Ivan Massar’s Musings – Dietmar R. Winkler

A Short Biography

The many portfolios of his images present a professional photographer’s life-retrospective of a true love for people of all walks of life, the environment and disparate places and moods, and the conflicts engendered by the variety of human and inhumane conditions, from Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to the streets of Paris, from Pittsburgh’s steel mills to a misty morn on the Concord River.

Ivan Massar’s photographs are all conceived with great artistry of light, scale and composition, and in addition, have a powerful, emotional impact, which gives each image a timeless significance, beyond the actual moment or event. Massar grew up in a small town in Ohio, with an insatiable curiosity to travel and see the world. He served a stint as a U.S. Navy photographer, on the air craft carrier, Lexington, in the South Pacific, from 1943-1946, and supplied support photography for the landings at Iwo Jima, Guam, Saipan, and the Philippines.

Following the war, he returned to study at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, and then at the Academie Andre Lhote inParis, in 1949, where he found great delight in documenting Parisians at work and play.

On returning to the States, he was commissioned by Roy Stryker, the legendary head of the Farm Security Administration, to photograph the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the Masabi Iron Mines of Minnesota and the coal mines of West Virginia. Massar’s interest in world events led to his joining Martin Luther King’s march to Montgomery, accompanied by his young children, wife and mother in law.

As a photographer for Black Star, a world-class photo agency, he journeyed to Spain during the Franco dictatorship, and to Kenya, Nairobi, the Seychelles, and North Vietnam.

He has photographed many of the famous and infamous, from Mickey Mantle, Robert Frost, Martin Luther King and John Updike, to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi party. Massar’s photographs have been published in LIFE magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Time, Newsweek, Paris Match, Stern, Time-Life Books, Encyclopedia Britannica, among others, and in two books, The Illustrated World of Henry David Thoreau, and Take Up the Song, an illustrated collection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

His photographs also have been exhibited at many prestigious art institutions including the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and at the Nikon Gallery in New York.

The Ivan Massar I know

by Dietmar R. Winkler

A frequent design collaborator with Ivan Massar, Dietmar R. Winkler, during the sixties and seventies, recalls him as one of the most open-minded and caring professionals he encountered:

“Ivan lived a seamless life, in which the professional human was never separated or cut off from the private person. His philosophy was to not segregate himself from true life but to celebrate, honor what is good in humanity, but at the same time expose the callousness, arrogance and greediness of man’s destructive side.”He did not believe in and showed little patience with shallow manifestos or political rhetoric. “History shows”, he would say, “manifestos rarely survive. They do not weather very well. Somehow they are bound to epochs of specific ideological euphoria or romantic heroism, and are not necessarily tied to deep insight.” Instead, he believed in direct action, and like Mahatma Gandhi, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King in nonaggression and passive resistance to everything unethical. He believed that social issues can only be understood by those who are intrinsically linked to communal life and are living through the issues and conflicts that confront a society.

What are the incentives to take on causes that are not connected to the returns of the stock market? It is hard to save the whole world from an abstract desk at corporate headquarters. “Activists live their responsibilities.”

Ivan Massar, a Black Star photographer, marched with his family, children and elders with Martin Luther King on Montgomery, Alabama, pointing to the real injustices in society, and later participated in sailing from Japan to North Vietnam, in a humane rescue mission for the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who brought badly needed medicine to Hanoi. To be able to fund his participation in this symbolic mission, he had to mortgage his home, live through harrowing strafing attacks by American Air Force jets on the small, vulnerable sailing vessel. When he came home, he had to face the anger of his hawkish neighbors, who dumped loads of garbage on his front lawn.

Activists, he would say, do not sit behind desks, they are in the middle of the fracas, because, in the final analysis, when we strip everything back and get to the center of human concerns, we must realize that ethics are connected to each of the solutions to the complex social, environmental, and cultural survival issues. They are only put to the task when questions are raised: For whom is it what we are doing and for whom is it not, and why so clearly delineated, winner takes all? Who is included, excluded? Who does not have access to or benefits from the promise? Ethics are not elastic and they can not be legislated. One either exhibits ethical traits, lives by them or one shows that one is lacking them. If there can only be personal ethics, then there cannot be a business conscience. There can only be a personal conscience.

I could never see Ivan Massar attend an Ethics Conference, after which conclusion all join at a nice reception, shake hands and lift their glasses. For him, there would be something wrong with such picture. Instead, his ethics act locally, in efforts that translate into positive global affects.

A Life-long Affinity for People and Places:

By Ivan Massar

Anyway, growing up in Warren, Ohio, I’m part of a long line – a big family of seven of us around the dinner table. And when there are five children, part of a wonderful family, there’s always so much static, and so much noise . . . I really wanted to get out of Warren, Ohio, and travel and see the world.

And one of my trips to the library in Warren, I stumbled across a book by Richard Haliburton. He was a young writer from Memphis, who had gone to Princeton University, and he had decided to travel the world and write travel books and write about where he went, and why, and how.

So he wrote books like New Worlds to Conquer, and Seven League Boots. And I just savored those books. He climbed the Matterhorn and he swam in the Hellespont, a narrow, natural strait of a significant waterway in northwestern Turkey, and he swam in the pool of the Taj Majal at midnight. I didn’t necessarily want to do all those things, but I really wanted to see the world, and I wanted to get out of Warren. I wanted to get out of Ohio, maybe even out of the United States. So that was kind of my long range plan.

