EDITOR'S LETTER4 min read
Editor's Letter: Issue No. 8
On bass guitars, Look Magazine, and the Nikon F that connects three generations.
Some editions of Just Gerald start with a destination. This one starts with a camera. Specifically, a Nikon F — the professional 35mm SLR that Nikon introduced in 1959 and that became, almost immediately, the instrument of record for the photographers who documented the second half of the twentieth century. Arthur Rothstein used one. His son Rob Stoner's father used one. And so, it turns out, do I.
The Rothstein Thread
Arthur Rothstein was one of the great American documentary photographers. He joined the Farm Security Administration in 1935, at the age of nineteen, and spent the next several years photographing the Dust Bowl, the Depression, the faces of people who had lost everything and were still, somehow, going on. His photograph of a farmer and his sons walking through a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma — taken in 1936 — is one of the defining images of the twentieth century.
He went on to become the director of photography at Look Magazine, the picture-driven biweekly that rivalled Life for thirty years before closing in 1971. Look's photographers carried Nikon Fs. They went to Vietnam, to the civil rights marches, to the moon launch, to every major story of the era. The camera was the tool of the serious professional — precise, reliable, built to last.
Arthur Rothstein's son is Rob Stoner. Rob grew up in that world — surrounded by photographs, by the visual language of mid-century documentary journalism, by the understanding that a camera is not just a device but a way of paying attention. He became a musician instead of a photographer, but the eye stayed.
"He became a musician instead of a photographer, but the eye stayed."
The Connection
I came across Rob Stoner the way most people do — through Bob Dylan. Rob was Dylan's musical director and bass player for the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and 1976, one of the most celebrated concert tours in rock history. He was also, it emerged, a serious stage manager — the person who actually made the Rolling Thunder circus work night after night across two continents.
We connected online. I asked him about his father's work at Look Magazine. I asked him about the Nikon F. He told me that his mother was also a photographer, and that the camera had been part of the household in the way that a piano is part of some households — always present, always in use, always a way of seeing.
I mentioned that I shoot with a Nikon F too. The conversation got considerably more interesting after that.
This edition is about spending a day in New York with someone who knows it the way Rob Stoner knows it — not as a tourist, not as a visitor, but as a person who has been playing its rooms and walking its streets for sixty years. The restaurants, the bars, the venues, the corners. The New York that exists underneath the New York that everyone photographs.
"The New York that exists underneath the New York that everyone photographs."
The Verdict
Load the Nikon F. This one requires a different kind of attention.
