TH: Could share some of your impressions of Ansel Adams? What was he like, and how did you come to be his assistant?

JS: Ansel was a down-to-earth guy. He loved to be around photographers -- young and old. He found it stimulating to be around people who enjoyed photography and other creative outlets like music and painting, and really any thoughtful people. Edwin Land (inventor of Polaroid instant films) was one of his best friends.

I met Ansel in 1973, when I was a student at a two-week-long workshop in Yosemite. At that time I was a photography major in college. My primary course of study was industrial or advertising. In intended to graduate, then work in a corporate environment or an aerospace company. But when I went to Ansel's workshop, I gained a feeling -- not just from Ansel but also from the other dedicated individuals that he had on his faculty there -- that they all loved photography. They pursued it with great professionalism, but they obviously were in love with the process and the magic that exists within it. It was at that workshop that I decided I wanted to learn to do black & white the way I saw Ansel and others on the staff there doing black & white. Their prints were amazing. It was also then that I decided to try and somehow find a way to do photography for myself, rather than on commercial assignment. That workshop changed my photographic life. A year later I went back as an assistant at an Ansel Adams Gallery workshop. My job was cleaning the darkroom floors -- literally. I also signed up as a student for a workshop with Paul Caponigro and Wynn Bullock and a number of other people who were instructing it.

In 1975, I got to go back as an assistant at Ansel's workshop. In '75 they started doing two workshops each year, back to back, and I did both of them. I didn't miss an Ansel Adams workshop as either Ansel's assistant, a director, or an instructor until they stopped doing them -- and that was actually after Ansel died. As far as I know there are only two people who have been to more Ansel Adams workshops than me: Ansel and Virginia Adams. I did around 22 of them.

Being an assistant, I began to communicate with Ansel on a more regular basis. I went back every six months with a new box of prints. I'd make an appointment and come show Ansel my photographs and he would comment on them and offer suggestions of ways to improve them. Then I'd go back home and work on those prints and make new negatives.

Then, in 1978, Alan Ross, an excellent photographer who had been Ansel's assistant, was moving up to be instructor of the workshops. Ansel needed someone to work as his assistant, just during the workshop, and he asked me if I wanted to do it. I said, ÒSure!"

The following year, Alan moved to San Francisco to open a studio and Ansel asked me to move up from Southern California and work for him. At that point, he was just beginning to work on the book The Negative, and he asked me if I would conduct all the tests and such.

I worked there full-time for about three-and-a-half years, until late 1982. Then I decided to go on and do my own photography. When I went to work for Ansel, he said, ÒWe'll both know when it's time for you to move on -- you can't be my assistant forever. You can't be anyone's assistant forever."

He kept me on as a consultant, which meant I kept doing projects for the Ansel Adams Trust until about a year-and-a-half or two years ago, just kind of overseeing projects. Things have sort of shifted -- there's no activity at the house any longer. Ansel's wife, Virginia, died just a few months ago at the age of 96. So I really don't do much at all with the trust these days.

Ansel demanded a lot of those around him, but he didn't demand any more than he demanded of himself. And he had a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor. That's the one thing that books and videos fail at conveying effectively. I think the sense of humor, unless you're live and in person, if very difficult to convey. He was just a funny guy, and he used that sense of humor as a release and relief from the intensity with which he approached his projects.

One of my fondest memories of Ansel was something that happened around 1981. He had been in the darkroom working on a negative he had made 50 years before. He had printed it many times previously and it had been reproduced in a variety of books. He was working on a set of prints called ÒThe Museum Set," and of course he printed all his own negatives for exhibition purposes. (Along with Ansel's other photographic assistants over the years, I souped film, made contact prints, and made prints for reproduction under Ansel's supervision. We made work prints from new negatives. He'd guide us, and if Ansel wanted to carry it on further he would then take our foundation and go on from there.)

Anyway, he was in there struggling with this negative, by himself, and he'd been out to the cupboard for two or three different kinds of paper. I don't remember how many hours he worked on it, it might have even been the second day he was working on it, he came out and said, ÒI finally got the print I wanted when I made the negative." The negative had been made in 1932! Ansel was beaming!