So that next summer in 1940, when I finished tenth grade – incidentally – my life has been made up of trips to different places – a lot of different places. I’ll talk about a few. And I realized I was the instigator. In almost every case, I found someone else to collaborate with me. In this case, it was George Stakehouse, who was a kid living in the next block. I used to walk down to school with him. And I knew George for years. And I said, “George, let’s go to the New York World’s Fair.” And it was 1939 when we first discussed this. And we’ll hitchhike. And so he said, Sure, but I have to ask my dad. His mother was dead. And his dad reluctantly agreed, if we’d be careful and so forth. So we saved our money, and when school was out, there in Warren, we hit the road, headed east to New York, and went to the New York World’s Fair. We went to Manhattan. Wow, what a city, with all those tall buildings. And we stayed at the Sloan House, the 34th Street YMCA. And I don’t know, it probably cost five dollars a night. I don’t know if it was that much. But there wasn’t much money in those days. And we went every day out to the Fair.

And we also – we discovered to ride the subway; the cost of a ride in New York was five cents, and you could ride as long as you wanted; to change we got on a different line. And we rode all over Greater New York City, out to the end of the Bronx, and out to the end of Brooklyn, and Queens. All for five cents. So we’d just get off the train and go back the other way. And that was some way to see New York. Come to think of it, the subways were all kinds of very similar, but we sure got our five cents worth on those trips.

But at the New York World’s Fair, it was out of Flushing Meadows, there in Queens, I think it is out in what is now LaGuardia Airport, and I saw my first television – a little television set – about four inches – maybe four or five inches square. And you could stand before a camera and see yourself on television. Boy, like a miracle.

And they also had a telephone you could talk into and listen to a playback, like everyone’s recording machine now, answering machine. There were a lot of miracles at the New York World’s Fair, all the things to come, and the things with automobiles, and new inventions. And I don’t remember many of them, now. But well, that was 65 years ago, wasn’t it?

At Patterson Field, Hal Roache, Major Hal Roache from Hollywood, was my boss. And he came by one day, and I was just bunching up cords all together, just around my arm. And he said, “Hey, kid, just a second, let me show you something. I’m going to show you this one time and I don’t want you to forget it for the rest of your life.” And I haven’t forgotten it for the rest of my life, how to put a cord around your arm, the same length each time, you end up with a nice, neat bunch of electrical cord or water hose or whatever it is. That was shown to me by Hal Roache. Isn’t that interesting?

So anyway, I quit the job. They said, “You cannot quit. If you quit this job, you’re going to be drafted, immediately.” I wasn’t going to be drafted because I was working for the Army for Civil Service. I probably could have stayed there endlessly. But that was kind of a dead-end job, it seemed to me. So I quit the job.

And with my friend, Sarkas, who had followed me down to Dayton, we took off on a Greyhound bus and went to Miami, Florida. It was getting cold. We thought: “Let’s have a little vacation before we join the Navy.” We both planned to join the Navy. I, because my father had been in the Navy in the First World War. And Sarkas, because I was, I guess.

But again, I saw no future in being a riveter. And I saw this other job advertised at Tunny Miron Studios, in the darkroom of Tunny Miron. And I thought: “Well, I’m kind of interested in photography, I’ll go there and apply.” So I did.

And I spent the last few months in Miami, maybe two months, in the darkroom, sepia toning portraits that Tunny Miron was making all over the South. It was a widespread interest studio, photographing high schools and weddings and things like that. And these prints were all sepia toned, in preparation for being hand colored. That was before color photography. So they were hand colored. And I must say, some of that hand coloring was really quite good. It was really – if you looked really closely – you could see it wasn’t a natural color photograph, but it was the next thing to it before they invented color photography.

We left Miami in mid-January. I’d been out of high school then for six months. Came home. Visited our parents for a week. And joined the Navy. Off we went to Great Lakes. So here I was, to sail the seven seas. I really wanted to see the world. So, if I joined the Navy, I’d see the world! I’ll go around all the seas of the world, and stop different places. And I didn’t think clearly, I guess. I mean, there was a war going on, and the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. But I wasn’t thinking.

They shouldn’t have done that. And I wasn’t mad enough at them to go over there and kill everyone who had killed from that country, especially if they weren’t the ones who bombed Pearl Harbor.I couldn’t kind of dig that rationale. But anyway, I joined the Navy, and as I say, I think just I wanted to travel.

So, I went to Great Lakes, and there we learned to march. Why, I don’t know. We didn’t march in the Navy very much. But we learned to march. And a lot of things we learned had to do with discipline. All the military! You learned discipline, to take orders. When you got an order, no matter how ridiculous, you’d take it, you didn’t question it. I mean – as a matter of fact – you can be court-martialed if you question it. So, I learned to take orders, to march, and fire a rifle. I never saw another rifle in the Navy, but I learned how to fire a rifle in a firing range, out there. So, I was prepared for anything.

Well then, at the end of Great Lakes, they were deciding whether you would go to sea and whether you would go to trade school. So, they checked different people for aptitude for trade school, and they gave us aptitude tests and so forth, IQ tests. And apparently, I did pretty good. And they said, okay, you can pick your trade school. So I sat down with this gentleman and we looked over this list of things. And I see torpedo man, machine gunner, bombardier, submariner. I didn’t see anything that really appealed to me. And then I saw photography.

I thought, “Well, and I said to him, “Yes, I’d like to be a photographer.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, wouldn’t everyone like to be a photographer? He said, “No.” He said, “You have to have experience as a photographer. Well I thought back and I thought – I’d just had my high school picture, and made it at Andrews Studio. So I dealt with photography. I posed for a photographer. And I delivered the Warren Tribune Chronicle. So that had photographs in it. And I’d dealt with the photographs in that. And I said, “Well, I’m experienced.” He said, “List your experience here.” So I listed Warren Tribune Chronicle and Andrews Studio in Warren, Ohio, and I didn’t go into details what kind of photography was doing there.

So they sent me to Pensacola, the Navy School of Photography. And when I got there, I joined a class of 30 or 40 people, none of whom had ever done any photography, maybe with the exception of one or two. But I don’t know if they had all kind of exaggerated their background like I had.I like to say exaggerated, because I don’t like to say I lied. I say I garnished the truth a little bit.

