
The first thing Sam Abell entreats his workshop students to do is imagine their photographs without a primary subject. “I cover up the subject with my hand and ask, is there still a photograph under here?” says the celebrated National Geographic photographer, who has lived just west of Charlottesville for going on fifty years. “The answer, almost always, is no.”

That can be a tough lesson for eager photographers, but it’s easier to swallow coming from such a calm and sympathetic teacher. It makes a difference, too, that Abell has always practiced what he preaches. Cover up the main subject in one of his photographs and an overriding visual integrity remains; his composition holds the subject meaningfully in place. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Abell’s approach is akin to the way a jeweler creates a setting for a gemstone before placing it into position. “I tell my students to compose the image first—to find a setting that works—then fit the main subject to it,” he says.


That strategy is abundantly clear in the retrospective monograph the photographer has been preparing for nearly a decade. To be published late next year, the book traces Abell’s work from its beginnings under the tutelage of his father, an avid amateur photographer, in forays around his native northwest Ohio; through his dozens of memorable National Geographic assignments; to the many workshops, from Maine to Japan, that have been his professional focus in recent years; and finally to the photography Abell has done in recent years in and around his Virginia home.


Given that rich history, it’s no surprise that Abell’s monograph has recently morphed into two volumes. The decision also reflects the photographer’s wish to give his images more room than they ever had in National Geographic. As with most magazines, that familiar journal’s layouts typically feature multiple images; some are reproduced at a larger scale, for impact, while smaller images provide readers with the story’s background and context. Images often “bleed” off the edges of the page, in a kind of visual ellipsis that tells viewers that there’s more to come.
Abell acknowledges that this so-called editorial style of presenting photographs on the page may help advance a narrative, giving images power and meaning in part through their adjacency. He believes, though, that it risks having images “go to war” with one another. “I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t allow this to happen in the book,” he avows. “I’ve always seen my pictures, whether good or not, as singularities.”

For this reason, nearly every image in the monograph gets its own spread, sitting by itself on the right-hand page. (Occasionally there’s a photograph on the facing page, sometimes to show seasonal change in a given scene.) None of the images is cropped, another common practice in editorial design that art directors use to abrogate the photographer’s aesthetic decisions, for fear they’ll detract from the main image on a spread. Nor is any image in Abell’s book laid out as a “double truck,” a convention of magazine design in which a photograph is printed across two pages, to avoid the risk that important details might be lost in the binding. This is why the book’s 180-odd images require roughly 400 pages to present. It may seem like overkill, but the purpose of Abell’s absolute control is simple: “I just want people to see what I saw.”

In 1970, when America’s moon landing was fresh in the public mind, National Geographic took Abell on as a contract photographer and promptly dispatched him to the lunar hinterland of Canada’s Newfoundland. It was the middle of winter, and the assignment was a baptism by ice. Abell struggled to make the transition from the black-and-white of his early years to color, the photographic stock-in-trade of National Geographic. Harder, though, was finding meaning in the bleakness of his subject.

“I was lonely and, at times, lost,” Abell writes at the beginning of his upcoming monograph. “Many times I chose my dismal motel room over once again facing the emptiness of Newfoundland in winter.” Ultimately Abell realized that the austerity of its landscape and the angularity of its architecture— not to mention the hardworking grace of its inhabitants— had much in common with his native northwestern Ohio. “Both places have those flat skies and that implacable horizon line,” says Abell, for whom gray is “the most eloquent” of all colors.

Midway through his Newfoundland assignment Abell had an encounter that helped define the aesthetic that has long since guided his work. At a regional arts center he purchased a silkscreen print by Christopher Pratt, who went on to recognition as one of Canada’s great contemporary artists. “I was at a low point with the assignment, and in desperate need of inspiration,” Abell recalls. “So I sought Pratt out, with the ostensible purpose of photographing him for the assignment.”

The photographer tracked Pratt down to his lifelong outpost near Newfoundland’s remote Salmonier Nature Reserve. As if fate were real, it turned out that Pratt represented the epitome of what Abell wanted to achieve in his own work. A brilliant draftsman, the artist rendered his scenes of Newfoundland life and landscape with meticulous realism—yet subtracted all extraneous detail. He locked his subjects into a rigorous two-dimensional scheme that fastened them to the edges of the frame. “I left Pratt’s studio a changed person,” says Abell, who is by definition a realist and by nature a minimalist.
To be sure, other artists have influenced Abell’s aesthetic. Among photographers he cites Henri Cartier-Bresson for his “full-frame integrity,” Paul Caponigro for his “astute seeing of still scenes,” and Dorothea Lange for her humanism. Among painters, though, one stands out—Edward Hopper. “I admire and identify with how he painted scenes of modern existence and was so good at capturing relationships,” says Abell. “He has been much on my mind in recent years.”