That excitement, that inspiration, meant so much to me because here's somebody who is at a point in his life -- he's about 80 years of age, he's been doing photography for many years, but he still found the excitement when the creative struggle led to a satisfying experience. I still look back on that day. He was so excited by that print, which he really struggled with. In his mind it was the best print he had ever made of that negative. I really felt reaffirmed that photography was something that could be a lasting and rewarding experience. I don't think it's just photography, it is the entire creative process. It's being involved in something that is exciting to you. For me these days, and for the last 26 or 27 years, it has been photography. When it's going well, it's exciting. It really is fun.

I still remember the magic I found in the darkroom when I first saw a print made. It's not like every sheet of paper is magic anymore, but when you get one that you really want, it really is magic. Somehow it's far more amazing to me than waiting for an inkjet print to churn out the other end of the machine or watching that little wristwatch on Photoshop. I mean, they're great tools, don't get me wrong, but there's just something about experiencing photography in the darkroom, agitiating the prints, crafting an image, that's different from working on a computer.

TH: Let's talk about Places of Power. How does one go about dialing up NASA and saying, ÒHi, I was wondering if I could have complete access to the Space Shuttle inside and out?" It's something I think the average photographer couldn't imagine doing. How did you get that whole thing going, and who was that first call to?

JS: Well, the first calls were to a lot of the wrong people. I got the idea in March of 1990, driving home from the first day of photographing Hoover Dam. I was sitting at a traffic signal and asking myself why I was photographing ancient Anasazi sites. That one made sense to me. They're in a landscape. I started that in 1987.

I started photographing power plants in the same year, when I was looking for a field-trip location for a workshop. I wanted to challenge them both aesthetically and technically. When I arrived in Wisconsin to scout for the workshop location, I called a former student and asked him about the possibility of bringing the class to a power plant he managed. He said yes.

I didn't really want to photograph the power plant because it looked so beautiful, but at the same time it had this kind of antithetical aspect to what I thought my photography of the landscape was about.

Then I had to go to a trade show in Las Vegas in 1990. I had a day off and I thought, what am I going to do? I could go out to Valley of Fire, I could go to Red Rock Canyon . . . then I thought, geez, I bet there's some really neat stuff at Hoover Dam. I'd never been in Hoover Dam, so I contacted them and sent them some power-plant pictures.They said I could come and look around and take what they call a Ònooks and crannies tour." It was amazing! I photographed during the day, I photographed at night, then I was driving back to my hotel in Las Vegas and I was thinking, ÒWowee, what a great day of photography! Why is it so great? Why am I making these pictures now?"

Then I realized that the thread of continuity in my mind was that these things -- the Anasazi site and the power plants -- were things that were engineered and crafted by human beings, and spanned a thousand years of human history. To complete the series, I felt that I needed something that created a connection between this work and the future. As I was sitting at that traffic light in March 1990, I decided that the logical choice for those images had to be photographs of the Space Shuttle. I made my first exposure of the first Space Shuttle three years later. I didn't spend every day of those three years on the phone or writing letters, but I spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to figure out how to get permission to photograph at NASA.

I started in Washington, because it had seemed like a good place -- headquarters, right? It was not like trying to pull strings, it's just that's where I knew NASA was, it's part of the government. And I ended up, on someone's good advice, with a NASA arts person. And they were quite non-responsive. I later learned that they were not favorably disposed to photography as an art form. I didn't know this. I wasn't getting any response. I wasn't getting yes, I wasn't getting no -- I was just getting nowhere. I even tried to employ the help of friends of mine who knew people in government at various different levels. I showed them the pictures, and they wrote letters on my behalf. Finally, a fellow who worked for Rockwell International -- the company that built the Space Shuttle -- took one of my workshops, and he put me in touch with a fellow at the Houston Space Center, who then put me in touch with somebody in Washington, who then tried to put me in touch with somebody at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At that point I was going to do a workshop in Florida, and part of my ulterior motive for doing the workshop at the Palm Beach workshop place was to get to Florida to try and photograph the Space Shuttle. To make a long story short, with the help of Bob Schneider from Rockwell and Al Bowing from NASA I was able to get to the right people at Kennedy and I called to arrange a visit.

