An Eye With An Attitude -- Brian Lanker Doesn't Just Take Photographs, He Makes Them Happen

I DREAM A WORLD

The exhibit "I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America," by Brian Lanker, will be on display at the Museum of History and Industry, 2700 24th Ave. E. in Seattle, p.m. Admission: general $3, seniors and children, $1.50. Free parking. Phone: 324-1126.

Let me tell you about my friend, Brian Lanker.

The Christmas present was nice enough, an expansive photo of China's Great Wall and the rolling and rugged mountains beyond. You expect good photographs from Brian. He won the Pulitzer Prize when he was 26 years old.

But standing on the Wall was a Chinese man reading a newspaper. It was the paper we both had worked for: the Eugene Register-Guard. The guy was reading my column in the sports section.

Lanker has the kind of mind that would visualize that photo - and think of packing the newspaper to get it. He's a photographer with the versatility to shoot the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and then find and photograph black women who have "changed America."

Some say he's good because he leaves nothing to chance.

Some say it's his pertinacious nature.

That was the case during his photographic session with the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in New Orleans. Lanker was there to do a story for Life magazine.

"Wynton was sitting on the porch, not really dealing with me, certainly not letting me into his life," Lanker says. "He's driving me around pointing out the sights of New Orleans, and I finally said to him, `Look, what would you be doing if I weren't here?' "

"Shooting baskets," Marsalis said to Lanker.

"Well, let's do that."

"Can't, man.'

"Yeah, sure. Probably would have beaten you anyway."

Marsalis woke up to the presence of this large, bearded, Pavarotti look-alike. OK, he'd shoot baskets, even spot Lanker to an eight-point advantage in a 10-point game.

"We had to scale a fence to get to the court," says Lanker. "And that was the hardest part."

He made his first two shots, one from 12 feet, the next from 15, and had won the game even before Marsalis had a shot.

"Wynton looked at me," Lanker says, "and he said, `Hey, man, I'm yours. What do we do next?' "

That's a good question for Lanker himself, now that he's 44 and has been to all four corners of the photography profession - from his newspaper Pulitzer Prize for an essay on natural childbirth; to his poignant magazine portraits of such notables as Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Jessica Lange, Magic Johnson and Muhammad Ali; to his trend-setting "Just Do it" Nike ads; to an art book that evolved into an exhibit that will come this month to a Seattle museum.

Called "I Dream a World," the book and now the exhibit is a collection of textured photographs and sensitive, pithy essays, also by Lanker, about 75 black women who have "changed America." The book is in its eighth printing, with sales of more than 300,000. At this rate, only the famous "Family of Man" series will have sold more copies for a serious photographic work.

" `I Dream a World,' " says Jewell Jackson McCabe, president of the National Coalition of Black Women, "is the strongest civil-rights statement about Afro-American women in the past 50 years. It is a monumental document that will live beyond this generation and into the 21st century."

The museum show - 75 30-by-30-inch black-and-white portraits - has established attendance records almost wherever it has been. At the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., where the show made its debut in 1989, 11,500 visitors, many of them black, mobbed the marbled floors of the 120-year-old museum on the day of its first access to the public. It was 10 times what the museum normally does on a Sunday.

Indeed, the show is so popular that Eastman Kodak agreed to duplicate the prints so it could be in two places at once, and will continue the duplicate exhibits until 1995. Two smaller versions produced by the U.S. Information Association are also touring Japan, Africa and the Caribbean.

Lanker, who has lived in Eugene since 1974 and promises he will never leave the Northwest, insisted the show be in Eugene and Seattle, where it opens Nov. 17 at the Museum of History and Industry and runs to Jan. 12.

While he often executes someone else's idea in an advertising shoot, the idea to record for history the lives and struggles of important black women in America was his. He was influenced by Barbara Jordan's speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1976. "Why wasn't she running for president?" he asked.

He read Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." "Her writing brought me out of my own narrow world and into the world of black women," he says. "When I finished reading the book, my life was not the same."

A third and ongoing influence was Priscilla Williams. She raised 14 children, none of whom were her own. She was also a nanny to Lanker's wife, Lynda, in Wichita, Kan. "By sharing some of the struggles from her own life, Priscilla taught me and my family a lot about survival, strength, dignity and love," he says. Jordan, Walker and Williams, who died in 1987, are among those profiled in the book.

Quickly, a list of 25 women grew to 75. It took him from Oprah Winfrey to a South Carolina midwife, Josephine Riley Matthews. It consumed most of his time for two years.

"It was incredibly frustrating," says Ken Mann, an agent in New York who handles inquiries worldwide for Lanker's work. "Brian was a new man on the advertising scene and very much in demand. But he would let nothing get in the way of doing the very best possible work for the book. He would not inconvenience these black ladies in any way, even though it meant he was losing $5,000 a day doing a job somewhere else."

