Ralph Sterner: See-er

AS you can see from my work, I am not trying to use my camera to bludgeon anyone into attention. When people ask me what I think I'm doing, I tell them that if I were immodest I'd like to say that I'm a psalmist.

I think that trying to be original is useless bootstrap lifting. Flaubert wrote to Maupassant: "To express what one wishes one must look at things with enough attention to discover in them what has never been seen by anyone else. That is what is meant by originality." I think "enough attention" carries with it the idea of slowing down. As Robert Frost said to the pilot of the small plane, taking him up for his first flight: "I don't want to go so fast that I miss anything; if you see any flowers, slow down." Some Frenchman said: "There is nothing more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried." Blaise Pascal went out on a limb and wrote: "I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: man's being unable to sit still in a room."

I am a compulsive quoter because other people say things better than I can. Here are other quotes; they are mine also because I believe them.

Dr. Harvey Cox, Professor of Religion, Harvard: "There is a close relationship between contemplation and celebration . . . there is the almost forgotten tradition of the Sabbath as a day of abstinence from physical activity, when a person simply opens himself to the beauty of the universe. Without such celebration we live in what many consider a joyless society."

Chardin wrote: "To see more is to become more. Deeper seeing is closer union. To see or to perish is man's condition."

No one says things the way Isaac Bashevis Singer does: "The dead don't know they are dead just as the living don't know they are alive. Napoleon is still waving his sword."

And Saul' Bellow said: "I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our modern Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos ... a stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."

And Norman Mailer, who I un-admire, once said something useful: "Boredom slays more of existence than war."

I came to Dartmouth from Cleveland, Ohio, in 1917. The look of the College and the State of New Hampshire was good for my eyes. At Dartmouth I distinguished myself during World War I by being one of the only two students (out of some 3,000) to fail Military Training. I was not bright enough to be a pacifist - I was merely inept.

In 1921, when I was about to graduate, Mr. Storrs, who ran the Dartmouth Bookstore, suggested that I publish a book of my photographs of Dartmouth, and generously offered to buy enough copies to pay the cost of printing. I did and he did.

In New York City for 40 years I alternated between earning my living making advertising photographs of trucks, whiskey, people, businesses and making still photographs for myself and making films - sort of art films to start and then documentaries. Advertising was not good for my digestion or my brains, and still photography and films were not good for my purse - hence the alternation.

In the 1930s, out on the Panhandle of Texas and in Wyoming, where Custer fell, I was cameraman on Pare Lorentz' ThePlow that Broke the Plains. Later I co-produced a nd co-filmed with Willard Van Dyke The City - the first funny-serious, full-length documentary. During World War II, I made films for the Office of War Information. All in all, I guess, I've worked on 35 films.

I "served time" in Hollywood with a contract which said I was a producer. But a film producer is one who produces films, and I never produced a film. However, I did live across the street from kindly, mild Boris Karloff and a few feet uphill from Stravinsky. Aldous Huxley used my backyard as a path to walk up into the bare hills, and Elizabeth Taylor, aged eight, once called me: "You traitor!" Of such is fame.

In contrast, something that really mattered: I taught for a year at Sarah Lawrence a course in "How to Look at the World." This teaching and my association with the Group Theatre did much to open my own eyes.

In the past years I have been making films in a series called "The Joy of Seeing." They are non-didactic since they are based on my theory of "education through inebriation." That is: visual inebriation. Your tax money, through the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council has paid for my filming, and the Carnegie Foundation most helpfully matched these government grants. Last . year the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation made me a fellow and gave me a splendid grant.

I show my films to nearby schools, and deliver talks about enjoying the senses - especially seeing. In visiting schools I have come to feel that the teaching of art, photography, and film-making is too often dreadful and a waste of time. As the great Bartlett Hayes told the Andover headmaster, after teaching art history for two years: "No more of that - nothing stuck." Instead he started to teach (hand-in-hand with the English department) the art of seeing and expressing what was felt about things seen. Then, when boys had learned to look, they were allowed to learn art history. What good is art if eyes are used for not bumping into things?

I now live and work most joyfully in Thetford Hill. When people ask me when I'm going to retire, I say: "When I can no longer lift a 4 millimeter film camera."

Self-portrait, 1925

Gypsy Rose Lee, 1960

Lee Strasberg and Morris Karnovsky

East 42nd Street, ca. 1920

Eggs, 1930

Elisabeth Neilson, 1960

Elisabeth Neilson, 1960

Sheets, 1960

Seashore, 1922

S. J. Perelman, 1935

Ralph Steiner '21 recently exhibited aselection of his photographs at HopkinsCenter.