The first time I went to Kennedy they didn't know who I was or what I was about, but they were willing to at least listen to me. And what I was trying to explain to them was that I wanted to photograph the shuttle in a way that I did not think it had been photographed before: as a piece of functional sculpture -- as a piece of artwork. From what I had seen of the space shuttle it looked very beautiful to me. It was very difficult to explain what I wanted to do, because all I had was images in my mind. A lot of those images evaporated very quickly, because I thought I would find this spacecraft in an open hangar type of building, just kind of sitting there, if it wasn't out on the launch pad. Well, I found out that it's completely encumbered in apparatus continuously and all sorts of things like that. Normally, NASA does not work with individuals on what you would call a freelance basis. In fact, I had even gotten a letter from my publisher, Little Brown, saying that I was working on this project, trying to establish that this was not some weekend-hobby type of thing. It's not as though there is anything secret there but, of course, there is a considerable commitment of resources on their part. I'm never alone at the Kennedy Space Center, I have an escort all of the time, and that requires manpower and money. The public-affairs people have been exceedingly gracious.

Once when I was at Kennedy they had a TV crew there all day, and they really were short-handed. They sat me down and said, here is the photography library, you can look at these things. I just sat there and looked and made notes; I pored through loose-leaf binders of hundreds of space-shuttle pictures. I'd write down the locations. Every once in awhile someone would drift by, and I don't think they really said this but the impression was, ÒOh, you're still here." They were hoping I would just disappear. Finally, a fellow named Manny Veratta, with whom I've spent countless hours since, came by about lunchtime and said, ÒYou just want to look around, right?"

ÒI'd love to look around."

ÒYou don't want to take pictures this trip, do you?"

ÒWell, if I see something I've got my camera with me."

ÒWell, we're really busy, but let's go get a bite to eat at the cafeteria and we'll talk about things."

He took me around that afternoon, then he had other commitments, so they handed me off to another public-affairs person and we went into what I now know is an orbiter processing facility. That's where I met my first Space Shuttle. I was really nervous that I wouldn't have a reaction, that it would just be a bucket of bolts. I remember looking up above my head and I couldn't even see the spacecraft, there's just all these tubes and workstands and scaffolds and stuff.

All of a sudden I look up and I see the distinctive mosaic kind of pattern of the tiles -- and I realized that I'm standing right underneath the orbiter Endeavor. I could feel my heart start to pound and I knew in that instant that the project was valid. That there were pictures there to be made, because I really felt an attraction to this. That's when I made my first picture, which happens to be in the book -- it's a photograph of landing gear. And then I think I did a tile detail, that's in the book as well. So that was in March. I came back a few weeks later to try and photograph a launch, but I didn't even get to see the launch -- it was aborted. I only did that because I had another trip that took me to the east coast. My objective was never to get a launch picture. I've tried twice, and I did get to see one launch, which was memorable, but I have zero launch pictures.

So I achieved my objective. I wanted to just photograph the pure aesthetic of the shuttle. But I came back with some work prints of the pictures I had made the first time, and I left them with one of the fellows there. The next morning I came back in and was told to go to somebody's office that morning to check in and find whoever's going to escort me, and as I'm walking down the hallway . . . I was not trying to eavesdrop, but I could hear a conversation that obviously was about me or my pictures, in this open office I'm heading to. There were two people in there from NASA looking at the pictures, and the one guys says, ÒHe really is photographing this in a different way." And that really meant the world to me -- that these guys would see this. That was what I was trying to explain to them!

They've been just terrific. I've spent 13 weeks there since March of 1990. Some people ask, is NASA paying you to make the pictures? Well, I wish! It's all my expense, which is fine. This is not a commercial assignment, it's a personal assignment -- and I'm not done yet.

TH: I was actually a full-time photographer at NASA for a year and a half and they didn't pay me either -- at least not very much.

JS: Another thing, and you might appreciate this better than many people can, people ask me, ÒWell, doesn't NASA have pictures like this?" I say, ÒI know a still photographer and a videographer under contract to NASA; they work for a subcontractor. But their full-time deal is to service and provide imagery for NASA Public Affairs. They are not government employees, they are contractors. These guys work so hard -- the still photographer is a superb photographer, he's really good, and the videographer is super good as well, and I watched them. They photograph some particular activity or operation, and the next thing they're running to their van because they've got to go across the Center and photograph the Center Director visiting with a senator or something like that -- doing grip-and-grin pictures. Then they're off to the next assignment, and then they drop their film at the lab (they have quite a photography lab at the Kennedy Space Center). Then the pictures are being edited and they're on the web that afternoon -- and they're public domain, too.

TH: And they don't credit you either.

