Picture of Determination

The Bronica camera and its sturdy tripod weigh maybe 10 pounds together, but Stephen Dantzig struggles visibly to hoist the rig before lurching forward a foot and setting it back down.

“OK,” Dantzig calls to the four posing models after sucking in a deep breath. “Let’s do it again.”

In the celluloid capital of the world, hundreds of still photographers struggle to make it, turning their apartments into studios, spending the money from their day jobs on film and lenses and $800 light meters. Perhaps none has struggled harder than Dantzig.

Suffering from cerebral palsy since birth, the 36-year-old must fight to steady his left hand enough to pull a Polaroid test shot from its protective sheath. He steps awkwardly, with the help of a cane, over the power cords that snake around his North Hollywood apartment-cum-studio, and his right arm “is just kind of along for the ride.”

But he fell in love with photography nearly three decades ago during a family vacation to Niagara Falls and--though he has a doctorate from Rutgers University and spends his days as a school psychologist--has seldom been without a camera since.

“I was one of those pain-in-the-neck kids who always had a camera around his neck,” says Dantzig, whose years of after-work work are beginning to pay off with album and magazine covers, movie posters and other jobs. “I just always had a camera, since I was 8 years old.”

He carried a camera in grade school, in junior high, at his high school on Long Island, N.Y., where he gave up on physics and snapped photographs for the yearbook and other student publications. Then, late in high school, he enrolled in a two-week workshop on the fine art of studio photography and portraiture.

For a teenager who sometimes toppled over when walking and had trouble keeping his right eye closed while focusing a camera with his left, other photographic disciplines might have been more suitable--disciplines that don’t require backdrops and heavy lights, that allow for some latitude in focusing the camera. But Dantzig had discovered his niche.

“The lighting [of those early portraits] was horrendous, but I didn’t know that,” he says as the models begin emerging from the bathroom-makeup room this evening. “I was like, ‘This is the neatest thing since sliced bread.’ ”

Knowing all along that “photography is a very difficult way to make a living,” he majored in psychology at Rutgers. But after class and between study sessions, Dantzig would unpack the light meters and cameras--as well as a backdrop he bought when he was 17 and still uses today--and take pictures of friends, and friends of friends.

He did the same while pursuing a graduate degree. On the day he received his doctorate, a friend asked how, exactly, he was going to use his degree.

Actually, Dantzig replied, he was going to be a photographer.

“I think he has more determination than anyone I’ve ever met,” says Natasha Duswalt, one of the models this night and a longtime friend.

Although Duswalt is standing just behind him, Dantzig offers no indication that he even heard the compliment. He is firing away at another model, Dianne Granger, and is entirely oblivious to anyone not in front of the lens.

“And he always makes you feel comfortable--which is important because you’re so vulnerable,” adds Drinda Shaneyfelt.

“Always,” chimes in Michele Ivey.

Dantzig hasn’t heard a word.

“Gooooood,” he calls as Granger strikes a pouty pose. “Cute, very cute.”

Having written his doctoral dissertation on “cognitive development in school-age children with cerebral palsy and spina bifida,” Dantzig works with physically and emotionally disabled students in the Los Angeles and Pasadena unified school districts. And he likes that job, very much.

“But this,” he says, “this is my passion.”