Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret interview about career as photographer, Iowa City, Iowa, April 14, 2001

Section 1: Q: Today is April 14, Saturday, 2001. Okay, Joan, we'll just start out with some basics and like I say, the whole idea is to jog your memory so that perhaps we can hear some anecdotes or interesting things that happened to you that you remember personally. First of all, when did you first decide you wanted to become a journalist? What was it that provoked - what motivated you or who was it that helped you get on the road to doing this? A: I had a summer job at age fifteen at Henry Lewis' camera store in Iowa City and I discovered graven images. And I was absolutely intrigued with the fact that you could take a picture and process it and out of this plain piece of paper, up popped an image. I knew that that was going to be my medium for the rest of my life. Q: When was it that you found that out? A: It was 1945 - no, it was 1944. I was fifteen. I had known always that I would do something visually in the arts but up to that point, did not know exactly what. Q: What were you doing at Henry Lewis' then? A: I was in film processing and print making and the soda fountain and selling cameras. It was an exciting experience. Q: And from there you ended up at the University of Iowa? A: I went to St. Catherine's School in Davenport and took a number of pictures there that wound up in their yearbook. Then I entered the university because I really wanted to take photography and it was in the journalism school. Q: Can you think back and recall what some of the ideas that you've had in mind for your future? What you wanted to do with this passion for photography? A: I wanted to travel the entire world and document people and what they were doing and explore. I suppose at heart I was a National Geographic photographer, but I also wanted to have a family and children and live a normal life. I had come out of a single parent, rather disruptive background of being shuffled around to various relatives and, of course, it was during the depression and I wanted to be independent and travel. Of course, I've been very lucky to be in Johnson and Loon counties, which have been interesting to me and I hardly ever get out of Johnson and Loon counties. Q: Did you see that there might have been a conflict between your work as a photographer and your desire to have a family? A: Yes, I certainly did and I asked Margaret Burke-White when I carried her camera equipment, about those choices and she said, "Life decides that for you." Now, whether she meant LIFE in capital letters and Henry Luce or whether she meant just accidental life, I don't know. Q: This was when White came to the University of Iowa more than fifty years ago. Do you remember anything more about that visit and how she made [interrupted] A: Well, she arrived as a big, big celebrity and everyone just did everything they could to help her. And of course, she strung umpteen floodlights and had all this gear to carry and I thought I was terribly privileged to be able to carry her camera case. [chuckles]. Q: Do you remember anything else that the two of you talked about? A: No, because that was my only opportunity to ask her for my own conflict resolution. And of course, that was the answer I got, that life decides it for you. Q: Have you found that to be true or not? A: Yes, I think it's probably true, except that I've never allowed anything to get in the way of my ultimate visions. Would you like to meet my husband, Duane? Q: Yes. A: Duane, this is Brian Thomas. Q: We've got the camera rolling here. [inaudible]. Nice to meet you, Mr. Bourret. Duane: [inaudible in background] A: It is pronounced Bo-ray. It is French. Q: Then how was it that you didn't finish your work at the University of Iowa? A: The Gazette, I was a stringer for the Gazette. The Gazette thought that I was graduating and offered me a permanent job and I was so thrilled that somebody wanted me that I decided not to go to Alaska that summer but to take the position of a photographer and feature writer at the Gazette. And of course, I got married that summer, too, to a journalism graduate, who was also working at the Gazette. Q: And that was Art? A: Hubenfeld. Q: How did you meet? A: I met him because of Henry Lewis' camera store. His sister worked there and she said he was coming home from Europe, from the Army. Q: When you were at the University, were you majoring in media studies or journalism? A: I was majoring in journalism and I was also taking an enormous number of art classes. You see, they had no major where you could be simply in the school of art and art history at that time, and involving photography. And my passion was photography. Q: Did art help you along the way of your photography career as it developed? I'm thinking maybe the same principles of composition and balance. A: No, he [Art Hubenfeld] had absolutely nothing to do with the imagery. He did have quite a bit to do, however, with the development of a story line for a series of children's books that were lavishly illustrated with black and white photographs. Q: My question wasn't about Art, the man. My question was about art, the subject matter? A: No, he had absolutely nothing to do with aesthetics. Q: Okay. You don't see the two, photography and art, coming together? A: Are you talking about my husband? Q: No, I'm talking about the subject of art. A: Yes, of course, of course. It's absolutely essential. Q: I guess I got off on the wrong foot. A: No, we got a little mixed up on those two things. Q: So tell me how art has helped your photography career. Art, the subject matter in the department there at the University of Iowa. A: Well, in a way, you are competing with any image that has ever been done and developed, whatever medium it is. Or maybe competing isn't the word, but mankind has, ever since the cave paintings in southern Europe in trying to depict experiences and I just thought it was wonderful to learn what had gone before. Q: Was it art history or was it - A: I took both. I took life drawing and James will say it was a professor of painting and drawing in that stance, was just wonderful to me, and we soon decided that I had absolutely no talent for drawing the human form with a pencil or chalk. And Jim would say, "Well, why don't you take this time and just go out and make some nice photographs because that is what you do best." And he gave me an "A" in the course, for which I was very grateful regarding grade points. And he encouraged me. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: Then this turns into my next question. What does make great photography? A great photographer and great photography itself? Thinking in terms of the artistic element of it. A: I think it's integral in a sense with the subject matter of it, because if it's too abstract, it really doesn't have any relationship to the human experience. I wanted my pictures to be able to communicate to people and to explore what the human condition is, what was happening to people, although currently I've been doing a great deal of work with nature and I suppose, in a sense, you would say it was ecology-related. I've been spending about twelve years documenting various aspects of Pike's Peak State Park. But in a sense, it could be any park, anywhere. Q: Give me an example of how your photography represents the human experience. A: I think perhaps one of my most significant photographs is that of the little black girl, looking through the white curtain, which is blocking half of her face. In a way, that is every minority child's experience in America, in this part of our era, the twentieth century and perhaps the first part of the twenty-first century. It shows what minority children have to cope with. Of course, pretty soon, we who are white are going to be the minority. There is a bullet hole in the window. I posed the child. I was on my way to photograph a very elegant affair in Cedar Rapids and I happened to stop by to see my housekeeper and drop something off and it suddenly struck me the incredible contrast between how she lived with her child and the Junior Leaguers that I was off to photograph at a very elegant event. So I did this picture, which sat around a long time with no publication aspect available for it. And of course, since it was taken, in - I think it was 1958 - in the last thirty years, it has been published quite a bit. Q: Did it end up in any local papers or any Iowa papers? A: It wound up, first of all, being published in the Iowan magazine when we did a feature, which I suggested, on the status of the Negro in Iowa. Usually, the publisher of the magazine, David Archie, was only interested basically in photographing nature and the homes and activities of wealthy Iowans. Q: This would have been back in the early fifties? A: Right. Well, no. The picture was taken in 1958 so it would be in the late fifties, early sixties. And I went to Waterloo and stayed with some black people there and photographed that community and used this picture as one of them illustrating the feature. That was probably the first comprehensive coverage for a white audience of blacks in the state of Iowa. David, who had great misgivings about it, wound up being terribly pleased that we had done it, because friends of his who were on the faculty at Iowa State University, praised him for running this feature. I would say that was the only socially significant documentary that ever appeared in the Iowan magazine in all these years. Q: Did you get any feedback about it? From readers? A: Not particularly. Q: Was there anything negative said about it? A: No. It was a straightforward documentary and some of the photographs that were taken for that series are now in my Traveling Retrospective of the State Historical Society, particularly one of a neighborhood in Waterloo with dirt streets. There were 10,000 black people living in Waterloo at that time. Q: What other photos have you taken that you think represent the human experience, as you described it? A: I did a series - I read in the Register that there were going to be migrant workers in Muscatine, Iowa, to help harvest tomatoes and I thought that would make kind of an interesting documentary for the Picture Magazine at the Register, so I asked Cal Gartner if he'd like it and he said, sure he would. So, I went to Muscatine and it was the only time in all these years that I had camera failure. My Hasselblad sounded right. It clicked and you could hear all the noise of it, but I got home and developed the film and it was totally blank. What had happened was, the focal plane shutter hadn't released. It had a defect in the camera. So anyway, I had, for many years, had all cameras in duplicate, if not triplicate. So I went back and got the unescorted tour. Then I found absolutely incredible living conditions on Iowa farms for these people. One was, there were fifteen people living in a machine shed and one was a mother with a new baby, maybe six weeks old baby. I photographed her and the Register ran the series on the conditions and the workers and the people and their children, and the following year, a great deal was done in Muscatine to provide housing for these people and change social conditions for them. I think that's the best use is to be made of documentaries photography, whether it's video today, on Sixty Minutes or it was stills in my era. Q: These changes came about as a result of your expos? A: I think so. I mean, they contributed to it. Of course, there were people that were concerned about conditions. Q: I assume this was back in the fifties, too. A: This would be the late fifties, early sixties. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: You worked for the Register. A: Yes, but my relationship with the Register wasn't just somebody on the street with a camera, throwing something in the mail to send to them. There was a cooperative feedback back and forth. I was more or less guaranteed my pictures would be used, I would be paid very nicely for them and I had all the benefits of being an employee without them paying insurance and other health insurance, retirement and all that. Q: And without your having to work 8-5 in the news room. A: Right. Which didn't work very well for me. Even when I was at the Gazette, I made an arrangement ultimately, with Pete Hoyt, the managing editor, that my hours would be different than those of other employees. They would begin like at 10:00 in the morning and I would get the hours in, but might lap over, way into the evening. Q: Under that situation, how were the assignments given? Were you asked for story ideas? A: Pretty much. I was given stuff to go photograph, like ladies' social events, but I also helped cover the Benechek murder trial. I did hard news, too. Q: Give us some background. I'm not sure we know what the murder trial was about. A: The Benechek murder trial was a very famous case and I can't remember whether it was '48 or '49. A college student in Iowa City accidentally killed a girl named G. G. Jackson. He was of Czech descent, from a poor southwest side family, relatively speaking, compared to G. G. Jackson, who was the daughter of an affluent Burlington lawyer and his wife. Q: What were you photographing when you photographed that? A: I was photographing Mr. Benechek going in and out of the courthouse. The Johnson County coroner didn't like it and tried to grab me and my camera. Q: So, what kind of story ideas did you come up with yourself that they approved of? Were you ever rejected? Did you come up with things that they'd rather not pursue? A: I did a piece for "Teen Talk" for the Gazette, which was a column that I had to produce something for every week, that was on an assignment. I did it on an outstanding black teenager. It ran. And Jack Elane (??), the city editor, came sailing over to my desk and said, pointing at it and shaking, "Don't you ever do anything like this again in 'our' paper!" Why an employee would feel such a proprietary interest that it would be "our" paper, is beyond me, as I analyze stock options and newspapers merging and all. We had a professor at the University named Art Wymer who came into the school of journalism, having been, I think, on the Washington Post or some kind of Washington news bureau, who kept trying to explain to the idealist student body, that newspapers were like manufacturers of washing machines. And it was all about a lying situation. So when Mr. Illion said "our" paper, I thought, well, you know, this is a long ownership route from what Art Wymer was talking about. Q: You're touching on some subject matter that I wanted to talk about later. And it may be evident to some, but is the role of a newspaper? It is a business. It does have a bottom line. What should it be otherwise? A: I think it should provide reporting social services in the sense that if there is corruption in government, there is one agency that can expose it. I think that idealistically, it is far more than the advertising department holding the pages apart. Q: But it is another kind of business that has to meet their payroll. A: That's true. Q: Is there something different about this kind of a business than there is, say, for Proctor and Gamble? A: Yes, I think so. I think there is the communication aspect of social service in trying to make social change in a democracy. I think that the press and TV news has a real role to serve and now, the internet. Because tyrants can't keep the news from the people with the internet. And the people, given a choice, are going to want freedom of information and democracy. The Western press, aside from the tabloid junk publications, which, of course, they have the right to do, but the press has a role. Don't you think so? Q: I'm not the subject matter here. [laughter] I would ask, would you say the press has a duty? A: Yes. I think that they do have an almost sacred duty to do this. And also to be truthful and not to manipulate the news and not to manipulate photographs. Of the 500,000 plus negatives that I have donated to the State Historical Society, I have stipulated that those images are not to be altered mechanically, so it will say, 'we have the head of former senator Culver on the body of a nude.' I mean, it's just unacceptable. I want my images that I shot to be straightforward and show the concept that I had in making them to begin with. Q: I'm wondering if that publication, citing the example that you gave, would say in response, this would generate sales and it's more attractive. It will sell more publications. A: I don't know that that's the concern. I think the concern - I mean, I did documentary photography to show how our state operated, how its people operated and how we were in the last half of the twentieth century. I do not want those images mechanically altered in an age of digitalization to be something that they were not. Q: In the fifty years plus that you've been in journalism, you've seen some dramatic changes in the technology, of what we could do and what we can't. Have those been for the good? Or has there been a problem you see with what we can do? A: I think all the technical changes are absolutely wonderful, especially the Internet. I can't speak for how other people or maybe art photographers might want to do their images. All I can say is that as a documentary photographer, I want the images un-manipulated and it be relatively straightforward to communicate what I saw and what needed to be said. Of course, my special concerns in our state became race relations and how we treat each other, on my people pictures. Plus, I inadvertently did a great many pictures showing women's roles before equality. