WESTSIDE/VALLEY : Images From a Life in Photography

Here was just a casual meal among friends, some chit-chat and debate on the art of photography in a Chinatown restaurant, ending another night spent at Ansel Adams’ San Francisco gallery. And here were Adams and Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston listening to young Horace Bristol talk excitedly about his job, shooting for a new magazine called Life.

He’d already established a career free-lancing to such magazines as Time and Fortune. But this was different--an oversized glossy magazine devoted to storytelling through the still-developing genre of documentary photography. Bristol was among the first Life staff photographers in the late 1930s assigned to travel the American West for his images.

Weston was concerned. “You mean you send in your prints,” he asked Bristol all those decades ago, “and the editors crop your prints, and use them the way they want?”

“Sure,” Bristol said, “that’s my job.”

For Weston, whose lush formal images of the human figure, of landscapes and still-lifes set a modern standard for artistic purity in photography, this was all just too much . “Well, you’re not an artist,” he chided Bristol. “You’re just an artisan!”

Bristol didn’t argue the point. He saw himself mainly as a storyteller anyway, using his camera to look at the world in much the same way his own family had done through several generations of work in the California newspaper trade.

Now 84, Bristol’s attitude toward his work hasn’t changed much since that Chinese dinner a half-century ago, even now that his own work has been rediscovered through a variety of exhibitions and publishing projects. But he does add: “When I see one of Edward Weston’s prints selling for $150,000, I wonder who was right.”

But he only smiles when his wife, Masako, tells him, “You have to wait 50 years to find out.”

Bristol spends much of his time at his home deep in the hills of Ojai cataloguing his life’s work in photography and talking with gallery owners and publishers about the pictures he’d largely forgotten about decades ago. His next exhibition opens Tuesday at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, which will present a collection of Bristol’s images from Asia.

Some of those pictures surround him now, dozens of prints of varied sizes displayed and stacked around the ranch-style house that’s become as much a gallery and work space as it is a home. There in one frame is his 1946 image of a Japanese fortuneteller, his distorted face watching the viewer impassively through a magnifying glass. In others are Bristol’s pictures of Japanese tattoo artists and their subjects, of a bombed-out factory in Japan, of expressive Noh masks carved in Asia.

He’d gone to Asia in 1946 after leaving Life and after finishing his days as a Navy photographer under Edward Steichen during World War II. Bristol arrived with his first wife and children, expecting only to stay for about two years while working on assignment for Fortune. He stayed for 25 years.

“It was such a unique situation,” he says. “No one had done anything for years in Japan. Japan was not at all friendly to photographers before the war. You had a very tough time, with the secret police and all that.”

But in American-occupied Japan, the former Navy lieutenant commander was made a “simulated colonel” by the authorities, and was provided with a house, five servants, free gasoline for his Jeep and free passage whenever he traveled in the country.

“I could go any place. The Japanese were so scared of these awful foreigners that nobody ever disputed anything I wanted to do. That’s an ideal situation.”

Fortune was mainly interested in Bristol’s industrial-themed picture-stories, but the photographer established his own East-West Photo Agency to distribute his more personal work documenting life there, including the quick rebuilding of Tokyo’s red-light district. “I truly fell in love with all the arts and crafts that I never dreamed existed. Some of the stories were offbeat, the tattooing and things like that.”

At the Cohen Gallery, many of these images from Japan, Taiwan and Bali will be presented as vintage medium-format contact prints. They are 2 1/4-inch square, each framed individually.

Bristol says he’s learned to appreciate the intimacy inherent in the small size of these pictures, among the few vintage prints from that part of his career to survive.

“It’s a more personal experience between you and the picture,” he says, holding a matted print close to his bearded face. “Maybe I’m just making all this up--I don’t know. But when you see big pictures, you’re looking over people’s shoulders, people are walking by. But if you want to look at this and study it, you can do it.”

Bristol had given up photography as a full-time concern by the late ‘50s, when he turned his attention toward architecture, building 15 homes in Japan and several more in Mexico. The rediscovery of Bristol’s photography came 30 years later. That’s when he unearthed his aborted project on migrant laborers in the 1930s, when his proposed picture book with John Steinbeck was eclipsed after the author decided to write the subject instead as a novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“I was disappointed,” Bristol says. “I really should have gone ahead anyway. But I was working for Life, and I just went on to the next story.”

He didn’t think about it again, he says, until his youngest son was in high school. “He came to me one day and said, ‘I have to write a book report on a famous book called “Grapes of Wrath.” Have you ever read it?’ That made me so angry with myself that I had never said anything to him about it, that I went out and got the prints.”

Soon he was showing the prints at his son’s school. “I realized they were a historic document,” he says. And when he heard that Butterfield & Butterfield was looking for material, Bristol showed the firm the prints he’d ignored for so long. “They were very excited,” he says.

So half a century after he’d begun in photography, and after a couple of decades of retirement, Bristol’s first gallery show emerged in the 1980s at the Art Center in Pasadena, where he first studied photography. He’s had several shows since, along with the new fame offered by a stream of magazine and newspaper articles re-examining his work.

“All my good friends--Ansel and whatnot--they printed for the print,” he says. “I printed for the printed page. So when I made a print and sent it out, my responsibility was over. I didn’t worry about it. I never cared what happened after that. I never had any exhibits. The idea of a print having any value other than the image never occurred to me.”

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An exhibition of photographs by Horace Bristol continues through July 10 at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7466 Beverly Blvd. Call (213) 937-5525.