Joe McNally Photography

Have, as always, received a warm and gracious welcome from everyone I’ve met here in Beijing. The organizers of this project have put together a wonderful week for the photogs. In the field,  ups and downs, as always. Yesterday I climbed many, many hundreds of steps to get to this Buddha, carved into a hillside outside of Beijing. Having been shut down at other temples on the grounds, I was prepared to climb all that way and not get a frame. I tried to forestall that programming my D3S into “turbo” mode (a little known firmware adaptation….Joe make joke….)  got my EV set, and knelt down. I had 20 frames off before anybody could say, “Hey numnuts tourist!” But the lady in charge of this temple was disinterested, and went back to her comic book. So, it was just me and the big guy, and I kept shooting.

Long day in the field. There was a PR lady with us, who I guess was pretty effective, ’cause we didn’t have to pay to get into the temple park, but man, she wouldn’t shut up. Chinese is a beautifully expressive language, but when someone is that vehement, in close proximity burst mode, all day, their vocal cords thrumming like the engine on a Formula One car, man it gets tiring. It was like having my camera to my eye and a woodpecker attached to my temple.

But the big guy was kindly and patient with me, there in all his goldness. He was also, blessedly, silent. I thanked him for his serenity, and permission to shoot. More tk….

Another week or so, going to St. Lucia. First project, very happily, is shooting a book for my friends at the Jade Mountain/Anse Chastenet Hotels. I’ve been going down there for fifteen or more years, and it remains an oasis of calm and beauty for me. For now, a book project in a beautiful place, and an amazing workshop with a couple of slots left. Hit this link, and it brings you to this page for all the info…

Given the coming 911 Tenth Anniversary observances, and the maelstrom that has been my studio of late, a little calm is welcome. More on that next week. Let me just say, trying to mount an exhibit in a major space in NYC as a lone, freelance shooter is not for the faint of heart. Thankfully, I’ve got Nikon helping in a major way with $ and logistics, and wonderfully, we’ve had the original K-Man himself, advocate on our behalf out at his place of employ, J&J. Thankfully, they are pitching in as well. The Faces of Ground Zero show goes up on Aug. 24th at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. It will be comprised of the original Giant Polaroids, and updated photos and video interviews, ten years later.

We got started by being asked to update the LIFE’s One Nation book of ten years ago. That book contained a section of portraits from FGZ. So, we went back to a number of the folks who made the trek to the Giant Polaroid on 2nd St. in the Bowery during that intense, emotional month immediately after the attacks. An example is Jason Cascone, who at the time of 911 was a probationary firefighter and is now one of the youngest lieutenants in the history of FDNY. This original is not small flash, by the way.

However, this is. Just one small flash, through a 30″ Ezybox soft box, camera right. 70-200mm lens, D3X, Bronx, NY.

Bring you more up to speed on that next week.

More tk….

Funny business, this. My career spun, substantially, on the first launch of the space shuttle, back in ’81. I was a staff shooter at ABC TV in NY, which was definitely an odd duck of a job. As a still shooter bound up in an organization whose reason to be was making moving pictures, I was often the odd man out, or certainly the last consideration. (It was good I got used to that feeling early in my career:-)

I got sent down to the Cape for ABC to photograph the test firing of Columbia’s engines, and to identify lens throws and positions, work out the credentialing path, and all that stuff you do to prep for a major media blowout. As it happened, Discover, the new Time Inc. science magazine, had a crew of three shooters down there, and all was not well with team Discover. Two of the team members came back to NY, and told their editor, “We need a new third. Hire McNally.”

I was already shooting for the magazine as a freelancer, so the photo editor had no qualms. She called me up and offered me the gig shooting launch and landing. It amounted to about two weeks of freelance day rates, which at the time was the princely sum of $250 per day. I walked into my boss’ office at ABC and quit.

In the early days of the launches and landings, I spent a lot of time in Cocoa Beach, Houston, and out in the desert of Edwards AFB, where they landed the first few. Cocoa at that point was a rusty old space town at the end of the Bee Line Expressway. We would ship roughly 40-50 cases of gear down, and pick ‘em up at air freight. Heavy tripods, wiring, rigging, long glass, 20 or so motor driven Nikons, timers, scopes, film, hi-speed Hulcher cameras, you name it. You shot multiple, multiple cameras, ’cause, as they say, once they light those SRBs (solid rocket boosters) that puppy’s goin’ somewhere, and you don’t want to come up empty.

