McCall’s photography more than a pretty picture

[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”17″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_imagebrowser” ajax_pagination=”0″ order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]Robert McCall will tell you right away that he does not do weddings, portraits or commissions.
“I didn’t have to sell out,” he says. “I could make money other ways.”
Before he settled on hanging wallpaper for a living, he tried making money with his camera. For a couple years he took photos that were made into wall murals. He co-founded a fashion photography business. And he worked undercover for a law firm before realizing that he “wasn’t very good at taking photographs of stuff I didn’t like to photograph.”
That, he said, was when he decided to concentrate solely on “fine art” photography.
Although he has never made a living from his photography, his work in the medium is much more than an avocation. For nearly 50 years McCall has used his art not only as a diary, but also as a lens through which he views different aspects of his life: relationships, ideas and experiences.
He is truly a photographer who takes pictures to discover what the world looks like.
Born in Minneapolis in 1946, McCall says that he began “fooling around” with a Brownie camera at age 10, but didn’t feel the photography bug’s bite until he was in his mid-teens.
That was in the early 1960s, when his dad, Robert Sr., purchased an Olympus-Pen half-frame camera for his own use and allowed his son to experiment with it. Small and easy to carry around, it was perfect for a young man just starting to taste the freedoms – and responsibilities – of adulthood.
“I remember taking photographs with it and trying to have some meaning to it,” he says.
His first attempt at creating a meaningful composition was a still life of a pop bottle. He still has a print of that one. At the time he was a college student working part time at a gas station, where he photographed an acid green bottle of Kick soda pop on a jet black desktop.
“I thought it was cool,” he chuckles.
“It was in Ektachrome,” he says, referring to a type of color transparency film, the kind used for slides. Made for amateur use, it was simpler and cheaper to process than Kodachrome, the superior color and longevity of which were immortalized in Paul Simon’s 1973 ode to the jaded reminiscences of young adulthood.
“It wasn’t until I started shooting in the Army that I realized what Kodachrome was,” McCall says.
Shooting film, that is.
His life took a turn in 1965 when McCall got a letter from the draft board requiring him to report for a physical, after which he immediately registered for college at the University of Minnesota. He was granted a deferment.
That their only child was furthering his education made his parents happy; McCall, who chose school over soldiering, was of a different mind.
“I didn’t like school. Didn’t like it since third grade.”
His college career kept McCall out of the Army for only a couple years. When he withdrew from a class that he was failing, his credit load fell below the 12 hours required for his deferment.
“I ended up in the service on April 15, 1969. The April draft in 1969 was the largest draft ever.”
It was also the year McCall began to consider himself a professional photographer. When asked during basic training what his dream job in the military would be, McCall said, “I want to do photography.”
“You’ll get it,” he was told.
McCall began his photo career as a lab technician at Fort McArthur in San Pedro, California. He soon graduated from developing film and “souping” prints, to being given a camera and told to “go out and take whatever you want” to learn how to use it.
McCall ended up taking photos of ceremonies, Army basketball games and head shots of the brass. He was never sent overseas; his orders for Vietnam were discovered behind a file cabinet in the personnel office when McCall was four months away from his discharge date. “The guy from the office said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve got less than a year left; you can’t go. We took care of it,’” McCall says.
After his discharge, he returned to Minnesota where he worked for a company called Pandora Productions, taking photos that were enlarged to wall-sized murals. One of the company’s owners, artist David Nordahl, became a life-long friend. (Nordahl later became pop star Michael Jackson’s personal portrait painter.)
A 1972 photo by McCall shows a wild-haired Nordahl with a skeptical gleam in his eye, standing with his girlfriend in front of a gigantic earth-moving machine. The picture fairly sums up what young adults in the Midwest looked like and did for fun back in the day.
A couple years later McCall worked with a designer to create window displays for “the largest wallpaper company in St. Paul.” He eventually took up the paper hanger’s brush himself to work as an independent contractor – first in Minnesota and, after his move here in 1989, in Vero Beach.
In January 1982 McCall had his first solo photography show in Minneapolis, in a restaurant in the Hennepin Center for the Arts. The exhibition opened on one of the coldest nights in Minnesota history. Of the 100 people who had RSVP’d for the event, only about 30 showed up. Nevertheless, the show remained on display for a month, during which time several prints were sold from it.
At that time McCall was photographing the South Dakota landscape as well as landscapes in northern Minnesota near Lake Superior. When he found a darkroom he could borrow or rent, he printed his black-and-white images himself. When he couldn’t, he kept on shooting roll film.
In 1998, McCall’s first solo show in Vero Beach inaugurated a Royal Palm Pointe gallery owned by photographer David Bazinet. In more recent years McCall has exhibited in the Vero Beach Art Club’s annual Art by the Sea Exhibition at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The museum’s then-director Lucinda Gedeon bought one of McCall’s ocean abstracts from the show in 2007.
No matter how personal the subject, McCall has one unalterable rule.
“Whatever I take pictures of, it has to be more than a pretty picture. It has to have something interesting about it. I’ve always had that.”