This is a profile of my dear college photography professor, Michael Simon. I loved his classes and because of that toyed with becoming a photo major–an idea he quickly clipped: “You’re a better writer than a photographer.” He was correct. But learning to take photos from him helped me see and think about what I saw better. One deep lesson: The photographer is always responsible for what appears in the frame. This one stuck with me, somehow–it also fits for writing and for life. We’re responsible for what appears in our creations, intentional or not, brilliant or less inspired. Then it’s up to us to crop, dodge, burn, learn from, and/or file away as needed.
Michael Simon
Professor emeritus of art
(1969-1998)
I looked forward to Michael Simon’s photography classes like I did therapy sessions—with a mix of raw yearning and nausea.
While we squeezed onto the lumpy couch and assorted chairs in his silty basement classroom, he’d line up our photos on the chalkboard ledge.
“What is this picture about?” he’d ask in that melodious Hungarian accent innocently enough, gesturing to images of trees, friends, dogs, buildings, milk, sheets, feet.
In the beginning we’d silently stare at the black-and-white photos. But once he pointed out how the subject was framed, how near or distant the camera, where the light hit, whether it was shot from above or below, etc., we saw all we had missed—and what the image conveyed about its photographer.
“What is Todd saying about these people?” he asked one day, gesturing to powerful pictures of drunken students greasily gleaming at disconcerting angles. “Does he like them? Does he feel like one of them?” Suddenly we saw the stepped-back disdain, fear, longing—while Todd (and many of us when it was our turn) protested that it was “just a photo.”
It was an exquisitely uncomfortable, enlightening, yet oddly gentle spiritual vivisection. Those who didn’t drop the class immediately often took the course over and over, becoming addicted to the unlayering, metaphors, literary parallels, universal truths, and existential questions: What is a photo? Why take them? Who are you?
In addition to using the camera as a lens into the self, former students talk about Simon’s intuitive personal interest—asking if they were depressed, suggesting therapy, offering unexpected life advice.
“He’d see right through you and expose your weaknesses and find these hidden strengths,” says John Dolan’82, a former student who’s now a professional photographer. “He was seeing things in the pictures I didn’t know existed. He was leading me into areas I wouldn’t have gone. It was really thrilling and terrifying at the same time.”
Ronelle Coburn’90 says of Simon: “He gave little pieces of myself back to me that I didn’t even know were missing.”
When he started teaching at Beloit, Simon, born in Hungary in 1936, had lived through “a war and a holocaust and a revolution.” These personal tragedies taught him the importance of grappling with one’s mind—an approach likely furthered by a distant relative who was a student of Sigmund Freud’s in Vienna. “I don’t recall too much of our conversations directly but I’m sure that strongly influenced me,” he says.
In 1956, at age 20, Simon moved to the States with about 30,000 other post-revolution Hungarian refugees, receiving a scholarship to Penn State in electrical engineering. Quickly realizing he’d be “the world’s worst engineer,” he drew on an early interest in photography, moving to New York City and assisting photographers. Though he eventually started a lucrative photo business, he realized after a few years that he preferred a more contemplative life.
In 1968, a series of serendipities landed him, his wife, Carol Winters Simon’82, and their young daughter, Amy, at Beloit (a son, Nicholas, came a year later). Teaching immediately gratified Simon; he aimed to help students more deeply observe the world—and themselves.
“You remember what Margaret Schlegel says in Howards End?” he says. “‘Only connect.’ I think a teacher is successful when one connects her or his students with self-discovery.”
Simon is modest about his own photographic career—yet he has photos at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; he has written Hungarian Photography—A Comparative History, and seen the publication of The World is Beautiful: The Photography of Michael Simon, edited by Thomas H. Wilson.
Taking pictures taught him about his interests and himself. “It’s very difficult to understand all the stuff that’s within us, and photographs tell much more about the maker of the photograph than the subject matter,” he says. When Carol recently hung his photos in their Maine home, he noticed, “They’re all about quiet. There’s very little action. And that’s what I enjoyed and that’s what I still enjoy.”
These days Simon basks in that quiet in Maine, where, retired, he lives among the trees and a pond, taking daily walks with his dog through the forest. He’s not taking too many pictures. “I’m not in a rather photographic mood right now,” he says. “I’d rather just look.”
—Valerie Reiss’95