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I Love Your Stories is a soulful conversation series hosted by artist and creative guide Hava Gurevich, where art meets authenticity. Each episode invites you into an intimate dialogue with artists, makers, and visionaries who are courageously crafting lives rooted in creativity, purpose, and self-expression.
From painters and poets to healers and community builders, these are the stories behind the work—the moments of doubt, discovery, grief, joy, and transformation. Through honest, heart-centred conversations, Hava explores how creativity can be both a healing force and a path to personal truth.
If you’re an artist, a dreamer, or someone drawn to a more intuitive and intentional way of living, this podcast will remind you that your story matters—and that the act of creating is a sacred, revolutionary act.
[MUSIC]
Welcome back to All of Your Stories.
I'm your host, Hava Gurvitch.
Today, I'm joined by award-winning
photographer, author,
and former B&H photography
podcast host, Alan Weitz.
From the golden age of
Kodachrome to the digital revolution,
Alan has witnessed photography transform
from nearly every angle.
We talk about his remarkable career, the
story behind his book, Kodachrome,
how two guys named
Leo changed photography,
what he learned from interviewing icons
like Jeff Bridges and Graham Nash,
and why his latest artistic obsession
involves Japanese manhole covers.
Along the way, Alan shares what keeps him
curious after decades behind the camera,
and why success is less about recognition
than creating something
you're truly proud of.
Help me in welcoming
Alan to this episode.
Now, quick word from our sponsor, and
then we'll get right back to the show.
When I started selling my art, I had
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a professional business.
And then I came across art storefronts,
and that was a game changer.
I've been a customer now for years, and
they've been instrumental every step of
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I have a gorgeous,
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I have marketing tools and a membership
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and teaches me how to
succeed as an artist.
Check them out, artstorefronts.com, and
tell them how I sent you.
Welcome back to all of your stories.
My guest today is award-winning
photographer, Alan White.
Alan is a
photographer, author, podcast host.
His photographs have appeared on covers
and inside a bunch of publications,
including GQ, Esquire, Life Magazine,
Money Magazine, New York Magazine,
Philadelphia
Magazine, all over the place.
He won tons of awards for his
photography, and he
recently published a book.
I'm going to hold it up even though some
of you can't see it.
Coda Chrome, helped two guys named Leo
change photography, and I'm excited to
talk about this book.
I'm also really excited to talk to you
about your podcasting career.
First, let's just get to know you.
Welcome to the podcast.
Nice to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Tell us a little bit about your
background, how you got into photography.
You're very, very connected within the
photography world, so it's kind of
interesting to hear that story.
Well, it used to be more so. There used
to be a magazine industry. That really
doesn't exist anymore.
I started off photography kind of. I was
wayside by the whole thing.
I, as a child, I used to
play around with clay a lot.
I was into sculpture and
some people had, you know, toys.
I had clay and I would just
make things out all the time.
And I grew up in Brooklyn. And being a
citizen of New York City,
one of the things that was really cool
about it is that New York has five
specialized high schools.
One of them being the high school of art
and design. There's music and art.
There's Bronx Science.
They each have their specialties. And
high school of art and design, which was
on 57th Street and 2nd Avenue,
that was for people who want to go into
commercial art and advertising.
And it was a very interesting school.
Each class was capped at 500 students.
And you had to take an exam and basically
trekked in from Brooklyn
to Manhattan every day.
I went to school with people from the
strata of New York City
and a lot of creative types.
And he was one of our classmates. I
remember when he didn't speak like this.
He actually had a normal voice.
It was interesting, the first year that
you're there, even though you take an
entrance exam and I got
there for a sculpture,
they give you a little bit of everything
that is offered in the school, just so
you could see what else is out there,
which is a great idea. Because it's a
good thing because you could die being a
sculptor of little clay animals
and you wouldn't expect to
feed a family doing that.
Anyway, one of the
classes we had was photography.
And it was taught by Mrs. Blake, a very,
very, very wonderful woman
who really knew photography.
And I fell in love with it. There was
something about taking pictures that I
really, really liked.
And I started doing
that. And that was 1966.
And I graduated from art and design. I
went from there to the School of Visual
Arts, a few blocks away,
for motion picture. And I didn't like
film. I was too busy.
Too many people involved.
I like being by myself with the camera.
Leave me alone. So I
got back into photography.
And then I left before I even finished
school because I started a
job opening at Look Magazine,
Washing and Drawing Prince. And Look
Magazine was competitive
to life back in the day.
And hey, why not? If I go Washing and
Drawing Prince, that's
a good place to start.