It was exhausting, but fun, and there was a great sense of launch fever in those heady early days. We would stay in a dogshit Days Inn, eat shoe leather steaks at the Mousetrap, and listen to Shirl the Girl on the piano. One of our team, Hank Morgan, remains a friend to this day. He was a pro’s pro, and I learned much from him. Nothing he couldn’t do with a camera. He didn’t get rattled, which was an essential quality, shooting these launches. The rocket fires, the noise rolls along with the smoke plume, and, like a monster Roman candle, the spaceship climbs, achingly slow at first, towards the heavens. You are 2-3 miles away, on a tower, with a three camera platform, most likely with a 1,000mm, a six and a five on what was at that point, F2′s. You had a single handle push on the platform, and all three cameras would be wired into a foot pedal. Your job was to track with the longest lens. If you did that smoothly, the six hundred and the five hundred (effectively, your wide angles) would also stay on track. Hitch or bobble, you would never again find the shuttle in all that sky with 1000mm of glass clapped to your eye.

Seat of the pants ruled the day, for photogs, and, I suspect, NASA. I love odd shit, so one early morning, I was in hog heaven, photographing Challenger as it was towed through the streets of Palmdale, Ca.

You can’t make this stuff up, right? You look out your window, and there goes the space shuttle.

Down at Houston, I got to photograph a silica space shuttle tile. These conduct heat so poorly, they cover part of the shuttle’s exterior, protecting it from the high temps of re-entry. This tile, glowing hot and fresh from the oven, is being held by unprotected fingers, demonstrating its’ lack of heat transfer. Strange and remarkable stuff goes into this flying cargo ship.

The first landing was rough. Nobody knew what this thing would look like coming down out of space.  Dropping like a rock, approaching at an angle so steep the pilots were virtually looking straight down, the only thing we knew as shooters was that whatever happened would happen fast. I had knocked around doing conventions and political coverages, so the editor wanted me on the longest glass. It wasn’t the prime spot, but it was the spot from which you could track the whole shebang. I was on the roof of the old fire station at Edwards with an ancient 1200mm lens, which came in two parts that you screwed together. With the shade, it extended maybe 5-6′ from the camera, and it was a bear to focus in the best of conditions, much less through desert heat waves. I had the whole thing wrapped in aluminum foil, for fear the 100 plus degree heat would just melt it right into the roof.

And there it is. Close as I got, through 1200mm of ancient glass. The hard part was picking it out of the sky, ’cause it was, at first, just a glowing speck in a sea of blue. I had one camera on the lens, and another looped around my neck, ready to slam it on. (Remember, only thirty six exposures.) I did better later, when I took a large ABC news sticker I still had in my bag, slapped it onto the hood of my car and drove  past Edwards security right onto the runway. Having a TV sticker could get you lots of places back in the day.

Scouting Edwards for approach positions was fun. Miles of open desert, and they pretty much let us have the run of the place. Not that there was anything out there. Hank, driving his own rental car, gave me one of those twisted, “I’m about to do something really fun and stupid” looks and brought the hammer down out there in the big empty. I was in a Buick Regal, and had no choice but to respond. My problem was that I was driving into his dust cloud at about 110 mph and could see absolutely nothing. It occurred to me that this was not advisable when heard an enormous crack from under the car. Desperately looking around, I noticed my gas gauge plummeting. I had driven right over a large, pointed rock embedded in the desert, and  it basically plowed a furrow right through the gas tank. I pulled up and started yanking gear out of the trunk like the crazy fool I was and Hank, thankfully, circled back to pick me up.  We moved away from the vehicle as it was slowly encircled in a sea of gasoline. I called the rental company and told them their car had malfunctioned and I needed a new one, which they obliged me with. They in turn called me back about two days later to tell me they had yet to find my vehicle. I assured them it was out there, gulping a bit and wondering how I could finesse a Buick Regal on my expense account. I never heard back.

It has been, as they say, quite a ride….more tk….

Work is pretty crazy right now. We are shooting in the field, catching up with folks from the original Giant Polaroid project of nearly 10 years ago. It’s hectic, but rewarding. There’s a wellspring in these people of good feeling and the power of optimism. There’s also the vibrancy of life in the big city, which I have always thrived on, photographically.

We’ve had a couple bobbles along the way, in terms of getting the show out on the floor of the Time Warner Center for the 10th Anniversary, but hey, it’s New York. It’s not a straight line to anywhere, here. (Is that a sentence? I think you know what I mean.) But we are committed, and going forward, even if Louie Cacchioli, a bunch of firefighters, and the gang at my studio have to pull and haul crates and set up frames.

Photographed Keith Johnson of Ladder Six the other night. Keith is a big, gregarious guy, with an even bigger heart. He drives the tiller truck, 54′, in length, and I’ve seen him u-turn that puppy in a space you’d swear you couldn’t turn around a Subaru. It’s got a driver in the back, Keith up front. As he says, the guy in the back has really gotta keep the wheels straight. “Some guys, you know, they freelance a bit. I’ll look in my rear view mirror, and I’m driving in the left lane and he’s driving in the right, and that’s a problem,” he says, laughing. But his expertise is well needed at fire scenes. His job is to get this massive truck in close to a building, and finesse its’ position so ladders can reach those in trouble.

