© Walter Chandoha
For the past 70 years, 95-year-old Walter Chandoha has made a career out of photographing cats for both editorial and commercial purposes. This year, Aperture published a collection of Chandoha’s colorful cat photographs in the appropriately titled Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer.
A self-described lover of photographing “everything and anything,”
Chandoha first stumbled into cat photography after he found a stray
kitten he named Loco in the snow. He took a few pictures of Loco,
submitted them to various contests, and won a few prizes. But things
didn’t get serious until the early 1950s when Chandoha began
photographing in color. With help from his wife Maria, who was his art
director, secretary, animal herder, and also the mother of their six
children, he began to play around with a few different ideas, including
photographing a kitten wearing a red Christmas ribbon. They submitted
that image to some magazines and were thrilled when Woman’s Home Companion called to say they were going to run the image on their cover and offered an incredible payment of $500.
The couple had recently bought—through false pretense—a freezer’s
worth of peas that were stale. They figured they would turn them into
soup, but when news came of the cover, Chandoha said their spirits were
lifted.
“I said ‘I don’t care how hard those peas are, throw them out, we’re
in the big time now,’ ” he recalled. “We starved for three more years,
but gradually it built up, we sold more covers, and worked on the first
cat book.”
© Walter Chandoha
© Walter Chandoha
© Walter Chandoha
He slowly became the in-demand photographer (and cat adviser) for a
number of cat-related advertisements. Not only because of his patience
and ease with cats and his ability to get them to do a wide range of
things, but also because of the look of his images. He used multiple
lights in order to equally highlight the cat and the color background,
with detail paid to the cat’s ears and back.
“I didn’t want a lot of props detracting from the beauty of the
cats,” he said. “I wanted to completely and interestingly separate them
from the background; it became a trademark for me.”
A renewed fascination in his cat work began when the New York Times Magazine became interested in some photographs Chandoha had taken of the original Penn Station in New York
before it was demolished in 1963. While going through Chandoha’s
collection, an editor noticed the cat photographs and proposed running a separate story about that work; it turned out to be the (pun intended) catalyst for the book.
Maria passed away in 1992, and since then Chandoha’s second-youngest
child, Chiara, has been helping out with the business. She has slowly
been digitizing all of Chandoha’s film and helped create the final edit
for the book that was whittled down from the thousands to 55
photographs. “If I live until I’m 150 I couldn’t digitize all the film
we have here,” she said.
Chandoha said he isn’t surprised by the huge presence cats have on
the Internet since they are great subjects and technology has made it
easier to photograph them.
“More importantly is how loveable cats are,” Chandoha said. “They make ideal companions.”
© Walter Chandoha
Courtesy of Walter Chandoha
Courtesy of Walter Chandoha
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