And the person who hired me was Arthur
Rothstein, who was one of the
photographers back in WPA
when they hired photographers to go out
during the Depression.
I didn't even know who he was at the
time, which is really embarrassing.
Anyway, from there, the
magazine folded in five months.
It was the beginning of the end of the
magazine industry,
which I didn't recognize.
And from there, I just started
freelancing. I had a
couple of jobs, semi-real jobs,
but mostly taking pictures from there on.
And I just would go
through a lot of the annuals
and magazines from a lot of advertising
agencies and graphic artists guild.
And I looked for designers whose work I
liked, who did the kind
of work I'd want to do.
And I would call them up. And back then,
they would actually answer the phone.
And I would, being in Manhattan every
day, I would go to knock on
doors and show my portfolio
and get wonderful advice from people who
were top in their field.
And one of the really nice parts was that
a few blocks away was Carnegie Hall.
And Carnegie Hall, there's a building
above it, and it's chock-full of the best
photographers in New York City.
And I used to walk down there with my
portfolio up to school
and knock on doors and say,
"Can I show you my portfolio?" And got
good feedback, which is why I like
talking to younger
people these days as well.
Anyway, so from there, one thing led to
another, and all happenstance.
I just fell into magazine work because
that's what I like doing.
I like traveling around with a camera.
"Give me a list of places.
Tell me what you want to see,
and I'll go find something for you." And
that's what I was good at.
That's amazing. You said that when you
started this art and design high school,
you enjoyed sculpting or ceramics, but
you fell in love with photography.
What is it about photography that made
you fall in love with it?
I don't know. I was good
at it. That was one thing.
Oh, that's a big
thing. That's a big thing.
No, no, I'm left-handed and slightly
dyslexic, so to me, it was
the best way of communicating.
You can't read my handwriting. I had to
do a form of communication somehow.
Computers in my life, they saved me. I
could actually type things
out slowly, but I can do it.
But I really, really loved looking
through a viewfinder, and I'm
very, very visually oriented.
I didn't understand that at the time. It
became very apparent
that I see certain ways,
and I have a way of eliminating clutter
and getting to the essence of an image
and just take a picture
of it that people liked.
By the time I was a senior in high
school, I had sold pictures that went
into three issues of popular photography,
and that's how I paid my $1,500 tuition
bill for my first year
at School of Visual Arts
from selling pictures
as a high school senior.
That's why when I was at the end of my
second year, I went to Alice Beck,
who's the head of the School of Visual
Arts Photo Department.
She recently retired. She's still around.
I said, "Alice, what's next year about?"
She goes, "Oh, it's
about making a portfolio."
I got one of them. Bye.
That was the good news and the bad news.
The truth of the matter is, back then,
they didn't really stress business
practices very well,
and that was the weak spot of, I would
say, my education back then,
but that's a whole other
conversation we could have here.
Photography stuck with me. People liked
what they saw one night.
They gave me an assignment that came
back, and they go, "Oh, I like this.
Here's another assignment for you."
It's rewarding emotionally,
creatively, and financially.
That's what I can do.
It sounds like from the way you describe
how you just knocked on
doors and showed your portfolio,
it sounds like you figured out the
business end of it all on your own.
Yeah. I don't know how I did, but there's
certain kind of work I want to do.
When I write something, I
write the way I like to read.
When I write something, if I'm not going
to like reading it, I'm not writing it.
It's the same kind of
thing with photography.
It just clicked with me.
It just became my language.
My understanding is that up until the
70s, maybe mid-70s or so,
photography really wasn't
considered art or collectible art.
You could still get Ansel Adams
photographs from the National Arts.
I remember when Ansel
Adams prints sold for $100.
$100, yeah. At the gift shop.
Seriously. I do remember that happening.
That was a big thing.
For the longest time, it's
not art. You could reproduce it.
We've had that conversation before.
That was the transitional
time, and now it's crazy.
I was fortunate to be in a
golden age of magazine work,
and I was actually able to raise a
family, feed them, and
keep a roof over our heads,
taking photographs from magazines. I
don't know how easy it is
to do it that way anymore.
I slowly transitioned. I actually worked
behind a deli counter for a year.
That was an interesting experience. I
taught me how to deal with people,
and I was quite good at what I did.
But I was also starting
to write at that time.
Popular photography asked me to write an
article on Inchat papers,
and they gave me a monthly column to do,
because before that,
I worked at a place called Photocare,
which was a high-end,
and still is a high-end
camera shop in New York.
