Shooting back to life

MOSCOW - Jeffrey Henson Scales took photographs to help him get back into life after receiving treatment for prostate cancer.

An exhibition called That Year of Living, which will be at the Prichard Art Gallery through April 6, features a series of black and white photos Henson Scales took nearly every day in 2009 on the streets of Manhattan. He did the same thing in 2010, but those photographs haven't been edited and displayed yet.

"I hadn't been photographing regularly for a number of years," Henson Scales said Monday from New York, where he has worked as a photo editor for the New York Times since 1998.

The idea for the project, which wasn't envisioned as a "project" at all at first, came from Henson Scales' wife, Meg. He said it wasn't so much a suggestion as a demand.

"She was pushing me to get out and make photographs. She said 'You've got to get out and shoot.' She deserves a lot of credit," he said. "She was quite the inspiration."

The work was physically demanding, Henson Scales said, something he came to appreciate as time went on.

"I got quite fit," he said. "It's grueling to be out shooting on the street."

The photos were taken as he walked from his job at the New York Times and during his lunch hours.

"Most of the things were just fleeting moments," he said of the photo series.

Henson Scales, who was given his first camera at 11 from his father, got his start in the field by photographing members of the Black Panthers in Oakland and San Francisco in the mid-1960s.

At 14, his photo of Bobby Seale was published in Time magazine. He didn't submit the photo, and he wasn't paid or credited for it. It was there because Time had reprinted a page from The Black Panther Paper, where Henson Scales' photographs of Seale, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and other political activists of the 1960s were regularly published from 1968-1971.

Henson Scales didn't know the photo was in the magazine and only happened upon it when he was reading the magazine as he regularly did.

Henson Scales later became an editorial photographer, while also working in the entertainment industry on record covers, film posters and publicity campaigns. He also worked for many years in live music production for performers such as Cher, Minnie Riperton, Airto Moreira and The Cate Brothers.

In 1979, he was recruited to be the photo editor of the brand-new LA Weekly.

"I've always documented humanity," he said. "I'm interested in presenting the human face."

Henson Scales' photos have been exhibited at museums throughout the United States and Europe, and his photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The George Eastman House and The Baltimore Museum of Art. His exhibition "Pictures From America by Jeffrey Henson Scales" traveled throughout the United States from 1996 to 2001.

In addition to his job at the New York Times, since 2005 Henson Scales also has been an adjunct professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Solan can be contacted at (208) 882-5561, ext. 235 or asolan@inland360.com.