Edmonds gallery features Scaylea

Josef Scaylea was a teacher as well as photographer. And he loved to tell "how I got that picture."

• Waiting for hours with Kleenex, reflector boards and lens hoods to get 30 good minutes of shooting time in a steady autumn rain of the Hoh Rain Forest.

• Perched above a bridge as scullers made "pools of motion" with their paddles on Lake Washington.

• Waiting until a couple finished their haying at a farm in the Teanaway Valley, the woman's pitchfork held aloft in the late afternoon light like "American Gothic."

Scaylea, the son of Northern Italian immigrants from Connecticut, fell in love with the Northwest. And for the rest of his life, including 35 years as a photojournalist with The Seattle Times, he passed that love along to the public.

His photos were strong, dramatic, unforgettable. Landscapes that looked like paintings. Cloud-scapes that played with light and shadow. Portraits of working men and women. The wiry, adventurous photographer took pictures right up to his death at age 91 in 2004. His life spanned three eras of American photography, as he put it: the pictorialist, the documentary recorder and the photojournalist.

The world knew Scaylea as a renowned photographer.

But Michele Scaglia and her sisters knew him simply as "Dad."

"We would wait patiently in the car while he shot a zillion shots, always waiting for the next roll to be done," she said. Back then, the patient children grew to appreciate his stunning work — and later became co-archivists of a huge legacy of prints and negatives. They've set up a Web site of his work, www.josefscaylea.com, which will be added to over time.

Gallery North in Edmonds is hosting a show of his photographs, which continues through Feb. 27.

Scaylea said the Northwest was unequaled in good photographic subjects, and he visited Edmonds frequently, often concentrating on the waterfront.

The show contains framed originals, black and white and color, as well as matted, unframed work.

"There's some particular works he's quite famous for, but we wanted to also bring items that are older, from the '50s and '60s, when he was in his heyday," said Scaglia.

Among Scaylea's most famous journalistic images were the Blue Angels flying over Lake Washington, with Mount Rainier in the background. Less well-known are almost abstract images — scrub pine, driftwood, Seattle shot through a sculpture, a red winter sunset reflected in the Snohomish River, Marysville's Union Slough, luminous ice puddles on a Capitol Hill rooftop.

There were portraits, too. "He always loved the working person, to capture them on film," Scaglia said.

What made a Scaylea signature picture? Intense. Immediate. Bold. Glory in nature and the achievements of man.

"His photographs reveal the photographer. He was a deep guy. You could see that in his photographs," she said.

He believed that "lighting is the key to photography" and that "nature provides the best lighting," he wrote in "Scaylea on Photography," one of his seven published books.

He would wait for hours for the low sun of a December afternoon to throw in high relief the rugged west face of Mount Shuksan in the North Cascades.

Fog was a natural dramatic visual. When an off-shore salmon-fishing charter got canceled at La Push, Clallam County, because of fog on a December morning, "I rushed to Edmonds to shoot the snow-laden Olympic mountain range with a ferry or other marine activity in the foreground," he wrote.

"Suddenly, low-flying, screeching gulls feeding in the rough surf, and spotlighted by the low-angled sun, demanded my attention. The Olympics and the ferry boat would keep for another time."

"He captures passion in all of his photographs, be it people, mountains or ships," said Scaglia. "There's always an element of passion and mood that he's able to find. His pictures were very intense. He did his own developing and liked intense color variations. His pictures usually made quite a bold statement."

Scaylea never gave up his Hasselblad camera and his Zeiss lenses for digital cameras, though he had a great respect for the new technology. He lived simply, what he called a "peasant" life based on the way he was raised by his parents.

After he died, Scaglia and sisters Jodene Hawkins, Annette Scaglia and Jill Chrisman and their families had a private family service. "His ashes are imparted on a few of his favorite spots," said Scaglia.

Maybe Scaylea's most famous observation is this: "There are no great photographers, only great subjects."

"That was his modest comment," says his daughter, "since he could photograph a subject better than most."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815