I worked there for 12 years, dealing with
top names in the field.
You could not bullshit people on this.
The people who came to you
depended on it for a living,
and I had top names who trusted me.
But while I was there is when Inchat
papers started happening,
and Inchat printers
and digital photography.
When I started working
there, it was film photography.
So I was there during
the transition to digital,
which was great because I
was trained by factory people.
I was flown to Rochester, flown to...
So I really learned it firsthand from the
people who were
actually designing this stuff.
Wow.
And initially, Inchat paper was available
in Luster, Matt, and Glossy.
That was it. You had no other choices.
So I would go down the
street to Sam Flack's Art Supply
and buy all kinds of watercolor papers to
see how they would react
to these Inchat printers, which I sold.
I was selling 24 and 36-inch printers,
and I just started
feeding paper through it.
And I got to a point where
I was able to identify paper
by just looking at it and touching it.
And then the manufacturers started coming
out with better papers,
and I started writing about them.
So I became this expert on Inchat paper.
And Pop Photo asked me to write an
article about it, and I did.
And again, one thing that led to another,
one person at B&H Photo was following me,
and that's when the
internet was starting up,
and their internet
site was starting up also
when he chased me down
for two years, saying,
"I want you to write
for us and do reviews."
And I hesitated, ultimately went there,
and I was there for 20 years.
I wrote over 500 product
reviews, technology reviews,
explained a lot of digital stuff when it
first started coming out.
Meantime, I was also working for
companies like Nikon,
helping them write their
first digital brochures
for their first digital DSLRs.
The D100, I wrote about three-quarters of
their first sales brochure.
They didn't know what to do with it.
So I had kind of an
interesting little journey here.
That's really interesting.
So you were really at the
very beginning of digital art.
Yeah.
Digital photography.
How...
What...
For somebody who grew up
with film and dark rooms,
and not knowing if you
caught what you wanted to catch
until you developed the film,
what are your thoughts
on digital photography?
I'm very spoiled.
I look at what today's cameras can do,
even the most basic cameras,
not even talking about
the high-end stuff anymore.
Nobody really needs the
high-end stuff anymore.
Your phone's amazing,
but let's not go there.
I found that...
I'm sorry, what was the question again?
I'm just...
I'm very curious how you feel about
digital photography,
like how digital photography...
Okay, I love the instant feedback.
I really, really do.
There's something about shooting film
and developing it and all that.
And I love the look of analog.
I love the look of film.
Film has its own qualities to it.
And I currently own some of the...
All the cameras that I
coveted when I was younger,
but I can never
afford to own them all now.
I have gorgeous examples.
I have the best film
cameras in the world.
I don't use them.
Because of the immediacy of digital
and what I can do with digital
and the fact that I can
preview so much digital,
the exposure, everything about it,
I could preview.
There's no surprise.
And that was kind of...
I look back at what I did for a living.
Kodachrome was the kind of
film where you couldn't...
Even though it was invented
in a bathtub, essentially,
you could not do it yourself.
There was no home
processing of Kodachrome.
It was far too complex.
And only for the longest time,
only Kodak facilities could process it.
That means when you took pictures,
you sent your film off to the lab.
Yep.
Okay. Under the best conditions.
Okay. You're talking about two days.
Yeah.
And that's if you're near a Kodak lab,
and it's not a Sunday with a weekend.
So you would have up to a week's time
before you would see your film.
And that was built into your schedule.
Digital shortened deadlines dramatically,
but also the mystery of, you know,
did it come out? Did it not?
Mm-hmm.
Now, how did you get around that?
You shot Polaroids.
Right.
Kodachrome 64 was best if rated ISO 80,
because you wanted it
under exposure a little bit.
Polaroid color was
ASA 80. It was perfect.
And I actually had one of
my Nikon cameras customized
to take Polaroid picture.
It had a Polaroid back on it.
It took little postage size, 35
millimeter size Polaroids.
Cool.
So before I would shoot a major shot,
I would take one of these.
And even Polaroid's not perfect,
but I would know where I was.
I would know if something was not right.
And every once in a while,
something would slip on me.
But that was my only
preview of what I would have.
Otherwise, I didn't
know what was going on
until I got the film back.
And that was pretty intense.
It's pretty different from today.
Wow. Yeah.
So that's really interesting,
because I was a photographer.
It was film.
And I did primarily black and white,
so I would process it myself.
But that built-in not knowing for me
was so much a part of the process.
Well, for one thing, it
separated the two discoveries.
