After hearing the sad news today about the passing of a photography colleague, I feel it necessary to share his memory with you. Kenn Morgan was one of the first people I interviewed for the short-lived Humans of Buffalo project.
He was also the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the city. The below photograph of Kenn was taken at the Burchfield Nature & Art Center in West Seneca, NY during his photography workshop. He was teaching me about natural light. I wanted to catch him off guard but in a playful way. It was my first time meeting him. He was definitely a charismatic character, blunt, tell-it-like-it-is personality, and I knew we were going to get along just fine. He was good for a chuckle or two, and then some.
Unfortunately, I lost touch with Kenn after a few phone calls, and I was unable to deliver the published post (at the time, he said he wasn’t on any of the social media channels because he wasn’t a big fan). Kenn was old school, from his lingo to his life lessons. I learned so much from him in the short time that we interacted. He gave me a stern talking to about wedding photography (he didn’t want me jumping the gun with it, as he bulleted everything that could go wrong on a momentous day for a photographer) and he taught me the difference between a picture taker and a true scholar of the form.
Here is just a snippet of what he shared with me about his passion. Kenn, you will be dearly missed.
What’s the difference between a picture taker and a photographer?
“A cell phone camera is like an electric guitar versus an acoustic guitar. Now, what’s the difference between the two? Simple. An acoustic guitar is an old traditional guitar. You sit there and play, play, play. And then as days started to change, the guitars, you couldn’t hear them too well. Bands got bigger and louder and noisier when the Jazz Age came around. Somebody finally figured out after making different types of guitars, you know, with resonators on them and different types of material, that the guitars had to be made louder so that you could hear them. Hence these guys got together one day and came out with a thing called an electric guitar.
The only thing an electric guitar does is it amplifies the sound of the strings on the guitar through the speaker. Cell phones do the exact same thing. They amplify light…a film camera cannot amplify light. You can only adjust it so more light can come in…so it makes everybody that has a cell phone camera think they are a photographer…If you really want to learn photography, the best way to learn is through film.”
Do you think this behavior has to do with a culture of instant gratification?
“Sure it does. The day they invented the pop-up toaster, the world was gonna change…soon as that thing was invented, people went nuts! We can now have toast in less time that is nice and crispy too that doesn’t burn my fingers, oooooh that’s perfect!… Instant gratification is taking over…”
What landmarks or buildings that existed long ago in Buffalo do you wish were still around so you could photograph them?
“The onion church on Jefferson Avenue. It was Russian Orthodox or something like that.”
What did you like about it?
The style of it. It was a real design of that time period, and of that type of religion and that type of edifice. I don’t think there are any photographs of its existence except the original ones that were taken because through time, no one was taking no more pictures of that…because it’s there every day…so they didn’t really think about it.”
This goes back to a real photographer’s job, though. To look at something ordinary from a different angle, right?
“Basically that’s right. That’s why you can tell a photographer from a picture taker. A photographer stops. Looks at it, raises their camera, puts the camera down, and then walks away. Comes back another day. Checks it again…There’s one place on Broadway and Person, a matter of fact, before they knocked this one down (the church on Jefferson), that, architecturally speaking, is a little special. I think it was an old music store at one time, but the color scheme was 1950s grey and pink.
One day, I had some time, and took my point and shoot camera, and said, Ken, let’s just do it now before they knock it down…I did about a half-hour just shooting it…there was a lot of nice detail to it…when I was growing up, our kitchen table was the exact same color top on it and the boomerangs–pure 1950s. before the time the ’60s were rolling around that stuff was fading out and by the time the ’70s came about all that stuff was gone. Architecture had changed by the 1970s. For a little while, we did good in Buffalo, but then we started going back again to shutters and gables, gables and shutters.”
– Kenneth Morgan, Professional Photographer