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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. They say a camera doesn’t lie, and if that’s the case, then Chris Pietsch has seen a lot of truth over his decades as a photojournalist for the Register-Guard. For years, he’s chronicled the big and small stories that have shaped our community and has navigated the ever-changing world of journalism, from shooting with print film to digital, and from a longtime family-owned paper to a small part of a corporate news empire. Today on the show, you’ll hear from Pietsch and hear his thoughts on both the past and the future of journalism. One could say he’s seen it all, and what he’s seen from behind his camera is a window into the growth and evolution of our community. Chris Pietsch is the former director of photography for the Gannett newspapers in Oregon, including the Register-Guard and the Salem Statesman Journal. Chris, it’s always great to talk to you. How are you doing?
Chris Pietsch: I’m all right, Michael. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and do a little postmortem on my 38 years at the Register-Guard.
Dunne: I mean, let’s be honest here. I would imagine that many people may not know your name, or they may not recognize you on the street, but they know your photography and they know your byline on a lot of stuff. Let’s talk about that. You’ve been doing this for a long time. How did you get started in this business?
Pietsch: Oh, I’ve been reminiscing a little bit about this. My grandfather and my father both owned a newspaper in North Idaho, in Sandpoint, Idaho. It was a weekly, of course, and I just kind of grew up in the business and did just about everything, from sweeping the floors to eventually doing some photography. The photographer they had was also the sportswriter, so he was excited about not having to photograph Friday night football games and write the story. I was interested in doing it, so I started. That was my first professional job, back in the mid-1970s or so.
Dunne: Did you have an interest in photojournalism, or did you just want to work for the paper, and that just kind of came together?
Pietsch: Yeah, I would say it was more just something fun to do back in those days. But later, when I went to the University of Idaho, I fell in with a bunch of journalists there, and that’s when I really got inspired to be a photojournalist. There was a photographer at the Idahonian there in Moscow named Phil Schofield whom I admired a lot. I just followed him around like a puppy, and that’s when I really started to get passionate about the idea of being a photojournalist.
Dunne: Here’s a dumb question, but you’re an expert at answering this. What do you start with, the image or the story idea?
Pietsch: Oh, that’s a good question. It’s almost always the story idea to start with. It might be kind of vague, like just going to a football game or whatever, or in real life, you might go to a city council meeting or something like that. But then you quickly have to develop an understanding of who the characters are that are there and what the issues are, and then make judgments as you go along about what the best storytelling image might be. So yeah, the process is definitely where you have to focus, not the overarching idea to begin with.
Dunne: Your career spans the great transition in photography from shooting film to digital. Do you miss shooting film?
Pietsch: Yeah, I was thinking about that. When I started my career, phones were attached to the wall. I remember going on my first assignment as an intern, and gas was being sold for about 99 cents a gallon. So there have been a lot of changes in the world generally. But film: I had a lot of skill sets as a film photographer that moved over into the digital world, but part of it, the darkroom and the processing and all that, has of course gone completely away. That was kind of an interesting period. You had an opportunity to reflect on how things were going while you were agitating your film, and then later making a print and everything. Nowadays it’s all compressed into mere moments, which sometimes can be a little dizzying. I won’t lie about that. But it’s hard to imagine photojournalism as it is today with that much time lag between when you make the image and when you’re actually able to get it into print. I think we started scanning negatives in the 1990s or so, so the bulk of my career has been in some form of digital.
Dunne: OK. This may be an unfair question because you’ve taken so many images, but are there a few that stand out in your memory, both in terms of the quality of the image and being happy as a professional, but also an image that you look back on and say, “Wow, that really told the story that I wanted it to tell”?
Pietsch: Well, that’s really a tough one. In fact, just for my own entertainment, I went back to try to pick one picture per year over the last 50 years, and just picking one was hard enough. But I think the ones I’ve been really excited about more recently were the pleasant surprises, where I went in with the notion of making a photograph and then got rewarded way better than I imagined. Like Comet NEOWISE: I went out to Fern Ridge the first night it was supposedly visible and was disappointed by the haze in the sky. I was able to make a picture, but it just wasn’t as dramatic as I was hoping for. So I decided to do a Hail Mary and went up to Dee Wright Observatory, and I was up there on top of the observatory with about a dozen other people, and it just kept getting brighter and brighter and brighter, and I was just going, “Oh my God!” I was being rewarded so much for this Hail Mary that I couldn’t even believe it. The picture went national, international. It got picked up all over the place. It was the perfect storm of having it early and having it really good, with Mount Washington right under it. Something similar happened with the aurora borealis too. I went out to Perkins Peninsula just on a total whim, and it flared up beautifully that night. I ran into some people out there who were up for being in the photo and everything. When stuff comes together like that, when you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into and then it works out spectacularly, that high never gets old.
