Todd Weinstein: Aiming for The Unknown Photographer
Story by Ellen Piligian • Photos of Todd Weinstein by Michael Sarnacki
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Following his instincts over the years has worked well for Weinstein. His commercial projects have included work for more than 65 clients, including American Express, Canon, NBC and the YMCA. His work has appeared in Ad Week, Forbes and Life, to name a few. He has also shot for numerous design firms.

Meanwhile, he's had 11 solo exhibitions, including "The 36 Unknown," which has been shown from New York to Vienna to Grobzig, Germany since 1999. He's been in five two-person exhibitions, including two in Paris and Rome, and 26 group exhibits. His work is in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. And two books of his photos have been published. All the while he's taught in the U.S. and internationally carrying on what he calls the inspirational critique he learned from his mentor, Ernst Haas, encouraging individuals to develop their own personal visions.

Weinstein was first introduced to photography in 1966 as a 10th grader at Oak Park High School in Oak Park, MI. Not much of a student, he says, he credits his teachers and a darkroom converted from a closet for capturing his interest in the craft. He even won a scholastic award for a photograph he made from a trashed reticulated negative.

Weinstein liked the entrée photography gave him to worlds into which he'd never otherwise be invited. He was taking pictures for the yearbook during his senior year, gaining access to the drama, sports and chemistry departments. "It was the first time I was allowed in the chemistry department without having all As," he says. "[Photography] broke all the barriers. I started meeting people. It opened my eyes."

Weinstein says he nearly didn't graduate from high school. He was spending all his time going to downtown Detroit visiting the museums. He also loved music. Weinstein, whose his father owned a teen rock club, began shooting the local rock scene and in 1970 became one of the first photographers to work for Creem, the Rolling Stone-esque magazine begun in Detroit in 1969.

Today, claiming he doesnt know if he's really that good of a photographer, Weinstein says he possessed a natural sense of composition. His work was good enough to get him into what is now known as the Center for Creative Studies in 1969. Working in the photo lab, he made connections with numerous professionals who had their film developed there. That led to a job with Dick James, a prominent commercial automotive photographer who taught Weinstein not only how to light a car but that commercial work was inherently creative and did not inhibit personal vision.

Around this time Weinstein organized an exhibition, "Ten Eyes on Washington," at the Detroit Public Library. The exhibit, which included 15 of Weinsteins photographs, documented Vietnam War protestors in Washington. "It was an eye opener for me that there was an interest in photography," says Weinstein. He realized he could make a living with a camera.

In 1970, he quit school to move to New York City to expand his opportunities beyond the automotive industry. "I wanted to explore the possibility of other places," he says. Weinstein, then 19, hooked up with the only person he knew in the city, a childhood friend who worked at a rock club. Weinstein slept on his floor for nearly eight months before getting a place of his own. It wasnt glamorous, he says. It was cold.

Weinstein looked for work at all of the famous photographers' studios. His big break was getting freelance work with fashion photographer Mel Dixon, who had been an assistant to Richard Avedon and Hiro. "Mel liked me and started hiring me," says Weinstein. The skills he learned back in Detroit from Dick James, including working with clients and answering phones, gave him added value. Most of their work was for bridal magazines, but Weinstein was more drawn to the urban scene. He always carried his camera to capture photos when he ran errands for Dixon, he says. "I realized I didn't want to be around beautiful women all the time. I was more curious about the outside world."

In 1971, he discovered the world of multimedia, then being done by photographer Harvey Lloyd. Weinstein began to work with Lloyd, producing audio-visual presentations for the likes of TWA. He was making about $75 a week and enjoying a lot of international travel, including memorably landing in Greece on his 20th birthday.

In 1972, Weinstein began a 14-year apprenticeship as an assistant to Ernst Haas, a documentary photographer widely known as the father of color photography. While it was Lloyd who gave Weinstein his real beginning, he says, it was Haas who most influenced his personal work. Haas also taught him that he could apply a private vision to commercial projects.

A year later, while assisting Haas, Weinstein co-established Dove Studios, Inc. to develop multimedia projects for major clients like AT&T and Rockefeller Center. "It was fantastic," says Weinstein of the work. Meanwhile, he was constantly doing and showing his personal work.

By 1978, Weinstein came to a crossroads. His business was moving away from audiovisual productions to more annual report work, which he continued to do through the 1990s. He had to commit to growing his business or cut back to nurture his personal work. He chose to cut back.

"My whole life I've been bridging commercial and personal work," he says. "My commercial work never felt like a sell out. It took me to places I never dreamed of. Still, one is for hire, one isn't. One is problem solving for someone else. The other is developing something for yourself."

By 1979, Weinstein turned to shooting mostly with the newly developed high-speed color negative film after realizing slide film was inadequate for fully capturing people's personal expressions at outdoor events. "I could record the comedy and desperation of life in all its colors, textures and immediacy, at all times of day and night, in any light situation. In short, I could live with my camera," he writes in his personal narrative.

