If there is magic on this planet, it is in water… Loren Eisley

OK, so, if a New York minute is something like three seconds, what is a photographer minute ? Time is not only relative but essential to a photographer, especially when you re talking about the darkroom, where the photographer’s ideal images come to life in so many different forms, shapes, shades, and angles - sometimes right on target, according to the photographer’s pre-conceived notion, often out in left field, where the developing images are abandoned to roll away like a wasted foul balls originally intended for glory over the centerfield wall.

Armed with Olympic-size talent and experience, Savannah’s most well-known photographer recently disengaged himself from a studio of work and people, and came noisily to the phone. And, then he promised to call you back in a couple of minutes. Yeah. Right. But, in all fairness to the guy - and Jack Leigh is just one of the guys, born and reared Savannahian - sometimes minutes seem like days in the Deep South.

Leigh escaped the South and his roots as a young man barely out of college. He went abroad and then he went back to school, disgruntled with the way he was viewing life. An old professor from the University of Georgia was running the photography and media department at Ohio State University. He toted his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism to the North. Not for long. He knew he didn’t t want to just take pictures. He likes to write, and for a while he would have liked to have been a painter. Leigh definitely wanted to be an artist. He also knew he wanted to get the hell out of the North.

So, he came back home, part of what he calls his unmapped journey to come full circle. He worked on movie sets, including The Great Santini just across the river in Beaufort, South Carolina. He treasures the experience - not for only being able to meet Pat Conroy but for learning how to organize in a business-like regimen his expressions of art,through photography. He became, essentially, a photojournalist/artist. In conjunction with the Summer Olympics, Leigh’s photos of the port of Savannah will hang in the Savannah City Hall. In the summer of ‘98, the exhibit will be the core of a book of 122 duotone photos and 16 pages of hand-set text.

"When I was young," says the 47-year-old photographer, closing his eyes as he shuts the door to his inner darkroom, "I left home, I left my own traditions. I left the water, the coast. I left on many levels, as a Southerner, I left my family. I fled from it."

But, then the line started curving, the beginning of the circle. With his first book of pictures and narrative, Oystering A Way of Life he began accessing his own mythology, the fables of the South, the water, rivers, estuaries, coast and streams. Leigh reads mythology, specifically the Joe Campbell series. "Mythology has become very important to me."

Drawing on his desire to be an artist, his connections to painting through family members who paint, and his growing up in early mornings and dark nights on the back creeks of Chatham County, Leigh found he was tuned in to light. "I found that it is deeply important. Light is affecting you all of the time."

Asked about the so-called unique light of Savannah, Leigh initially reacts with mild puzzlement, thinks about it, and then hypothesizes that it’s - what else? - the water.

"If you spend any time whatsoever in Savannah, you will notice that water seems to be everywhere, a part of everything. I think if we have a different light, say, than out West, you would see the differences in photography, for example, in Ansel Adams. I think it is simply the humidity here, the quantity of water in the air. So, if you re born into that kind of light, you see how the world looks through that."

Leigh begins to warm to the idea of water in air. "The more you work with photography, the more you see the quality of water. Light is diffused by water. If you ‘ll notice, all of my books are connected to the coast, and a lot of my photographs are taken in the fog. My photography is a synthesis of light and water."

A series of photographs is called Veil of the Coast, Images of Mist and Fog, so he has fully integrated his familiarity with water, air and light in his works.

Fog plays a big part of life in Savannah and most of the communities on or near Georgia s coast. A Savannahian may bed down for the night with the stars blazing and wake the next morning to a fog so thick he can t see the yard or street from his front door. And, the Savannah port puts out the red light for in- and outgoing freighters. Fog and mist are different, of course, in an urban setting, in a rural locale, on water, streams and rivers. There’s nothing like a downtown Savannah fog, or watching a great bank of fog rolling up the Savannah River like a ghostly merchant marine.

Leigh lives smack in the middle of the downtown Savannah Historic District, just down the street from Conrad Aiken’s childhood home and last years of retirement, and only a few blocks from the house in which Flannery O’Connor grew up, NOT surrounded by, as one reviewer recently wrote, . . . an eccentric mix of wild characters . . .in search of its counterculture roots."

