Our featured photographer this month is Scott Dine. Scott is a lifetime member of the Arundel Camera Club and has been a mentor and friend to our club for many years, sharing his insights and experience.
Scott spent 35 years at the Post-Dispatch working as a Sunday Pictures Magazine photographer, a photo editor and director of photography, and was inducted into the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame.
ACC: How did you get started in photojournalism and how long have you been in journalism?
SD: I began taking pictures and processing film in a darkroom consisting of a blanket draped over a table in our garage. I was thirteen. In high school I began taking photographs for the student newspaper and the yearbook. Some of my photographs ended up in the Amarillo (TX) Globe- News and I began hanging around their newsroom when I was about 16 in 1950. I worked a couple of summers and some weekends, first in the darkroom and then doing assignments. So I worked full-time for fifty years, but I still practice the craft, read about it, study it. I can’t put the camera down.
ACC: Where did you work?
SD: After Amarillo and a couple of years of college went to work for United Press in Dallas, first in the darkroom and then as a staff photographer in Dallas and later Austin. I was drafted, spent two years In the army, most of it as a photog, then worked for the Richmond, VA, Times Dispatch, then moved to the Denver Post. Tried freelancing for a couple of years in the DC area and crashed and burned. Off to the Houston Chronicle for a brief period and then spent thirty five years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch where I worked as a staff photographer, Sunday magazine photographer, picture editor assignment editor, and Director of Photography. The Post-Dispatch was founded by Joseph Pulitzer His grandson Joseph Pulitzer III, was the publisher during my time there. It was a first rate operation, one of America’s best regional newspapers.
ACC: How would you describe your approach to photography?
SD: Dazed and confused. That’s how I start out. I don’t have an agenda, I keep my eyes and ears open. In the back of my mind I keep essentials like facial expressions, light, movement, relationships, I might find a shaft of light that is intriguing and try to build a composition around it. I have to be aware of the environment the subject I have chosen resides in. How much of the environment is necessary to make an interesting photograph. On the street I do this hundreds of times a day, maybe getting one or two worth photographing. These are a few of the items I am looking for.
ACC: What makes a photograph interesting?
SD: Photographs that need no explanation are the ones I find most interesting.
ACC: What photographers influenced you?
SD: Early on the influence came from other newspapers. The Globe-News had subscriptions to newspapers from around the country and I watched the Denver Post, Milwaukee Journal, LA Times and Detroit Free-Press, all of whom had outstanding departments. In the fifties there weren’t many monographs of photographers published. Life magazine came to our house weekly and and I got ideas from it. Later on I wore out a copy of Cartier-Bresson’s’ Decisive Moment and Richard Avedon’s Observations. I discovered Kertesz and Elliott Erwitt and Dorothea Lange. Walker Evans was probably the most influential: He approached his subjects- head-on and so do I. My work evolved through time. My approach today is entirely different than the 1950’s and 1960’s. I began with a Speed Graphic using 4×5 inch film. I also worked with a Rolleiflex (2.25 in square) quite extensively. Today I am all 35mm, having spent most of my career with a bag of Leica and Nikon cameras and lenses from 21mm to 300mm with me constantly. Technology certainly had an influence on my evolution-the Speed Graphic had one lens and maximum film speed in those days was about 125 ISO. I initiated the changed to digital cameras in the late nineteen nineties with the Kodak DCS 4 producing a 1.75 MB file. The cost was about $12,500 per camera. A lot happened to photography between the Graphic and the DCS 4, developed by the Associated Press and Kodak. It had either a Canon EOS or Nikon body on a Kodak digital platform.
ACC: Do you have any advice for Club members?
SD: Follow your instincts, photograph what interests YOU not a CONTEST JUDGE.
ACC: Can you say a little about the photographs you have shared with us?
SD: It’s difficult to wrap up my career in ten photographs——a lot of stuff is left out—food, fashions, all the things that photojournalists deal with. News pictures are important, but on a day-to-day basis there is very little photograph in a city that makes spectacular front page photographs. The result is that we perfected our craft on life in a city—the day to day events, lives and activities of the population.