Dunne: I often feel that in photojournalism, you have to have two mindsets. You have to have incredible patience, because photography takes incredible patience, but you’re also trying to tell a story on deadline. How have you made those work together?
Pietsch: Yeah, I know. That’s how the sausage is made. Every situation is different, but I go in there with kind of a loose game plan, and then I try to stay really open to whatever opportunities might present themselves in that moment and just be in the moment, in a way that most people are. But you have to add the complexity of actually squeezing the shutter at the right moment and everything. Honestly, I don’t really know myself. It’s one of those things where, when I teach students about it, I say the doing of it is really how you’re going to develop the skills you need, and then rinse and repeat. Go back and be critical of what you managed to pull off and whether it was successful, and if it’s not, what lesson can I take from that experience to do something better the next time? It never gets old, really. To this day, it may be part of what I’m going to miss most about doing it daily, because now I can pretty much pick whatever I want to photograph. In the newspaper business, you just get whatever is coming your way that day. Sometimes it might be challenging, and sometimes it might be a slam dunk, and you just do the best you can in that moment.
Dunne: Sure. I’m glad you brought up the students, because you’ve taught at the University of Oregon as an adjunct professor, and of course you’ve been a mentor to a lot of people over the years. Talk about that in your career, from having mentors yourself to becoming one.
Pietsch: Oh yeah, I think that’s the best way to learn anything, really. There are basic fundamentals that you could herd 30 kids into a classroom and teach, and out of that group, maybe a third of them might be thinking about going on and doing something with it professionally. Then you get your hands on them and really start teaching the things that are hard to impart in a classroom environment, because you have to know a little bit about the person, what their interests are, what their strengths and weaknesses might be, and then just react to that and bring them along. I think photographers are a little bit of a club that way. Having some humor, but mixing it with a life lesson in the middle of it, is the best way to learn, I think.
Dunne: Sure, sure. You’re also in many ways the last link between when the Bakers owned the paper and when it was bought, and so on and so forth. Give us your insider’s perspective on how things have changed, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.
Pietsch: How much time do we have? Yeah, I think about that a lot, and there’s not one simple answer, of course. The whole evolution of photography in that time frame was one whole component of it, and then there’s the business model behind the newspaper business. The Bakers held out a lot longer than other newspapers in the country in terms of being family-owned and whatnot, and probably, in hindsight, they should have contracted faster than they did, because they were pretty much upside down by the time they finally sold. I don’t think a lot of people recognize just how quickly the industry cratered with that one-two punch of the recession in 2008 and then the effects the internet had on things. You’d have to be a mystic or something to have predicted all of it, for sure. But I think the business model eroded more dramatically than anybody thought in the moment.
Dunne: How concerned are you about the health of local newspapers going forward?
Pietsch: Oh, I’m a big fan of local newspapers, sure. A lot of people have lamented what’s become of the Register-Guard over the years, and I say the fact that it still exists is really kind of a miracle, given all the pressures that have been on it. The idea of a community becoming a news desert is very real. There are lots of communities around the country that have fallen into that, and I find that to be a terrible tragedy, really. The newspaper is like a mirror that reflects the community back to itself, the good and the bad. I don’t think we as a society take enough time to really think about the newspaper playing that role, both in the moment and historically, being able to go back and look at that kind of stuff. Its value to the identity of the community is immeasurable. Marshall McLuhan talked about the medium being the message, and I think that’s absolutely true. They’re inseparable, really. But take it away, and what do you have? Fortunately, we haven’t had to find out in Eugene yet. But I see other communities, and I just kind of feel sad for them in that regard.
Dunne: There’s another technology out there that is both looming and already here, and I’m wondering about it, as a photojournalist, as someone who has made his living taking pictures, as a human: AI. Obviously it can do a lot of good, but there’s the idea of AI slop, images that just get created by a computer, versus someone like yourself. Talk about that as a concern for you.
