Travels With Steinbeck : Horace Bristol’s remarkable Depression-era photographs are on display for the first time

Tucked away in a dim corner of his lodgings in this hilly, rural community, Horace Bristol may look like an old man biding his time, but in fact he has embarked on his third life.

When he isn’t talking to reporters, curators or publishers about his first life as a photojournalist--explaining how he amassed so many credits and so little recognition--he composes memoires on his word processor. And if he ever gets to it, the 80-year-old photographer will go through one last trunk of prints and negatives that he hasn’t looked at for 35 years.

“There just isn’t enough time,” the portly, white-haired photographer protested, in a voice tinged with excitement and weariness. Next weekend he will be particularly busy, greeting visitors at the opening of his very first exhibition, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The show of about 150 photographs taken in the ‘30s and ‘40s opens with a reception on Friday evening and continues through March 4.

Bristol’s debut exhibition will introduce the public to a forgotten photojournalist who had a 25-year career of international adventure: Traveling with John Steinbeck through “The Grapes of Wrath” country in California’s central valley, he photographed people who became characters in the 1939 classic novel of Depression-era migrants and in a subsequent movie; he was on staff at Life in the magazine’s glory days, when its favored cameramen could be counted on one hand; as one of five photographers selected by Edward Steichen for his U.S. Naval Photographic Unit in World War II, Bristol shot striking pictures of Pacific rescue missions in “Dumbo” planes; during a postwar stint in the Far East, he worked for Fortune and established an agency in Tokyo, selling pictures to a vast array of clients including National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.

It was a thrilling life of exotic travel, only marred by his inability to spend more time with his first wife, Virginia, and two sons, Horace Jr. and Christopher, and by his quest to follow his own muse rather than fulfill assignments. But that career screamed to a halt in 1956 when Virginia committed suicide while they were living in Japan. Devastated by her death (during a severe depression after a hysterectomy), Bristol threw down his camera, destroyed many of his negatives and gave up photography.

“Masako thought I was sort of a lost soul,” he said of his second wife, a Japanese woman 20 years his junior who was librarian for a press club in Japan when they met. They were married in 1957.

Bristol’s second life, with Masako, didn’t include photography. Instead he fulfilled old desires as a “frustrated architect,” building rental houses and living off the income, first on a peninsula in Tokyo Bay and later at Lake Chapala, Mexico. The Bristols’ 24-year-old daughter, Akiko, was born in Japan, their 20-year-old son, Henri, in Mexico. The couple decided they didn’t want to raise their children as expatriates, so in 1968 they moved to Ojai.

Bristol’s third life began nearly four years ago, when Henri came home from high school and announced that he had been assigned to write a report on “The Grapes of Wrath.” “Have you ever read it?” Henri innocently asked his dad.

Harboring a lingering annoyance with Steinbeck for never acknowledging his part in “The Grapes of Wrath” and feeling remorse over not sharing his past with Henri, Bristol began to dredge up his former existance as a photographer. Thousands of fragments of that life were waiting in musty trunks--but only because his wife and mother-in-law had disobeyed his command to dump them.

Bristol had left his remaining photographs in Japan, packed in Navy foot lockers, when he and Masako moved to Mexico. About 10 years ago on a trip to visit her mother, Masako shipped the trunks to Ojai. “If my wife was foolish enough to spend the money to send them from Japan, I wasn’t going to fight it, but I wasn’t interested so I put them in storage,” Bristol said.

Now inspired by his son, he finally pulled out “The Grapes of Wrath” prints, depicting miserable “Okies” who came to California in the hope of finding steady work and buying little white houses in orange groves but had to settle for unimaginable poverty, squalor and hostility.

“I took the prints to Henri’s school,” Bristol said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I could sell some prints to Butterfield & Butterfield and Sotheby’s.’ At this period of my life, I decided to try to make something of what I have.”

He got an enthusiastic reception from a Butterfield representative who was visiting Santa Barbara and agreed to put some prints in an upcoming sale. Expecting his pictures to be worth about $100 apiece, Bristol soon noted that works by his contemporaries were going for $500 or $600. When a few of his works actually went on the block, he was astonished to see them bring around $1,500 apiece. “I hate to be mercenary. The pictures were just as good when I thought they were worth $100,” he said, “but from that time on I’ve had a little more respect for my work.”

Finally realizing that the public might he interested in his work, he called Art Center, which he had attended part-time in the early ‘30s, and took some photographs to Stephen Nowlin, director of exhibitions. The result is the current show, including a few examples of Bristol’s student work, poignant shots of migrants, striking portraits of famous people, strangely beautiful World War II photographs and several masterful suites on Asian cultures.

“Some of them are good, and some of them are just story-telling pictures,” said Bristol who has never considered himself an artist.

He was just “the luckiest guy in the world” back in 1937 when Life hired him at $750 a month. “I wasn’t any different from thousands of other young men who would have loved to have the same opportunity,” he insisted.

Living in San Francisco two doors away from Ansel Adams’ gallery, Bristol used to argue withAdams and Edward Weston. “They would talk about art and I would talk about photojournalism,” he said. “I thought I was sitting on top of the world with a good job with Life, and it was a good job, no question about that. But Weston was disgusted with me because I would allow other people to crop my photographs. He shot right out to the edge of each negative and no one would dare touch them. I just sent my negatives off and what they (the magazine editors) did with them was their business. I was just grateful that they did something.”

While based in San Francisco, Bristol was impressed with Margaret Bourke-White’s and Erskine Caldwell’s book, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” a classic record of the Depression in the South. Having visited California’s migrant camps with photographer Dorothea Lange, he thought, “Gee, this story is even stronger.”

Envisioning a photo essay for Life, he contacted Steinbeck who agreed to accompany him to the camps. But Life turned down the idea because it was “too far away” and “not important enough,” Bristol said. He called Fortune and got a positive response, but Steinbeck didn’t like the prospect of working for such “a capitalistic publication.” Steinbeck eventually decided the story was worth much more than a magazine piece; he would write an entire novel.

“I never thought Steinbeck stole my idea, never that,” Bristol said. “I was working for Life and I just went on to other things, but I did think he could have been a little more gracious about mentioning my involvement.”

During the six rainy weekends in 1938 that they traveled together, “Steinbeck was paranoid about his safety” because local law enforcement officers resisted outsiders who might publicize the migrants’ living conditions, Bristol said. “I never thought I would be physically harmed, largely because I worked for Life and the deputies couldn’t afford the bad publicity that might have attracted, but Steinbeck was terribly worried. He thought they were going to try to kill him. He always wanted to be out of the area before nightfall.”

Bristol remembers Steinbeck as an extraordinarily sensitive man whose “approach was so soft and good that no one could take offense.” The pair had no trouble at all from the migrants. “I think they were so beaten down, so despondent with life that they didn’t have any strength left to resist. They could have taken offense at my taking pictures, but nobody ever did,” he said.

A few of Bristol’s “Grapes of Wrath” photos were eventually published in Life and they were used to cast the movie, but most of them have never been in the public eye. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the novel, Bristol has compiled a book of related photographs that is awaiting publication.

“I wanted to do it for my son and for other children,” he said. “The book became very popular and now of course it is considered great art, but I think it’s important to know that the characters in the book were real people.”