Education: Teacher with a Camera

Until the birth of LIFE 23 years ago, top U.S. photographers were rare. Today, they range the earth in peace and war, catching the human face in joy and pain, laying out the world before eager eyes. Sometimes they work alone amid squalor and risk; sometimes they haunt the watering holes of wealth. Wherever they are, some 300 artist-hustlers are likely to swap fond recollections of the quiet little man who launched them: Clarence A. (for Abel) Bach, 65, founder of the first U.S. high school photo-journalism course. Last week, after 34 brilliant years at Los Angeles’ John C. Fremont High School, Clarence Bach retired.

Bach’s protégés, most of them poor and obscure at the start, have snapped some 100 LIFE covers in all. At one time nine Bachians were on the staff of LIFE (Bob Landry, John Florea, Mark Kauffman, George Strock, Hank Walker, John Dominis, Peter Stackpole, Harold Trudeau, John Wilkes). West Coast newspapers are full of Bach alumni; others are aiming the nation’s TV and newsreel cameras. In World War II, 146 were combat cameramen, and four died in action. What Harvard’s George Lyman Kittredge was to Shakespeare, Fremont High’s spry, spectacled Clarence Bach is to news photography.

Take a Chance. Bach came to his eminence—he got nothing more material out of it than $758 a month—by love and toil. Born in Hollywood, the son of a building contractor, he started as a carpenter. Hating it, he wangled a job as a “second cameraman” errand boy at the old Fox movie studios. In 1925, hunting security (he has a wife and four children), Bach tried to peddle himself to seven Los Angeles high schools as a photography teacher. He was coldly turned down everywhere except at Fremont High. “I’ll take a chance,” the principal said skeptically. “But you’ll have to show progress without spending much money.”

Hired part time, Bach crammed a tiny photo lab into the auditorium dressing room. Soon “Bach’s Boys” were rushing about, shoving big black boxes in students’ faces and yelling, “Hold it!” Other teachers were shocked at Bach’s brand of pedagogy: he encouraged playing hooky on sunny days—with a camera. “Go get the picture,” he would say. Bach badgered officials into buying extra film, gave his budding photographers more than most daily newspapers allow their regulars. He ceaselessly sent his boys to football and basketball games to get realistic pictures (blur was just fine) and warned: “Don’t bring back any pictures of the basket.”

“Cover Eleanor.” “All I ever demanded was results,” Bach recalls, “and I got ’em.” One reason was Teacher Bach’s skill at spotting hungry boys with talent, most of them Depression kids with a drive to make good. For them, Bach’s first aim was finding a fine camera: “In those days, it was like buying a diamond.” Often Bach lent a boy the down payment out of his own pocket, persuaded a camera store to give him credit, found him odd jobs to keep up the payments. With a precision instrument in his palms, a boy’s confidence soared and soared. And Bach carried through by getting his boys jobs on newspapers—on condition that they help future graduates, however high they rose.

Time after time, the payoff was extraordinary. One of Bach’s students was shy, skinny, 17-year-old Mark Kauffman, owner of a rickety Speed Graphic and the sole support of his parents, two sisters and 14 brothers. “Go out and cover Eleanor Roosevelt,” said Bach to Mark one afternoon in 1939. At a press conference, Kauffman snapped unobtrusively in the background, produced one of the most human, humorous pictures of the First Lady ever taken. A week later it adorned the cover of LIFE, and Kauffman was on his way.

Bach’s students have left the country some of its most stunning pictorial records: George Strock’s heart-stopping World War II scene of a dead American soldier on Buna Beach in New Guinea, Bob Landry’s slinky wartime pinup of Rita Hay worth (reprinted 60 million times), the distinguished Korean war photographs of Hank Walker and John Dominis. Today, Fremont High is still turning out expert Bach graduates. But fewer are able to cash in on Bach’s training: the school has become predominantly Negro, and Teacher Bach confronts a color line (though it is steadily receding) when he tries to find jobs for prize graduates.

Bach aims to circle the world soon and check up on his proteges. Last week, as scores of them descended on Los Angeles for a banquet in his honor and messages poured in from others, Teacher Bach had a thought. “I might even get a job from one of them,” he mused as his spectacles slid down his nose. “You never know what those monkeys are going to do.”