So we began from scratch, how to develop film, and how to hold a camera. They issued us Graflex speed graphics cameras of all things. And it was mainly Graflex cameras, I think, which we didn’t use. Yeah, we did use Graflex cameras in the Navy after that, also.

We learned to fly. At that point, they made photographs leaning out of a plane. And we flew up to Mobile, Alabama, and different places to do aerial pictures, oblique aerial pictures with a K20, a lightweight handheld aerial camera. You just kind of pump it like this, and photograph Mobile, Alabama, and I don’t know, different places along the Pensacola coast, just to practice our skills at aerial photography. And bigger cameras, like Keystone-8s, which would be in a bigger plane if we got to it. But we went flying.

What was the name of those planes? I can’t think offhand. It was a two-seater, a pilot in the front and the photographer in the back, with leather helmets on and goggles. And you’d lean out of the cockpit, and when he got over your target, and lean out of the cockpit and make photographs of the target. And it was kind of fun. I liked flying – SNJ was the name of the plane – we were flying in an SNJ. And had a parachute on in case we ran into trouble.

And good lord,
I thought,
if that pilot leans back to me and—
and I could hardly hear him—
He’d shout—
we didn’t have an intercom—
he shout???
And I said,
Well, is he saying bail out?
And I thought,
that’s all I need to climb over the side
and bail out.
When all he was saying,
this is Mobile, Alabama, coming up.
So I was a little worried
about that bailing out.
I knew where the ripcord was
and how you—
and I thought—
you have to be high enough
for that parachute to open.
And I always worried
about that aspect of flying.
But I never did bail out.

Anyway, we finished Pensacola.
Then we were sent to Washington, D.C.
I went to lithography school.
I never understood why.
I think,
because it kind of rhymed
with photography.
I learned to make lithographs.
Never used it again in the Navy.
I think,
I made some stationery for myself
with lithography.
And I never used it again.

And then
the assignments came up,
and I was assigned to the
USS Franklin.
By the way,
I loved being on ship,
on an aircraft carrier or any ship,
I suppose.
We were like a family,
the ten to twelve photographers.
We were together all day long,
doing things together.
We became a family.
And they all became my buddies.
I mean, Harry Schaeffer,
who to this day is my buddy,
he’s now 85,
Harry and I later started a studio
in Parkersburg, West Virginia,
when we got out of the Navy.
And Marvin LaForest
from Pinconning, Michigan.
He was a chicken farmer.
He was older than he needed to be—
he wouldn’t have been drafted—
I think,
he was forty-one or so
when he joined.
But he was a photographer,
and a good photographer,
as well as a farmer, raising chickens.
But he knew a lot of poetry.
And Marvin and I became close.
And then there was David Steppick
from Memphis, Tennessee.
A young kid. He was 18.
And Dave was a nice kid.
We were good friends.
And then
Chief Petty Officer Durante
from New Jersey,
he was a fair-minded guy.
He was our Chief.
And I liked Chief Durante.
And who else?
I’m naming a few of the guys
who I became close with.
At any rate,
I loved being at sea.
I loved looking at the water go by,
and watch the rush of the ship
through the water.
And I was not totally into the bombing
and the strafing and the thing.
And of course,
along the line then,
as enemy ships started to show up,
and we have general quarters,
and all hands on deck to their guns,
and we’d run up to the top—
to the ship’s bridge with our camera—
to record the action.
And we never actually had any action
on the ship at that point.

After the Philippines,
we headed up to Iwo Jima.
And I think after Iwo Jima,
I believe it was after Iwo Jima,
the big landing on Iwo Jima,
on all these landings,
we stood offshore, a mile or two.
We could see the bombing happening
and knew
there was terrible slaughter
going on there, on both sides.
And flame throwers on Iwo Jima.
Some of the Japanese
were hiding in caves,
and they’d burn ’em out with flames.
That’s a fast way
to get ’em out of there.

Then I was up above,
on the bridge.
We had general quarters.
I ran up there
with my camera at the ready
to record the action.
And all hell broke loose.
All the guns on the ship.
Twenty millimeter,
forty millimeter,
boffers,
five millimeter,
all firing straight up.
It was so deafening
you couldn’t even hear yourself think.
And I looked up
and I could see these plumes
of tracers
coming down toward us.
And a plane
heading straight down at us
from above.
And I knew it was a Kamikaze.
And I did what any
intelligent person would do.
I dropped the camera
and ran the hell out of there,
inside the steel door there,
next to where I was standing.
And inside,
a bunch of Navy people
were in there diving on the floor,
and cowering on the floor,
taking cover in there,
including a Lieutenant,
who was trying
to get underneath me.

You know this is what happens
when you don’t stand up there and
you know I’ve heard of heroes—
I didn’t see any of them.
I saw a lot of scared kids.
And some of them stay there
and stand their ground, and shoot back.

And I guess
they call those guys heroes.
Anyway, we got hit.
The Kamikaze hit us.
Loud explosion.
And it landed on the flight deck,
went right through to the hanger deck.
Immediately blew

And I guess
they call those guys heroes.
Anyway, we got hit.
The Kamikaze hit us.
Loud explosion.
And it landed on the flight deck,
went right through to the hanger deck.
Immediately blew
to little smithereens
seventy-five of my buddies and sailors.
Not all of them I knew.
So we spent the next day or two
cleaning up
and picking up body parts
with shovels
and photographing
some of that mess.

You know this is what happens
when you don’t stand up there and
you know I’ve heard of heroes –
I didn’t see any of them.
I saw a lot of scared kids.
And some of them stay there
and stand their ground, and shoot back.