For three days Lanker sat in a motel room in Jones Island, S.C. He was waiting to meet, interview and photograph 89-year-old Septima Clark. "I had read about her work as a teacher and civil-rights activist, and we knew we just had to have her in the project," Lanker says. "They told me she had just had a stroke and I wouldn't be able to photograph her. I knew I just had to: She embodied the project."

Typical Lanker. He checked weekly on her condition and waited for months until she was able to move from a hospital to a rest home. Then he went to South Carolina to wait some more.

"A lot of the women in the project," he says, "were fairly old; much of what they accomplished might have been 20, 30, 40 years before. These weren't times in their lives when they necessarily wanted to be photographed. It wasn't their fault. It was my fault. Why wasn't I here 30 years earlier? If not me, someone else?

"How do you take someone in a nursing home, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, and give her the dignity and the strength her life embodied? It transcends the reality of the circumstances I had to work with."

They met one day, and worked the next. Lanker was seduced by her amazing strength. One side of her face was paralyzed, so he decided to profile the other. He was struck, too, by the regal, African quality of the cornrows in her hair.

"I go to the rest home the next day and some well-meaning white attendant has taken the cornrows from her hair and put it up in a nice little bun," he says. "I said I'd wait another day if I had to."

Finally, he had 15 minutes during which Clark was able to sit proudly in her wheelchair without oxygen.

"I asked her to bring a hand to her face," Lanker says, "and she did so in a most majestic and unusual way. It was almost Egyptian-like. I made that photograph, and it was the only one like it."

The portrait of Clark graces the cover of his book. While the portraits will endure, the women will not. Since the project began in 1987, six of the women have died, including Clark and jazz singer Sarah Vaughn.

Lanker had cut a deal with the publisher to keep the price down ($19.95) - he got no advance, opting instead for royalties. "What good is the book if it could not be in the hands of those who needed and deserved it most?" he asked.

There is so much of Lanker in the book: the vision to understand the scope and historical importance of the project, and the persistence to make it work.

"It was clear in my mind what had to be done," he says. "I wanted to have the book for posterity, but also put an exhibit in white-establishment museums. I wanted it to be honest and comprehensive. I didn't want to have parents dragging their little girl through the museum only to have her say, `Gee, I wanted to be a surgeon, but there wasn't one in the museum.'

"When I first started talking about the idea, I met with a young black woman from Portland. She was about 18. I told her about the book and she said, `Really, are there enough important black women to fill a book?' My heart sank."

McCabe, as president of the National Coalition of Black Women and herself a personality in the book, pondered the obvious question: How can a middle-aged white male be sensitive enough, persuasive enough, knowledgeable enough, to produce the benchmark book on black women?

"Humanity is universal," she says. "Brian has an intuitive mind, an intuitive eye. I've talked to many of the other women in the book and they all found the interview with Brian to be a catharsis. He made me cry, and I don't cry in front of people.

"He made himself vulnerable with his openness, honesty and sincerity and we responded in kind. Mostly, he listened."

As Lanker himself admits, he could have done 35 instead of 75 women. He could have done the famous and obvious. He could have photographed them all in the same context. He could have had someone else do the interview.

But he didn't. He never does.

"Brian has captured our strength, our courage, our determination, a unique blend of nurturing and stewardship, and really that of heroines," says McCabe. "He has shown us as individuals, but established a relationship among us. We are not all whores, welfare mothers, nannies and neutered intellectuals. We are scholars, surgeons, political activists, lawyers, judges, prima ballerinas."

Wrote Maya Angelou in the book's foreword: "Brian Lanker possesses an acute eye and a brave heart. He has discovered women whose images show us the high cost of living and the rich reward of thriving. The sameness of their gaze informs us that they will not be removed, that indeed although they are shaken, bruised and uprooted, they are determined to remain."

Later, she says, "Brian captured us as we are - soft and disciplined, poignant and playful. When I saw the photographs of the other women, I had to leave the room for a bit to contain myself."

There seems some confusion whether Lanker's work is photojournalism or art, largely because it lacks a consistent style.

"I didn't want those photographs to be about me, I wanted them to be about the women," says Lanker.

Andy Grunberg, director of the Friends of Photography in San Francisco, says that before "I Dream a World," Lanker had been thought of as a photojournalist, not someone who would have his work in a museum.

"He's obviously made the transition from that particular genre with remarkable speed," Grunburg says. "The museum prints are lovely things to look at and I know the subject of the exhibit has provoked strong interest, especially in the black community.

"In the fine-arts community, we look for styles that grow and develop, but in this case the stylization of the portraits might have gotten into the way of the exhibit."

As always, for Lanker, there was first a vision.

As a boy growing up in Phoenix, Lanker would rearrange the family furniture and be disappointed his parents didn't notice. He was given painting lessons, but was frustrated with his ability to re-create the vision. A high-school photography class introduced him to a tool that was as quick and reflective as his brain.