While pursuing his own work, he also wanted to promote other photographers and in 1980 established the Union Square Gallery, which was connected to his darkroom at the time. The artist-run space presented works of emerging and known artists in various media. "It's very important for artists to exhibit, to let go of their work," says Weinstein, who provided most of the funding for the gallery, which closed in 1990.

Over the years, he exhibited his work regularly. Highlights of that work appear in his book, "Personal Journalism: A Decade of Color Photography, 1980-1990," including photos of a man sitting in a bar, lovers in a subway and people on the street in Tokyo.

During that period, Weinstein had an experience that would affect him and his work more than a decade later. In 1983, he witnessed a pilgrimage by 15,000 Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C., a gathering meant to connect friends and relatives separated during World War II. There, Weinstein saw parents of childhood friends that he never knew had experienced wartime horrors. He photographed them and heard their stories, all the while wondering how they could find the strength to deal with such a horrific past and still want to keep living.

He began to find some understanding in 1994.That year, the German government invited him to work on a six-year project titled "Darkness into Light: Re-emergence of the Jewish Culture in Germany." Weinstein worked with a writer to document the return of Jews to Germany. It was the beginning of his own understanding of his Jewish heritage.

"My desire to understand why Jews were returning to live in a place ridden with painful memories and anti-Semitism deepened my search and my being," he writes in his narrative. "By photographing Jewish culture reinvigorating itself in German society, I felt I was helping people expunge the racism in themselves and validating a new life."

While Weinstein's residency culminated into a final presentation of 55 images and a slide show, it also led him to photograph the 50th anniversary of the liberation from concentration camps and his work with One by One, an organization that helps Jews and Christians affected by the Holocaust.

It also led him to "The 36 Unknown," one of the most important projects of his career. The project took root in 1995, when he was traveling in Poland and stopped in Krakow and Auschwitz. Weinstein, who'd focused much of his work on people, began shooting abstract faces he saw in the shadows and the light. "The 36 Unknown" came from these ghost pictures, or re-readings of found objects.

Among the 36 photographs that make up the exhibition are The Mourner, a yield sign in Krakow, Poland that appears to be crying, and The King, a rock in Mainz, Germany that harkens a wise god-like profile.

As Weinstein explains in his personal narrative: "['The 36 Unknown' is] a reference to the idea in the Talmud, the oral tradition of Judaism, that the world requires a minimum of 36 righteous individuals in order to exist. In later lore, the 36 hidden ones have the power to save the world. They arrive at times of great peril." These 36 Unknowns may know they have this purpose or be oblivious to their role. They can be anyone, a teacher, a friend. Maybe even a photographer.

"It was definitely a personal journey for me," he says, adding that it was also a healing experience. "It is the culmination of my whole life. Through the process of taking the pictures and living with the pictures it came to an end. It took 10 years."

Now as he looks back on his career, Weinstein says one of his proudest achievements is that his work is not easily summed up in one style. He says one of the biggest compliments he's gotten came recently when he showed "The 36 Unknown" to someone he declines to name at a prominent museum. He told Weinstein there was so much variety. "He said the work was very fresh," says Weinstein. "I was blown away because they see a lot of work. I took it as he couldn't say: This is a Todd Weinstein."

To Weinstein, there is no better praise. "Photographers should put more emphasis on the subject than on the photographer. I find [stylistic] work very tiring and not that interesting. Were all very full of ourselves," he says. "The most important thing is the subject."

If Weinstein has any advice to photographers, it's to follow their bliss and be patient. "Bring something spiritual into your work and follow your interest. Your work has to take over and develop over time. Its not something that happens very quickly," he says.

For himself, he's found spirituality through his work. "[It comes] through the mantra of working, the doing of it," he says. "Doing is the key. That's it for me."

Surprisingly then, Weinstein says his next move may not include photography at all. "Photography has gotten kind of diluted," he says, sounding more matter-of-fact than bitter. "You can go to the Internet, Corbis.com, and type in what you want. With cell phones and cameras today, everybody is taking pictures. It's in a moment of re-thinking or it's going into new dimensions. I'm not sure where it's going or how I fit into where it's going. Everything's gotten commercialized and consumer driven."

Not that Weinstein is giving up. "A good image is still a good image but it seems nobody is looking for those pictures. I hope I'm wrong," he says. "I'm still looking for those pictures."

Meanwhile, Weinstein considers what he'd like best to be known for. "I think my most important work is yet to come," he says, questioning whether his name should even be attached to any of his photographs. "I react to the world around me rather than the world within me. So maybe I'm not the typical artist or photographer," he says. "I'd like to be known as the Unknown Photographer. And for the picture I haven't yet taken."

View slide show | View thumbnails
Todd Weinstein's "The 36 Unknown" Web site

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