Working from the Heartland

Peter Hvizdak
Staff Photographer, New Haven Register
New Haven, Connecticut

No matter where I go, I am asked the same question about my search for Americans who love their work: "Where do you find these people?" By the amazed and cynical tone of the question, you'd think they were asking me where I've managed to find fresh sushi on the planet Pluto. One of the key themes of my project is to demonstrate, as repeatedly as necessary, that happy people are all around us. This makes me a rare breed among reporters: Part of my mission is to show how easy it is to get the story.

But I have to say I met Peter Hvizdak in an extraordinary way: He was sent to cover me! Normally, I'm on the search for strange names and strange faces. Now I'm the strange name/strange face. And it's his assignment from Across the Board magazine to take my picture for an article scheduled to run in the September issue. Sure, I got to watch him on the job. That's usual. But it's rare that the job is me!

We met way too early one humid Monday morning in the gnat-infested Lighthouse Point Park. His specific assignment was to get a picture of me posed on a road with a double solid line. If you're up on your American driving rules of the road, you'll know that solid double lines happen on roads where the traffic is too fast, too busy, too curvy to risk passing. On either side. That's pretty dangerous stuff. And the design editor wants me to stand in the middle of the road? Yikes!

So Peter's first job was to find a place that had those lines but on such a road that wouldn't transform us into what he called "road pizza" before the shoot was over. Lighthouse Point Park fit the bill, but we didn't count on the gnats. You know how models are always saying their job isn't all that glamorous because they're forced to freeze in bikinis and swelter in fur coats? Well, they should try smiling into a faceful of black bugs!

I felt like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark who had to say his lines with a fly crawling into his mouth! So, if you pick up a copy of the magazine this September and take a look at whatever picture they chose, remember that between clicks of the camera shutter there were plenty of slap! slap! slap! sputter! sputter! spit!

But it was fun! And working with Peter was a pleasure. His calm and meticulous tweaking of the light, his calm instruction to his assistant (another Peter, whose photo of a Swedish princess was on the cover of July's Life magazine), the time he took getting my chin just right, my hands just so, my smile not too broad, the gentle way he did it all told me "this is a man in the groove of his work." So, between gnat garnished splutterings, I said, "Hey, can I interview you?

And he said yes! So here are the results. But one word of warning: For a photographer, he makes a terrible photo subject. Every time I tried to take his picture, he would turn this way and that. No smile, no grinning like a tourist into my digital camera. No nothing. Full face, he's actually kind of cute. Not that you'd know it from these pictures.

A man who has peered through his lens to frame the like of American presidents, corporate giant, my hero Charles Kuralt, and, well, me, Peter also spends his days driving throughout Connecticut's southwestern shoreline towns in search of golden shots that in a 500th of a second capture a specific instant that is just as common to us all as it is particular to the moment. An elderly couple, for instance, sit on a sea wall overlooking the Long Island Sound, shaded by a mutual beach umbrella. Can I take your picture? Peter asks. In Russian.

By rights he doesn't have to ask their permission. They're in a public place and the law protects him. But, at the moment, it just seems like the right — the courteous — thing to do. Astonished at hearing their native language uttered by this stranger with cameras, the couple agreeably cooperates. He takes their picture. He takes their names, making sure they're spelled right. And the next day, the big umbrella, along with the curving sidewalk appears on the front page of the New Haven Register. The couple is hidden by the umbrella, but you can plainly see their young grandchildren standing further out in the background, on a rock, mulling over the summer day. It's a summer shore scene that has been captured and painted throughout the centuries.

And it's not the first time he's has photographed Russian families. In fact, the first time he did, his life was changed forever.

"When I was in college, I went to Leningrad to study," he says. "I was there as a student, but I had a camera with me anyway.

"I was out wandering around one day, and I remember there was a bridge, which I started shooting with a telephoto lens," he recalls. "Suddenly a family started walking across the bridge, causing all these pigeons to fly into the air. And there I was making pictures of this scene, and thinking, 'wow, this is neat. I wouldn't mind doing this all the time.' There was a sense of satisfaction I had never experienced before."