And then it was decided
that the Franklin could not be fixed.
They had blown a big hole in the deck,
in the flight deck,
which is necessary
for the planes to be able to take off,
and the Franklin
would have to return to the States
for repairs.
So we were going back to the States,
going to have a leave in the States
after a year out there.
And that was probably good news.
However, in the meantime,
the Lexington,
another ship in our task force,
had been hit, also.
And –
it was not that badly damaged –
it had killed several dozen sailors,
including two photographers.
And they had requested
for replacements
of photographers.
They were going to stay out there
and they want replacements of it
from us.
And our Chief Petty Officer Chester Zilstra
from Pella, Iowa –
he’s Dutch –
really a nice guy –
Chester came and said,
Massar,
report to the darkroom quarters.
And Warrant Officer Hoard said,
Get your things ready.
You’re leaving within an hour.
You’re being transferred
to the Lexington.

So the night
before the Franklin headed back
to the States
to be repaired, and for leave –
maybe I think a month’s leave
for all the sailors on board –
I was transferred to the Lexington,
and back into action
two days later.
So you know,
that’s the way the ball bounces.
And I was the most,
I felt betrayed by the Navy,
which I didn’t exactly love,
but I had accepted what I was doing,
and I’ve done a good job
up till now,
and I’m going to –
you know –
I’m doing the best I can.
But I just felt
like I was just a number.
Two new photographers joined us
as we came back into Inaweta.
We had stopped in Inaweta,
a lovely little island.

Local people living there very simply
in the grass huts and so forth.
And we went ashore
and were given two warm beers,
each one of us,
which I gave away immediately.
I didn’t like warm beer.
And that was the end of Inaweta,
which some years later,
we all know,
was blown into smithereens
in one of our tests of an A-bomb.
They did take all the people off,
and forcibly redeployed them
to another island.

And we also went,
before we went to Imo Jima,
we slipped in behind the Philippines
into the South China Sea,
and were bombed
from high altitude bombers at night,
none of which hit us,
but they knew we were down there,
and they were trying to –
it sure was scary, all those explosions.
And we went over toward Viet Nam.
And we –
listen to this –
we dropped supplies to the man,
the Vietnamese, who was helping us
against the Japanese,
who had occupied Vietnam.
And we dropped supplies
to Ho Chi Min
and his group,
who we know later became
the enemy.
So, that’s the way it goes,
doesn’t it?
One day the friend,
the next day the enemy.
And anyway,
we helped Ho Chi Min
in his striving
to become the head of Viet Nam.

So we were out there
another two or three months,
I guess.
And then the
Lexington headed back to the States.
And that’s
when I made the big decision.
You know I was going –
we were going to have a month’s leave
and then head back to the Pacific.
And I made the decision
I was not going to do this any more.

In the ship’s library I discovered
the book Walden
by Henry David Thoreau.
In the back of the book was the essay,
Our Duty to Civil Disobedience.
And reading that, as he said,
Our conscience is the strongest law
that there is.
It’s more important than any civil law.
And if our conscience tells us
something is wrong,
it’s wrong.
We should abide by our conscience.

And I decided,
I’m not going to go –
Well, the war
was pretty much over then,
so there was no danger really
in going back.

But I decided
I’m going to leave the ship
when we get back to the States.

And so we left Seattle,
went down to San Francisco.
I went ashore
for overnight liberty
before it left to go back
to the Pacific.
Our Captain had said,
we’re going to go back there
and sweep the seas clean of the enemy.
And I said to myself,
Not all of us, Sir.
Not all of us, Sir.

So I went on leave that night,
stayed in a Y in San Francisco.
Early in the morning,
I got a plane out of there for Omaha.
And as I flew over
San Francisco harbor, circling,
headed for Omaha,
I saw the Lexington steaming,
getting ready
to leave San Francisco
for the South Pacific.
So when it headed west,
I headed east.
And that was the big decision
of my life.

I hitchhiked across the country,
ended up timing
so I was in Warren, Ohio.
Dropped in on my parents
on June 12th,
on my 21st birthday –
I had joined the Navy when I was 18 –
I was now 21 –
and in en route to Washington, D.C.,
where of course
I ended up in the brig.

When I was up above,
on the bridge.
We had general quarters.
I ran up there
with my camera at the ready
to record the action.
And all hell broke loose.
All the guns on the ship.
Twenty millimeter,
forty millimeter,
boffers,
five millimeter,
all firing straight up.
It was so deafening
you couldn’t even hear yourself think.
And I looked up
and I could see these plumes
of tracers
coming down toward us.
And a plane
heading straight down at us
from above.
And I knew it was a Kamikaze.
And I did what any
intelligent person would do.
I dropped the camera
and ran the hell out of there,
inside the steel door there,
next to where I was standing.
And inside,
a bunch of Navy people
were in there diving on the floor,
and cowering on the floor,
taking cover in there,
including a Lieutenant,
who was trying
to get underneath me.

And –
it was not that badly damaged –
it had killed several dozen sailors,
including two photographers.
And they had requested
for replacements
of photographers.

They were going to stay out there
and they want replacements
of it from us.
And our Chief Petty Officer
Chester Zilstra
from Pella, Iowa –
he’s Dutch –
really a nice guy –
Chester came and said,
Massar,
report to the darkroom quarters.
And Warrant Officer Hoard said,
Get your things ready.
You’re leaving within an hour.
You’re being transferred
to the Lexington.

So you know,
that’s the way the ball bounces.
And I was the most,
I felt betrayed by the Navy,
which I didn’t exactly love,
but I had accepted what I was doing,
and I’ve done a good job
up till now,
and I’m going to –
you know –
I’m doing the best I can.
But I just felt
like I was just a number.
Two new photographers joined us
as we came back into Inaweta.
We had stopped in Inaweta,
a lovely little island.
Local people living there very simply
in the grass huts and so forth.

And we went ashore
and were given two warm beers,
each one of us,
which I gave away immediately.
I didn’t like warm beer.
And that was the end of Inaweta,
which some years later,
we all know,
was blown into smithereens
in one of our tests of an A-bomb.
They did take all the people off,
and forcibly redeployed them
to another island.