Leigh’s home is easily within foghorn distance from the river - a continuing bend of the circle home. Leigh’s work - beyond photo exhibits and sales of his photographs - has settled on his books. With the books, he can tell a story, through images and words. Each one has a carefully crafted story line, much like a movie. Making the books is very much like making a film, and that s something I learned working on film sets. There is a form to creating a book, not a mere collection of photographs or conglomeration of still images with captions, but a vast story, a large experience that many of us pass right by on the highways of our lives.

Leigh prefers to describe his books as cinema, as documentary, just without the movement. But, he strives to represent a photograph s subject s kinetic form: the upraised arm, the moving gait or the darting eye. He learned the artistic business of putting a movie together and has applied that skill to organizing books.

"When I was working as a grip on The Great Santini, I learned how a story was being told visually. I took lots of notes and observed how a movie is organized and structure, and how it is put together. I still use that formula. Basically, it s all schedules."

Working in Beaufort brought him to the idea of shooting oystermen, the hardy souls who work until daylight to bring us those delicacies that make us love more and better. His union grip job on the movie set helped Leigh finance the production of the oystering book. In an oyster shell, Leigh’s photos are about real life, real experiences, nothing less. He believes that most people had no idea of the work that went into oystering back in those days. People who read the book cannot possibly eat an oyster and feel the same way again.

You can see Leigh’s life unfold through different lenses in his books: oystering - he grew up in what he calls the oyster roast culture, the vacations, the cookouts, the holidays, the gathering of family and friends. "I had a desire and passion to go deeper into that. What produced the ingredients of my experiences, my life. With the book, I m coming back to that center of life I was born into."

The oystering photographs build a bridge to a deeper world of where oysters come from and who gathered them. White people had never seen this before, this exotic world of oystering. That was 18 years ago, and many of the oystermen are gone. Night oystering is virtually non-existent, as are most of the oyster beds. The cannery is long closed. Which brings us to the book on Savannah’s seaport, an international player in the movement of cargo, both raw materials and finished products, and both exported and imported.

"Being from here can work for you or against you. My father worked for Colonial Oil, he retired as a vice president, and the shipping aspect of life was a great part of his career. In a way, my father helped me to start the book. It s the past, of coming full circle again. The book is directly his life and his experience. Here I am, getting closer and closer to home. I m just two blocks away from the seaport, the river s fog, the giant ships slipping noiselessly up the Savannah to their Garden City docks."

"I ‘ve always loved books," Leigh says as only a writer can say, adding later, again in the way only a writer can truly understand: "There’s no money in this."

Therefore, he learned the fund-raising circuit of historical organizations, luncheons and dinner parties with potential sponsors. While his oystering photographs were being displayed in Charleston, Leigh met Pete Wyrick, director of Charleston’s art museum. They teamed up to secure financing for the oystering book project and formed their company, Southern Images.

The second featured exhibit on the Ogeechee River attracted financing for a book from the Wormsloe Foundation, and Leigh’s book publishing career was off.

Exhibit and book number three came floating in with the eight-foot tides: Nets and Doors, about commercial shrimpers - an extremely lively vocation barely touched upon in the hit movie shot partially in Savannah and Beaufort: Forrest Gump. By now, Leigh had gotten expert at cinematic scheduling, meshing all the components of photography and words into a cohesive story line in book form. He knew how to take a picture, of course, and he knew to stick with subjects that not only appealed to him but which were familiar. He knew how to raise financing, since the business is painfully non-profit - initially, at least. He know how to make the best of his time: family time, photographing time,darkroom and printing time.

With the seaport exhibit - to hang Guggenheim-like in the rounded halls of Savannah s gold-domed City Hall - Leigh has pulled together everything he s learned. It is his biggest, most expensive and complex undertaking in the last 20 years of his career. It has been a little easier pulling together a team of financial supporters, mainly from the maritime industry, "because I know the people and some of them are personal friends."

The book was published in time to help celebrate Savannah’s participation in the 1996 Summer Olympics. He said the maritime community got excited about the project, a surprising emotion from a usually staid and dead-serious group of businessmen and women.

