Picture this!
Talk about chutzpah!
Would you go up to Michelangelo and offer to paint his portrait? Or suggest to Mozart that you might compose a little sonata for him? One of us met with Constantine "Gus" Manos last week and took his picture.
He was gracious about it. Then he showed us his photography. Enough said.
Columbia Art Museum hosted a talk and slide show by Gus Manos on Friday, Sept. 19. This world- traveled and widely- published photographer is a Favorite Son, having grown up in Columbia. His Greek name, Constantine, was shortened to "Gus" early on. That's how folks remember him in his home town.
For his part, he holds fond memories of a happy childhood here, and the discovery, while a middle school student, of his calling.
"I attended Logan School, then Wardlaw Junior High where I joined the camera club," he recalls. "I was hooked right away. A Wardlaw teacher, Ms. Sadie Cox, took me under her wing. She introduced me to the darkroom, and to this day, no one else ever touches my negatives. I do all my own developing.
"I took it very seriously from the very beginning. I worked hard to learn as much as I could, and by the time I was 15, my pictures and articles were being published in the Sunday Magazine section of The State newspaper."
Manos pays tribute to his hard- working Greek immigrant parents, who never had the benefit of higher education but were determined that their children would. "After Columbia High, I attended U.S.C. on a full photo- journalist scholarship. Tuition at the University was $127 per semester. Then when the scholarship ran out, I changed to an English major and got a first- rate liberal arts education. I played the flute, and my brother and I played in the S.C. Philharmonic in the 50s."
During those student days, he took his camera to Daufuskie Island, then a totally isolated coastal island near Beaufort. Many photographs of the inhabitants there still appear in his books.
"Also, I had the good fortune to work as a photographer for the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, their summer festival site. A book came out of that, Portrait of a Symphony."
Manos was drafted into two years of Army service, 1955- 56. He moved to Boston, and in 1962 took his first trip to his family's homeland Greece.
"Photographers do commercial work to pay the bills," he says. "I have done a lot of corporate photography for big companies like Morgan Stanley. I lived in Boston for 42 years, and last year I sold my house there and moved to Provincetown on Cape Cod. Now I do what I call personal photography, just the things that interest me."
He shared a few tips about his work. "I never pose a picture," he says. "I look around me for interesting things that people are doing, and I watch for the right light and shadow to capture. Photographers will sit for hours waiting for the right moment.
"All my cameras are Leicas, and I don't use a telephoto lens. After all those years with film, I like digital very much. Now I have a closet full of film cameras. Don't know what I'll ever do with them."
His first book, American Color, is now out of print. He is working with his huge inventory of thousands of photos, to put out a new edition, to be called American Color Two. An exhibit of his work, "A Greek Portfolio," is on view at the Columbia Art Museum.
Columbia City Councilman Dan Rickenmann, on behalf of Mayor Bob Coble, presented Manos with a Key to the City.
