As a photographer you always hope for a bit of immortality. Maybe you’d capture the Marines raising that flag or happen to be at Kent State-or maybe you’d make an ionic image of a girl wearing a white tennis dress rubbing her butt. Martin Elliott took his most famous shot in 1976. He died recently of cancer at the age of 63.
Like most teens I had a mild to serious obsession with Posters. I had one of those Farrah Fawcett and the scrapie posters, and I always looked at The Tennis Girl poster, but didn’t buy it. At some point posters lost their power over me and I stopped standing around flipping through those clunky metal display stands at Spencers. Posters are one of those art forms like Calendars that seem to be filled with simple images, but usually they take a lot of time and money to setup. But not always. Martin Elliott seems to have had a simple idea and brought it to life one afternoon. The rest is history.
It’s easy to be jealous of other photographers-I’ve had friends say things like-well, if I had been there I could have taken that shot. Right. It’s also easy to say if I had better equipment or a famous model like Farrah Fawcett-but here is a simple image with a powerful visual impact, shot on a school tennis court with the photographer’s girlfriend as the model. Simple, but I would have never thought of it.
It seems that Martin Elliott didn’t have too many other flashes of genius either. But hey, one flash is better no flash at all.
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I always looked at the posters in the stores but could never justify spending the money on one when my dollars were so scarce. It didn’t stop me from buying a good camera way back when though, and thousands of photographs later, I think my hobby has given me much more satisfaction than having having a poster ever would have. But to have that one shot….yes, that would have been a trip. Fortunately, our lives are not yet over, so I keep shooting, but only because it is so much fun.
Making my own images has been much more rewarding than buying posters-but I did like looking at them. And who knows, maybe we do have a couple of iconic images just waiting for their moment to be made.
I am so cynical, I always assumed that had been photoshopped.