Transcription of Jack Montgomery for the show The Art of Living, #76
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that I’ve had a chance to do as a physician, is to spend time with a broad variety of people out and about in the world and in the last couple of years, my world and my ability to spend time with people has broaden that much more. I’ve encountered people such as Jack Montgomery, who is sitting in the studio with me today.
Jack is a practicing attorney and also a fine art photographer and these are the type of people that I just love to spend time with because it goes to show that you don’t have to just be one thing or follow one path. You can kind of find your own way in the world and really find happiness, so thank you for coming in and spending time with us today, Jack.
Jack: It’s my pleasure, entirely.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you and I were speaking last week, I believe, and we were talking about what led you to become an attorney and this was because of, you said imprinting.
Jack: That’s right, my dad was a lawyer, had practiced for many years, I grew up in a shadow of a lawyer and he was somebody who enjoyed a great deal and I think that led me down that path, even though I kept telling myself, I wasn’t doing it, as I look I realize, I was very definitely following his path for many years. He got tremendous amount of satisfaction out of the practice of law and even though he enjoyed photography, he was a lawyer and a complete person as a lawyer, so that I think is what got me started in that direction.
Dr. Lisa: You also have a photography background in your family as well.
Jack: That’s right, my grandfather and my father were both photographers. I actually have negatives my grandfather took at Versailles during the First World War with all the statues protected by these giant tempers. So I can see that the roots of that interest go back at least two generations.
Dr. Lisa: What was your turning point? When did you go from being a full time practicing attorney to deciding, you know what, I’m really caught by what I can see with my eye and what I can do with that with the camera.
Jack: Well I had had an interest in photography since I was a teenager, but I had never really gotten serious about it until, about 1993 and I had gone with my family to a vacation place in Massachusetts on the shore and I’ve never been a beach person, so I had brought my father’s old camera with me just to clean it up and I went to buy film for it and I couldn’t get film.
So I wound up buying a $25 medium format camera, which is a large negative and just playing with that one afternoon, I took a few portraits of my daughter, Molly, developed those and that was the moment lightning struck. I look at that and I said, “This is what I want to do” using the camera to create portrait. From that moment forward has been preoccupation for me.
Dr. Lisa: Did you have to change the way that you actually saw things with your brain, to go from being an attorney, which is very thought oriented to being a photographer, which is very visual.
Jack: Yes and no. Certainly, the visual realm is very different than the intellectual, rational word oriented world of the lawyer. So in that sense, yes, it’s a different vernacular that I had to learn. On the other hand being a lawyer is not just analyzing contrast, more and more, as I get older and older, I realize it’s more and more assessing people and recognizing what their motives are and what’s driving them and what there passions are.
There is some cross over in terms of the, what you might say, is the emotional intelligence, which I think is a big part of portraiture, but then again there is this other whole realm of the visual, which is in and of itself very exciting to me.
Dr. Lisa: How did you make that transition?
Jack: Well, it was abrupt. I went from zero to 60 in about seconds in terms of the photography. From that moment forward, I was initially buying equipment, learning, taking courses, constantly looking for new people to photograph. It was a very abrupt process and I then had to learn how to integrate that time that that was taking into my other demands, which were family and my professional life.
I have three daughters and when I got started with this, they were all, I think they were eight, 10 and 12, around in that sequence. There were still a lot of family demands. I say demands, I mean it was passionate, I loved being with the family. My work has always been demanding. It was not easy to find the time to accommodate this new passion.
I did that. I gave up a lot of sleep. I’m not complaining. I was glad to do it. I started out during the age of film. So every time I shot a picture, I calculated this, every time I pushed the shutter, I was committed to five minutes just to get to a proof sheet. So if I shot 10 rolls of film, that was hours and hours of work. I used to get up at four in the morning to process my film.
The subtext for all of this is that I’ve had a very tolerant wife and more than tolerant, she has been very supportive, but I’m sure there have been challenging moments for her. It never was a question of choice for me. It was never something I sat down and thought, well I’m going to do this. It was something I had to do. That made it a little easier I suppose.
Dr. Lisa: You also had children who kind of bought into their father being simultaneously a photographer and attorney.
Jack: Yeah, my kids have been wonderful. I appreciate that more than you know. Because some of my photography has been challenging. I have not simply done things that are benign and simple and comforting. Some of them are and some of them aren’t, and I’ve always gotten a particular degree of pleasure out of using photography as a way to introduce subjects into the minds of my audience that they might not be comfortable with.
Put that in the context of three kids who were in middle school and you might think that they would be terrified that their father was going to do something that would be horribly embarrassing. There has not been one moment when they have been anything other than supportive. Together with a wonderful wife and three great kids, I’ve felt that I’ve been able to do things that I otherwise would not.
Dr. Lisa: Talk to me about the work that you did after 911.
Jack: Three weeks before 911, we had taken my oldest daughter, Molly, the subject of my first portrait, down to New York, where she was starting college at the new school about a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center and like every parent, we had all the anxiety of leaving your Maine kid in New York. What’s that all about?
On the morning of 911, I was at my desk and the secretary outside said, “Oh, my gosh, a plane has flown into the World Trade Center” and I thought it was just a Piper Cub or something and then it quickly evolved to something else. I called Molly and I woke her up. I said, “What’s going on?” She said, “I don’t know, I hear a lot of sirens” I said, “Well go out to the street and call me” and five minutes later she called.
She said, “Oh my God dad, you won’t believe what I’m seeing.” Well then when the towers came down, we lost contact with her and we were terrified, the major cell phone towers were on top of the south tower through that whole end of New York. I wound up driving her down to New York and like everybody at that moment we wanted to do something to help and couldn’t figure out what to do.
