Jackson Tiffany
Biographic Sketch
Born 1925, Madison, Wisconsin
My father, who grew up on a farm in Lyndon, Kansas, taught in the Agricultural College at the University of Wisconsin. My mother, who was raised on a farm in central Oregon and graduated from the University of Southern California, was a dress designer who had her own business. Some of my early memories from the 1920s include the art deco environment of some stores on Madison's State Street where my mother had her studio for dress design and production. I was exposed to the high quality of photography in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines she had around our home. The dress shop was very successful and my father left the university to manage the business side of the studio.
Early Photography
I recall making my first photograph at the age of five. It was made with a plastic Univex camera I received by sending in a cereal box coupon and ten cents. It made images about 1 x 1.5 inches on roll film. That first photograph was of a sunset seen from my parent's bedroom window. I was disappointed with the badly under exposed result, but it was a start. Most of my photographs with the Univex, a Baby Brownie, or an old black 120 Kodak box camera during the next seven years were of airplanes, both my own models and as many real airplanes as I could get near enough to photograph. A few photos were of friends and family. My mother died in 1936 after several years of illness. My father tried to keep the dress business going employing several talented young women to continue to design original dresses.
Focus on Photography
Around the age of 13 I began to do my own darkroom work starting with printing negatives using blue print paper and working up to developing roll film and making contact prints using the bathroom as darkroom. I also became interested in electronics and built several radios and amplifiers. One influence during that period was Fritz Kaeser who had a studio and camera shop on State Street near the dress shop. From him I bought my first good camera. It was a German Foth Derby It had a good sharp lens with a focal plane shutter and made images about 1.25 x 1.75 inches on 127 roll film. Fritz Kaeser's store was decorated with handsome photomurals of images he made in the western mountains. I started to make photographs with artistic intent.
A job found me.
I made a portrait of my father that won some local award and was published in the newspaper. It was seen by William Meuer who operated the Meuer Photoart store on State Street. He needed an assistant to serve as a camera caddy on a trip he was making around Wisconsin shooting a movie about the state's recreational facilities. He hired me at the age of about 14 or 15 to go with him. I learned to load the Cine Kodak Special 16mm camera he used and carried his tripod that summer of 1939. For the next year and a half, I worked part time at his store helping him edit the film and doing whatever assistant duties needed doing around the store, studio and photo lab that Meuer operated. The income I earned enabled me to buy a Graflex single lens reflex camera using. 6x9 cm sheet film. I attended West High School and became active in the camera club and doing pictures for the school newspaper and annual.
Photography in a small town
This was during the depth of the 1930s depression. In this period, while I was working for Meuer Photoart, my father's business failed. It was seriously weakened by my mother's death. The deep depression of the 30s finished it. My father got a job in Juneau Wisconsin, a town of 1,300 about 40 miles from Madison. There was no photographer in the town, and word got around that I could do that work. I used my earnings from the Photoart job to buy a 4x5 press camera and a 4x5 enlarger. The owners of the house, where my father and I had a small apartment, let me set up a darkroom in the basement, and I was in business both with the occasional commercial or portrait assignment and with pictures for the high school annual. In January 1943, my father got a job in Madison. I returned to West High to finish the senior year there doing more photography for the school newspaper and annual.
Art Center College of Design
World War Two was raging and I, along with most of the young men in the Madison West High class of 1943, expected to go into the military. I had decided to make photography my life work, and wanted to study at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. I admired the work of their students and faculty that I had seen in U.S. Camera magazine. We had enough money for one semester, so I went to Los Angeles where Art Center was located on 7th Street near what later became MacArthur Park. Ansel Adams was a guest instructor that summer. I learned the zone system from him. That became the basis for my technical approach to photography. The cost of living in Los Angeles was greater than expected, so I got a part time job as usher at the Warner Brothers theater in downtown Los Angeles. The movie "Constant Nymph", with Charles Boyer and Joan Fontaine, was having an extended showing. I saw it, or heard the sound track, about 100 times. I could repeat the dialogue word for word.
World War II
In the fall of 1943, I returned to Madison and worked as assistant to Photographer Frederica Cutchins who had taken over Fritz Kaeser's studio. I didn't wait to be drafted. In February of 1944, I volunteered induction into the Army.
Signal Corp in Chicago
After basic training, I was assigned to the Signal Corp Photography Lab in downtown Chicago. For six months, I served as an all purpose cameraman shooting news, public relations, accident photos, portraits, whatever was needed. I had my evenings free, so I took an evening class at Chicago's Institute of Design where I met its founder, Moholy Nagy of Bauhaus fame, and did class projects in the mode of the institute's modernist style.
Medical Corp in Philippines and Japan.
The army reassigned me to the Medical Corp as a photographer. I trained in Washington D.C. in motion picture and still photographic methods for documenting medical procedures. Then I was assigned to a medical art unit that was sent to the Philippines to work and wait to go in with the anticipated invasion of Japan. While in the Manila area, our unit photographed the effects of tropical diseases. In my spare time, I made pictures of political demonstrations and the government buildings destroyed in the war. When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I became a nuclear pacifist. I recognized that either we did away with war or the human race would become extinct through war. With the war ended in 1945, two of us in the Medical Art Detachment were given the assignment to shoot a movie in Japan about the disease schistosomiasis that was endemic in some areas of Japan. This disease was taken to the Philippines by Japanese soldiers and spread there. The Army was concerned that US troops would take it back to the United States. While we were in Tokyo making arrangements to do the filming, I had spare time to photograph the ruins of vast areas of that city.
