Mark Sherman is smart about relating to his clients. “You don’t get in
their face,” he says. “You talk to them for a while.” He finds this
approach works well, and says, “They see me as a friend. I’m totally
on their level.”
Well, he’s not literally on his clients’ level, since few of them
stand more than three feet tall and he is more like six feet. But he
is completely in tune with the cats and dogs he photographs, and also
with the occasional mouse, homing pigeon, or horse.
Using sophisticated camera equipment, props, and an assistant, he has
the technique for capturing pets’ personalities down, but now he is
upping the ante. Sherman, until recently a staff photographer with the
Trenton Times, is now devoting all of his time to Lawrenceville-based
Mark Sherman Photography (markshermanphoto.com), and is adding
humans to the pet portraits he has been taking for decades.
“I want to capture the family, and pets are part of the family,” he
says. “If I were sitting for a family portrait, I’d want to include my
cats and dogs.” He is not alone in this sentiment. A postcard from the
mid-1890s, part of a South Carolina-based traveling exhibit, “Pets in
America” (www.petsinamerica.org), shows a mother and her six children
arranged as a triangle for a formal portrait. At the top, panting
away, is a Benji-like dog.
While domestic animals have been a part of family life in America for
over a century, increasing affluence has elevated their status in the
21st century. At the same time, a broadening of the definition of
family has made it widely acceptable to include pets in outings, trips
to stores, restaurants, and friends’ houses – and in the professional
portraits that chronicle a family’s life.
Sherman is well-positioned to serve the growing cadre of Americans who
see Tigger or Max (the most popular U.S. pet names according to
website www.bowwow.com) as integral members of the family. He has been
a professional photographer since he shot a photograph of a Dr.
Strangelove look-alike politician at a pro-war rally in New York City
in the late-1960s and sold it to the Village Voice. A freelance
photographer, and then a staff photographer, but one who always
maintained a solo business on the side, he has been attracted to
animals as subjects for nearly four decades.
He has made trips to Africa, which he calls “valhalla” for an animal
photographer, and has also traveled to the Galapagos and to the Arctic
to capture animals in the wild.
Closer to home, in the mid-1980s he sold the New York Times on the
story of West Trenton veterinarian and homing pigeon racer Dr. John
Kazmierczak (www.westtrentonanimalhosp.com). He went along on a club
event where large cages of birds were trucked out into the
countryside. He knew that at the release point the doors would open
and the pigeons would shoot out. “But there was no way of knowing
which way they would fly,” he recounts. “I rigged up five motorized
cameras so that I could capture them no matter which way they went.”
Getting the essence of the pet/family relationship is a snap in
contrast, but is never easy. “I think of scenarios in advance,” says
Sherman. When he arrives at the clients’ home – or at an outdoor
locale of their choice – he spends time just observing the client, and
its humans. This can be especially important with cats.
“They’re creatures of habit,” he says. They also tend to be major
prima donnas, with important business to attend to – the morning nap,
the mid-day milk break, the ritual couch shredding. Cats, he finds,
are generally best photographed indoors. Like small children, they
also respond well to props. In his photo gallery, on view at his
website, there is a picture of a blissful cat rubbing against a
Christmas stocking overflowing with catnip-stuffed mice. In another
portrait, a cat looks through a goldfish bowl, one paw cunningly
poking out in front.
Dogs are generally more into the whole photo sitting thing. Indoors,
outdoors, it doesn’t matter. They are eager to please in any setting.
But that doesn’t make a great portrait as easy as, say, reducing a
slipper to ribbons. For one of his photographs, Sherman captured a
couple in a their convertible, their Jack Russell terrier, sporting a
red bandana, between them. Sherman got the shot just right by
positioning the pooch on his assistant’s stomach. She moved up or down
at his direction until he had the dog at just the right height, its
head even with those of its humans, and its reflection captured
perfectly in the car’s trunk.
