something I'm really excited about and she'll say, ÒWell, that's not really working." Generally she's right, because she offers a greater level of objectivity. Once you're invested in the image, you lose objectivity. I soup all my own film, and Anna and I help each other with contact sheets. It's fun to see that first step in getting the negative onto paper, to study them and figure out which ones are at the top of the heap, which ones I want to do first.

Very often I have favorites. There will be two or three that felt like they were the most exciting, and they're the biggest disappointments if they don't work on the film. And there are the ones where you say, ÒOh, yes! I got it!" I put a loupe on those right away and make sure they're sharp. It's distressing when I botch up somehow. Maybe there's a cable release hanging down in the middle of the picture. Twice! Y'know, I normally like to make two identical exposures if it's possible -- in case I screw something up, but sometimes I've screwed things up identically on both negatives!

I like to go back through contact sheets when time permits -- it's not as though I spend days looking at contact sheets, I just look at them and file them away. Every once in a while I go back and find things that I overlooked that might have some promise that I want to play with.

TH: What kind of equipment do you use, anything other than 4x5?

JS: For 99.9% of my work I use 4x5. When I was first forced to use a 4x5 as a photography major in college I hated it! I thought it was a really stupid format. It was very inconvenient and awkward and I didn't like that upside-down and reversed image on the ground glass. I just wanted to get through the classes where I had to use it and go back to using my Hassleblad. Somewhere along the line I got used to it. Now it's the format I feel most comfortable with. I also have an 8x10 and a 5x7, but 99.9% of the work I do is 4x5. I've owned 2-1/4 cameras and I've liked them for certain things. I own a 35mm, but the last time it was off the copy stand is years ago.

The one exception to this has been some 2-1/4 work at the Kennedy Space Center with the Hassleblad ArcBody. I have used it for landscapes as well, but it seems to be most productive for me in shuttle photography. I start a long exposure with my 4x5 and then, because I get to use much wider apertures with the Hasselblad, I can get two exposures off with the 2-1/4 while I'm making an 8- or 10-minute exposure with the 4x5. I use the 35mm and the 45mm lenses and, at f/11, everything in the world is in focus.

A couple of pictures in the book are with the Hassleblad ArcBody. It took a little while to get used to it. It's a cross between a Hassleblad and a little, tiny view camera. It's pretty fast once you get the feel for clicking the magazine off and putting the viewfinder on -- it's very light and compact. Hasselblad has been nice enough to loan that to me when I needed it. They have been very generous that way. There are a couple of images with the shuttle that would have been impossible with the 4x5 because of access or cramped space.

That being said, I just love my 4x5. It's the camera that feels the most comfortable to me. I've used the Linhoff Technika for 20 years. I bought my first Linhoff, used, for 400 bucks in 1980. I stripped it down and got rid of the rangefinder, which is just not a part of the way I use the camera. I was trying to get rid of weight and the bulk. Four or five years later I sold it to a friend, who still uses it. Then I bought a new Linhoff in Germany. I traded that one in about three years ago and bought an updated model, which I currently use. When I'm in the landscape that's the camera I use, and when I'm doing industrial subjects, like the space shuttle, I use the Linhoff Technikardan, which is a folding monorail camera. It's really great with super-wide angle lenses. The lensboards on the two cameras are interchangeable, which is very convenient.

TH: And what lenses do you use? Any specific ones that you prefer, or do you use whatever is appropriate for the shot?

JS: Whatever is appropriate. Then, if it doesn't turn out right, I just say, well, I didn't have the right lens. [laughs] For seven years, from 1973 to 1980, I only owned one lens. That was, as I like to say, Òthe best decision I never made." There wasn't anything in the wallet to buy a second lens. That was a 210mm Schneider Symmar lens and today, if I'm just making general-purpose pictures, that's the focal length I use most often.

In 1980, I sold that lens and I bought a Nikkor 210mm lens. I also bought a 120mm and a 300mm. So I tripled my lens selection. If you look in the back of Quiet Light or "Listen to the Trees, where pictures span a fair amount of time, you'll see the 210mm there a lot -- and every once in a while you see a 90mm in those years. That's a lens that I borrowed as a student, and later as an instructor, from school.

TH: Was that a 90mm super angulon?

JS: Yes. But today I use mostly Nikkor lenses, except for a 58mm Schneider, which is a superb lens, and a 450mm Fujinon which I've had since about 1983. I have a little tiny 200mm f/8 Nikkor (I think it weighs 4 ounces) which is a phenomenal lens. I can fold my Linhoff with the lens in place, it's that small. I didn't use all the coverage the big Schneider 210mm had, and 10mm of focal length is meaningless. You can't see the difference. I tested the Nikkor before I bought it, because I thought, maybe it's not so good; but I went out and did side-by-side pictures, then made 16x20 prints. It looked great.

I must say, though, that my Schneider 58mm is a super piece of glass. When I'm working on the space shuttle, that's the lens I use a lot. Almost everything on the space shuttle is wide because I'm usually either very close to the orbiter or I'm inside the orbiter -- it's very, very cramped quarters. I am often backed up against a bulkhead or something with the 58mm. Even with the Anasazi sites I often use wide lenses to exaggerate the scale of the objects -- which are pretty small. Industrial subjects are just made for wide lenses, especially when you are doing interiors.

TH: What film and paper do you currently use?