"That particular feeling translated into my first job," he says. "someone mentioned that if I went back to college, I could probably start shooting for the yearbook. Sure enough, I got a job as a student employee. That was when I stopped being a student, even though I still was officially."

Like so many students who find themselves in the college publications offices more than the classroom, Peter got his education by absorbing life on campus, listening and watching and recording the pulse of the everyday world. And it was what he would see and overhear that would shape the way he would meet the world for the rest of his life.

"There was one day that was especially beautiful," he says. "There was a blue blue blue sky, so gorgeous, that I decided to blow off some classes and just walk around campus, just to marvel at what a beautiful day it was. I spotted a girl leading a man who was obviously blind. And just as we passed each other on the sidewalk, I overheard him say to her, 'It feels like a really beautiful day.'

"That gave me shivers," he says. "He couldn't see it, but he knew. Here's a blind man who know exactly the same thing I do. Bt he doesn't see it, he feels it. I share that story with younger photographers today. It's very very important for photographers to feel what their subjects are going through as much as see it through their viewfinder. If it's a riot, feel the anger. If it's a wedding, feel the happiness.

"Feel the relationships with other people and then translate that feeling on the film," he says. "Otherwise the photos are just snapshots. They don't mean anything. You have to bring some other element into it that takes the picture to the next level. It has nothing to do with the filter on the lens, or the setting of the f-stop or the speed of the shutter. It's a rhythm, a flow.

"It's a lot like the blues," he says, also being a harmonica player. "I pick up on a riff and start jamming with the people I'm photographing. You don't have to know where the song is going, there's a certain rhythm, a melody that sweeps you along.

"The best assignments I get is when the photo editor says, 'just go out and make music,'" he says. "To have a designer who works with you like that is really wonderful."

For someone who has photographed presidential elections, it might be easy to think Peter's daily assignments of American League baseball games, story hour at the local library, the winner of a local gardening contest and a fund-raising dinner might be humdrum. It might be for many photographers, he concedes, and depending on his mood, it can be for him at times, as well. But that's life at a local newspaper, he says. And what comes from the photo session is what shows the melody in even the most tedious assignment.

"We're always complaining about shooting the 'garbage job,'" he says. "But we have to remember that picture is important to somebody, it's a big moment in their lives. There's a real sense of accomplishment when something wonderful comes out of an assignment that seemed to be really boring at the time. You're not really photographing a wedding or a basketball game. You are photographing people who have worked hard doing something they've committed themselves to, who have found something that they love. It's not the event itself. It's the motivation, all those things below the surface that doesn't meet the eye.

"Do you raise the level of your photojournalism only when you're in China with Clinton ? And all the other times you don't make an effort to try to get something special?"

That, says Peter, is the difference between a photographer who works from the heart or who is a hack (my word, not his). It's the difference between working from the heart and just earning a living. The hazard here, he says, is that photography can be an enchanting profession, luring the photographer away from all other areas of his or her life, creating an unhealthy imbalance.

"For some photographers, the work is their passion, it's who they are," he says. "There's a danger in letting it be all consuming. It can really hurt you, if you're not careful. Sometimes folks can love it to the expense of everything else. And it's really sad, for themselves and for the people who are closest to them."

As if to underscore that exact point, our Saturday workday, which began at 9 a.m. to shoot a baseball game, ended past 9 pm because he was assigned to photograph the pilots of the original Memphis Belle. And the pilots, not knowing the newspaper photographer and reporter were waiting for them to appear at a special reception, took their time moseying to the hangar where the party was taking place. That made Peter very late getting home, and he was forced to break a date with his wife, Kate, to see Little Richard play in New Haven. It wasn't the first time he had to disappoint his private life to meet his professional obligations. But he has learned to balance his work a little better as the years have passed.

"There is indeed a balance that must be found," he says. "God has given me everything I have, and it's my responsibility now to treat those gifts and blessings appropriately."

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.