All that talent notwithstanding, Abell’s most abiding aesthetic influence remains his father, who in addition to teaching geography at his son’s high school led the photography club. “He taught me that photographs are built,” says Abell. “He told me to use the horizon as a structural element, and to look for diagonals and verticals. Learn to see in layers. Bad weather makes good pictures.” And perhaps most important of all, this mantra: “Compose the picture, Sammy, and wait.”

None of this is to say that Abell’s approach to photography has always been reductive. His monograph tracks an aesthetic arc, especially in the National Geographic assignments that consumed him throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Those stories took Abell to such disparate but remote places as the Australian outback, Japan’s ancient cities, and the American Great Plains. It was as if destiny understood his developing aesthetic.

In the Great Plains piece the complexity of Abell’s photographs reached a pinnacle, in a well-known Abell photograph of cowboys rounding up bull calves for castration and branding. A cowboy in the foreground works on a downed calf, surgical knife held like a stick of straw in his mouth, the wide brim of his hat turning him into an archetype by obscuring his face. Just beyond that, a blood-red bucket of testicles swings into the frame from the right. In the middle ground two cowboys wrangle a calf to the ground. In the far distance, a cowboy on horseback looks on, waiting to collect the next calf.
Abell created this remarkably complex composition not just with fast reflexes but with the physical positioning that is so important to good photographs. His low, crouching stance helped stack the layers of action one on top of the other. His lateral (side to side) position placed the middle-ground and background action in between the two foreground figures. And his tight framing turned the calf in the foreground into a black mass across the bottom of the frame, identified with a single white stripe, also cropping out the cowhand holding the red bucket.
“I was at the peak of my powers as a photojournalist then,” Abell writes in his monograph, acknowledging that this image is probably his most well-known. “In the 1980s and 1990s I was a nonstop assignment photographer. I was extremely adept with my camera and with film. I was using a streamlined camera that had fewer bells and whistles than typical professional models but was compact and rugged. And I totally understood the way my film would respond to light and capture different subjects. Most important, I could time life in a way that I can’t anymore.”

Abell recalls what may be the last photograph he took that embodied such visual complexity. It shows a bride in a long white gown, with her back to the camera in the middle of a busy Havana intersection. She is standing with a surreal stillness as other people stride across the intersecting streets and through the frame; five figures form an independent line that starts in the middle of the left-hand street and recedes to a point in the very center of the frame, directly behind the bride. Meanwhile, a pedicab driver heads down the opposite street and toward the edge of the frame while the rounded, baby-blue rear fender of a circa-1950 Ford sedan fills the lower right of the image, on its way out of the scene. “That kind of timing and reaction are the result of being totally in tune with the camera and medium you’re using, whether film or digital,” says Abell.



Abell’s life began to change around 2001, especially in an emotional sense. This is reflected in the deeply felt photographs that comprise most of the second volume of his new monograph. Among other family matters that required his attention, his father began to suffer from dementia. Film had been largely eclipsed by digital cameras. Abell’s National Geographic contract was expiring, and he chose not to renew it. A mid-career retrospective was also underway then, taking the form of a book called Sam Abell: The Photographic Life and a concurrent exhibition at the University of Virginia’s art museum. “It was the great dividing line of my adult life,” says Abell.
At that time Abell told this writer that, should his far-flung work for National Geographic come to an end, he could find more than enough to photograph in his own back yard. The magazine had understood this in a figurative sense when it assigned him stories on topics such as Jefferson, Madison, and the Appalachian Trail. Abell’s meaning was quite literal, though. As then, he could open his back door and walk a hundred feet to the south fork of Moormans River, which confines itself to Albemarle County for its entire length, and where the rocks “have an ancient and warm feeling.”

Since then, as he has spent more of his time at home, Abell’s photographs have become “clarified,” to use the photographer’s term. “My pictures have reached a kind of steady state,” he says. “They’re studies.” Those studies focus on familiar things: “my wife’s jigsaw puzzle by the window, or the tea house on our back yard pond.” And sometimes they chart change: “I’ve been photographing the roof of the parking garage across from my studio window as the seasons come and go,” he says. Sam Abell’s external reality may be different now, but he’s okay with that. As his father told him years ago, “The photograph comes from within you.”



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