hitzgallery@sbcglobal.net
Studio Phone 636 484-0535
Ok I realized early on that I was not going to come up with something like the theory of relativity but here is my long walk down my road from the beginning to where I am today.
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. Boy did 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, Copying down what the teacher wrote on the board was about as interesting as it got at our school. We had terrible teachers. During high-school I had several different jobs after school working at a photo store and at Sears in the camera department. I also worked as a bus boy at night for a short time. One day a friend that I played guitar with 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 worked my ass off, sometimes as much as 60 hrs. a week, in terrible conditions. It was so dusty you had to wear goggles and a respirator to breath. Freezing temperatures at times working outside down by the river and one hundred and twenty degrees by the cement kiln in the factory. I was also still shooting concert pictures 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. It wasn't in my budget, not even close. I heard of a Fine Art photography school in California, (Brooks Institute) applied and was accepted. At the time it was rated the best in the world.
While going to college full time I worked many different jobs, I had to, sometimes working three jobs a week to keep afloat. I drove a lunch truck, worked at Hertz Rent A Car, in a color processing lab at night and also the local YMCA on weekends. When my roommate needed extra waiters in the restaurant he managed, I filled in. The topper was driving a large delivery truck 40 hrs. a week for a commercial laundry company delivering clean tablecloths, napkins, uniforms and diapers and picking up the dirty ones to return for laundering. Two days a week my route went to convalescent homes where I picked up carts full of dirty diapers, this was a hard, heavy lifting and a disgusting job, but it paid great for a student. 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, 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 top 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 fashion, in the U.S. that is, Europe was down the road but I didn't know that at the time. I graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, California 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. Even at that time it was almost impossible to find apartments for reasonable rent. 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.
Life sucked.
Early on in NY, 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. This blew my mind. They would hire people like myself to set up the lights, figure out the exposures and filtration, shoot the tests polaroids then they would walk in push the button and leave. Little, if any, input into model direction or any part of the production of the image was ever given. The fact is they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. They didn't need to! Looking through a camera mounted on a tripod and pushing a button 300 times without moving the camera, then selecting 1 image to use from the pile is just not that hard when all the work is done for you. Many had never been in a darkroom and many wouldn't know how to load their own cameras, but they were well connected in the industry. Connections meant everything. For example, Irving Penn when starting out in the 40's never went to photography school or had any training or previous photo assignments under his belt but he new the head man at Vogue magazine. When he needed a job he went to him and was given his first assignment, shooting the cover for Vogue magazine, a job any experienced photographers with 30 years in the business would give their left arm for. Penn had people to help him figure out how to produce his first images as a photographer at Vogue. Times have changed but this business is still all about connections for getting assignments. Rarely but once in a great while while I was assisting I would run into a truly talented photographer that knew what he was doing technically and had a vision of what they wanted to produce visually. Irving Penn had become one and Horst P. Horst was another complete photographer, I had the pleasure to work with both of those great guys.
In the 1980's 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. 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.
In 1992 I moved back to California and set up a studio, I was tired of living in lunchbox size apartments & riding the subway. 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 and images that I have shot 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.