JS: Exactly. They can be used over and over and over again. These guys are really good, but they don't have time -- they would love to have the luxury of time that I'm able to take. I'm sure if they had that and desired to do so, they could do photographs that would be really good pictures, because they're really good photographers.

It was really hard to get permission and try and convince the people at NASA of what I was trying to do because they're continually bombarded with photographers on assignment both still, and probably more often than that, video and motion picture. They're all working on one aspect or another of the space program, many of them from overseas, and of course there are only so many people that can service the various demands. I can't offer anything but the nicest comments about the people at the Kennedy Space Center.

TH: Was it more difficult to get permission to photograph inside the Shuttle?

JS: That was a tough one. When I'm inside the Space Shuttle photographing, it impacts a lot of people's work; and it's always a situation where, from the top down at Kennedy Space Center, they're aware that a photographer is in the Space Shuttle photographing. I've been on board all four orbiters more than once, and some of them I spent quite a few hours on board. It's a thrill. It was exciting the very first time and it is still a thrill every time I am on board.

TH: Are you still working on Places of Power?

JS: No, Places of Power as a project is done. But I'll continue to explore the magic and the mystery of the Anasazi. And there are specific pictures in my mind I want to make at the Kennedy Space Center, and my plan at the present time is, in two years, to do a book of all space-shuttle photos. It will include a number of pictures from this one, but it will probably be fifty pictures of just the shuttle and shuttle-related things. Just because in the 22 or so shuttle pictures in the book, I couldn't tell everything that I wanted to show. It's a magic machine and I'm anxious to get back and go back to work on that project. I still have pictures I want to make.

TH: Any other projects that have caught your interest?

JS: I still love photographing landscapes, and I will continue to do so. I'd love to do another book of landscape pictures. I just want to make pictures and get caught up on things. I want to make new negatives and print new negatives.

TH: I'm curious about any photographers whom you find inspiring or interesting -- current or historical.

JS: In the historic vein, Ansel is a big influence. I have been influenced by Wynn Bullock and the mystery that he conveyed in his photographs. I also like the graphic expression of Brett Weston's photographs. Those are still photographs that give me goose bumps sometimes when I see the original prints. I've got a Paul Caponigro on the wall (I'm looking at it right now) that I bought at a workshop in 1974 for a hundred bucks, which was fifty bucks more than I had. I had to borrow fifty from my photography instructor. And I've looked at that picture for 26 years and it's still a magic picture. So those are some photographers that worked a while ago, and of course, Paul is still working today. I think Jerry Uelsmann's photographs are very exciting. I really like Jerry's work. I like the sense of humor in many of them, I like the surrealistic quality, and I also have the highest respect for the precision and the technical expertise in the way he has combined these images for decades and makes it look so easy.

TH: Do you have any other tips, or one gem you think you could share with the readers -- something that you think might make their life easier in the darkroom.

JS: I'll start on the other side of things, and then see if I can think of a darkroom thing. Now, I think this is really good advice. I mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it because it was just in passing. I always try to make two identical exposures. Whether that's with sheet film or a roll of 120. I think of it as six pictures. There are times when the picture just disappears, and there's no sense exposing a piece of film if the picture isn't there, but so many times I've screwed up a negative -- I've accidentally scratched it or dinged it going in and out of a negative carrier, or with sheet film I've had some sort of problem in processing -- that it has been a godsend. I've got a few pictures because I had the second negative. That's for working in the field.

In a general sense, in the darkroom, I think it's important, and I try and use these words: "Listen to the materials." And by that I am not trying to be metaphysical. To me, listening involves more than your ears -- it involves being receptive. When I look at a print in the darkroom, I ask the question, ÒIs this achieving what I want?" If not, what is missing? Then I try and take those steps to reach that goal. And always taking steps that are synchronized with what the photographic material wants to do. I try and think like film, I try and think like paper and that sort of drives my decision making process in terms of exposure and contrast, and dodging and burning when necessary, or whatever procedures. Not in a metaphysical way, but just trying to realize that I'm not there to argue with the paper, I'm there to converse with the paper. And if we have a good conversation, we're both going to end up happy. I'm going to end up with the print I want and the photographic paper is going to be happy to give that to me. That being said, sometimes what I want does not exist in the negative. And there's nothing I can do in ÒconversationÓ to make that magically appear. So I have to buffer that with that objectivity. That's kind of little more general than the specific tips, but maybe that would be something that could be helpful to your readers.