American Photo Magazine
May/June 2004 issue (cover: Helmut Newton)
The inside back cover is a two-page Nikon ad, and features Henry Diltz and his famous Morrison Hotel photograph
advertisement text follows:
ONE THOUSAND WORDS ...
They are the moments that have impacted our lives ... the indelible images that become etched into society's collective mind. In the relatively short time that man has used the power of photography to educate, inspire, document and shape modern culture, Nikon cameras have captured some of the most powerful and poignant moments ever witnessed. Evoking emotion and provoking thought, long after first view -- a powerful photograph can render a poet's adjectives pallid; here then is such an image, "a picture is worth a thousand words..."
No one had any ideas until Ray Manzarek mentioned the Morrison Hotel.
Henry Diltz, the photographer, and Gary Burden, the graphics director, were meeting with the Doors -- Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore -- to talk about the cover of the band's new album. It was December, 1969, and the Doors had hired Gary to create the cover, and Gary had hired Henry to be the photographer. The two had worked together before, most notably for the cover of the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album.
"We asked the band if they had an album title in mind, or any ideas for the photography," Henry says. "They said, 'No, not really.' Then Ray said, 'Well, you know, my wife and I were driving in downtown L.A. and we saw this hotel, and it was called the Morrison Hotel ...' And everyone went, 'Oh, man, that's great.'"
Henry, Gary and Jim went to check it out. Henry took a few photos of the front window, and a few days later everybody got in John's VW bus and drove down to the hotel. "It was a really seedy place," Henry says, "you know, a flophouse. The sign in the window says two-fifty and up, and that's not two hundred and fifty dollars.
"We went in and there were these old overstuffed chairs and old floor lamps in the lobby and a guy behind the desk. I went over to the desk and said to the guy in passing, 'We're just gonna take a few shots,' but the guy said, 'No, you can't.' We weren't ready for that. I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'You have to talk to the owner, and he's out of town.
"So we all walked outside, and I was thinking, maybe the guys could lean against the window -- they can't stop us from photographing from the outside. As I was thinking that, I saw through the window that the desk guy was getting in the elevator, and then I saw the floor lights start to go up. So I said to the guys, 'Quick, run in there.'"
Henry stood close to the window at an angle to the glass and started shooting. "Then Gary said, 'Back up, back up, get the whole window' -- he was already thinking about the cover layout." Henry took the 35mm lens off his Nikon F, put on his 85mm lens and backed up into the street. "The guys just hit those positions," he says, "there was no, 'stand here' or 'stand there.'" Henry shot one roll of Ektachrome-X and they were all out of there before the desk guy returned. Later, when Gary Burden picked the shot for the cover, Elektra Records' legal department contacted the hotel's owner and got the rights.
For Henry it's always been about the pictures, and he always made those pictures for the pure pleasure of it. Not for fame or fortune, and certainly not for history. "Someone recently said to me, 'You must have quite an archive,' "Henry says., "I don't like that word, archive. It sounds too professional. I mean, I'm a professional if that means I earned a living from photography, but I was just photographing the stuff I saw during the day as a musician and as part of knowing all these people."
Henry started taking pictures in the early '60s when he toured as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet. He shot slide film with a battered used camera and would put on slide shows for his friends and fellow musicians. When a fan magazine paid him one hundred dollars for a photograph of Buffalo Springfield, Henry thought that here was a way to make some money to pay for all the film he was buying. "I was mostly interested in taking more shots for slide shows," Henry says, but the phone kept ringing and people kept asking him to take more pictures. "I never advertised, never brought my book to an art director."
Henry's first photos were taken with cameras that ... well, let's just say they weren't built for the job. "I had to have two camera bodies, one for black-and-white and one for color," Henry says, and they'd always break. So I had to have three bodies because one was always in the shop, and then just to be sure, I had to have four bodies because at any time one of the other two would break." Then all the cameras were stolen out of the back of Henry's VW -- "when I went into the laundry for two minutes" -- and a friend who was a photographer gave him a Nikon. "I got lenses, and another body and pretty soon I was a Nikon guy. The Nikons were like tanks." After all these years his favorite lenses are still the focal lengths he carried that day at the Morrison Hotel: fast f/1.4 35mm and 85mm Nikons.
Today Henry has if not an archive, then, in his words, "an accumulation" that includes friends and contemporaries like James Taylor, the Eagles, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Lovin' Spoonful, the Monkees and Joni Mitchell. (If you want to see some of this work, you can visit his online gallery at www.henrysgallery.com. If you're in New York City, Henry has a real gallery at 124 Prince Street in SoHo.)
Henry doesn't make much of technique or technology. A meter reading and a couple of numbers is pretty much all it amounts to. "It's just about wanting to get what you see," he says. "It's so much fun to look through that little window and see the world. Like I said, I never felt like a professional. I felt like a participant, doing something I loved to do."
(thanks, Mark)
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