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: You and I were talking earlier this week about the Percy Harris story. I wonder if you could expand on that, and what the Gazette's role played in that? A: Well, [about the] Percy Harris came to town as a resident at St. Luke's Hospital. He was from Waterloo, from an extremely poor family. He had married the black doctor's daughter and she came from a very good distinguished family. Her father was one of the first medical graduates, black, at the University of Iowa, I think, in the early 1900s. And Percy Harris was upward social mobile. But he had a little problem. His wife was Catholic and they had about seven or eight children at that point, and Cedar Rapids had racial districts. You could not live north of Mount Vernon Road or in the upper northeast area, or the more affluent southeast area. Very few black people lived in better areas of the southwest Cedar Rapids or northwest. So Percy was restricted to about an eight-block area, none of it suitable for a medical doctor and his family. He was condemned in chit chat by others, for having too many children and for being black and for wanting to live the way other doctors lived. So, there was no housing available for him when he made his decision to stay in Cedar Rapids. Since he was a Methodist, he met Robert Armstrong, who owned a department store. The Armstrongs had become socially active in the NAACP because their daughter, Goldie, was a missionary to Africa. She came home and said, "Why don't you have any black people working at Armstrong's, other than running an elevator up and down?" So the Armstrongs promoted black people behind the counter and proceeded to offer opportunity and jobs. Well, Dr. Harris, of course, being a Methodist and Robert Armstrong being a Methodist, they met and I suppose Armstrong was on the Board of St. Luke's and this problem arose regarding where Dr. Harris and his brilliant family, which ultimately was a dozen children, were to reside. So, the Armstrongs decided that they might as well reside next door to them, on Beaver Avenue and 34th Street on Pleasant Hill, the name of their home. So, they decided to give the Methodist Church the land for the Harris home, as a tax write-off. But the Methodists were, in turn, to sell it to the Harris'. Well, this caused an enormous meeting and uproar at the church, in which the church congregation met to vote on whether this deal should go through. Of course, the Gazette and Mr. Aaron Jack Illion had a policy of only covering black crime. Q: Was that a stated policy or was that implied? A: I think that if I couldn't cover any other, ever do a black teenage girl who was a straight-A student and outstanding in volunteer and other activities, I think the odds on anybody black being covered in a feature story were pretty remote. So, of course, I told the city desk at the Register about this and they swarmed in, with Leftie Mills, their top investigative reporter and I did some photos and Mills did an absolutely tremendous banner story. Of course, we sold out of newspapers in Cedar Rapids, because the Gazette simply didn't cover it, because to the Gazette, it didn't exist. I thought it was quite exciting! Q: Absolutely. And you had pitched this story to Jack Illion? A: No, no. I worked for the Register by that point in time. I had worked for the Register ever since I sold them the birth of the baby pictures that I did myself. Q: I want to ask about that, too, but how was it? Was the Gazette ever given a chance? Did you ever notify the Gazette? A: No, why would I? I wasn't on their payroll or any relationship with them. Q: Did the Register just beat the Gazette on the story? A: Yes, it was wonderful! Q: Did the Gazette ever come back and do the story? A: I think they ultimately did a coverage of it. But it was pretty after the fact, because the Register, as I recall, for several days in the weeks that were involved, would have banner headlines. So if you wanted to know what was happening with 3,000 Methodists in Cedar Rapids, you better take the Register or pick it up off the news stand. I don't recall that the TV news did anything with it. Q: Can you recall what year this was? A: I think it was '62. Q: So you were long gone from the Gazette. A: Oh, I'd been gone from the Gazette since '52. I was ten years out. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: I wanted to go back to your days at the Gazette though, when you first started, actually. Who hired you and what was your pay? A: It was $45.00 a week and hired by Pete Hoyt, managing editor. Pete Hoyt and John Reynolds, who ran the photo desk and the feature desk, were just wonderful to me. Q: What were your duties when you first hired? A: I was always a photographer and a feature writer. They would both give assignments and then I developed a network of people that liked my pictures. I had pictures that always had some degree of impact, you know. So people would phone me. The one picture that I have that had a great deal of impact was when I was assigned to cover a Coe College baccalaureate procession, an event, going into the First Presbyterian Church. And a professor stuck his tongue out at me and I got the picture. It is a very funny picture. I don't know if you've seen it or not. Q: Yes, it sounds familiar to me. A: And the Gazette hesitated about running it. And I said, "Well, I don't care. If you don't want to run it, it's fine, but I'm sending it off to the United Press. I've got a career to put together." So that forced the Gazette to run it. They ran it on the back page of the paper, which a headline "Pomp and Circumstance." Of course, that really kind of helped my career in Cedar Rapids, because everybody thought it was so funny and they called me with more projects. Well, Ben Peterson, who was chair of chemistry at Coe College also called me. He was just furious! And said I was to never set foot on Coe College again and that I had ruined the career of a young man. Q: Of the professor that stuck his tongue out at you? A: That's correct. So, I guess my response - I meant to say to Dr. Peterson, but I guess I didn't. It was lucky that I didn't put in that this professor's field was sex research. [laughter]. But the San Francisco Chronicle ran it with a wonderful headline, Higher Education in Iowa. I mean, I did sell it to the UP for five bucks. Q: Do you know whether he did that gesture kind of whimsically? Or did he do it hostilely? A: No, he did it whimsically. He knew me because I was doing quite a bit of work for Kathy Culvert Stupponick, who was PR director for Coe, but after that, of course, I never, ever was given another commercial photography job from Coe. I had to drift into obscurity as far as they were concerned, until maybe 15 years later, one of the professors in art gave me an exhibition at Coe. And I had had another one since then. Q: But you did end up photographing the ladies at Coe? A: Yes. I did set foot there again. But not as a commercial or freelance photographer. I went as Ruth Nash's guest to the Coe Faculty Wives Club because I was interested in art, always, and Ruth was interested in art and had become my good friend, but she also became my good friend primarily due to the campaign for equalizing race relations in Cedar Rapids. Ruth and Russ Nash spearheaded many activities and projects to prevent urban renewal until real estate was opened up to all blacks, not just a black doctor who would have a large income, but to the average Cedar Rapids black man and woman who needed housing. So we integrated neighborhoods and had a project of no more than one black family to the block to prevent ghetto-izing another neighborhood. Q: Did you write stories about this? A: No, I only did the one piece of writing and that was for the Iowan magazine on the status of the black in our state and who they were and where they were and what they were doing. I didn't do very good coverage of Des Moines, and the Moore - I think the people's name was Morris and they had a newspaper. Q: Sure, okay. A: In general, we did kind of an overall skim view of these people. But of course, I must say, I also was doing Indians and I did the Hispanics and Norwegians. I did a lot of ethnic and in a way, the Iowan got me involved in ethnicity. Q: Photography and writing? A: I always did the research and then I would write and somebody would clean it up. You know, proofreaders are still bleeding red ink over everything I write. Q: Would you consider yourself a good writer? A: Some people think so. But I don't think that I aesthetically put words together as well as I do the photography. Julie Jenson McDonald of Davenport is a wonderful wordsmith. Often, if I need to work with someone, I send the research to Julie and she polishes it. I have a lot of humility regarding my writing abilities and virtually no ego. But I do research pretty good. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: We started the story about your invitation to the art exhibit at Coe College. Could you continue with that, the fact that you ended up with this classic photograph of these women? A: There was a very nice nude by Kuni Oshi that really, the figure in the painting in really quite covered up, compared to a lot of nudes. But there were four ladies sitting in front of us. Q: This was a ladies dining? A: It was Faculty Wives Club Meeting. And the exhibition was the collection, I think, partly of the Elliotts maybe, and partly of the Schramms, Dody and Jim Schramm of Burlington. And the Kuni Oshi nude really is a wonderful painting and it's worth an enormous amount of money and one of the ladies was looking right up the crotch of the nude, over her shoulder, and another lady was looking very disapprovingly. I had put a hat on my head to go to this meeting because women were wearing hats then, but I took my super-wide Hasselblad camera with me and got this incredible photograph. Q: How did you take that photograph so discreetly? A: I had the camera on my lap and it was a wide-angle camera and I just sat there and saw this and clicked it. But they kept kind of repeating to do it, but I think I only got one really great negative on it. Then that picture languished for a while, with nothing much happening until Nancy Green McQue was editor of the Junior League magazine wanted to do a feature on culture in Cedar Rapids. And I offered this print, this image to her and she said, well she couldn't possibly run it, because she might get sued, but I had to go out and get model releases from all of the people in it. And they were delighted to do it! Women have always helped my career. Q: How so? A: By hiring me to do pictures for them or telling me when there is something that I might find interesting. For example, some of my friends said, you know, you really ought to get a load of Women's Club bowling. And