It All Started 44 Years Ago with a $1 Brownie

By Patrick Keefe
The INDEPENDENT and GAZETTE
May 21, 1979

BERKELEY -- G. Paul Bishop was a 19-year-old pre-dental student at UC-Berkeley in 1935 when a friend gave him a birthday present --- a "one dollar Brownie" camera.

He said he began taking pictures and was "just electric."

Today, 44 years later, Bishop is still shooting photographs. In 1946, he and his wife, Luella, opened a studio in what is still the living room of their home at 2125 Durant Avenue. Since then, he has photographed some world famous personalities in the arts and politics.

Included in that list are biologist Alfred Kinsey, psychoanalyst Theodore Reik, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Indian leader Sri Shidara Nehru, Odetta, W.H. Auden, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, photographer Imogen Cunningham, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, playwright Maya Angelou, environmentalist David Brower, comedienne Phyllis Diller, playwright, Christopher Isherwood, poet Robert Lowell and San Francisco sculptor Benjamin Bufano.

Bishop said that he still feels that electricity every time he does a portrait shooting (only one per day, lasting from one to two hours) or spends all day creating the perfect print in his kitchen-darkroom.

He was born in Stockton and moved with his family to San Leandro when he was 14. He graduated from San Leandro High School and from UC-Berkeley, but never went to dental school.

Bishop is a relaxed-looking man with a round, smiling face and thinning reddish-brown hair. He looks 10 years younger than his 64 years.

He credits a former bacteriology professor, Max Marshall, with helping him make a career decision.

"He said at best I'd be a mediocre dentist," Bishop said, "But he thought I was a very good photographer."

Just before World War II, he opened a portrait studio with a partner on Grand Avenue in Oakland near Lake Merritt. When the war began, Bishop joined the Navy, studied at the Navy photography school in Pensacola, Fla., became an officer and was assigned to an aerial reconnaissance photography unit aboard an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. San Jacinto. That she was crippled in a hurricane and he was assigned to the U.S.S. Hancock in the South Pacific, and eventually was promoted to lieutenant commander.

He served briefly with Capt. Edward Steichen, a famous American photographer, in a special photographic unit set up to record the history of the war.

Bishop's small living room-studio has brick walls, a high-beamed, wooden ceiling, and a brick fireplace. Dozens of his photos hang on the walls. The furnishings consist of a small sofa and table and a large hassock. There are shelves and a work counter along one wall. On the shelves is a collection of photographs, samples of his work --- signed, dated, matted and sandwiched between plates of glass. Next to the photographs is an old Kodak photographic paper box, containing out-takes of some of his more widely known subjects.

Bishop took from the shelf two of the glassed portraits he shot on one of the Navy carriers during 1944. One he titled "Sad Sack" was a semi-profile of a sailor with a sad and weary expression, wearing a helmet, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The other, titled "Father James Doyle," was a full face shot of a tough-looking, determined Irish Chaplin wearing a helmet with a cross painted on it.

"Father Doyle was the bravest man I ever met," Bishop said. "The war was very important to me. It brought my thinking into focus, gave me a clear idea of how to photograph people. There's a quality of humanity that comes out in war. All of us have tremendous mental potential. I want to capture that spirit when I photograph people."

He said he tries to photograph people "just as they are."

Bishop said there are about 400 portrait studios in the Bay Area, but "(the late) Imogen Cunningham and I are the only ones who refused to retouch photographs."

He picked up a portrait of an older photographer-friend, Laura Gilpin of Santa Fe, N.M. Every crease and freckle in her face was there, the detail so sharp and true that it almost rose off the paper.

"There, what could you take out of that picture that would make it better?" he asked.

"Why do people want retouched photographs?" he asked. "I think people are just great the way they are."

Bishop has been friends with famous West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams and the late Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Ms. Cunningham and Berkeley's Dorthea Lange.

"Weston was really my mentor," he said. "I used to sit at his feet and learn whenever I could."

His favorite subjects, he said, were Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost and Frank Lloyd Wright.

"I was a little in awe of Wright," he said. "But when he came here, he saw a photograph I'd taken of the stone house my wife and I built by hand in the Sierras after the war. He asked me about it, and was very impressed that we had built it from the ground up. Then he was easy to talk with.

"I find the older I get, though, the less awed I am by famous people."

Bishop once photographed Frost in the home of writer George Stewart in Berkeley. While Frost and Stewart talked, he said he moved around quietly shooting photos.

"Frost had a somewhat unhappy life," he said. "He really bared his soul to his friend. I was impressed."

Bishop has been a lecturer in environmental design at UC-Berkeley and teaches photography at UC Extension. He and his wife have three children living in the Bay Area. The youngest, a recent university graduate, is also a photographer and works as a print-maker for a Berkeley photo laboratory.

Bishop said the greatest advantages of his job are that it offers personal freedom and the chance to spend an hour or two with famous and fascinating people.

He said he and his wife haven't gotten rich with their business, but they work when they want and spend summers at their Sierra house, the second one they've built by hand.

"I really don't know what I'd be doing if I weren't a photographer," he said. "I don't think I'll ever retire.

"Actually, I feel that I've been retired since I got out of the Navy."

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Keefe, Patrick. "It All Started 44 Years Ago with a $1 Brownie." The INDEPENDENT and
    GAZETTE, 21 May 1979, pp. 1 & 4.

 

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