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Work Of Former News Photographer On Display

Cheryl Bentley/SUNCOAST NEWS

Susan Geier, along with her three sisters, selected 90 photographs of her late father photojournalist Mel Finkelstiein for an exhibit now at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs through Oct. 19.

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: September 6, 2008

When Susan Geier remembers her father, Mel Finkelstein, he is always with his camera. Finkelstein carried it not only for work as a photojournalist but also at home and on family outings. He had an insatiable hunger to record all of life, in both its minutiae and grandeur.

Some of the results of that hunger are on display at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in "Mel Finkelstein: Playing a Hunch." The exhibit displays 90 Finkelstein photos lovingly selected by Geier and her sisters Anita Rosenbloom, Alana Tietje and Donna Wendler.

"The idea was to bring my father's work back into the public eye," says Geier, a Tarpon Springs photographer. "We wanted to be sure his images were not in boxes."

The photos are among thousands culled from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Finkelstein's four-decade career - first as a long-time photojournalist with the New York Journal-American and the New York Daily News and finally as photo editor with the New York Post. He died in 1992, when he was only 60.

Right spot

The show takes its name from advice Finkelstein gave about finding news photos: "The right spot at the right time. That's what this business is all about. Sometimes you stay in one spot and other times you play hunches and you would cruise."

Geier sits on a bench at the Leepa-Rattner, in one of the rooms in which her father's images are on display. In contrast to the bold black and white of the photographs, love, humor, pride and passion are all jumbled together in a many-hued tapestry in Geier's stories about her father.

Geier remembers growing up in a home in Baldwin, Long Island, in which the police radio was always on to catch news of late breakers.

The dark room was as much a family gathering place as the living room, with Finkelstein developing all his photos and teaching his craft to his daughters. When Susan and Anita were students at Buffalo University, the girls use to meet in the college darkroom, a place in which they could communicate about their inner selves through the images of the outside world they developed.

Always a devoted family man, Finkelstein frequently visited his daughters in the college darkroom, where they spoke the language he had taught them, that of capturing one unrehearsed second of life.

The exhibit displays those momentary happenings in all their variety. Guns held by National Guardsmen appear ready to lunge at civil rights protesters in 1967. A homeless man looks for food in a bag labeled, "I Love New York." Richard Nixon is surrounded by adoring fans. Nixon smiles, but he cannot hide the tension in his shoulders.

Unsparing images

Finkelstein's images were unsparing in their honesty.

An underlying note in all Finkelstein's work was his compassion, says Geier. It marked both the life and the photography of the man who would always carry an insect out of the house to its freedom rather than kill it.

"Journalists who have compassion are the best. I think that's what made my father the best," she explains.

As a photographer with her own Tarpon Springs studio, Geier credits her father with giving her top-notch training.

Geier eschews the high-tech accoutrements of today's digital photographers. After all, she was trained by a man who used a milk carton as a diffuser and epoxy to fix broken pieces on his camera. "I do it from a very raw touch and kind of make it work," she says of the method she picked up from her father.

"Mel Finkelstein: Playing a Hunch" runs through Oct. 19. The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is at St. Petersburg College Tarpon Campus, 600 Klosterman Road, Tarpon Springs. Call 727-712-5762 for more information.

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