[ from Spartan Daily ]

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Spartan Daily, an official SJSU daily newspaper,
carried an article titled
"Steinbeck center harvests new photos"
on its front and 8th pages, on October 20, 1999.
With permission from the Spartan Daily,
I upload the article
with the flavor of
the original article.

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Photos

Continued from pg 1

"Pastures of Heaven" and "The Wayward Bus' as suitable for translation into photographic images.
  Yet Plant did not want to even begin the project without Steinbeck's approval.
  "I didn't want to ride on his coattails," Plant said.  "I would not have done it without his involvement."
  Plant's mother and aunt, popular screen stars Constance and Joan Bennett, knew Steinbeck's wife, Elaine, and arranged for Plant to meet the Nobel Prizewinning author.
  Steinbeck was supportive, but gave Plant a warning.
  "You're going to have a hard time finding a lot of these places because I took an awful lot of liberties," Plant said Steinbeck told him.  "You bring me what you find."
  Plant chose not to take the same liberties, although Steinbeck told him it would be acceptable to do so.  He was able to find the real places although in some cases he had to use maps of very small areas to locate them.
  Encouraged by photographer Ansel Adams, he went to several New York publishers but was dissatisfied with their response.  The Sierra Club turned him down flat because it was their policy never to publish any photos which contained man-made images.
 

 

   "I@got so disgusted, I put the photographs in a vault in the bank, where they stayed for over@30 years," Plant said.
  Within the past year, Plant offered his photographs to the Salinas  Public  Library,  as Steinbeck, who died in 1968, had wished. He was told the library might not have sufficient space. The executive director of the recently opened Steinbeck Center in Salinas never returned Plant's call.
  Plant called Steinbeck's widow to ask her what he should do. She told him to call Susan Shillinglaw, an SJSU professor of English and the director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies.
  Shillinglaw, and the 15 students and scholars present at Tuesday's reception, were awed by Plant's vivid black and white photographs, which he reprodced from the original negatives just three weeks ago.
  "They really capture the serenity and sense of place (in Steinbeck's works)," Shillinglaw said.
  "I was very much impressed," said Satoru Tagaya, a visiting English professor from Baika Women's College in Osaka, Japan.  Tagaya recently completed the first Japanese translation of Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights."
  Plant spoke briefly about the man who inspired his photographs.
  "I liked him," Plant said of Steinbeck.  "He supported the effort ... and supported me.  He cautioned me I might need to take photographic license as he did. I chose not to." 
 
 
 

 

(Original article : written by Liz Cloutman)

  (Upload: Oct. 25, 1999)