The first one is like
when you see something
and you're looking at
it in your viewfinder
and you decide this is
it and you take a picture.
And then the next time is
when you're in the darkroom
and it comes up and you're like,
"Yeah, that's what I saw."
And I think you're absolutely right.
I think it happens in
every age with every art form.
There's painters who still insist
that mixing their own pigments with oils
is the only way to paint.
But on the other hand,
it really, what it does,
if you think about it, it removes all the
technical guesswork.
It doesn't have to.
Well, it can remove some.
And it just becomes about your eye.
It just becomes about your vision.
It just becomes about your creativity.
So you could take any camera,
just about any single
camera you would buy,
just about every camera I know,
it could be put into
auto exposure, auto focus,
and you literally point and shoot.
And also, every
single one of those cameras
can also be put into fully manual
where you have to set the
shutter speed and the aperture
and balance the exposure,
through what used to be the little needle
going back and forth.
Now, I did the picture
getting brighter or dimmer.
You could focus manually.
You can do all of these things.
And I think it's kind of funny.
A lot of people don't understand it,
but I thought it was brilliant
and I can't justify
the cost of the thing.
But Leica has one of their digital M's.
They make film and digital, same camera.
They look almost indistinguishable.
But they make one version of their full
frame digital Leica M's.
There's no screen on the back.
You have to go home and take the card out
and put it into your computer,
if you want to know what you got.
So you can't be distracted by chimping,
looking at the back of your camera
every 30 seconds or less than that.
You're just taking pictures
because there's nothing to look at.
There's no playback.
Wait, you said that word with chimping?
Chimping.
Chimping.
It's like a monkey.
When people take people like that,
it's called chimping.
Because if you give a monkey a camera,
that's what they do.
They hold it up like this
and that's what they do.
They do what you do.
So, yeah, that's chimping.
So, you are definitely somebody
who is very interested in the technology.
And so it makes a lot more sense to me
that you wrote a book about Kodachrome.
You can get the book--
There are great recipes in it.
No.
It's available on Alan's website,
and we'll have links
to that in the notes.
And if you get it from him directly,
you will get an autographed copy,
which is really nice.
So, what is it about Kodachrome?
What got you to write the book?
Tell me about it a little bit.
It's interesting.
I actually finally realized,
after being asked, you know,
what made you start on this,
I actually figured out what it was.
And that was about seven years ago.
Kodachrome 64 was my film
for 95% of everything I did
as a professional.
So, that was my vehicle.
That was my medium.
I knew that film intimately.
I didn't need a light meter.
I look around.
I could tell you what the exposure is,
even with electronic flash,
because I use the same lighting systems
that I would travel with.
So, I knew my lights.
I knew the sun.
The sun doesn't change, okay?
Clouds go in and out.
You adjust for that.
So, I started going
through a lot of my slides
because everything,
again, was going digital.
If you want to share your pictures,
you have to have digital versions.
So, I started doing high-resolution scans
of my Kodachromes.
And in doing so, I
started to really appreciate
the qualities that they had
that I really liked about them.
And you're talking
about being in the dark
and with burning and dodging.
That came into play here,
because one of the
things that amazed me was that
Kodachromes are a
very, very contrasty film.
Yes.
And when you took a picture, you had to,
if it was a bright, sunny
day, especially in the summer,
when you have extremes of contrast,
you had to expose for the
shadows or the highlights.
You couldn't capture them both.
And if you exposed for the shadows,
you'd get shadow detail,
but your highlights would just be clear.
They'd be blown out.
And then vice versa.
The best thing to do is
go for your highlights,
let the shadows go where they may,
and hope for the best.
When scanning and then reproducing these,
I was able to open up those shadows,
and I saw a detail that
I never knew was there.
Wow.
That even the printers,
when my pictures would go to
the printers for the magazines,
they could do a
certain amount of fudging,
open up the shadows, ways of doing it,
however way printers do that when they
make the separation negatives.
But working digitally,
I was able to go into little areas and
open and close them.
And I was pretty amazed at how much was
actually captured by it.
And now here's the funny thing about it.
We talk about the color of Kodachrome.
Kodachrome had a very
unique color palette to it
that was never been duplicated by any
other film or medium.
Now here's the catch.
35 millimeter slides are one square inch.
They made larger formats.
They made 11 by 14 for
a while, even 8 by...
I have an 8 by 10 of Gregory Peck.
It was just stunning.
But it was a limited run.
It was only used for certain studios.
To appreciate it,
you had to look at
something one square inch large.
So how do you appreciate that?
