Rochester Institute of Technology

Carl Chiarenza was a member of the second class to graduate from the newly-established bachelor of fine arts program in photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. His classmates included well-known photographers Bruce Davidson, Kenneth Josephson, Pete Turner, and Jerry Uelsmann. In an interview with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen from 2000, Chiarenza discusses the dual influences of Minor White and Ralph Hattersley, two prominent faculty members at RIT during the mid 1950s: Now in the photo thing, as this program is developing, Hattersley was the person—of the teachers we had Hattersley was the person who was directly involved with putting the program together. Minor came into the program when he moved to Rochester and Eastman House, so he came in part-time. Anyway, as the classes got going over the two-year period, we would be bouncing back and forth between Minor and Ralph. So the wonderful thing about this was that we didn't get stuck with a single track. We were not under Minor White, we were not under Ralph Hattersley. We would go to minor and we would learn the Zone System—and how to stare at a picture for an hour and really digest that picture detail by detail, you might say silver halide by silver halide. At the time, we all sorta thought he was really nuts, I mean having us sit there for an hour looking at these pictures, but again, as we’ve all said in retrospect, that was a major part of our education—what a picture is and how you deal with that, particularly in photography, where photographers generally see a subject or an object and say, “Oh, that’s nice, I’m going to make a picture of that,” whether its people or a lamp or whatever it is, and don’t really think about what’s going on behind it, in front of it, to the left of it, to the right of it, and so on. So we really learned to understand that photography, like any other picture, is made up of everything that’s in it. And everything that’s in it is important. On the other hand we went to Ralph and Ralph would say, ‘Well, what’s in the darkroom trash this morning? Is there anything interesting that we can pull out and start with?’ These would be prints that had stains on them that could be developed further. I know this sounds extreme, but it happened! Or he would take us on field trips to New York. We went to New York and we spent a couple days at LIFE magazine meeting people like Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White and meeting people and going through the whole building, the labs and meeting the layout people and so on. And we would go back to RIT with negatives that he had gotten for us from LIFE magazine and we experimented with them to see if we could do something different from what LIFE did. Or we went to Chicago and we met the people at ID, Callahan and Siskind, and learned about an entirely different way of teaching photography. We walked into—I guess it was the Mees building or Gropius building, I can’t remember—and as we were walking up toward the photo department, up the stairway, and we heard this terrific jazz going on. We make it up a stairway, up a landing, and there’s Chico Hamilton quartet playing, live, in the middle of this space. It wasn’t a concert, it was just in the middle of the building. So it was experiences like that that really opened us up to all kinds of creative worlds. Source: LensWork Interview (2000)