Ashcroft Studio

HART PHOTOGRAPHY by Frank Lovece

We are deep in the Hart of Texas.

Houston's Michael Hart – who really is all heart – has had his Hart Photography here for more than 26 years, operating in a no-nonsense, working-class strip far from the downtown garden of Enron. If you were shooting a drama about a veteran commercial photographer – one who has in fact shot both Enron and astronauts, to name another type of Houston denizen – this is the spot your location manager would pick. Heat-stressed concrete and telephone poles like the kind that used to line Route 66. This is the real thing, and looks it.

Just as Hart is the real thing, and sounds it. "I'm in an office warehouse complex, in kind of a funky area," he tells you about the spacious, unpretentious, 1,500-square-feet space. "There's a Salvation Army thrift store a block away, some apartments, and some more office warehouse space. It's utilitarian! I once had some bankers come down here for a group shot," he remembers, "and one of them said, 'Damn! I wouldn't want my wife to drive here!'"

A three-piece-suit banker, no doubt. This is more of a William-from-WaMu place.

Also a celebrity kind of place. Hart Photo has seen sports giants like Indy 500 racer Rick Mears and Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell. It’s seen test shoots for Playboy's "Girls of Texas" and "Girls of the Southwest Conference" pictorials. And it once saw a session with Houston legend Marvin Zindler, the muckraking TV journalist who served as the model for crusader Melvin P. Thorpe in Broadway's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. "On the air, he was larger than life," says Hart. "But in the studio, he was so quiet and soft-spoken, we had to turn off the air-conditioner to hear him."

Hart's classroom is a working photographer's studio, with white seamless backgrounds and, for advanced classes, two digital workstations and printers. If you really want to see old-school, Hart can show you an actual, old-fashioned darkroom – or, more precisely, what used to be a darkroom.

"Now it's just storage," he chuckles. "After I got into digital photography I donated my enlarger to [Houston's] High School for the Performing and Visual Arts." So, sure, the room doesn't look like it used to – but you can picture, so to speak, the chemical trays and the drying prints handing by clips from wires strung overhead.

"Back in the old days when I did a Southwestern Bell annual report," he reminisces about one of his favorite shoots here, "we did a futuristic still life, with phones and things flying through the universe. We did it all without computer retouching back then, using invisible wires and other things you couldn't see." It wasn't so much the hands-on doing that was important, though that craftwork is not to be slighted. It was the figuring-out, the finding of a practical solution to make a vision come alive.

That part's the same whether you get your phones flying with monofilament or Photoshop. And just as writers use laptops instead of typewriters, the creative part is still the creative part – the figuring-out, which comes from working in the real world and learning from the veterans. There's isn't a young reporter alive who wouldn't want to breathe in the feel of an old newsroom. For photographers taking classes in Houston, that's what Hart Photo is.

"I don't know," Hart himself demurs. "It's just a practical working space. I guess there is a lot of history here," he concedes. "It was here when everything was 35mm film and you used an enlarger and had to do things like burn-in spots by hand. I remember when I started messing with digital, that it took a while since there were only studio digital cameras at first – long before you had cameras with enough memory to go on location. I remember going to the Photo Expo in New York and taking seminars, and getting totally immersed in it. It's hard to believe, but I guess that's been a long time ago now."

And still Houston's Hart Photography beats steadily, in a part of the city – in a part of the world – like they just don't make anymore.

Michael Hart Photography
www.hartphoto.com
mhart@hartphoto.com
(713) 271-8250
(713) 271-6008 Fax

7320 Ashcroft, Suite 105
Houston, TX 77081