You had to either put
it onto a light box,
a backlit light box,
and look with an optical
loop added through the loop,
or you projected it, okay?
Well, you made a print.
Yeah.
When you made a print, you're now looking
not at the Kodachrome.
You're now looking at the
color palette of the print
as interpreted by
whatever the process was.
When you take a scanned Kodachrome,
as good as your scan might be, as
accurate technically as it might be,
when you play it back on your computer,
how accurate is your screen?
How many shades of gray and tonality?
What's the dynamic range of your screen?
So you never really see Kodachrome unless
you're holding one up
to a light box or projecting it,
assuming you have a
color correct bulb in it.
So it's a very weird animal.
We talked about the
quality. It's unmatched,
but it's very hard to
actually appreciate what it is.
Even in my book, I have 16 pages of
original Kodachromes.
You're looking at offset print pictures
of scanned Kodachromes.
The scans are great, okay?
It's a limit what you can do with four
colors of ink on paper.
Just a limit.
Yeah.
And I see those limitations.
People go, "Oh, the pictures look great."
And I'm saying to myself,
"You have no idea how
good those pictures are."
And so that got you just to really,
really appreciate Kodachrome
to the point that you decided you want to
write a book about it?
Yeah, because I also knew there were a
lot of good side stories to it.
I mean, long story short, for those of
you who have no clue about this,
Kodachrome came out in 1935,
and the beginning of it was 1916
to 16-year-old classically trained
musicians who lived in Manhattan,
who also happened to
be photo enthusiasts,
and they made a movie called Our Navy,
which was filmed in Prismacolor,
which was touted as being the best color
movie film ever made,
and they couldn't wait
to see how good it was.
And they thought it was terrible.
They say, "We could do
better than the big guys."
So they started
puttering around the bathtubs
of their parents'
apartments in the Upper West Side.
And they were knowledgeable.
These were bright guys.
And they made a
certain amount of headway,
and every few steps
forward, a few steps back,
Kodach ultimately took notice of them
and started helping them in several ways,
and it took them 20 years.
But in 1935, they
came out with Kodachrome.
The first year was only 8-millimeter
and 16-millimeter motion picture film.
The next year, they came
out with 35-millimeter,
and 828, which is a version of 35.
And it remains the
best color film ever made.
And what's cool about it
is that the same basic film
went through two generations of updates,
but it was still Kodachrome.
And they made the film for 74 years.
Now, that's a pretty long run.
Now, what's also cool
about it is that the book
has 174 pages.
A third of that are ads from 1935
into the late 80s, early 90s.
And all of the ads, almost all of them,
were produced by the
same advertising agency,
J. Walter Thompson in Chicago.
So if you're into
advertising and marketing,
this is a great book just
to see how one agency handled
the same client and
the same basic product,
film, projectors,
cameras, and the accessories,
as popular tastes
change, as technology changes,
to a point where they're not
even showing the gear anymore.
They're just showing
gorgeous photographs.
Wow. That's amazing.
Yeah, so I mean, and then
I have all these anecdotes
that go along with it.
I mean, there's a bunch of funny stories
that go along with Kodachrome.
I had no idea.
It was such a...
I used to do cross-processing, so...
Not with Kodachrome.
Well, the other one.
At the Chrome. At the Chrome, okay.
Or, yeah, yeah, you
could do with the E6 films.
All other color slide films are E6 films.
That's a generalization of it, okay?
And by the way, the big
difference between that,
just for those of you who are saying,
so what's the big deal?
Yeah, what is it?
Okay.
All of the E6 films, the
Ectochrome, Fujichrome,
all of the films that end in chrome,
those are slide films.
If it ends in color, a Kodacolor,
Ectacolor, Fujicolor,
it's negative.
So if it ends in chrome,
these days it's all E6.
E6 films have the color in them.
The color dies are embedded
in the film at manufacturing.
How old is the film?
Where was it stored?
How is it transported?
Who's processing it?
There are a lot of variables because you
could develop it yourself.
You could have the guy
down the street do it.
Any lab can do E6.
It's very simple, relatively simple.
Kodacrome was the opposite.
Kodacrome was actually
a black and white film,
and it had layers in it that
accepted color couple dies.
Oh.
And those dies were
put in during processing.
So there was nothing
handling, no, nothing.
They went in exactly
the way they should be,
and they had the exact color qualities
during the processing.
Wow.
And the film had to
be re-exposed to light.
It was a whole complex,
ridiculously crazy process.
So that's why it was so unique.
Yeah.
Wow.
I did not know this.
