Dual Careers

In the fall of 1979, a little more than a year after I moved to NYC, I began working at Prentice-Hall, a major textbook publisher, in a specialized office located in Midtown Manhattan on 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue.

In the beginning, my work was a combination of duties. I interacted with all levels of editorial and production, as well as authors, freelancers, researchers and vendors. Eventually I was promoted to Permissions Editor, with the responsibility to obtain a wide variety of external material that appeared in elite college textbooks.

At the same time, I had been deeply involved with photography and had been published (in Chicago) long before I worked at and sold images to Prentice-Hall. Photography was my first and true love.

The Director to whom I reported quickly realized (as did everyone in the office) that I was also a photographer. Thus began an additional role that grew and grew, leading to my images appearing in hundreds (and later thousands) of Prentice-Hall books. I was a photojournalist who also took portraits as well as architecture/cityscapes/nature. My photos involved youth, elderly, finance and business, urban life, protests and demonstrations, and sports and recreation. I also traveled to Washington, D.C. for memorable and historic events. I printed photos in my darkroom or used a photo lab. The images were used inside or on the covers of textbooks on Sociology, Psychology, Health, and American Government and Political Science. Prentice-Hall was the first of several New York publishers and major clients that used my photos.

Not all was perfect. Along the way, my interaction with the photo buyer at Prentice-Hall was in later stages far less than positive. I have written elsewhere about some racist words from her and very unfair and highly objectionable practices by her and those above her.

However, during that time, I actually had two full-time careers. This phenomenon continued periodically for many, many years (including when I worked for another publisher, Cambridge University Press, as copyright permissions manager.)

The inclusion of my images in books continued after Prentice-Hall was absorbed into a larger company, Pearson.