I tried a few things that didn’t work and it dawned on me that maybe I could use the same process that I had employed for the holocaust pictures for the New York fireman. So I took the portfolio of the holocaust survivors, went to the nearest fire station, near Molly’s dorm, because I’d taken her back to New York. That was the one time in this whole process I’ve been nervous. I thought I was going to get thrown out.
These people were going to say, “We don’t need this.” They were so welcoming and they had lost their engine. Actually the engine for Ladder Company III which is where I photograph is the one that’s in the museum now. So the whole floor was empty and I just spread all the holocaust pictures out on the floor where that engine had been and all the fireman came and looked at it.
They brought down the Captain Ray Trinkle, who’s portrait became the signature picture for the show and I said, “Look, I don’t know where this is going to go, but I just have a feeling if we do these pictures, we’ll all be glad we have them and something good will come of it” and Ray Trinkle said, “Let’s do it.”
I was down there a lot that fall and did pictures for, oh I think three or four days all around the fire house. We then said, “What are we going to do with this?” We formed a committee, Andy Verzosa, among others, was terrific, but there were a lot of other people on that. My secretary at the time, Diane Langdon, jumped in, Nano Chatfield and then we got Henry Kennedy on board and Henry is the director of Camp Up the Coast.
Well the long and the short of it is, we then got the museum involved, we had a show, we raised money. The first money that the families of the latter three family received were from the people of Portland, Maine. There was a big snafu with the Federal Government. The first dollars, and they had it before Thanksgivings, thanks to the people of Portland.
It was quite an experience. I should also say that as a result of the fundraising and then the generosity of Camp Kiev and Henry Kennedy, the fire fighters come back to Maine. The surviving fire fighters come back to Maine every summer for family camp.
Dr. Lisa: How has being a photographer and a father and an attorney, but let’s just talk about being a photographer, how has this changed you?
Jack: Oh, a lot. It’s been wonderful. It’s been one of the greatest things that’s happened to me because it’s given me an opportunity to meet people all over the place from every experience and I love that. On my 30th birthday, my best friend Jody said to me, “You know you’re a wonderful guy, but you’re kind of boring” so I still tease her and we tease each other about that and I think was, she sort of threw down the gauntlet for me.
I’m still a 10-year-old kid at some level. If something happens across the street and I want to run over and see what happened and if there is some new person around, I want to go meet them. I’m just curious. The camera has given me license to go to places and to meet people I’d never, ever, ever would have seen. It’s been one of the great gifts in my life, this passion I have.
Dr. Lisa: Let me broaden up the questions, how do you think that photography and art contribute to the health, wellness and inspiration of a society?
Jack: Absolutely. In so many ways, my answer to that question is focused on a … start off a narrowly and maybe I can address it more broadly, but narrowly, for me, I think art has a tremendous capacity for reaching into people, getting beyond certain filters, into their emotional center to get them to look at things they would not otherwise see.
Dr. Lisa: Have you encountered any challenges along the way?
Jack: Oh, yeah, of many. The first is reconciling my time commitment to this with my profession that’s always been a challenge. I run into people who are resistant from time to time. I have people who, not often, but occasionally who get angry with the photographs, which is always a fascinating moment by the way. I used to get a little uptight and now I’m fascinated because I realize that this photography among it’s many other functions can serve like a Rorschach test for people with …
Particularly an ambiguous image and some people will seize on that image with an interruption that never occurred to me, but they’re sure that’s what that picture means and sometimes they get angry, sometimes they’re defensive or sad or it rekindles some experience in their life, in their early life in a very passionate way. It’s fascinating. I don’t enjoy it when it happens, but that’s the causative of doing what I do.
I can’t be completely benign for me. If it’s too simple, it just doesn’t grab me. It doesn’t wake me up.
Dr. Lisa: What about the people who are a part of your professional life. Have they always just easily accepted the fact that you’re not only an attorney, but also a photographer.
Jack: Yes, everybody been, either been very nice and supportive or just ignored it and I think when the 911 was happening, I think people were aware of that because it crossed a line of their own emotional interests. I mean at that point everybody was engaged. No, I’ve never had one moment when my colleagues have in anyway made me feel reticent, anything but supported, they’ve been great.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you’ve done work in Maine Magazine, you’ve done profile pictures of Linda Greenlaw, also Angus King, so people who are listening can see your pictures in Maine Magazine with those articles. Where else can they find your work?
Jack: I have a website, jackmontgomeryphotography.com, which is now showing a small portion of what I do. I have not have had show in Maine in a while, in about a year, but I hope to have some up soon. There is a new publication coming out, a new book coming out, the Maine Art Now, which Andy Verzosa and Edgar Beane are working and I have a number of photographs in that. Including some of the gender pictures, which are the core of what I’m doing or a lot of what I’m doing right now.
Your question raises a very interesting point too, which is given the finite amount of time that I have to dedicate to this, if I have an hour, do I spend it making more pictures or getting it out in the world. Promotion of ones artistic work is a hugely time consuming process and I’ve been bad, I should be doing it more, but if I have that extra hour and I have a subject to shoot, I’ll always go and shoot. Stay tuned, I hope that there’ll a lot more that’ll be more easily available very soon.
Dr. Lisa: Jack, you’re a very busy man, and we’re so appreciative that you’ve come in and spoken with us about what it’s like to be a photographer and an attorney and a husband and father living here in the state of Maine, thank you so much for spending time with us. We’ve been speaking with Jack Montgomery.
Jack: Thank you very much. My pleasure entirely.