So Ectacrome was a slide film, but it
relied on just like the
more traditional technology
of having colored film.
Yeah, and that's what
you can get right now.
If you buy a slide film today, it is.
And again, there was
sometimes I would use E6, by the way.
E6 on a cloudy, rainy day gave me a
little bit of a better
color rendition than Kodacrome.
And also, if I needed the film back real
fast, they'd shoot a job in the morning,
and they'd eat it in the afternoon.
Now, another little thing, New York Film
Works was open in the
late 80s in New York City,
and they were able to flip Kodacrome
around in four hours.
And that became a mecca for photography.
I bet.
That was a game changer.
Yeah.
For a lot of pros.
So you are also a podcaster.
Yeah.
And tell me about that.
I was working for B&H for about 10 years,
and I was doing the product reviews,
and I was doing videos for them as well.
For new cameras that came out, I would do
a little
presentations and stuff like that.
And there were a couple of people who
were planning a podcast
they were talking about.
They did a couple of test runs on it, and
upper management, that
was a pretty good idea.
It was kind of early in the game.
But some people thought there was not
enough vibrancy to the two
people who were doing it,
even though they knew their stuff.
It was kind of NPR-ish, and they wanted
something a little bit more fun.
And I had a reputation of being a
troublemaker and having a big mouth.
I know you find that hard to believe.
Yes. So somebody said, "Get Alan White's
behind a microphone."
Okay?
And we just started doing it.
I had no clue as to what I was doing.
I listened to the earliest podcast, and
it's like, "I'm a stiff. I do about it."
And then I just started kicking back
after one, just figuring, "You know what?
I'm just going to hang out
and schmoozing with my friends."
And that's what it became.
That's pretty much mine, too.
Right?
No, no, you come off that way, and
sitting here doing--
It's like having a regular conversation.
It would be no different if you and I
were just sitting somewhere
in a park or in a restaurant.
It'd be the same conversation with the
same tonality to it.
But you did get to--
You had some pretty
high-profile guests on your podcast.
I had the best on--
I interviewed just about everybody who
I'd ever want to meet, the
inventor of the digital camera.
Wow.
Another Brooklyn boy, my age, that we had
a lot to relate to on that one.
Jeff Bridges, the actor.
I know. I saw that, the big Lebowski.
Yeah, and he's amazing.
Now, he's a very interesting guy because
he uses a camera called the Y Deluxe.
The camera actually pans and
takes those panoramic pictures.
He has these little
35-millimeter versions of them.
He has a few of them
because they break all the time.
That was part of the conversation.
But he has them, and he leaves them
around the sets when he's making movies.
So he'll reach over and grab a picture.
So he shoots through the entire thing.
At the end of every movie, he takes these
pictures and he makes
leather-bound albums
and gives them to everybody involved, the
actors, the cast, the crew.
Everybody gets a
bound book from the movie.
Wow.
And they're considered real collectibles.
So we had great conversations about
goofiness of these cameras.
But I would say the most interesting
person I had on was Graham Nash.
We had been trying to
track him down for a while.
Graham Nash, from Crosby Stills Nash &
Young, who is about 85 now.
He started taking pictures
when he was 10 years old.
His father gave him a camera.
It turns out the camera was stolen.
His father was tracked down, refused to
rat on the guy who sold it to him.
And his father spent a year in jail
rather than rat on his coworker.
Wow.
Great stuff.
But Nash, from his earliest
pictures, had a wonderful eye.
He knew how to compose a picture.
He really appreciated it
and never put a camera down.
Now, you're talking
about when digital prints,
where photography first
started becoming valuable,
when an angel Adam prints quite for $100,
Graham Nash is the
person who paid $100 for it.
Graham Nash is the person who started
collecting photo photographs
from the people who he
thought were significant
and ultimately sold his collection for 4.
something million dollars
back in the late 80s at Sotheby's at a
major auction of the
Graham Nash collection.
He then took that money and started
approaching people like Epson
and all the other
printer manufacturers saying,
"We're making great
computers and you guys make printers,
but nobody can make prints from their
computers. Why not?"
So when you make a digital print,
you could thank Graham Nash from Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young
for doing that because he was relentless
and finally got Epson to say, "Okay, what
do you have to show us?"
And he is responsible for that.
That's amazing.
And talking to him was just amazing.
Plus, it was very funny.
We tried to track him down for a while
and his agent wasn't responding.
So I live in West Hartford, Connecticut,
and he was appearing in
Hartford, and we went to see him.
And as we walk into the theater,
I see him crossing the
street with his bandmates.
