Air Rescue, Meigs Field- Chicago

I have a degree in photojournalism. In my early years in Chicago I shot a lot of freelance photo stories.
This is from a summer I spent flying with the Chicago Fire Department - Air Rescue Unit; based downtown on Lake Michigan.

bending Time and Space

Having lunch with Albert. This is a photoshop elaboration on an advertising project shot some time back. The original was the immediate area around Einstein and chalkboard. It had some sort of a corny cut line like "you don't have to be a genius to use our [product]" The character actor was Jan Leighton. Jan specialized in doing historical characters. He had all his own wardrobe and did his own makeup for over a thousand persona's. I think we shot about six characters for the client. It was a lot of fun. He enjoyed "staying in character" and during the shoots I kept a running banter with him, pretending I was a reporter prying out the real story behind each famous figure. His Albert Einstein kept telling dirty jokes.

------------------------------------------------

"...an zen she sayz, datz no Cucumber!"

Roll Out by Robert McCall 1964

Everyone has been saying it- but it does seem unreal that we went to the moon for the first time 40 years ago!

I am not surprised that we stopped going. It was a far and hard reach for the technology of the time. People forget that it was a "race". Real space is nothing like "Star Wars" or "Star Trek". Real space is very cold and very, very big.

This is a wonderful painting by Robert McCall which appeared in Life magazine when I was a kid. I carefully cut it out [both pages] and put it in the center of my bulletin board in my room. I was nine.

In 2000, when I was finally learning about computers and scanning, I tracked it down at the Cuyahoga Falls library.

Robert McCall did a lot of high-profile work for NASA and the aerospace industry. He did the posters for Stanley Kubrick's "2001". Today, I am very disappointed by the cheap computer cartoon style of illustration used by NASA and many science publications.