Back around 1968, my father took a photo of the interior of the Grand
Trunk train station in Lansing MI.  Recently, some literary magazine
decided to use this photo for its cover.  The magazine's format,
apparently, includes comments at length about the cover picture by the
photographer.  Since my Dad has been gone more than seven years, they
asked me to write a brief essay about my father's background, photography,
and the picture.

Here's what I wrote:

=======================================================================

My father, Justin Kestenbaum (1925-1995), was born in New
York City.  Following the separation of his parents, he grew
up in a series of foster homes and (after he got into
trouble) in Pleasantville Cottage School, in Pleasantville,
N.Y.  It was there, in the late 1930s and early 1940s,
under the tutelage of German refugees from Naziism, that he
began his lifetime passion for photography.

In 1943, following graduation from high school, he lied
about his age to join the Army, and was sent to the Pacific
to join a unit already in the thick of hostilities.

After the war, my father and his brother Al, who also had
photographic skills, worked in night clubs from New York to
Buffalo to Chicago. "Photo girls" would go from table to
table taking pictures of patrons, while my father and his
brother worked behind the scenes in a tiny darkroom,
developing and printing the photos.  Eventually they settled
in Chicago, where the two brothers worked at places like
Lakeview Photo.  In those days, photo processing was still
done largely by hand, and required a lot of skill.

Eventually my father, with the help of the G.I. Bill and
a William Randolph Hearst fellowship, pursued graduate work
in American history at Northwestern University. In 1963, he
accepted a faculty position in the history department of
Michigan State University, where he remained a professor for
the rest of his life.

But all this time, in each of the apartments or houses where
we lived, he always had a darkroom full of sophisticated
equipment and plumbing that kept the water at exactly 68
degrees Fahrenheit, considered ideal for developing black
and white photographs.  He mixed his own chemicals and even
formulated his own developer, which he called "Justinol".

I disappointed him by seeing photography as a pragmatic
means to an end, and took little interest in the details of
darkroom work.  But he generously shared his skills with
many others, who came to our house and to his darkroom to
learn.  I remember the little aphorisms he often repeated,
such as: "Expose for the highlights, develop for the
shadows" (he always scoffed at the recommended settings) and
"Film is cheap!" (i.e., go ahead and make multiple images
with different exposures).

He took pictures, too, but at first the picture taking was
almost casual, an adjunct to his darkroom work.  We have
boxes and boxes of hundreds of pictures he took of my
sisters and I when we were kids.

By the 1960s, he was snapping candid, unposed pictures of
his friends and colleagues, using only available light.
Some of these portraits became quite memorable.  One of the
greatest was his picture of John Robison, founder of
Jocundry's bookstore in East Lansing, showing John in a
wide-brimmed hat and a twinkle in his eye.  No other picture
quite captured that twinkle.  When John and more than two
hundred others died in a 1979 plane crash, my father's
portrait of John Robison became one of the main images used
by the national media.

By the 1970s, he took a great interest in the photographers
who traveled the country for the Farm Security
Administration during the Depression, such as Walker Evans
and Dorothea Lange.  They made documentary photographs that
transcended documentation, often unpeopled images of
buildings and storefronts and signs that expressed the
poverty and dignity and humor of America at that time.

He made a slide show of many of these images, accompanied by
music and commentary about the U.S. in the 1930s.  And
pretty soon he and I were driving around the countryside
looking for similar kinds of images he could photograph:
abandoned barns and houses, the paint weathered off, old
windmills, school houses, and cemeteries.  He would
take the pictures; I would carry cases and lenses and film.

As I became more interested in architectural history and
preservation, I guided our tours toward the most interesting
(and threatened) old buildings of the region.

He and I visited both of the old railroad stations in
Lansing while they were still in use for passenger trains:
the Michigan Central station on East Michigan (now Clara's
Restaurant), and the Grand Trunk station on South Washington.

Both were built in the era when the railroads were far and
away the dominant form of transportation in the country.  A
whole new architectural motif was invented for the train
station: the wide roof with the sheltered platform to
protect passengers from the weather; the large and very high
ceilinged space inside the terminal to provide glorious
relief from a long trip cooped up in a train compartment.

But by the time he and I were exploring these places, they
were no longer appreciated.  Passenger train service was
fading away, and the ornate, high-ceilinged train stations
were seen as ugly as well as outmoded.  So many of the old
buildings of Lansing were being demolished at that time that
we did not expect the train stations to survive.

In my 13-year-old pragmatism, I had a clear documentary
purpose in photographing them, but my father was an artist.
He considered the interior photograph of Grand Trunk Station
to be one of his best.

[END]

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