Note anything hanging below caption, upper right?
The Steeple
&
The Showgirl
by Jamie Jobb
Once upon a time – a mere half-century ago – I summered in Aspen, Colorado. Most folks “winter” there when the town becomes Skiers World Headquarters for much of transnational society’s roaming uppity crust. However, Aspen also hosts plentiful summer visitors who enjoy the challenge of high-country wilderness lands that surround the famous Rocky Mountain town.
Heck, John Denver, the guy who wrote “Rocky Mountain High”, famously lived there as did the gonzo-rambling rolling-stone Hunter Thompson and the manic SNL straight-arrow-head Steve Martin. Not to mention boatloads of big-name billionaires, hedge funders, oilmen, developers, digital pioneers, pro sports owners and other upstanding oligarchs who maintain mansions and yachts elsewhere, but frequent their precious multi-million dollar second homes in the Rockies.
Itinerate non-celebrity workers like me couldn’t afford to live in Aspen itself, so we found rentals in nearby down-valley villages while earning our paychecks up-valley – a similar regional demographic also found in the clastic sedimentary economic striations of California’s luxurious Napa Valley.
Anyway, I was merely passing through Colorado, on the way to San Francisco after vacating The Deep South – and Florida in particular. I wanted an integrated world-view that Dixie’s crackerjacks could not afford to provide me. Little did I know my three months in Colorado would upend my back-woods world-view before I ever crossed California’s border.
The Aspen Times needed help with two chores which I could handle that summer. So The Times employed me as its primary photographer as well as its circulation manager, meaning I got to deliver fresh papers all over Pitkin County – to nearby towns of El Jebel, Carbondale, Basalt, Woody Creek, Snowmass – all the while taking photos along the glorious way.
I was new to these mountains and it showed in my contact sheets.
Given the pokey economics of small-town American newspapers, my kind of personal job-share was not uncommon. Indeed, the paper’s entertainment/education editor was also the religion reporter. Her “beat” cast a wide swath around town.
The Times’ part-time gig also allowed me on weekend camp trips to savor Colorado’s astonishing array of national parks and monuments, as most of these attractions were “near” Aspen’s central location within the state: Colorado National Monument, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Pikes Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park.
Of course the photojournalism side of my job-share was most challenging, particularly with all sorts of famous folk passing through town. Since World War II, Aspen had been developing its summer reputation with its “Institute for Humanistic Studies” drawing world-wide brain-power for local lectures while Aspen Music Festival invited world-class virtuosos to play in its big white tent and the historic Wheeler Opera House hosted various famous live performers and filmed attractions.
Indeed the place was a veritable Festival of The Humanities, which we seriously studied in college then, but now seems an alien concept to American youth who believe such study makes them like … totally unemployable!
I photographed visiting authors, musicians, artists and scientists, as well as anonymous road-flag girls, construction workers, switchboard operators, house-movers, al fresco ballet dancers, abandoned airplanes, abstract art installations, brass bands, parades, lost dogs, stray cats, tennis coaches and famous folks like India’s sitar master Ravi Shankar.
Aspen is a peculiar high-profile slow-news small-town, with gig workers living elsewhere while most of its quaintly unaffordable Victorian streetscape sits semi-occupied by international jet-set big-wigs with more than one abode to attend. Residing in the middle of that cultural club sandwich were long-term landed-locals who’d been there a while and could afford to live in or around Aspen’s finery.
Which brings us back to the aforementioned entertainment/education/religion editor who had deep contacts in town, as we would expect. I can’t recall her name now, but I’ll never forget what happened after she assigned me to take a photo of American Theater Institute’s final production of the season – “Everyman: Aquarian” – at the newly-completed fully-ecumenical Aspen Chapel on Meadowood Drive just outside town.
This was mid-August, 1970 – days before I’d leave town for good and never return.
* * *
With its tall imposing steeple, Aspen Chapel remains an iconic local landmark. It’s the building behind the actors in the above poorly-reproduced photocopy of The Times August 13, 1970 front page. The unedited version of the photo is printed below.
As the theater event was a fundraiser for The Chapel, I assumed that the iconic steeple should figure prominently in the framing of the photo. After I arrived we found a ladder and I began to arrange seven actors in poses below, around and on top of the Chapel. One young actor held a peacock feather and seemed most eager to pose for me as she was costumed in a brief floral bikini. She introduced herself and I got a sudden shock: she’s the daughter of the woman who assigned me to this photo shoot!
Before I could say anything further, she quickly climbed up the ladder to pose herself in a dominate position next to the steeple on the roof – with her peacock feather sticking out as a “tail”. She seemed to have thought this through, her tail feather outlined in stunning profile as she certainly intended.
I shot a roll of film and went back to The Times to develop it. On the way up to the darkroom, I told the entertainment/education/religion editor in passing: “You’ll get a kick out of these photos of your daughter.” Little did I foresee the force of that “kick”.
I processed and dried the film, printed and dried a couple 8-by-10s and a contact sheet. When I returned to the newsroom, the editor had gone so I left the photos on her desk and returned to the darkroom to print other assignments for tomorrow’s paper as deadlines are deadlines. An hour or so later, the editor came upstairs to see me.
She tossed the photos onto my desk. Her head was bowed over the image in front of us: her outrageous daughter standing out as some satanic penthouse vixen befouling a new local religious landmark. I expected she might be a little upset, but not THIS upset.
“We can’t print these pictures!”
I said: “Just crop her out.”
That was an obviously easy solution which would eliminate the daughter altogether from the photo as she was standing far above the other actors, including a guy on another ledge below her. I wouldn’t mind messing with my composition if it meant so much.
The editor seemed to think cropping out her daughter was workable, although I realized later she didn’t fully understand what I meant. Clearly the photo’s value to any success the fundraiser might achieve outweighed her daughter’s obvious public dalliance. It was the main image on the front page, under a headline: “SPECIAL DRAMA READY”.
Drama-ready, indeed! The editor had cropped the photo not in a straight line but in a crudely cut-out way that eliminated the daughter’s bikinied body, complete with tail-feather, but left her bare legs dangling mysteriously below the caption. Anybody who looked closely would want to know about those UFLs – Unidentified Floating Legs!
This was my last week in Aspen before heading further West, but before I left town the editor called me into his office and told me his entertainment/education/religion editor had quit over the incident. It was such a shock to her civic standing and personal well-being that the embarrassment was simply too much for her to bear in public.
“So,” the editor said, pointing to her empty desk ... “do you want her job?”
While that offer seemed somewhat tempting in an obtusely ironic way, I told him I had commitments (albeit vague ones) in San Francisco and needed to leave Aspen, thank you very much.
As decades have distanced me from those brief summer months in Colorado and my solitary time as a day-to-day photojournalist, I imagine what I would have become if I had remained there – a bucolic worker in that bucolic land, hanging out with my gonzo pals Hunter and John and Steve.
Of course, all I need do to evaporate that idea is recall the steeple and the showgirl which remind me that staying in Aspen was not a good idea for a guy like me who abandoned his own brand of gonzo back in Florida.
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