But anyway,
back into action I went.
And the Lexington then went –
well that was
when we went to the Philippines –
actually, I misjudged on that –
The Franklin wasn’t in the Philippines.
We went to the Philippines
on the Lexington.
And we also went,
before we went to Imo Jima,
we slipped in behind the Philippines
into the South China Sea,
and were bombed
from high altitude bombers at night,
none of which hit us,
but they knew we were down there,
and they were trying to –
it sure was scary,
all those explosions.
And we went over toward
Viet Nam.
And we –
listen to this –
we dropped supplies to the man,
the Vietnamese, who was helping us
against the Japanese,
who had occupied Vietnam.

And we dropped supplies
to Ho Chi Min
and his group,
who we know later became
the enemy.
So, that’s the way it goes,
doesn’t it?
One day the friend,
the next day the enemy.
And anyway,
we helped Ho Chi Min
in his striving
to become the head of Viet Nam.

So we were out there
another two or three months,
I guess.
And then the
Lexington headed back to the States.
And that’s
when I made the big decision.

You know I was going –
we were going to have a month’s leave
and then head back to the Pacific.
And I made the decision
I was not going to do this any more.

And I decided,
I’m not going to go –
Well, the war
was pretty much over then,
so there was no danger really
in going back.

But I decided
I’m going to leave the ship
when we get back to the States.

We were on the Metro
and we saw an Affiche on the wall.
Etudianne de Travallieur
Vienna Budapest,
for the International Festival
for the Peace.
And where we were students,
we thought,
Budapest,
that’s behind the Iron Curtain,
no one can go there,
we’re not allowed to go there
with our passports.

And so we went to the address
they gave us there.
And they said,
you’re students?
Yes, we’re in art school here,
and we’re students in Paris.

And of course,
we wanted to go there
and photograph.
And they okayed us to go,
all three of us.
And it consisted of –
for $75 we would get the train,
round trip train trip,
to Budapest from Paris,
and two weeks we would stay
in a girls’ dormitory.
It was while school was out.
So our upkeep was provided.
And I think
there were meals given
at that dormitory, too.
So it was kind of all taken care of,
and we’re off to Budapest.

Well, immediately,
we thought,
we have to figure out
what we’re going to do there.
So we went to Magnum,
and actually met
Robert Kappa,
one of the founders of Magnum,
and Hungarian.
We thought, He’s perfect.
If he can give us some tips on
Budapest.
And we told him
we’re going to go there,
we’re going to photograph
Budapest
and that part of Hungary, wherever
we can get out of there,
and we’d bring the film back
here.
Would Magnum handle it
for us?
And I said,
Could they develop it?
He said,
We don’t develop film,
you have to find someone
to develop it for us,
bring us the proof sheets
or bring us the slides,
if you shoot color,
and we’ll look at it,
and we’ll show it to some
of our clients.
So we said,
Okay, well let us figure out
what we’re going to do now.

So we went to LIFE Magazine
and told them the same story.
And they said,
Well, let’s sit down
and have a little conference here.
And they said,
We can’t develop the film,
we don’t have labs to do that here,
but we can tell you
where you can take it to a lab,
and bring us the proofs,
and we’ll look them over,
the proofs or the slides,
and make selections for LIFE –
for the LIFE Magazine.
And we said,
Okay,
well we’ll make plans to –
and they sat down with three guys
who knew something about Budapest
and gave us a lot of tips. They’d been there before the war
and they were very helpful.

Kappa had said,
I can’t tell you what to look for,
you to do that on your own.
And we thought,
Well you’re Hungarian
and you have no idea
what’s going on in Budapest?
And I think he was jealous
that we were going there
and he wasn’t.
But it was not easy to go there,
and we’d found this little loophole
that we were going.

So LIFE would look at it.
So, we said,
okay, let’s go to Paris Match.
So we went to Paris Match,
the three of us, sat down.
They said,
Oh, wow, let’s come in here.
They had a conference
with several of their writers,
and talked about tips in Budapest,
and kind of things to photograph
and so forth,
just in general.

And they said,
Bring the film back to us,
we’ll develop the film,
make our selection within 24 hours,
and return all the material to you
within 24 hours,
then you can take it
wherever want to,
if you want to sell it elsewhere.
Wow.

So there was no question
of where we’re going to go first.
We went to Match.

So, we went to Match.
I’ll come back to this in a bit.
We went to Budapest,
and had to march –
had to participate
somewhat
in all of this big
Communist festival, marching through downtown
Budapest,
and carrying signs,
and trying to hide our faces
from the camera,
because we weren’t really in –
you know –
we were not antagonistic
to all of this,
but we’re not Communists,
and we’re not being persuaded
very much
by what we’re seeing and hearing,
and we were there because
it was free.

So we spent
an interesting couple of weeks
in Budapest
and talked with people.
We went into a worker’s . . . –
George Theory –
a young friend of ours in Paris,
a Hungarian,
we told him what we were doing.
He said,
Come out
and meet my parents,
come out to dinner.
And they invited us to dinner.
And they said,
We have an uncle –
George had an uncle in Budapest, and they gave us his address.
Go out and talk with him.
He knows everything
that’s going on in town.
And so we took that address
and some of the tips they gave us.

And when we got to Budapest,
we did get out to that address,
his uncle’s.
They pulled down all the shades
and we sat
and talked for a couple of hours
with them about –
they said
There had been beggars
all over the street.
They had all been rounded up
and taken out of town
a few days
before the big festival began,
and they had cleaned everything,
cleaned the streets up
better than they’d been in years.

And the big tip they gave us,
they said,
While you’re here,
next week is New Harvest Festival,
it’s a big Communist holiday.
Incidentally,
it’s proclaimed on the day of
St. Stephen’s Day.
St. Stephen’s is a religious holiday.

