A Famous Photographer Needs My Help ••••

Back in the ’80s, there was a famous commercial photographer whose name was familiar to virtually everyone in the industry: Jay Maisel.

Jay Maisel was a New York photographer who became both famous and wealthy by being one of the pioneers of commercial stock photography licensing. Today, you can find any kind of image online for pennies on the dollar. But back then, stock photography was a very different business. If you wanted to use a photograph, you licensed it. And Jay Maisel had an impressive collection of classic, beautifully executed images.    The Statue of Liberty. The New York skyline, photographed at every conceivable time of day. The American flag. Businesspeople shaking hands, walking city streets, or sitting around a conference table.

By today’s standards, they might sound like fairly standard commercial images. But at the time, those photographs were highly sought after, and Jay Maisel was considered one of the kings of commercial stock photography.    I eventually ended up working for one of his competitors, a photographer named Joe Barraban. That, in itself, was quite an experience.

One day, everything was perfectly ordinary at the studio. The assistant and I were working on a basic product shot. The client wasn’t there; they trusted me to handle the job. Then the phone rang. The assistant answered it, paused, and called over to me.

“Mel, it’s Jay Maisel. He needs your help color-correcting a computer screen.”

Of course, I immediately knew it was a prank. But who was pulling it?    Which one of my many off-color friends had decided to have a little fun at my expense?

I figured it had to be another photographer. After all, who else would know who Jay Maisel was? My mind immediately went to my college friend Frank Schaefer. He had a particular fondness for obscure things, and a famous New York photographer calling me for help color-correcting a computer monitor certainly qualified as obscure. But I decided to play along. If I kept the conversation going, I figured I could eventually draw the culprit out.

I picked up the phone and launched into a long, detailed explanation of how I had loaded the film in bright daylight to make sure it was secure.    Which, of course, was a definite no-no to anyone who knew anything about photography. Then I explained that I had processed the film by hand in my bathtub, making sure to scrub the film and sand it down to remove any dust. I kept inventing increasingly ridiculous and technically incorrect ways of doing things, hoping that eventually I would hear a laugh, or at least a crack in the act. But nothing.

After about five minutes of my tirade, I finally gave up.

“Okay,” I said. “I give up. Who is this really?”

Silence.    No laughter.    Nothing.

Then, finally, a voice came through the receiver.

“Mel, this really is Jay Maisel. I’m at Apple Computer shooting their annual report, and they told me you get the best color when photographing their monitors. So I need to ask you something: 30 magenta plus, 10 cyan?”

As a fellow photographer, I knew exactly what he was asking.    And in that instant, I also knew something else.    It really was Jay Maisel.

My first response was to confess.

“Everything I just told you was bullshit.”

“I know,” he replied.

I gave him the correct filtration, and after a few more words, he said goodbye. I can only hope that everyone at Apple had a good laugh over the whole thing.

As for me, I had to sit there in stunned embarrassment for a few moments before I could even bring myself to tell my assistant what had just happened. I had spent five minutes trying to expose a prankster—and instead, I had managed to turn a genuine call for help from one of the most famous photographers in the business into my own private comedy routine.

And, yes, it really was Jay Maisel.