they all were in their fine dresses, bowling, because they didn't want to get re-dressed for lunch. And they're very funny! I mean, the roles of what women do and did were very amusing. Of course, I felt very alienated. I could not understand why I felt to estranged. But of course, obviously I couldn't possibly do the roles that most women were doing in the fifties and sixties on the social level. Q: You felt estranged, what? As a professional? A: Yes, I felt estranged as a professional and I felt estranged as a woman. Maybe to some extent, that is the role of the documentary photographer because if you are part of the group - I don't know if you have the psychological distance to say "I'm going to photograph, I'm going to cover what in the world these aborigines are doing." You know? Even if they are my aborigines. Q: With regard to the fact of the wide photos that you took, when you went and asked for the releases, what was their response? A: Mrs. Barrow, Mrs. Arthur Barrow, said she was just delighted because she loved how she looked, because she detested nude paintings. The others, the faculty wives, thought it was absolutely hilarious and they were very happy to give a release. As I said, women have cooperated and have been very helpful in the advancement of what I was trying to do as a photographer. Now, maybe they sensed they were somewhat displeased with the roles they themselves had to live. I think there was an element of that because after I got my divorce in 1963, thirty percent of the members of the Junior League applied to me to be employed by me. I was just amazed! So there was this kind of, I'm sure, underlying discontent for our generations, maybe since Adam and Eve left the garden, as to what women's role has had to be. -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: When you were in the Gazette newsroom, did you ever feel discriminated against? A: Sure. I got half the pay of the men. I had to freelance to kind of get my money situation to where I felt it should be. I've always had an enormous amount of expense in my life because photography is expensive to do or to own the gear and the equipment. I'm always just hanging by a thread in terms of expense. Still am. Q: I think you have more confidence than you did, though, at the time. You say you weren't just so confident back then. A: I was terrified! Then, I had a good friend, Mary Jane Morgan, who moved from Cedar Rapids to Des Moines and took a lot of my family pictures to show Better Homes and Gardens, and their baby book editor, who also had a column on child rearing and development in the H & G in the late fifties, very early sixties, flew into Cedar Rapids to look over my work and in six weeks time, bought $8,000 worth of pictures. That launched me into more than roll-a-cord cameras. I put every cent of it in to Hasselblads, which I still have today, forty years later. I mean, they are just work horses. Q: You talk about Hasselblads. What are these? What kind of camera are these? A: It's a still, two and a quarter square, but they are lightweight. I felt at the time that they had better clarity for me doing - I had to do a lot of commercial photography to make money as well as what I wanted to do. And I got a clearer, better image for enlargement for consumers I felt than if I had been using 35mm and having possible grain problems in processing or scratches. A bigger negative is good, but you get it big enough and you're not mobile enough to do people. Basically, I'm a documentary photographer of the human condition. Q: When you were doing commercial photography, were you getting your contracts, I guess, word of mouth? Or were you actually out there soliciting or was it a little of both? A: I suppose it is a little bit of both. After John Culver was elected to the senate, and I had done his campaign pictures. I think we must have done four hundred of his head, until he got the look that he wanted. I asked him if I could have assignments in USIA. And I got them. There is a feeding relationship. Q: Is this when he was running for U.S. Senate? A: Yes. I did his campaign pictures. Then the Republicans hired me to go to Washington and do his opponents. So I thought that was kind of remarkable, to be able to do both sides of this. As a photographer, you are somewhat alienated, at a distance, a psychological distance from your subject matter. Q: As a non-partisan photographer? A: Yes. Q: Talk about minorities and women in the newsroom back in the early days. Did you see many minorities represented? A: Oh - they didn't exist. Q: I thought there were several at the Register who were writers but like you say, not many. Was there anyone at the Gazette that would be considered a minority? A: Not unless you consider women a minority at that point. And they did have Del Blumenstein, who had one leg. He was handicapped, physically. Great guy. Photographer. He also processed film and made prints. He was wonderful. Q: Did this ever come up, was this ever an issue at the Gazette, the fact that they weren't represented? A: I don't think it ever occurred to them. Q: What were the women doing? A: They were doing social roles. They covered social events. Except for one, who was an Air Force man's wife. I think he was a co-ROTC or something like that, and she was kind of a Helen Thomas type, but much more gentle, and when they left, she was not replaced. Q: Was she a columnist or an actual reporter? A: She was an actual reporter. