Roger Bruhn-Photographer

Adapted from the documentary "Picture Nebraska"
Produced by Michael Farrell, Senior Producer, Cultural Affairs

[Roger Bruhn:] "I'd never been in a helicopter before I did this job [a close up photo of 'The Sower' statue on top of the Nebraska Capitol]. The pilot was great -- he was a fighter pilot in Nam, and I think he figured, 'If it's not shooting back, Hell! I don't care how close I get to it. I'll get as close as you want to get.'
"He got so close that I had to say, 'Back off,' because the thing was more than filling the frame. It's an impressive sight, by the way, when you get up there that close to that thing. I think it's 32 feet tall. It's a hunk of bronze."
Roger Bruhn is best known for his dramatic portrait and poster of the sower atop the Nebraska State Capitol building. In addition to his commercial work he has been photographing historic and contemporary architecture.
[Roger:] " I like the formal qualities of architecture. I like the different feeling that there is to different kinds of buildings and different kind of photographs that you can make of different kinds of buildings."
[To see some of Roger's architectural photography, just click.]   For this project Roger chose to create portraits of people who live and work along Lincoln's "O" Street.
[Roger:] "Every city has got a variety of stuff. What's interesting in Lincoln is that it's all around one street. You know, it's the great western town. It's got one street that shoots right through the middle of town. And if you want to have a business, that's where you want to be.
"You have to do what you like doing. You have to do what interests you. You have to have a commitment to it. Any project that you get into as an artist you have to have some personal commitment to it. You have to like it. You have to be interested in it, I think. This is an interesting idea. There's culture along this street. It's ephemeral. It's here today. It's gone tomorrow.
[Roger photographing Boog's Rock&Roll fashion shop:] "Can you read it? Yeah, good. That's good.
"I think it's strange to have such a mix of stuff. I mean, you've got your business district. You've got a kind of a combat zone. you've got a street with small businesses and all of that packed into a mile and a half."
Roger Bruhn feels that his portraits can make a statement about "O" Street and its significance.
[Roger:] "Portraiture is something that is relatively new to me, where I really tried to think about what I was doing. Because I always worked with sort of with inanimate stuff. And it's real exciting for me. It's a really exciting new thing to be doing. Portraits are a little bit like sex in the sense that you get real close to someone in a real short period of time. And that notion of interaction ... A portrait is not just a picture of a person. There's got to be something going on between you and that other person.
"I shot a federal judge down here in the courthouse. What a contrast! And it can be something very momentary. It can be something that you kind of set up In an almost artificial sense. You put someone where they might not ordinarily stand but you're trying to get a result that looks right because, I mean, after all the end product is a photograph. It's a visual object."
[Camera clicks]
[Roger:] "It is a little bit aggressive. I mean, you're intruding yourself into other people's spaces. When you do portraiture I mean, you really -- you are, in a sense, taking something away from that other person. You always hear anthropologists talk about certain aboriginal peoples who don't like to have their photographs taken because they think that when you take that photograph you have a piece of them now.
[Roger introducing himself to the owners of a tombstone business:] "Hi, how are you?"
"Fine, how are you?"
"Pretty good. Is it John? John, Jim? Roger. Roger."
[Roger:] "Like with this "O" Street thing, I have to contact these people. I don't like to just walk in and spring this on them. I like to let them know that I'm coming. For one thing that increases my chances that they're going to say yes. But I still have to write letters. I have to make telephone calls. the whole thing is very difficult to set up. If I spend half an hour photographing you I'll come away from that -- from my own point of view at least -- feeling much closer to you, and like I know you much better like you showed me something than I did if I would just have a conversation with you for the same length of time."
[Roger photographing the reflections in a shop window:] "I'm outside. She's inside. And the only way that you can see into the inside of the building is where the shadow of my head and my hand -- those are my fingers on the camera, where they block the reflection -- is the only place that you can see into the building. Otherwise what you see -- you see the street itself reflected back on the edges. This is wonderful. It's wonderfully complex and ambiguous. I'm very pleased with these on the whole.
[Roger:] "I want to show you one that's far more difficult than I thought. Judge Warren Urbom.
[Judge Urbom:] "See, it isn't very often that you try those cases without a jury."
[Roger:] "The room is just not an interesting -- visually interesting -- and I'm trying to work with context and environment with these things. So I had a really tough time with that room. I just couldn't make it look like anything.
[Showing one photograph:] "Actually I would like this one a whole lot better if it were not for this line which is just simply too close to his head. If I could get that line up here if I could have changed my angle on such a way to move that line ... But that line is what kills this photograph for me. Otherwise I think it's okay.
"I did some of him in his office. These are nice but they just don't grab me. It just doesn't say anything about him being a judge.
"This is what I finally decided I would use [see the photograph above of Judge Urbom in the jury box]. It's interesting to have him in the jury box because I like the way that the empty chairs sort of symbolize all of the people -- all of us maybe for whom he is making decisions when we're not there. So in a kind of symbolic sense, I like this one.
"With the one of [commercial portrait photographer Fran] Zabloudil here I wanted to show the studio situation. And I think -- this gets it, you know. You've got the hair light. In fact, I just used his light -- plugged into his lights. This was his background. We just sort of turned him around. Just turned the tables on him, as it were. But I like the way he gets framed here by his camera stand and the background. And so, compositionally, I liked it and that was the only one I printed.
"This one here -- I looked through the contact sheets pretty carefully, but this is the only thing I printed. It does a great job of showing the context. I love the way that the sign on the top looks almost like it was stripped in there on a piece of tape. I think it captures those two guys.
"I'd like it if people would be very interested, and just be knocked out with this sort of street stuff. Maybe they will, Maybe they won't. I like it. But I'm not one of those people who's really trying to figure myself out by photography. I think I'm more trying to say something, not necessarily about myself, but about other things.