St. Stephen was the patron saint
of Budapest,
of Hungary.
And it’s a religious holiday,
and every year
a few people march up
to the little church in Buda –
Buda or Pest –
I always mix them up.
But they said,
we predict
there’ll be a big turnout this year,
and that there will be like a
silent rebellion.
And we had the key,
we had the word for our essay.

So we went on New Harvest Day.
There were fireworks
over the Danube,
and dancing in the streets,
and they make every effort
to draw people away
from the St. Stephen’s Day Festival.
But at St. Stephen’s Day,
we went up there,
and there were thousands of people
turned up for the parade,
more than it had been in many years,
silently carrying St. Stephen’s arm
or whatever they carried
in that caravan.
And we photographed all of that.
And that is
what appeared in LIFE Magazine,
and in Paris Match, and
in Illustracione Italiano,
through Kappa.
And we brought our material
back to Paris –
by the way –
and gave it to Match,
and they got it all back to us
within a day.
And then we went over to see LIFE,
and they made a selection,
and they got the material for that.
Then we took it over
to see Kappa again.
And he said,
Why didn’t you come here first?
And we said,
We came and talked with you first, Bob,
and you weren’t very helpful.
And they really sat down,
they gave us a lot of tips,
they developed the film for us,
Match,
and we had to do that.
We don’t have a lab here in Paris.
And so we felt like
we had to take advantage of that.
And he took the film.
But then it was published in
Picture Post in England
through Magnum Picture Agency.
And so it was published
in half a dozen magazines,
pictures by the three of us.

And so that was our
first journalistic endeavor,
and it was published
in half a dozen countries.
So we were off and running.

You know Hemingway’s book,
Paris is a Moveable Feast—
he makes the point
that once you’ve lived in Paris
as a younger person
or whatever,
you carry it with you
for the rest of your Life.
It’s a part of you.
It’s a part of who you’ll become
and a great influence on you,
which it certainly was for me
and most of the people I knew
who lived in Paris.
Anyway to get back to Paris,
our next trip –
let’s take a trip again now –
we read in the Herald Tribune
that Yugoslavia was opening up
for tourists.
It was a Communist country,
and for the first time
they would open it for tourists.
They had broken away
from Russia.
This was in 1950.
So we immediately went down
and got visas to go to Yugoslavia,
and were going to go there
and do a story on Yugoslavia,
Leonard and me,
and we’re off to Yugoslavia.

So we drove down.
I had bought this old French car, Sara.
And I think,
there’s a picture of that,
Len and me in that car
driving through Verona.
Two Gentlemen from Verona.

We drove all the way to Venice
and across through Trieste.
Stayed overnight in Trieste.
And then on to Yugoslavia.

In the elevator in Belgrade,
I met a journalist from Italy, Paolo –
I can’t think of his name –
and he said,
Are you a photographer?
And I said,
Yes, I am.
He said,
Listen, I’d like to hire you.
I can’t pay you now,
but if you could go out
for the next hour
and shoot pictures for me,
I’m writing a story on Yugoslavia,
and I need some kind of illustrations.
I have a little camera,
but I can’t take anything.
So I immediately shot out in the street.
Came back about 45 minutes later
with 12 pictures for him.
And gave it to him.
And he gave me the address of
the magazine,
Illustracione Italiano in Milan.
He said,
Stop in the office
when you get back
and we’ll pay for the use of these.

So we stopped in the office
on the way back,
to jump ahead.
On the way to the office,
we looked at a magazine rack,
and there was
Illustracione Italiano,
with a little band
across the front cover saying,
Special, American Photographer,
Ivan Massar,
photographs of Ivan Massar.
And there were four pages of pictures.
They used all the pictures.
And I went to see them
and they paid me, I don’t know,
$75 or something like that.

With the Hamilton Journal News,
in Hamilton, Ohio,
I did all the assignments,
good, bad and indifferent,
and I loved it.
I had my little MG.
My parents bought me an MG
as a present for my first job here
at age 23 or 24
or whatever I was.
So I’m tooling around town
in my little convertible MG.
And I was kind
of a big man on the block
in some ways.

But I told the editor that,
You know,
I want to go out
and make some feature length,
or just good single pictures
of covered bridges
or whatever,
something of interest in a small town,
just to make the newspaper
more interesting.
And he said,
Well, I don’t know, I don’t think so,
you’d better stick around,
something might break.
Well ah hah,
nothing broke in Hamilton, Ohio.
I don’t think
anything ever has broken
in Hamilton, Ohio.

But working for him,
he owned me.

You know
he paid me $50 a week I think,
and he didn’t want me out
having fun
and doing pictures
for the newspaper –
incidentally –
but it was something
I wanted to do,
and it was something
he should have appreciated,
I think.
So I had to stick around.
But I had promised myself
I would stay a year,
just for that discipline,
and it did give me that discipline
on a daily –
and with the “Scanograver”,
I made all my own engravings.
You would attach a plastic sheet
to a lathe like machine,
and you would do the photograph
next to it,
and they’d both spin around,
and a little rotating needle
would be going ratatatatata,
making the engraving,
copying the photograph.
So there’s 85 lines per screen,
which was an improvement
over most of the newspaper prints
who had 65 lines a screen.
So they were really beautiful prints.

And also, Saul Regal and I,
he was a writer,
we proposed doing a daily column
called Among Those Present.
I think it was daily.
It was three times a week.

And we’d go to
different occasions in town,
and instead
of the traditional newspaper way
of having one photograph
to show what happened there,
we’d do a series of pictures,
like a magazine essay,
and they’d run it like across,
like the shape of a comic strip,
but it was much more serious
than that.
We’d go to the Lion’s picnic
and the Ladies Union Aid Society
and just get interesting,
human interest pictures,
and run across.
And that became really big in town,
People would call and say,
Why don’t you send
Among Those Present
out here?
We’re doing something here
at the mall,
a handicapped picnic
or something.
And we would cover
a lot of those things.
And the circulation of the
newspaper went up.