At the moment Sherman is busy plotting a much more difficult
assignment. He has been commissioned to create a family portrait that
is to include a man, his wife, and their dog and horse. The height
differential is keeping him up at night. Well before the scheduled
shoot, he is working out the arrangement in his head. “I’ll probably
take a table along,” he says, weighing the possibility of boosting up
the pooch – “and the wife, too, if she’s really short,” he jokes.
Sherman, who shares his five-bedroom home with his wife, Maryanne, and
their pets, two chocolate Labs and two Japanese bobtail cats, grew up
petless in New York City. His father was a printer and his mother,
“must have been some sort of bookkeeper,” he says. The confusion over
his mother’s work comes from the fact that she carried around, “an
enormous machine, sort of like an adding machine.” He thinks it was
called a comptometer, but isn’t sure.
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and then earned a
bachelor’s degree in political science from Hunter College in 1966.
The Vietnam War was well underway at that time, and, in danger of
being drafted, he joined the Marines. “I thought I would rather go
with a group that knew what they were doing,” he says. He soon
regretted his decision. “It was my first experience with complete and
total mind control,” he recalls. “It was worse than anything Orwell
wrote.” He was relieved when he sustained a back injury during basic
training and was discharged.
Back in civilian life, he wrote for ad agencies before landing a
stultifying job writing catalog copy for Ethan Allen, the furniture
maker. But good things can come from even the worst job, and he came
away from his catalog writing gig with both a wife and a passion for
photography.
“They had an on-site studio,” he says. “I watched the photographer
work with an old 8-by-10 camera, and became very interested in
photography. I got a camera from someplace and started in on street
photography.” There was lots going on in the streets of New York in
the late-1960s, including frequent anti-war, and pro-war,
demonstrations. Sherman really thought that the photo of the pro-war
demonstration that he sold to the Village Voice had launched him. He
went to the newspaper’s offices the next day, eager for assignments.
There he was told that his shot had only been used because the staff
photographer had been unable to cover the rally. It was a blow, but it
did not deter him.
Sherman soon left his catalog job. He and his bride moved into a
$75-a-month walk-up apartment in the Bronx, and he drove a taxi for
five years while he built up a freelance photography business. By 1975
he was established enough to park the taxi and join two other
photographers in renting a studio. He worked for a number of clients,
including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco
Examiner, Fortune magazine, IBM, and ABC TV.
Sherman then went to work for news service UPI, but was soon lured
away to rival AP. By that time he was living in New Jersey. He had
moved because his wife, who specializes in writing for the insurance
industry, had been lured away herself, from AIG to INA. “INA’s offices
were in Philadelphia,” he says, “and I was working in New York.” The
couple decided on a domicile that would suit both of their careers by
“taking out a map.” They determined that Ewing was just about half-way
between the two cities, and moved there, thinking they had landed in
space-heaven when they rented a three-bedroom townhouse after so many
years of New York City apartment living.
The New Jersey move soon provided more than bigger rooms and more
spacious closets. Maryanne, finding corporate life too constraining,
took an office on Lenox Drive and struck out on her own as a freelance
insurance writer (www.shermanthinktank.com). Meanwhile, in 1987,
Sherman got an offer of a full-time staff job at the Trenton Times.
Photography is a notoriously competitive industry, with far more
talented people than staff positions. He accepted the job offer, and
spent the next 19-plus years covering all manner of events in central
New Jersey.
“We worked shifts,” he says. “You would cover anything that came up on
your shift.” It could be a fire, a championship basketball game, a
street fair, a murder. He photographed it all. Like most newspaper
staff photographers, he also shot random scenes when nothing big was
happening. While walking about looking for subjects, he found himself
gravitating toward animals, so much so in fact that an editor once
snapped at him, saying “Squirrels don’t buy newspapers, you know!”
Sherman liked working at the Trenton Times, but also decided early on
that it was a bad idea to “put all your eggs in one basket.” So, after
only nine months on the job, he asked to be cut back to four days a
week so that he could take on freelance jobs. Through the years his
clients have included ETS, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the wire
services.
