How a war veteran became the most prolific cat photographer in history goes the life of Walter Chandoha . How a chance encounter with an abandoned pussycat purred the Don Drapers of Madison Avenue , the real ones, is about the long existence of a man who was born in a small New Jersey city just after World War I and died in a even smaller city of the same state when kitty memes were already the undeniable kings of the Internet .
Chandoha was a visionary with no intention of being, but when his favorite home pastime began to sneak into the designs of the American dream, he said he had finally found his true calling. Long before all that, little Walter was fiddling at home with a rudimentary dark room that had been made of curtains and his mother's soup bowls.
Up to six bulbs he used to not lose a detail of his furry models. He even asked a tigers tamer for advice
In there, in that kind of children's teepee with ínfulas, the boy watched fascinated how so many scenes of his daily life were painted on the wet paper. First the silhouettes appeared; then, little by little, the details, like born from a puddle. He was so fascinated that as soon as he finished high school he left for Manhattan to work as a photographer's assistant for $ 12 a week. He didn't give him to live but he gave him to learn, and that was enough for him.
"I understood that a strong backlight could turn a good photo into an even better one and that became one of my signatures," he would write much later, at 98 , just before he died. His words are collected by the retrospective Cats. Photographs 1942-2018 , published by Taschen . And indeed, the studio photos that conquered Andy Warhol himself had two protagonists: cats and light.
Up to six lights used Chandoha to draw every single detail of the mantle of their models. He especially liked the hairs that came out of his ears and that stood out against the background, always smooth, always sober, only the shadows of his muses crossed him. "I don't want anything to distract from the beauty of cats," he said.
In his tireless pursuit of perfection he came to speak with a tiger tamer to see how he did so that his felines were still. "Patience, food and noise," he replied. So he started meowing, barking, peeping ... "There were days when my studio looked like a farm," he joked. Who would say that all that joviality was born between shots and dust and a lot, a lot of blood.
Veteran meets cat and changes his life
The shock of Pearl Harbor caught Chandoha camera in hand and with 21 years, so fate led him directly to portray the Pacific front in the front line. From World War II he returned as a veteran directly to the University and one cold night, when he returned from class to his apartment, he appeared shivering the future in the form of a hair ball. The loneliness and helplessness of that gray marengo puppy on the nuclear white of the snowy streets of New York touched him and took him home.
Boy knows cat, cat does not die frozen and boy throws the next 70 years photographing cats. 90,000 photos of cats in the curriculum, nothing less. As soon as it got warm, that fluff began to jump, to bounce, to climb the walls, it became completely majareta for exactly one minute. And as it began, it ended. Dead calm. He kept repeating that ritual not a single day thereafter. It had to be called Crazy .
Chandoha had trained almost feline reflections on the front that came from pearls to capture the wild nature of Loco, first, and that of any furry that crossed his path, then. He lay on the ground, in the middle of the street, and waited to catch a band of cats in Reservoir Kittens mode in fraganti; he picked up how many homeless felines he detected to observe them for hours, to soak up his instinct. He knew them well and could foresee their reactions, capture that exact second, that smile that was not, that dominant look.
A profile of Chandoha published in the Financial Times said that walking through the pet section of an American supermarket in the 60s was like attending one of his exhibitions. Any commercial product that had to do with animals bore his signature. And from there, his fame jumped into magazines. The first cover was that of a female publication that talked about Christmas. But what made the difference was the Cat-a-log of Ethicon , a division of Johnson & Johnson dedicated to manufacturing medical products that published a small booklet with funny images of cats and very human dialogues. LOL Cats was born in 2006. Half a century before Walter Chandoha had invented, unknowingly, kitty memes .
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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