John Stamets -- A Very Focused Life

With John Stamets, it's always about photos. Like the afternoon in September 1995, when he was bicycling - he used to bike everywhere - from his small apartment on Capitol Hill to a downtown photo processing firm.

Wham, some vehicle hit him, and now Stamets has got pins in his right wrist and elbow. He doesn't even have a memory of the accident, but he does have a photo of himself being wheeled into the emergency room.

Of course, that day, as always, Stamets, 47, carried a camera. That one was a 35 mm Contax T2. Stamets wanted me to get the exact camera model. The people who know photography, he said, they'd recognize what a dandy little camera that is.

Anyway, there was Stamets, on a stretcher, all black and blue, and he gave the ambulance driver the Contax T2 and told him to take a picture. That's what photogs do, thinkpictures even when on a stretcher.

Stamets is single by choice, recognizing that with all those hours spent on photography - you have a family, something's got to give. It's not going to be photography. Any extra money that he has, it always goes for another lens, or one of many books (yes, usually about photography) that he collects.

You might have noticed that accompanying this piece are a number of photos of buildings. For nearly a decade, Stamets has been taking pictures of buildings.

Buildings being demolished, buildings being built. He's been there to record nearly every major tearing down, and lots of the major building up.

How many negatives of buildings does he have? He sighed. Maybe 20,000, possibly thousands more. The number of negatives didn't matter, he said. It's what is in those negatives that matters.

So why does he have this passion for buildings? Stamets sighed again. In the past, he has chronicled the Pike Place Market, and, when in the late 1970s he drove a cab, he did a collection of pictures of taxi passengers.

It's not that he has a passion for buildings, he said. It's the project he decided to do. Although, true enough, it is now going on a decade.

To Stamets, buildings going up, buildings going down are the geology of a city, like how mountain ranges are formed.

It was seeing old photos of Seattle - of the skeleton of the Smith Tower when it was being built in 1913, for example - that got him interested in taking pictures of buildings. You look at those old pictures, and you get a feel for the innards of a town that's literally growing.

The way Stamets figures it, these pictures he takes are for an audience not even born. But in the year 2097, there they'll be, the John Stamets chronicling of how Seattle grew in the 1990s.

It is a time-consuming endeavor, taking pictures of buildings.

Stamets uses a bulky camera that takes 4-by-5-inch negatives, the big negatives enabling him to photograph buildings without optical distortion. Sometimes, by the time he is all set up, Stamets is taking two pictures an hour. He's become so good at taking photos of buildings that he's a lecturer in photography at the University of Washington's Department of Architecture.

Believe it or not, there is drama in pictures of buildings. There is drama in seeing the gaping hole in a wall as demolition of the Music Hall, a grand old downtown theater, began in 1991. Stamets was there to document it. There is drama in the pictures Stamets took of the now-demolished Longacres racetrack, weeds and grass already popping up on the abandoned track.

Sometimes there is very vivid drama. Exactly 10 years ago this week, Stamets was taking pictures of a $12.9 million addition to Husky Stadium when the steel frame began collapsing.

Snapping as fast as he could over a period of 12 seconds, Stamets got the only visual record of the collapse.

In 1991, Stamets was downtown, taking pictures of the new Seattle Art Museum when the 22,000-pound steel "Hammering Man" that stands outside toppled. Stamets kept snapping. Suddenly his picture of a static building was full of people running away.

That's what a photog does, and with John Stamets, it really always has been about the pictures.

What is the weather forecast for tomorrow? Hazy blue, with high clouds?

That means no shadows. A wonderful day for taking pictures of buildings.