It turns out a diversification mindset, along with the structure of a
freelance business, was a good thing. He recounts how, in January, the
Trenton Times told its editors that staff was to be cut drastically.
“Each editor was able to say for how long they would need their
people,” says Sherman. Some employees were offered buy-outs soon
thereafter, but Sherman was needed to take sports photographs through
the spring season. His buy-out offer came in July.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. Then he pauses, and revises
his statement, adding, “It was no fun working on a dying ship.”
“They told us that we could take the buy-out, or we could stay on, and
they would try to find something for us,” he says. But it was clear
that there would be no jobs for many people, and that others would not
be working in their fields. “I didn’t want to learn how to drive a
fork lift truck,” says Sherman. He was sure that there was no chance
that he would be able to remain a staff photographer.
The newspaper’s photography staff has been cut from 12 to 4, he says,
and cuts of similar size have been made in other departments.
Nevertheless, Sherman has nothing but praise for the Newhouse family,
owners of the Trenton Times. His buy-out offer, including some nine
months pay, was generous, he says, and he will receive a pension. He
understands that changes in the way that people get their news is a
big reason for the cuts, guessing that “there will be no newspapers in
10 years.”
As he predicts that the newspaper industry will go away, Sherman
thinks back to his parents’ work. “One Saturday my father took me
downtown, and spelled out my name in linotype, hot type,” he says. “It
was a big thrill.” Soon thereafter, that technology disappeared, along
with the livelihoods of many of the pressmen who had made a living
setting newspaper type. As for the his mother’s occupation, it’s safe
to say that it would be awfully tough for anyone to find employment as
a skilled comptometer operator now.
Photographic technology has changed, too. Sherman stopped using film
cameras years ago. The switch to digital is nearly complete now.
Sherman’s latest digital camera is an $8,000, 17-megapixel Canon. The
images it produces rival those from the finest film camera, and can
easily be blown up to poster size with no loss of detail. But, still,
says Sherman, “I spend hours in the lab.” It used to be that you just
took the photos and you were done, he recalls. Not anymore. The good
news is that the latest technology can remove every blemish. The bad
news is that doing so can take an enormous amount of time.
Each of the portraits that Sherman turns over to his pet-loving
clients is perfect. There are no shadows or off-colors to mar the
moment in time that the camera captures. His commissions include a
90-minute photo session and a 13″ x 19″ portrait. He says that some
clients balk at the size, thinking that it will be too big. He
disagrees. “Most people fill their living rooms with 4″x 6″ photos,”
he says. In his opinion it’s difficult to see the smaller images,
which tend to come across as a jumble. The large photo “is eye
catching. It looks great on the wall,” he says. So far, all of his
clients – those of them who are human, anyway – have agreed. (Pets
tend to be silent on decorating matters, only weighing in when they
are being evicted from the new wing chair.)
He sends a choice of images via low-resolution E-mail files, and
clients choose their favorite. In addition to the large portrait, he
is prepared to make up photo cards, photos in different sizes, and
digital files.
Sherman, who made a cat a part of his family right after college, and
“progressed to more cats” before adding dogs to the household,
understands how important pets are to the life of a family. “For
people without children, or those whose children are grown, dogs and
cats are the children,” he says. In some ways, of course, they are not
as rewarding as children. There will be no first words or hand-imprint
art projects brought proudly home from kindergarten. But there will be
oceans of unconditional love, wagging tails to greet every return
home, and intuitive sympathy for all of life’s setbacks. Cats and dogs
are part of every day and are key players in many family stories. It’s
hard to imagine a pet owner who doesn’t think that Tigger or Max
belongs in pictures – with them, their guardians and friends.
Mark Sherman Photography, 15 Hopkins Drive, Lawrenceville 08648.
609-896-2228. E-mail: info@markshermanphoto.com.,
www.markshermanphoto.com