Like most artists and perfectionists, Lanker is demanding. He expects the same kind of caring and effort from co-workers and can be abusive to those who he thinks don't care. "I don't have any trouble working with quality people," he says. "In fact, I like very much to work with people."

His ego is manageable, but his sense of control is almost uncontrollable. It is his way of making sure things get done properly.

"He knows so clearly what he expects from a project, a relationship," says his wife, "that it can come as a tremendous disappointment to him when he doesn't get it."

It isn't for lack of planning or trying, however. He knew from the start of the "I Dream A World" project that he would use black-and-white film. And that each portrait would fit the individual, not the frame.

"The black-and-white medium could pull the show together, but the women needed to stand alone," he says. "I didn't want you responding to hues of color in the photograph, but to something inside the women. I didn't want anything to fracture the group, the separation had to come from me in honoring the individual. I could have gone around the country and used a gray backdrop for all 75 women; that would have been a terrible disservice to all of them and their accomplishments."

Photographs are as tight as the imperial face of Leontyne Price and as environmental as Alice Walker in a leafy glen and Angela Davis in a tree. Michael Weizenbach, the visual-arts critic of The Washington Post, compared Lanker's exhibit with Richard Avedon's "Portraits."

"More than capturing the characters of these women, Lanker has elevated their traits to enduring art by compositionally alluding to memories. It fixes these women's faces in history, not just on the wall. Too often one sees mediocre pictures of fascinating people. How good it is to see fine portraits of fine subjects," wrote Weizenbach.

Lanker doesn't take photographs, he directs them. He has an innate sense of composition, and then an ability to understand and manipulate people like he would apples and oranges in a still life. And, finally, he has a persistence to overcome all technical resistance to the project.

For instance, when Nike wanted to advertise all-weather running gear. It wanted a runner darting past rain clouds mixed with sunshine. It wanted it now. Hey, Brian, "Just do it."

Lanker called the National Weather Service and asked where he could get such a setting. The Florida Everglades. So he took a crew - including a huge generator and movie lights - to a lightly used airfield in the Everglades where he got his weather and his picture.

Bugle Boy pants wanted to show off a new line of men's clothing by having a model do a swan dive, fully clothed, into a pool. It took 50 dives to satisfy Lanker. "I asked for 50 sets of the same clothes," Lanker says, "but they were new and just not available. So I hired one guy to wring the clothes out and another to run them to a nearby commercial dryer, and then someone on the side of the pool pressing them when they came back."

Lanker refuses projects that he thinks are underfunded. Some of the budgets for Nike ads have been as large as $200,000.

"I don't want there to be any excuses for failure but me," he says. "Even so, I get to a situation that looks bleak and I say, `Sure, it's bleak and won't work,' but Henri Cartier-Bresson would have made a picture here."

Early, in a class at Phoenix Community College, Lanker studied the master photographers. He developed a visual discipline that has never left him.

"It is almost impossible for him to push the button if everything isn't perfect before the camera," says Rich Clarkson, former director of photography at National Geographic and one of Lanker's two mentors. The first was Allen Dutton, a teacher at Phoenix College; then Clarkson, whom Lanker worked for at the Topeka, Kan., Capital-Journal. Dutton taught Lanker photography; Clarkson taught him journalism.

Lanker came to Eugene in 1974 to be a staff photographer for the Register-Guard, where he quickly became director of graphics and did a redesign of the paper. For eight years he was more involved in news content than in taking pictures. During that period he did occasional freelance work for Sports Illustrated and Life. He quit, in 1982, to freelance full time.

"My work was in demand," he says, "and I was intrigued about working on my own. I was apprehensive, but really I shouldn't have been. Newspapers had trained me well for many types of photography."

He shot essays of unprecedented size and quality for SI, including one of 16 pages prior to the 1984 Olympics. He was asked repeatedly to photograph the magazine's provocative swimsuit issue.

"I told them no," he says. "They kept asking and I looked at what had been done and believed I could do it better. It was simply a professional challenge."

In 1987 he started the "Dream" project and spent two years, mostly in small towns in the South, to get his story. It was a time he also decided to stay in the Northwest.

"It's home, I've lived here longer than anyplace else," he says. "People wonder all the time why I'm not in New York or Los Angeles. You know, `If you were any good you'd be there.' I guess I wonder why people live anywhere else. The Northwest fits my temperament. I'm not overly formal. People here seem to respect different lifestyles. I hate heat, I love the closeness of the mountains and the oceans and there is a lushness to the environment that I think is just incredibly important."

Lanker met his wife Lynda during the prize-winning childbirth project. She was the woman on the delivery table. Today Lynda is a watercolor artist and both are focused on a major home-remodeling project.

Ahead is a long list of advertisers wanting Lanker's work. An idea to do a book on Northwest Indian art.

"Maybe film," he says. "I'm interested in doing something with film."

BLAINE NEWNHAM IS AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT THE SEATTLE TIMES AND WRITES A COLUMN FOR THE SPORTS SECTION.