The work shows the daily port life, an honoring and celebrating of the working life of a port. Not all was easy street, though; Leigh first had to gain access to what essentially is a closed and very tight- knit society. Even with his connections, many along the docks weren’ t so accepting and welcomed him with orders to vacate the premises.

"I found some foreign ship officials very offish, but that was few and far between, " he said. "Most are more than friendly, interested and helpful. Longshoremen would greet him after they became acquainted with his presence on the wharves. Shipping agents and company officials would give his pretty much free rights to wander at will on freighters."

"The thing is, once you get credentials and security clearance, you’re on your own, and you’ve got to know where you are, where you’re going." Not only can you get turned around in the port, you can get run over, what with container cargo cranes loading and unloading at frenetic paces and 18-wheel behemoth rambling and swaggering along the docks, in the cargo yards, on practically unmarked roads. The project is not a glamour job, Leigh says - no high romance, no waving girls. It shows among other things the monotony and the effects of the monotony.

It shows the reality of the shipping industry, he said. A large segment of the romance indigenous to the port life went out to sea as the containerized cargo and container ship docked in ports all over the world. Savannah now is known as an international leader in containerized cargo. Everything, just about everything, comes in these giant boxes. A lot was lost with that. Leigh explored every aspect of the maritime industry in Savannah, from riding out at night with a state-licensed bar pilot, or ship pilot who steers the mammoth freighters up the tricky and narrow channel to the Georgia- and privately-owned docks, to climbing gingerly down into the deepest bowels of break-bulk cargo ships.

"I went down this tiny chute to get to the bottom of a ship, and I couldn’t get down there while wearing my camera - someone had to pass it down to me."

From the claustrophobic confines of a ship’s hold to the widespread vistas of the Georgia Ports Authority,s vast Containerport in Garden City, Leigh snapped hundreds of photos. Only a select few will make it to the viewer’s eye.

"This … book will not be pie in the sky. People will look at the photos and see life in all its essence. I’m telling these stories and showing these lives of the men and women who deserve to be recognized and appreciated for their work at the port. I work with the musical composition in my mind: the ship appears on the horizon, sort of like you see on Tybee Island from the beach, and the music starts."

Photography is full of allusions that are musical. It’s like a symphony, an orchestration of components produced by the photographer, who in essence is the conductor. The average person who appreciates photography still does not quite comprehend the artistic values of the creation of a photo. He may see it exhibited on a wall, like a painting, or he more likely will see it published in book form.

Photography is not like painting, not like lithography. We are making images as artists, expressing that particular moment when the shutter opens. A good photograph lets you be there without actually being there. Like: on a ship, getting kaolin dust in your eyes, ears and nose; or, hearing the thundering grating of the slowly but steadily moving skyscraper-like container cargo cranes; seeing the dark, unfriendly Savannah River foaming and churning just a foot away between you and the dock and a tied-up freighter; or standing all alone on a ship’s helm wing, hung out above the ship like the captain who controls every minute movement of his precious ship and its cargo and crew, who scramble below, working with the local International Longshoremen’s Association’s longshoremen, clerks and checkers.

People ask if each time one prints a negative, is that an original (piece of)art?

Leigh says. "I say, exactly. You take your negative to print, and then it s your interpretation, what you want it to say. You create a musical composition. Each print is unique. The cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil certainly is a unique piece of work. The photo of a statue in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery nearly single-handedly sold the book initially. It is compelling and mysterious, grabbing the eye and making the viewer want to know more, in other words, to read the book.

Leigh said he was extremely disappointed and upset when the family that owns the statue removed it because sightseers were trampling other graves to get to it. He has talked to the family several times since, and now hopes a replica of the statue in the Savannah Historical Museum will act as a magnet to the curious and distract them away from old, beautiful and fragile Bonaventure."

"Remember, I’m from here, and it really saddened and disheartened me that they had to move the statue, " Leigh said. "But, I understand, and I hope that someday things can get back to normal. "

Nonetheless, the photographer is grateful for the opportunity Random House handed him. "I didn’t have a gallery before the book," he explains of the fruits reaped from the book project. "The Garden expanded the audience for my other work. The success has been phenomenal. Garden was a significant turning point in my career."

Oh, and he autographed a copy of Midnight, "… from the Garden. " Wish y’all were here.