They were going through the batty.
I said, "Well, my wife
and friend, excuse me.
I got some business to do."
And Graham Nash was crazy.
"Excuse me."
I said, "You don't know me.
I don't know the lights.
Being on H Photography podcast,
I've been trying to get
you on a show for so long.
I'd love to talk photography with you.
No music, just photography."
And he looked at me and he
goes, "Do you have a card?"
Of course I didn't.
My wife had a card.
And then three weeks
later, we had him on the show,
and he was delightful.
But a gentleman, an
extremely good photographer,
knows his stuff
aesthetically and technically.
He's an amazing story.
So he's kind of like a
little Kodak story himself.
Wow.
So what are you most
passionate about right now?
So for those of you who are
not, who are only listening,
Alan just stood up to show me his, the
artwork on his t-shirts.
Tell me about this.
Okay.
It's really funny.
My wife and I, we went to Japan,
and we travel around as
much as we can right now.
And again, I'm visual.
And walking around in the cities,
I noticed the manhole covers were so cold
because about 20 years ago,
they hired artists and kids.
To design, just make
up stories and things.
And they got Winnie the Pooh stuff.
They got everything.
So all the manhole covers
and utility covers around town
are like these little
gorgeous pieces of art.
I started walking around.
They were looking at temples.
I'm looking at sewer covers.
And I start photographing them.
I'm saying, I'm going to
do something with this.
I knocked them into a
black and white high relief.
And I just started with Photoshop, just
dropping colors into them.
And I just love--
Oh, wait.
The colors are yours.
The whimsical of it.
It's all whimsy.
And again, I'm putting them on
Tote Dance for those of you--
Wait, wait, wait.
So the manhole covers
themselves are just relief.
And you are adding the colors?
Yeah.
These are metal manhole covers.
Now, many of them are painted,
but the paint's worn off a lot,
which makes them actually even cooler.
The patine is great.
But that's not the real color.
I basically knocked
into pure black and white,
made as kind of tracy as
possible, opened up shadows
to make them too barter.
And then I just
started dropping in colors.
So it's sort of like
silk screening in a sense,
but I'm using Photoshop for false colors.
Nice.
And I'm reinterpreting an existing thing.
I'm cropping into it.
I'm just taking pieces of it.
I just love it.
I'm having fun.
You have them printed on
T-shirts and tote bags.
I know they're available on your website,
but I believe you also have
them in gift shops now, right?
Yeah, actually, this week I
opened up three gift shops.
(both laughing)
No, I walk in, I show it to people.
They go, "Ooh, are these available?
"Yeah, let's take four.
"Let's see how they go."
And it happened three times.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, people
just fall in love with it.
It's design.
I've done Tote Beds in the past,
and they were all kind of photo-related
or sailing-related, so
they were very specific.
But these are--
Graphics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's kind of fun, and I just--
And you're the king of just
walking in, knocking on doors
and saying, "Hey, do you like this?
"Do you want this?"
(both laughing)
Amazing.
I'm the bag man.
You found a bag?
You come to me, I'm the bag man.
You named the subject, I got the bag.
So, Alan, with all of the things
that you've done in your life,
this is a question I ask all my guests.
What is your definition of success,
and how has it changed over time?
First of all, I'm
thankful for everything I have.
Good and bad, that's number one, okay?
You know, you could bet your mind
about your station in life,
and this is true for anybody,
and I know people who
have a lot of problems.
And I think what you have
to do is look at what you got
and be thankful for
the good things you have
and as far as the bad things you have,
and we all have those,
you'd be thankful for that too
because you don't have
to look too far to realize
that a lot of people have it
a lot worse in many, many ways
than I hope I never have to be.
So that's number one, okay?
Be thankful for what you got, all right?
And that's regardless of
whatever your belief system is,
okay, be happy, this is it, okay?
Number two, accomplishing things.
This book is a really
nice accomplishment for me.
Number one, I've got my
pictures all over the wall,
I have covers all over the walls here.
I have about 75
magazine covers to my credit,
and that's all great, all right?
And it's there and it's gone.
But I was assigned
that, and it was a thing,
I just performed a little service,
and I was able to compose a picture,
and everybody was
happy, everybody got paid,
and we all have a roof over our heads
and hot food on the table.
But this book was
something that I thought about,
again, while scanning, I said,
"You know, this is some good stuff here,"
and then I went on to eBay
and started just putting in
Kodachrome and seeing what came up,
and I started finding
advertisements and shit
and what kinds of little
chachkes that Kodachrome wanted,
water bottles, a 25-gig thumb drive
made out of a
Kodachrome 25 film canister,
and I started buying
them for a few bucks apiece,
and I ended up paying a
lot of money after a while.