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: What were the circumstances of you leaving the Gazette? A: I got pregnant. Pete Hoyt had decided that I should have my maiden name, so I'm there like eight months - maybe seven months pregnant and they got embarrassed introducing me as "our photographer, Miss Liffring." Then, one of my duties was to go from the top floor of the building, three stories down, under the sidewalk of 5th Street, where the dark room was. If it rained, of course, you got electric shocks. Tape One Side Two A: Then they would say, "Just go down and get this." I mean, they had those pneumatic tubes - but that didn't work on pictures. So I was the tube that went up and down. Well, ultimately, it was very difficult in my condition to be doing all these stairs. Q: They had one of those at the Register, too, where you could shoot copy down the tubes. A: Yes, but it didn't work on the photos going up and down. I don't know about the Register, but that kind of precipitated my departure. Then they said, "If you have an idea," I think it was Peter Hoyt that said this to me, "be sure and tell your successor." Because he knew that I generated a lot of ideas. "And we'll just assign those." And home I went. Q: He would assign those, is that what he said? A: Yes, to somebody to do those ideas. It made me very angry. I mean, I was just furious. Q: What made you so angry about that? A: Being told I couldn't work anymore and couldn't take my pictures for them and I was to go home and that was the end of my career. Q: Because you were pregnant? A: Yes. I was to be a mother and I was to stay home in the suburbs, which are really quite boring, you know. And I did try being a full-time housewife and mother for six weeks. I got very depressed. By that time, people were phoning me to ask if I'd come do pictures for them. Q: Was there ever an implication that maybe you could come back after your child was born? A: No! I was out the door, forever. Q: Not your choice? A: Not my choice. It wasn't so much the fact they didn't pay me very much that I cared about, is that I just liked going out and photographing people and documenting and doing it. So, I photographed the birth of my baby. Because I felt, in my condition, if I could do that and show other women that childbirth was not to be a terrifying experience, that would provide me a social service and it would give me more confidence. The Catholic Hospital was thrilled with the idea because they thought it was a wonderful promotion for their birth department. Here we are, fifty years later, and Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids is still promoting birth at Mercy. So I got the pictures and every magazine in the United States rejected them, that I could see about sending them to. Look rejected them initially and Life and Ladies Home Journal. The whole bit. So finally, I sent them off to the Des Moines Register's Picture Magazine. And they just went wild over them. Q: Carl ?? A: Yes, and Frank Eyerly. Frank Eyerly said it was one of the great photo features of the 1950s, which I thought was just wonderful of him. Then, they made an arrangement that I would keep working with them. Q: So this precipitated your start of work with the Register? A: Yes. I mean, once I had that feature, they hung onto me. And they paid me a lot of money for those three pages. They ran banner headlines about it and advertised the feature. Then the Cowles picked them up for the Des Moines paper, and for Look, which had already rejected them and they wanted the rejection letter. I should have made a copy, except we didn't have copy machines. I should have copied that rejection letter, but I just sent it off. Q: What do you mean? Look rejected those pictures? A: Initially. Q: But then? A: The Register and Mike Cowles wanted the rejection letter and probably sailed into Lewis at Look and I think they - soon, there was a different name, in terms of photography features for the magazine. Q: So they showed up in both the Register and in Look magazine? A: Yes, but see, the Cowles family owned Look. And Gardner Cowles had founded Look. Q: How about Life? A: They ran one as part of a photo contest, in a very sexist manner. They ran a photograph of somebody that had shot his uncle, and it said, "He shot his uncle, she shot her baby." Q: Oh! A: It was gross. Then, they refused to use me as Joan Liffring. I was Mrs. Hubenfeld. I was just furious. Q: It was not appropriate. A: I didn't think it was at that point, even though I was married. I suppose this was all rather hard on my first husband. Q: How did he feel about this? A: I don't know. I think he felt hostile as hell as it turned out later. Q: You didn't know it at the time, though? A: Without getting into the personal relationship, I think that he ultimately decided that I shouldn't be working for the Register and have this career. I guess he felt uncomfortable because it was a much better paper than the Gazette for those years. Q: And your husband at the time was the editorial page editor at the Gazette? A: He was a reporter for quite a while and then he went into the editorial area. Q: Did you get any negative feedback about the pictures? A: About the birth pictures? I think my Aunt Madeline was aghast but she lives in the period of Louis XVI at Versailles Castle.