But after ten months or so,
eleven months,
I thought,
Okay, it’s time, time to go.
So I gave them my notice.
And Mr. Grover,
the head of the newspaper,
what do you call it, the publisher,
called me into his office
and he said,
Ivan, what’s wrong?

And I said,
Well I want to move to New York,
I want to work for magazines.
And he said,
Well you know,
I’ve learned something over the years.
You don’t quit one job
until you’ve found another.
So you need to find that job.
I said,
Mr. Grover,
there’s no way to find a job from here.
I have to go to New York.
I have to talk with people.
I have to go to the magazines.
And so they raised my pay
then I think to $75 a month,
and one month later,
I left, and I loaded up my little MG
and headed to New York.
And I was off and
running to the Big Apple.
And I found a wonderful apartment
in the Village,
thanks to Peg Thomas,
who lived in this same building.
And it was wonderful.
It had a garden.
You could use the garden in the back,
a picnic place.
And $65 a month
on 44 Morton Street.
I’m sure it’s $2,000 a month
for that apartment now.
It was one big bedroom,
and a bathroom,
and a kitchen.
But beautiful,
on a tree lined street in the Village.
And that was wonderful.
That was a wonderful year,
as a matter of fact.

I went around
and talked with magazines,
and I went to see Black Star.
And Black Star told me,
Well, you ought to go out
and do some essays and things.
We showed them
a lot of single pictures from Europe.
And they said,
Your photographs are wonderful,
but you need to so some essays,
and maybe we can sell those.
And they weren’t interested
and they couldn’t offer me anything
at that point.
So I said,
Thanks a lot.
And meantime,
I met Sada Amman,
who was the dancer in the King and I.
She was living
in the same apartment building
as I did.
She’s Israeli.
Isabra,
which means born in Israel.
And she was absolutely beautiful.
And I photographed her.
And went out to Jone’s Beach,
and photographed
A Dance to the Sunrise.
She was a dancer.

She was dancing with Martha Graham.
And a beautiful woman.
But it was kind of a –
it wasn’t a very intense relationship.
She would come in to see me
about midnight every night
after the show was over,
after the King and I was over.
And she’d come down to the Village
and stop in,
and we’d talk for an hour or two.
But any time
that I made any kind of advances,
as you might call them,
she’d say,
Ivan,
it’s not that kind of friendship,
we’re good friends,
but nothing like that’s possible right now.
Anyway, so that’s the way it goes.
We were good friends.
And I thought, she’s probably gay.
You know how men think.

And that’s the only reason surely
she’s not interested in me.
But we stayed friends.
And also Peg Thomas and I
were good friends.
She was from Warren, Ohio.

About that time,
I got a letter from my best friend,
Leonard, in Pittsburgh,
Leonard Sugar.
He said,
Ivan,
Roy Striker
is coming to town,
he’s going to document
the steel business here,
he’s going to spend time on this,
probably years.
You ought to come here.
Maybe you can get a job with him.
Well, Roy Striker was very famous.
All photographers knew him.
He had been the head
of the Farm Security Administration
all during the dust bowl era
in the ‘30s and worked with
top notch photographers.

And he was an editor, basically,
and a former economist
from Columbia University.

So I packed up my little MG a year later,
after a year in the Village,
and went out with –
you might say –
my tail between my legs,
and moved to Pittsburgh.
No job.
I think,
I had a half day
for the Western Electric,
photographing people giving blood.
You know that’s a really nothing job.
And it was for a company magazine.
And anyway I was off to Pittsburgh.
I went to Pittsburgh.

Len and I rented an apartment.
He paid the rent
and loaned me the money.
And I went to see Roy,
and he said,
Well, Ivan,
I don’t have anything right now,
I’m using some of my old photographers
from Farm Security,
so I can’t start with new photographers yet,
until I go through these different friends,
and I promised them work.
And I love your work,
and maybe some day
we can do something.
But he had nothing for me.

And he called me
maybe a week later
and he said,
Ivan, Russell Lee is coming to town.
He was one of the
Farm Security photographers.
You see his pictures
all through the
Farm Security photographs.
And Russell,
he works with a big camera,
and he has no car,
if you can drive him around
and help him
with the big camera,
I would hire you as his assistant,
and I think – he apologized –
he could only pay me $100 a day.
I’d never earned that much in my life.
So I said,
Well I think
I can do this, Roy,
sure, I’d like to do that.

I went out that afternoon,
traded in my MG on a brand new Ford,
4-door Ford,
so I’d have it big enough
to handle Russell’s equipment,
which I couldn’t do with an MG.
And he came the following week,
and I was his assistant then
for I think two weeks in the steel mills.

Russell’s a wonderful man.
I really enjoyed working with him.
And he left after two weeks.

And Len said,
My god, you got a two week job,
and you go out
and buy a new car,
and I don’t understand
what you’re doing.
I had accepted a job
with Jack Judge
photographing Davenports
at a studio in Pittsburgh.
And I called Jack
and I said to myself,
I’m going to be
a freelance photographer,
I’m not going to photograph
Davenports for a living.
So I called and I said,
Jack, you said
you really didn’t need anyone
right now.
You said, kid,
I’m just going to give you a favor,
I like what you do,
and if you can use an
8 x10 view camera,
I’ll hire you to do the Davenports.
So I quit the job
before it ever started.

And a week later,
Roy called and said,
Ivan, I’d like you
to go into the steel mills.
I went out to his house for lunch.
He said,
I’d like you
to go into the steel mills
this week
and maybe
spend three days
in an open hearth and
a blast furnace area
and see what you get.
And I said,
Wonderful, Mr. Striker,
what sort of pictures do you want, sir?
And he said,
Ivan,
I have no idea,
I want to see what you see.
I couldn’t believe it.
I mean, I left Roy’s house,
and driving home
I was just screaming with joy.
He thought,
he wants to see what I see.
I’d never heard anyone
say that to a photographer.
Not to me certainly.
And so I was going to show him
what I could see.

