If you had met Clark Winter '73 the year he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, you might have suspected that one day he'd become a professional photographer. After all, he was rarely seen without a camera draped over his shoulder, and he spent his weekends exploring then-rural Delaware—first on a bike, later in Grandma's faded blue Plymouth—snapping, snapping, snapping.
What you wouldn't have expected is that he would defer acceptance to a prestigious graduate photography program only to become an internationally known finance exec, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Henry Ford and Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and George Soros; appearing regularly on CNBC and at Davos; navigating billion-dollar deals.
Winter is full of surprises. And his latest is this: His first book of photography, Here to There: Photographs from the Road Ahead (Damiani Books), hit the shelves this May. Here, we print some of the book's photos that Winter made during his college years, and Winter talks about his days in Delaware, what ties the worlds of photography and finance together, and the power he still finds in pictures.
It was a fascinating time and place to take pictures. The country's economy was struggling, and buildings nationwide—Delaware included—hadn't been maintained let alone rebuilt, so there was architecture from the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s. Many decades happening simultaneously.
But a mile from town? It was farmland, and I'd just explore—10, 15, 20 miles—in an unpremeditated kind of way, more like 'Let's see what finds us' rather than 'Let's see what we can find.' The unfolding landscape was thrilling.
I took a class in ornithology my junior or senior year, and something I learned there I still think about: Birdsong is occurring all the time, but to hear it, we have to reduce our protagonism and be a humble observer of the phenomena.
We can't get in the way. My sophomore year, I studied photography with a young professor named Steve Liebman. He had a true gift: He didn't assault you with a stack of facts, but somehow figured out the particular key that unlocks your awareness and passion. Steve unlocked that for me.
After I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, I was accepted to the MFA program in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, but I realized I wanted to make pictures that were relevant to the world. Before I could do that, I felt I needed to actually see the world and understand how it worked.
I went to New York and interviewed with anybody who would give me the time—book publishing, gas delivery, manufacturing, anything. I was offered a job working on a tugboat in New York harbor, and I nearly accepted it. But the next day I learned there were jobs in finance where, for a year, you'd be trained in how the world works through the lens of finance and then be given an assignment. So I started as a trainee for JP Morgan.
At Ohio Wesleyan, I'd spent my junior year abroad, and Morgan needed a number two for its office in Spain. I should mention it was a two-person office. This was 1975, and the country was still under Franco's rule and had been almost hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world for about 40 years.
But Spain was on the verge of a tremendous rebirth, and when Franco died, they wanted to rejoin Europe. It was an amazing moment of transition, and I was lucky to be there. When the number-one guy left, I took over … as an office of one.
I was young. No wife. No kids. No cell phone or email. Our day finished just as New York's began, so there was a lot of freedom. In the late afternoons, I'd take my camera and just explore. I got to know Spain very well.
Look, if there was a deal involving a fleet of cargo ships, you had to learn how boats worked. You had to learn about wind, about currents, about rope.
I really was learning how the world functioned, one sector at a time. "Finance" sounds intimidating but it's just a tool for navigating a certain area, and I was using the tool without prejudice or preconception. Like a good journalist, you don't set out to prove a point; you try to figure out what's really going on.
I once had lunch with Henry Kissinger, and he wanted to know about how investors at the time were interpreting the world. He said, "Tell me what you think you're seeing. Don't try to be right or wrong." I haven't forgotten that.
I hope so. Photography is also a tool. For me, it's another way to investigate how the world works. The photographers I respect most are those who use their camera to go out and reveal to us what's actually happening, as opposed to looking for scenes that fulfill their preconception.
A lot of it is just being ready, being alert to the possibilities, always having your camera with you. You'll spend thousands of hours looking and looking, but a lot of it comes down to luck—and looking for luck—and being prepared to take advantage of it. When you really start paying attention to small moments, little gifts appear. You hear a kind of music.
As a kid, cars captivated me—their shape, their design, those tail fins!
As I got older, and particularly when I was at Ohio Wesleyan, I started seeing them more as a stage upon which characters could act out small, daily dramas. People behave differently in the presence of cars. Their body language changes around them.
But as a photographer, one of the most interesting things is that people in cars often forget that they're in a public space, that people can see them. They act as if they're in their own private world. To me, those public-private moments lead to compelling pictures.
Written by Bill Shapiro, the former Editor in Chief of LIFE magazine.