Post War Study
I returned to Madison in May 1946 and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. I knew I wanted to do photography as a career, and the UW did not teach camera work, but I wanted a broad background. I took as many classes in Psychology and Sociology as I could. In 1947, I married Virginia Neitzke and started working part time at the UW Photolab while continuing to take classes. In one class, Urban Sociology, I made a documentary photographic study of life in Madison for a class project. Fifty-one of those images were exhibited in 2002 at the State Historical Museum in Madison. In August 1948, Virginia and I moved to Los Angeles where I enrolled again at the Art Center College of Design. My father died in 1949. I flew back to Madison for two weeks, then returned to Los Angeles. After four semesters at the Art Center, I decided that I wanted to work in film. I came to know a group of film students at the University of Southern California who were also studying privately with a former MGM director, Slavko Vorkapich. I joined the group and began my serious study of the motion picture. In the fall of 1950, Virginia and I decided that we had been in Los Angeles long enough and wanted to return east and look for work. We were en route to New York when we stopped in Madison. I visited a friend who worked at the UW Extension Bureau of Audio-Visual Instruction and found that they had a job open for a cinematographer. I applied and got it.
Film making at University of Wisconsin-Extension
In the 29 years from 1951 to 1980 I made thirty three films working in at least two major roles on each including producer, cinematographer, script writer, director or editor. I also made three filmstrips. The substance of the work during those years is recorded in the list of films elsewhere on this web site. In the film unit, the staff ranged from two to seven members. Often we worked on each other's projects when a full crew was needed, but each film was a major project for the one of us in role of film maker. On some projects one person did most of the work performing each of the production roles. Consequently, the number of completed films averaged to a little more than one per year. From 1955 through 1962, I took University classes, one per semester, to complete a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology and did some graduate study toward a Masters in clinical psychology. I interrupted that class work in 1962 when I had an opportunity to do a major film project that would require all my attention and then some. This was the film titled "To Find A Home" about racial discrimination in housing. It was based on research in Madison showing that landlords were often refusing to rent to African Americans but were willing to rent the same unit to Caucasians. It was my first dramatic film. It was followed by two more dramatic films "White Collar Grievance", and "Telling the Parents".
Along the way, while I worked on major film projects, I also developed a productive collaboration with the UW Dance Department. Working with choreographer Anna Nassif, we planned short abstract films that were projected on a large screen while dancers moved in front of the images. One of those films, "Reacher", won the Cine Golden Eagle award in 1968. My last film for the University was "Citizen Participation: A case study in economic development." That was a cinema verite documentary about downtown development in Eau Claire Wisconsin.
Teaching
Starting in the late 60s, as a side line to the production work, I began teaching UW Extension classes in film making. Short courses in writing, direction, editing, and camera work were given. In the 80s, I started teaching a class in the psychology of visual communication incorporating some research I did in the 70s.
Still Photography 1951 to 1995
The term "still photography" makes no sense except from the point of view of motion picture work. For several years after starting to work in film full time, my still photography suffered. After making several films, I started to be able to shift gears at will from thinking in terms of the fluidity of the motion image to the static dynamics of the still image. In 1956, I shared a two man show with Cameron Macauley, a friend from Art Center days who joined the film unit. I continued to make still images for myself. At the University, I made stills only occasionally when a slide-tape project was needed. In 1975 my attitude toward stills took a totally new direction. Serendipity enabled me to acquire an 8x10 view camera with a Schneider 121mm Super Angulon (wide angle) lens. I have long had a preference for wide angle lenses. Along with the new camera and the fine detail it recorded, I was developing a new technique which I called the maximum interleaving technique. It was an adaptation of techniques from the motion picture special effects field that enabled me to combine two images in a way that emphasized design elements. One of the pictures made with that technique, "The Office" was selected for the 1980 Wisconsin Biennial at the Madison Art Center. Other prints exhibited at that time were at the Milwaukee Art Center and the Wustem Museum of Fine Arts in Racine.
Media Generalist
At the end of the 1970s, the sources of funding for university film making dried up. This happened on most campuses having film production units. Our film unit was disbanded. Some of our staff went into television. I went into an administrative position working with all the media including television and the teleconference network. I did some of the early planning for the interactive use of computers in statewide Extension teaching. I became an educational media generalist. This continued until I retired from the University in 1987.
Family
Virginia and I have one son, Steve, living in Minneapolis. We continue to live in Madison, Wisconsin in the home we built in 1953.
Since 1987
After retirement I became actively involved in volunteer work that engaged my humanitarian interests and built on what I learned in my studies in psychology. At the same time, the computer became a vital tool for me. The maximum interleaving technique, while often yielding rewarding results, was time consuming, and for me, limited to black and white. It was best used with the extra resolution of the 8x10 image. In 1995, when I acquired a computer with the muscle needed to run Photoshop, I found I could accomplish similar effects quicker, in color when wanted, and with better control. It enabled me to start making use of the thousands of 35mm negatives, both black and white and color that I have continued to make. Printing with the computer has enabled me to make prints and share them with others in ways that seem mutually rewarding.