[laughter and inaudible]. She was at Versailles in Los Angeles at some flea market, but she has her own world. Q: I'm just thinking, in the fifties, the same feelings. A: Women liked it because it showed you didn't have to be terrified. And the medical people liked it. Q: Did they use it to [inaudible] A: No. It had quite a bit of publicity with the major papers. The United States Information Agency [USIA] bought them to show the women in Finland. Because women in Finland tend to have birth in the sauna, because it's sterile. It's very hot and it's very sterile and it's a clean place on the farm and they birthed there, historically. So I suppose the USIA figured that an American woman photographing the birth of her baby would appeal to the Finns. And I only photographed what I could see. Now you can see birth on TV, and that's a radical shift. Mine were kind of modest little pictures. Q: You said your family had some feelings about it. Was there any other reaction from readers? A: Just my aunt that lives in this elegant world that she has created. Q: I'm wondering if someone - if they ever got letters at the Register. A: I don't think so. Q: Like you said, they were relatively modest pictures, but still. A: I had one with the baby's feet up in the air and the umbilical cord still attached to me before he had breath. And the doctor was so excited about having his picture taken, he forgot to scrub up before he came in, and they called him Dirty Gerty for years. Q: Who was the doctor? A: Dr. Sam Lear in Cedar Rapids. A general practitioner. I didn't go to an ob/gyn person, I just went to my family doctor. Q: Did you anticipate that these photos would end up all? A: Yes, I wanted them to. Q: That was the plan? A: Yes. I wanted my career that the Gazette was denying me. I was furious about it. -- <br><br> Section 9: Q: Talk about some of your other assignments with the Register when you doing freelance, ones that were most memorable for you. Did you do any feature writing at your time at the Register? A: No, I just did my captions and a block of type. Then Cal Gartner, who was a great wordsmith, re-wrote them, put good headlines on. Then, I got a lot of assignments just as spin-offs. Like the Chamber of Commerce magazine wanted H.R. Gross covered, the senator. Was he a representative or a senator? Q: He was a representative. A: So I covered H.R. Gross. I went up to Waterloo and photographed him. But I did a lot of photography for ad agencies. Because I had done family photography from people who owned corporations in Cedar Rapids, those men decided that they liked what I had done on their family so well, that they would like me to do their ad pictures and whatever they needed for their corporations. That, along with my nice, sharp Hasselblad, threw me into a whole other world, economically. Because I felt I should have New York rates even though I lived in Cedar Rapids. So I charged them. Q: And you got them. A: Yes. A lot of these people became very good friends and they wanted to take care of me. Now, I always drove little Volkswagens. I didn't dress very well. One time, my housekeeper had a friend who asked her if she was still working for that woman who looked like poor white trash. Because I always dressed very simply and did not call any attention to myself because as a documentary photographer, if you blend into the woodwork, you can do far better. Although one time I had to do some pictures of a meeting with either 300 or 600 men and I tried to figure out what to wear. I decided there was only one possible color and that was red. Q: Red? A: Red. So I wore my red dress. And the after-dinner speaker, who was sitting [inaudible] asked somebody to get rid of this woman that was in the room photographing. I thought that was very funny. Q: Did you leave? A: Sure. I didn't care. Q: There is no other garb you could have worn, except a red dress? A: Oh, I didn't think so. Q: You didn't want to try the black suit, huh? A: Nope. I wore my very bright red dress. Q: Did you get the photos you wanted? A: Sure. Q: What were they of? A: I don't know, various people. They were insignificant. Q: So that was the one time you weren't inconspicuous? A: Yes. Q: Other memorable stories that come to mind or situations when you were doing free-lance for the Register? A: Not particularly. -- <br><br> Section 10: Q: Talk about the equipment that you used back then, too. I know that you said you have about seventy pounds that you still carry around. But I imagine it was more than that, back then. A: Not really, because I never had the strength to do much more than that. I always had a flash battery that I bounced off. I don't like direct flash. I had three cameras, in case one broke. Q: You don't use a flash now - A: A bounce. I still bounce when it's too dark. But in general, since I'm not doing commercial photography any more, or much with having assignments, it's pretty lightweight. And now I've gone to Leica Flexis. Then, my husband, Duane, has the digital camera. He's learning how to operate it. Q: Are you into digital at all? A: I got the camera. But I handed it to Duane. Q: So it's analog, huh? A: I wanted it to photograph book covers for the Web, primarily. But it's kind of nice, as a note-taking camera. For the money involved, it's tremendously sharp. It's a Leica. It was under $1,000. Q: Were you working at the Iowan freelance at the same time you were working at the Register? A: Yes. Q: Was there a distinction between the kind of stories you would do for either? A: Yes. I would say the Register, in general, was more of a hard news kind of coverage. Well then, eventually, in addition to Picture Magazine, a woman reporter on the Register, whom I did not know and I don't think I've ever met her, named Lula Mae Cole, suggested to Frank Eyerly and John Zug that I be engaged to do one picture a week in Cedar Rapids to help build circulation. Anything I wanted. So, I would come up with a list of what they might like to have and then John and I would go over it by phone. I talked to him for nine years. Never occurred to me that I'd marry him. Q: So nine years before you actually married him? A: Yes. From the time I was 28 years old on. Married him when I was 38. Q: Had you ever seen him? A: I saw him three times at his desk. Of course, we discussed a lot of things other than the assignments.