I’m trying to catch up to people, and shoot pictures that reflect their lives now, 10 years after the dust cloud. One ongoing devotion in Keith’s life is to his daughter, who is just an amazing kid. So she came into the house last week, and we went out on East Broadway for a picture. I asked if we could roll the truck. He said sure. I asked if that would be difficult to do. He looked at me and said, “Hey Joe, wanna see how difficult?” He turned and shouted over his shoulder, “Ladder Six, we’re rolling!”

More tk….

The Navy SEALs have been in the news a lot lately, something they regard as a dubious blessing, I’m sure. Navy SEAL Team Six went in and dropped a hurt on bin Laden and created a legend. You know you’ve hit the big time when Disney tries to trademark the rights to your team. The Mickey Meisters backed off when they became the centerpiece of virtually every late night comic’s routine out there. It wasn’t a good move. When the troops you can muster on your side have names like Goofy, Ariel and Tinker Bell, you should think twice about messing with the SEALs, right?

I’ve worked out in Coronado with the SEALs a couple times, and was stupefied by the demands, the stress, and the resultant call to excellence. It’s a narrow funnel you pass through as a SEAL, and many don’t make it. I was one of the first journalists allowed to spend all of Hell Week with one class of hopefuls. (As my guide and adviser, himself a SEAL, told me, they had been reluctant to let the press into Hell Week, ’cause they “didn’t want America’s moms seeing what we were doing to their babies.” I gained entree by virtue of being on assignment for the National Geographic, doing a story on the limits of the human body. When you do a story like that, you pretty much have to make SEAL training one of your objectives.)

Just keeping pace with the week photographically was daunting beyond much of anything I had previously tried. I would hump cameras through various exercises and drills at all hours, then go back to the PAO office and grab a piece of linoleum floor and crash. I didn’t leave the base much during the week, and I got so tired that linoleum felt like a feather bed at a Marriott. But all I was doing was carrying cameras. I had breaks, and was often ferried about in a truck while they ran in wet fatigues. What they faced, night and day, was a schedule designed to break them.

That particular Hell Week started on a fairly easy going Sunday, in the very late afternoon. The class was summoned to a general meeting hall, and lulled into a sense of well being by being shown a movie. In the darkened room a DI walked in and started screaming at them to get outside. As they went running out of the room they were greeted with the din of machine gun fire into the air (dummy rounds) and flash bang grenades going off all over the place. The air was thick with smoke, and they were told to run over the berm and into the ocean. From that Sunday afternoon, until the following Friday, they all remained constantly wet.

They generally lose about 70% of the class during Hell Week. It is easy to see why. From Sunday through late on Thursday, they are generally allowed no sleep. They are constantly drenched in salt water, even when on land. Often times, they are actually in the water, and depending on what month your class is going through, the waters around San Diego can range from just plain cold to an ice bath.

During training like this, recruits are organized into boat crews, based on their respective heights. Tall guys with tall guys, and so forth, reason being that they carry their boats on their heads, so everybody’s gotta be in the same ballpark. The short crew generally gets dubbed “The Smurfs.” Interestingly, though, during the week I observed, the shorter crew did very well. In fact there seemed to be no actual body type that would guarantee success. A lot of the bigger, body builder types dropped out. My PAO confirmed that often happens. He chuckled and told me, “Yeah, when you see some of these skinny little guys make it all the way through, you know you got yourself one tough little motherf@##$%!”

One particularly difficult stretch involves a length of time staying afloat in San Diego bay at night, and then laying down, shirtless on a steel pier. From what I was led to believe, while embracing the pier, certain classes have chanted, “The cold steel is sucking the life from my body. The cold steel is sucking the life from my body.”

One really tough evolution is through an area called “Mud Flats.” Recruits basically have to perform maneuvers in muck so thick it can render them immobilized.

If you screw up, you meet Misery. Misery is a 300 pound piece of lumber emblazoned with the words “Misery loves company.” Boat crews who under-perform, or displease an instructor, do a round with this log.

While I was making this picture, the DI came up beside this struggling recruit and shouted at him, “Oh good, they’re gonna put your picture on the cover of Whiner magazine!” I felt bad, but I kept shooting. They do their job, and, as a shooter, you do yours’.

Protein intake is important, even though guys are literally falling asleep in their plates. The instructors move among them, pushing them to stay awake, and eat.

At the end of Hell Week, a handshake from the Bullfrog, the oldest active SEAL. It is a handshake well earned. In this week after Memorial Day, if it were possible, we should all shake their hand.   More tk….