JS: I had an instructor in college who wrote four letters on the chalk board the first day of beginning photography: K-I-S-S. At the end of class he pointed to the letters on the chalk board and said this is all you need to know about photography: Keep It Simple, Stupid. It was very good advice from my instructor. To this day, though, I try and keep things fairly simple. For years I only used Tri-X. For the last 14 or 15 years, since a little before it was introduced, (because I was one of the people who consulted with Kodak on T-MAX films) I've used T-MAX 100. Occasionally, in low-light situations or in the case of a landscape when wind might causing camera movement, I use T-MAX 400. I'd say 70 to 80 per cent of what I do is T-MAX 100. Some people have trouble controlling that film; but again, based on the good advice of some of the instructors I had at Cypress College as a photography major, we were taught to process film very accurately, and one of the classes we took was Color Film Processing. We had to learn how to do transparencies and color negatives. Twice during the semester each student had to process the class's whole film run. So those people who weren't getting it as quickly as others got a lot of help from everybody who was, to make damn sure that the other people were Òwith itÓ when it was their turn to process. Everybody wanted to make sure everyone else was a success. Do you see what I mean? Because your film could be in that person's hands -- twice during the semester.

I remember the importance of timing and temperature being impressed upon us. I said to myself, ÒHey, if it matters for color, it probably matters for black-and-white." So I tried, in my home darkroom with the controls I had available (which weŽren't particularly sophisticated -- ice cubes, hot water, and stuff like that), I tried to control my black-and-white processing and improve it over the years. When T-MAX came along -- and it was a process-sensitive film -- to me it wasn't really an issue at all because I had already, for several years, tried to keep my process under control. If it's 8 minutes, I wasn't doing it 7:45 or 8:15. I mean, how hard is it to do it eight minutes? For years (when I was manually processing) I always put the thermometer in the tray of developer once I got into the stop, and then the first thing I looked at when I turned on the white lights was to see if my temperature drifted. I had arrived at methods to try and keep that temperature plus or minus a degree. And if it wasn't, I thought I'd done something wrong. I've used T-MAX 100 for a long time and it works very well for me. I know its ins and outs -- I've made a lot of good negatives with it -- in the process of learning it I've made a number of bad negatives. It just takes practice to learn a material.

I print everything on fiber-based paper. It's one vote that I know can somehow be counted. There's nothing wrong with resin-coated paper, but it's my desire to make sure that black-and-white fiber-based paper is available for as long as possible. So I'm going to spend every dollar on stuff that I want to use. I don't think there is a single sheet of resin-coated paper in my darkroom. I've used it over the years and it's much better than it used to be, but the only way I can tell any manufacturer -- whether it's Kodak or Ilford or Agfa -- that this stuff is important to me is to vote with dollars.

I have been using a lot of POLYMAX Fine Art over the last few years. I also use some Agfa Insignia paper, a little FortŽ warm tone and Oriental Seagull. Those are pretty much the four papers that I work with regularly. That's plenty for me. That's plenty of balls to juggle at one time. I have used thousands of sheets of them over the years, learning the idiosyncrasies of each paper. It takes a long time. A couple of years ago someone faxed me a description of a print. They wanted to send me some prints so I could tell him how to fix it. I said, ÒDon't send it to me until you've gone through a whole box of paper. Make prints on 50 sheets of paper. Don't do it all in one afternoon. Print a few sheets, then look at them the next day, then try some more. Then send it to me, because then maybe I can help you." I never heard from him again on the subject. My guess is that either he gave up after 15 sheets, which could have been the right answer, or perhaps he found the answer at 35 or 40 sheets.

A lot of people just move on to the next negative after two or three sheets if they don't have the print they want. Sometimes, that's the right answer. I've printed a box of paper and then later realized that there was nothing in the picture to begin with. It was just a foolish attachment on my part.

TH: I think that happens a lot. You're involved in some sort of experience that's really special, you make a photograph, and you want it to conv-ey that feeling that you had, and sometimes it's just not in there.

JS: I like to tell people jokingly, at workshops, that the ultimate photographic bit of knowledge is just a few words: ÒI wanted it that way." Because if somebody asks why is a picture this way or why did you do that, you can always say, ÒI wanted it that wayÓ. I always add that if have to explain too often that ÒI wanted it that way," either there's something missing in the picture or you ought to want it another way. You don't want people always asking you why it's out of focus or why it's too dark. Sometimes we have this attachment to the image, and the viewer with objectivity can cut right to the core and ask, Òwhy is 90 per cent of this picture irrelevant?"

It's probably because you were emotionally caught up in the experience, as you said. When we are successful and we make a picture that is exciting to others -- it's based on that experience. It's not based just on shutter speeds and f-stops and what sort of tricks you can pull in the darkroom. It's taking that experience and translating in a way that I think is magical. Photography is a mechanical process. Sometimes you make a picture that's exciting or you see one by another photographer that brings tears to your eyes or makes your heart beat faster or makes you want to get out behind the camera again, and that is the magic of photography. That's what photographers should be working toward.

When most of us start in photography that magic is easy to find. When I first got an enlarger, I thought my prints were great. But I didn't have a point of comparison -- I look at those same prints now, and of course, they are miserable. But I was excited by the process and thankfully I had good, generous teachers to guide them and give them a point of context and ask them the question, ÒWhy is it all out of focus?" (Well, IÊwanted it that way . . . )

If people have a little bit of guidance, and if they don't give up, then they can probably have a level of satisfaction and fulfillment and whatever they think is success in photography. It's just a matter of sticking with it and deciding what you want to do.