And I went into the steel mill
the following week.
And what I came out
with was mainly portraits.
I just was fascinated
with the variety of men
who worked in a steel mill,
Poles, and Ukrainians, and Russians,
and American Indians, and Blacks.
Just all dedicated steel workers.
And close-up portraits of them
by their work.
And he loved these.
Roy said,
These are wonderful,
no one’s done that before,
they always do the
big industry things
and so forth.
So this works perfectly for us.
So we were off and running.

And he said,
Okay, let’s work three days a week.
And for the next three years,
I spent three days a week
for Roy Striker.
My pay went up to $150 a day,
and I was in big money now.
So I could pay off my car,
I could pay my part
of the rent with Len.

And Black Star
called me in Pittsburgh,
Mr. Mayer,
and said,
Ivan, we like some of your work,
we saw your essay
in Fortune Magazine.

By the way,
speaking of my essay in Fortune –
I’m still going all over the place here.
Sorry about that.
But we had eight pages,
Red Hair and I, Red Clyde Hair,
eight pages in Fortune Magazine,
the Beauty of Steel.
And a real break
to have in a big magazine
like that,
a big-page magazine.
Laid out by Leo Leoni.

Black Star called and they said,
We saw some of your work
in different magazines
and the big essay in Fortune.
Would you be interested in going
to Houston for us?
And I said,
Well maybe, Mr. Mayer.
I’m pretty busy here,
and I’m really keeping busy here
in Pittsburgh.
But he said,
We could give you a contract
for three years probably
with Black Star.

Well, I had approached
Black Star in New York
a couple years before that
and they weren’t interested at all
in anything.
They liked my work,
but they couldn’t offer me anything.
Here they’re calling me –
laughing –
So we negotiated and
I signed a contract with Black Star.

Packed up the car,
packed up Barbara,
who was then pregnant
I think six months, seven months,
and headed for Houston.
And so we were off,
headed to be a family in a new town.
Andrea was born then
in Houston in 1958.

And Houston was interesting work
for Black Star.
I worked for all the magazines
on the news stand.
And some interesting assignments.

I’d been really working hard,
and working too hard,
and not seeing my family enough,
and upset by all of that kind of life,
even though
I was earning good money.
I said,
Let’s drop all this for awhile.
Let’s sell the house.
Let’s go somewhere to a remote island
and live our lives for a year
or two
or whatever.

Seychelles is wonderful.
We met some interesting people.
Our friends were Tamugi,
who is a Parsi,
ran the biggest department store
in Victoria, the main town.
And Sha Givan Sha,
who ran another small store there.

They were James and Parsis
and Hindi.
And our best friend
become Ian Woodruff
and his wife, Carol,
who before we left the Seychelles
a couple years later,
was the Governor of the Seychelles.
He was attorney general,
I think it was called,
Assistant Governor.
And we went to Queen’s Day,
and soccer games in town.
It was very English.
Something like out of
Somerset Maugham.

By the way,
we’d gone to New York,
Brentano’s,
before we left
and bought a foot locker
full of books,
paperback books,
all the books we wanted to read
and had never gotten to.
So we read.
I had plenty of time to read.
And I wandered and photographed.
And Barbara wrote,
what she wanted to do,
worked at her writing.
And the kids played down
on the beach
with Sonya and Teresa Cook.
And we had about an acre
of sand beach,
white sand beach,
just right below our house there.
I have a painting of that I made,
when I was blind in one eye,
when I got up to Vermont
that summer.

A year in Nairobi,
we decided it’s time,
we’d better come back to the States.
And we were running out of money,
which is what the plan was.
We stayed
until it didn’t make any sense.
You know when we got hungry.

We didn’t get hungry yet,
but we were getting low enough
we thought we would go back
where I can –
and I had an agreement
with Black Star,
and I could pick up my contract
where I left off.
And I came back.
I talked with Black Star.
Stayed with the Optons in New York,
with my family.

By the way,
we came back on the Queen Mary.
We traveled by boat.
We had planned to slow down
and take a closer look at things.
And that’s what we were doing
all along here
with this arrangement.
And I think it was wonderful.
I had very little problem with MS
in the Seychelles.
And bought a ?? there.
It was just,
everything was much better,
quieter.
And you really have to slow down
a little bit,
you know.
Look around you
and see what’s happening.

We came back to the States.
I conferred with Black Star
in New York
and I said,
what’s happening,
what can I do now to resume
my career
where I was before,
or something like that,
somewhere akin to that.
And they said,
Well it looks like
there’s an opening in Baltimore now
and there’s an opening in Boston.
Well I’d been through Baltimore,
and all these row houses
and driving down Route One.
And I thought,
I think Baltimore – Boston,
I remember pictures
from the calendars,
Vermont calendars,
of white spired churches.
And so I said,
Boston sounds good.
I think we’d like to go to Boston.
So we chose Boston.

We went for a Sunday drive.
I wanted to head out toward Concord
and Walden Pond.
And this is the place
that I had heard of.
And so we drove out here.
And driving into Concord on Route 62,
we found a house for a sale,
an old farmhouse.
And we looked it up
and looked at it.
And they said,
We’ve already had an offer on it.
I thought, this is the perfect house.
It sits way back from the road.
And it was built in 1880.
So to raise kids
away from the main road
and back in the woods.
And they said,
We’ve had an offer on it,
but why don’t you make an offer?
Sometimes these offers fall through,
and if it does,
you’ll be next in line.
So, because it had already sold,
we thought,
Okay, we’ll make an offer.
So we gave them a hundred dollars,
provisional,
and they would return it
if the house wasn’t available.
And they called us a few days later
and said,
It’s your house.
I’m like, god, we can’t afford that house.
So this is the second publication.

The Ivan Massar I know

A Life-long Affinity for People and Places:

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