hitzgallery@sbcglobal.net
Studio Phone 636 484-0535
St Louis MO was a good place for a kid to grow up, sports, racing dirt bikes & fishing were my world. I remember days when my parents would drive me to hockey practice at 6 am, then to a baseball game in the afternoon and a football game at night. Changing uniforms in the car became the norm. My Parents never pushed me in sports but always supported me. At 12 I became an entrepreneur. I hijacked my parent's lawnmower pushing it around the neighborhood knocking on doors trying to get lawns to cut. I cut a lot of grass. I was the top CEO of this corporation & only employee.
I hated high-school, I was bored to tears with it. One day a friend that I played guitar with that knew I had a Camera called and asked if I could shoot pictures for his boss, a local concert promoter and his company, Contemporary Productions. I took the job and from then on every concert that came to town I was given a front row seat and a backstage pass so that I could photograph the event. Bands such as Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Dylan and a hundred others were my first jobs in photography.
After High School I got a full time job working in a cement factory to save needed money for college. A jackhammer, sledge hammer and a shovel were the tools of the trade. I was also still shooting concert photos at night when I could. I was making good money for teenager and saving most of it.
One thing I always wanted to do was get my Pilots license. I was obsessed as a kid and still am to this day about airplanes so I got my license when I was 18. I considered becoming a pilot until I looked into the cost of a commercial flying school. I ended up going to A Fine Arts photography school in Santa Barbara California, (Brooks Institute) I applied and was accepted. At the time it was rated the best in the world. Many of my classes were at The University of California, USC, Santa Barbara as part of the Masters program.
While going to college I worked many different jobs, sometimes working three jobs a week to keep afloat. I drove a lunch truck, a Linen laundry delivery truck, worked at Hertz Rent A Car, also in a color processing lab at night and the local YMCA on weekends. When my roommate needed extra waiters in the restaurant he managed, I filled in. Going to school at the same time and getting all of the assignments done required a lot of juggling with my work schedule and gave me little time for anything else including sleep.
One day after shooting a school fashion assignment for class, I realized that being around beautiful women all of the time wasn't too shabby. It beat taking pictures of food, products on a table or sports which were the other assignments that week. I decided right then that I would move to New York City after graduation because that was where you had to be if you were going to shoot high fashion in the States. Europe was down the road but I didn't know that at the time. I graduated from Brooks Institute / USC with a Masters of Fine Art Degree and the plans of moving to New York City which scared the crap out of me.
Never having been there, I took a bus from California to NYC's Grand Central Station with nothing but a small amount of money and a large student loan payment hanging over my head. Not knowing a soul in NY or even which direction was north, I walked to the 57th St. YMCA and for $16.50 a day rented a room with a bed and chair. It was so small you had to step over the chair to get to the door. Bathrooms were down the hall. Talk about a culture shock. Later, I moved to an overpriced dump in the west village that was home during my first years in NYC. I was not only paying double what it cost to live in beautiful Santa Barbara I was stuck in dirty NYC, riding the subways and eating hotdogs to survive.
Life sucked.
Early on in NYC, I was hired as a freelance assistant by the day or week by Photographers Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst, Scavullo, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindberg, Avedon and Steven Meisel for my technical lighting expertise, camera knowledge and darkroom printing abilities. As a #1 Technical Assistant you usually have more to do with the final image than that of the photographer. Depending on who you worked for and I worked for many top fashion photographers, you learned that many of them have little, if any, technical knowledge of photography. Social Connections is what got them work, they meant everything. Times have changed but this business is still all about connections for getting assignments.
I opened my first studio in NYC and started shooting fashion, album covers and advertising assignments. These took me around the world and I eventually ended up living in Paris, Milan & London for a few years. I was working like crazy. Always the experimenter, I used every type of camera & lighting equipment I could get my hands on. I worked in all camera formats from the tiny Minox spy camera to the Giant 20"x 24" Polaroid and my hand made Mammoth, 20" x 24" Wet Plate camera. I tested and worked with all different kinds of films with conventional and cross processing. Many times I would shoot jobs with 8x10 polaroid and use them as the final art. I also did many of the processes of the 1800's which included daguerreotypes, collodion wet plates on glass & tin, 3 color carbon prints, platinum, salt prints, and since the early 90's high end digital imaging. Unconventional to say the least especially when many successful photographers do the same shot & technique over and over for their entire careers.
I moved back to California and set up a studio, I was tired of living in NYC. The industry was changing, department stores were buying each other up and the fashion and catalog work all but stopped for many freelance photographers. The whole industry was getting crunched and work started to disappear. Stock photography was growing and photographers kept supplying the stock houses with images, basically cutting their own throats killing their own industry. Now when you see the credit of Getty or Corbis on a photo in a publication, realize the credit used to be that of the photographer and he or she received 100% payment. Now the stock house takes 50 - 70% of the payment leaving what is left for the creator of the photograph. Photographers as a whole, aren't very bright.
In the last few years along with commercial work, I have spent much of my time doing fine art photography using several of the painstaking processes from the 1800's. Also, many of the plates, images, paintings and sculptures that I have made over the last 30 years have been taken out of storage and I am now making fine art prints for sale and shows. New projects are always in the works and as usual, they are nothing like what is currently on these pages or what I have done in the past. This site is constantly changing with new work being added several times a year.