Pietsch: Well, I kind of alluded to it already. It’s the surprises that always excited me in the business, so how do you make an AI image of a surprise? You have to discover it in some way, and AI is all derivative. It’s taking things that already exist and regurgitating them into something the way the person who imagined it imagined it. So we’re getting into this stage now where it’s like the beige-ification of society or something, where we’re regurgitating what we already know back at ourselves. I feel a little bit conflicted about the humor that has emerged out of it, because I admit I’ve laughed out loud at some of the creations, and you don’t have to be an artist or anything. All you have to do is be conceptual about what you are trying to create. There’s no way we’re going to put that toothpaste back in the tube. We’re going to have to figure out how to live with it. But I think there’s no substitute for actually going out and doing the pavement pounding and the shutter clicking of real life to amaze and surprise and actually inform people. Hopefully we’re not to the point where we’re just regurgitating the same crap back to ourselves, though I see glimmers of that. It’s like any fad; it’s kind of taken over in the moment. But I think I already see a little bit of backlash to that. People are counting fingers in pictures now to see whether or not they’re real. If you have any kind of sense of AI, they’re immediately recognizable as being too good to be true, in a way, both in the light and the dynamics. They have this almost “American Gothic” quality of people staring back at the screen that, for me, is immediately recognizable. With a sense of humor attached to it, it’s kind of a shrug. It’s when people try to palm them off as legitimate news pictures that it dismays me, and I’m constantly surprised at how gullible people are about getting caught up in that trap too, so that’s a little disconcerting.
Dunne: So, Chris, my last two questions for you are these, and this goes along with what I asked you about how you view journalism going forward, but pulling the lens out even more, pardon the pun: Are you concerned about human creativity? You’re a creative person. You’re a photojournalist. Whether it’s AI or just the internet in general, are you concerned that individual artists are a vanishing breed?
Pietsch: Well, I think we’re too much in the middle of it to make the call right now. But I think what you’re seeing on one level is the democratization of art, because you don’t have to have any real skills anymore. You just make some prompts and let the AI do the work for you a little bit in that regard. I talk to my artist friends all the time, and the process is really the key to good art: how you get from your concept to an execution, and all the aspects of that. The inspiration feeds back on itself and helps the creative process. That’s always going to be there, I think. But the ability to make money and do it as an occupation is probably going to be more challenging. Then again, that’s always been the case too. There are artists who are maybe a little more commercial who can make big money, and the people doing the more interesting work might struggle a little bit. I think it’s going to have to play out a little bit for us to really see what it all looks like. With photography in particular, one of the big things that’s always been there for photographers is commercial work. There was a sweet spot a few years ago where a guy could make a pretty decent living doing commercial work, and I think that’s getting eroded big time by AI. The advertising agencies and such are falling back on it to create some of these images, and they look pretty good. So where does a photographer clicking a button fit into that? I think we’re still figuring that out. But I’m kind of hopeful, I guess, to end on a positive note, that this fad is going to run its course a little bit. It’s always going to be there, but authenticity, and creating images that are obviously real and have the context of reality, is still going to have some value to our society. OK, fingers crossed.
Dunne: Fingers crossed. Ten fingers and not any more. Chris, my last question is: So what’s next for you?
Pietsch: Well, I got in the car and went over to the coast on my first day off, and that was very enjoyable, I have to admit. I hung out over there. I’ve got a few trips planned in October. In fact, I actually had to resort to a Google Calendar to make sure I was keeping it all straight, because I picked up a few freelance things and I’ve got a bunch of travel plans and whatnot. So October’s pretty well booked out, but if you guys have any parties you want to invite me to, November is looking pretty open at this point. After I take a breath, well, people keep asking me if I’ve got some big grand project in mind, and I have several. It’s hard for me to imagine jumping on those in the fall and winter months just because of the unpredictability of the weather, but by spring I may be gearing up for that. And UO has reached out to me about teaching some more over there, so I’m probably going to take advantage of those opportunities and see how that goes. So I think I’m going to be pretty busy.
Dunne: Well, I know you will be missed at the Register-Guard. He is Chris Pietsch, the longtime former photo editor over there. Chris, it’s always great to see you. Thanks so much.
Pietsch: Thanks for inviting me, Michael. This is awesome.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, the race for Oregon governor is surprisingly close, and we’ll check in with the main political reporter at OPB to find out what the latest polling is telling us about this critical race. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