And I realized I had the makings of a
really interesting book,
and I also had the passion for a film
that pretty much served me
for close to three decades
and was my medium, it
was my medium of choice.
The stories were great,
the anecdotes were great,
and I always wanted to do
it, and I knew, I'm a writer,
and I had the
resources, and I was fortunate,
and I know a lot of people that have gone
out to try to write books
and have great books, and
they go nowhere with them,
you know, they eat them for lunch.
I headed down to when I had my fourth
version of The Dummy,
which looks really, it's
about 85% of the final book.
I did four different
designs on it myself,
kept printing them on
blurb to see how they look,
hold them in my hand.
I went to a photo, what is it called,
a big photo show in Brooklyn every year.
Anyway, I knew I was going to
run into people that I knew,
and I did, and I ran into some old days,
and I ran into Lauren Walsh, who is head
of one of the photo departments at NYU,
she's a writer,
photographer, and she knows her stuff.
She was on my podcast as a guest,
and I showed her The Dummy
of the book, and she goes,
"I'm going to give you a
couple of names of publicists."
Check it out.
Two people said, "Great
idea, but it's not for me."
Third person, Mary Bisby-Vig, out on the
west coast, looked at it,
and she goes, "I like this, I want to
show this to somebody."
And she put a call into a guy named Bruce
Rutledge of Chin Music Press in Seattle,
who she said, "I have a
book I want you to look at."
He goes, "What's the name
of it? What's it about?"
She goes, "It's Kodachrome."
He goes, "I've been having that song
going through my head all day.
I have to see it."
We sent him a PDF he read and called me
up, because let's do this book.
And we split it.
It's a collaboration in
every way between the two of us.
He hired a young man, who is excellent,
Elon Robinson, right out of art school,
and I was shown a few portfolios.
He says, "Let's use a student for this."
I go, "I love it."
I looked at three student portfolios, and
Elon's work was just stood out.
And we had a conversation.
I go, "This is the guy
who's going to do it."
And he took my concept, and he
carried it to the next level.
He really, really did.
He polished it really well, added some
things that I never
would have thought of,
vastly improved it, and it's still mine.
So if you ask what success is, this book
represents success to me,
because it was an idea that I had.
And I've had a lot of great ideas over
time, and they've all bombed.
And for one reason or another, I didn't
carry them through something.
But this one I saw through.
And even if I don't make
a dime on it, I did it.
It's solid.
I could hold it in my hands.
This thing is real, you know?
Can't take that away from me.
So what's success?
Doing something and completing it and
looking at it and saying,
"I'm happy with this."
I love that.
I love that.
That's amazing.
What's your favorite deli sandwich?
[laughter]
And I don't eat these too often.
But I'm going to have to laugh.
You're talking about my
favorite deli sandwich.
A few years ago, I had
quadruple bypass surgery.
Did great.
I was gardening seven days later.
Anyway, my last meal, just in case
something goes wrong,
was a Dagwood
Pastrami Cornedive Sandwich.
Oh, this sucker was good.
It was just dripping with
fat and Russian dressing.
I went out with style.
It was really good, you know?
And I survived.
[laughter]
Sour or half sour?
Sour.
Okay.
Yeah, I'll tolerate the habit.
No, it's got to be sour.
Really?
Alan, thank you so much.
This was really, really great.
Thanks for having us.
I've learned so much.
It was a pleasure talking.
It is a pleasure.
Appreciate you.
Wait, one last thing.
Where can people find you?
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
AlanWhites.com, okay.
That's your website.
AlanWhitesDesign.com.
TheCodaChromeStore.com.
I have a whole lot of
CodaChrome stuff, believe it or not.
And the book itself is
available on my website.
If you order it from my website, I do
sign them before I send them out.
It's also available at any bookseller,
Barnes & Noble, Rizzoli, Target.com,
and if you have to, even Amazon.
And I know it's
available worldwide right now.
I've seen it advertised in Australia and
New Zealand and Japan.
So, anywhere online, it's there.
And $24.95.
That's the price of two sushi rolls or a
hot dog at Nancy's Stadium.
Oh, you can't go wrong.
You can't go wrong with that.
You can own a piece of history.
There you go.
Thank you so much.
Thanks again.
Pleasure.
Thanks again for tuning in.
That's our episode.
I hope you enjoyed it.
And if you did, please help us out by
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