On several occasions during my father’s last years, we sat at the dining room table with my tape recorder running and I asked him about his early life experiences. Those tapes are prized possessions now. I feel fortunate to have preserved those fascinating conversations, to hear those old stories again, delivered in my father’s familiar speech patterns and punctuated by his unique laugh as he recalled details from an era when homes didn’t have running water and farmers went to town by horse and buggy.

He was born in 1914, when life and history still moved slowly, and lived until 2004, having seen changes that were unimaginable in his youth. Cars. Airplanes. Tractors. Yes, and cameras, too, with all of the magic they could produce in the hands of someone blessed with vision and skill.

Jim Lott was blessed that way. He probably would have scoffed if someone called him an artist, but with a camera in hand, that’s what he was. He could compose a photo in his mind, click the shutter in the field and make it come alive in his darkroom. In a life full of the hardest kinds of work, he found escape and fulfillment in photography.

"I like to see that print coming up in the developer, you know," he said.

I knew. Thanks to my father, I too was smitten with photography. Before I was a teenager, he taught me to develop film in a tray in total darkness. After a few minutes of mystical hope and faith, we would turn on the dim red safelight, hold up the film and breathe a sigh of relief as our negatives came into view. For both of us, the darkroom was a place where magic happened.

Jim Lott traced his love of photography to a few pivotal months in the winter of 1937, when he left the farm on the Fairfield Road to enroll in a speech-therapy school in Toronto, Ontario. It was his first time away from home. His Toronto experience cured the stutter in his speech and infected him with the photography bug.

"When I was in Toronto, one of the students in my class had a Kodak of some kind and he took pictures of us, and took them out to be developed. It lit a fire under me."

Jim was amazed to learn that one could take a roll of film to a shop in Toronto and get the prints back the next day -- for 25 cents.

When he returned from Canada in March 1937, he was indeed smitten. At his grandfather’s farm (now Granite Hill Family Campground), he set up a darkroom that spread from the farmhouse to the pigpen.

"My grandfather let me use part of a hallway for a darkroom, and I got a Ford tail-light for a safelight," he said. "We had no running water at the house. I had to take my prints down to the hogpen to wash them. We had running water in the barn, not in the house. I had a bucket, and I’d go down to the hogpen three or four times, to get the right water level. I’d be going down across the yard in the snow at night. I could only work in the darkroom at night."

Jim built his first enlarger from spare parts. Later he bought a Federal enlarger for $19. It lasted for more than two decades, and served me well when my father taught me to make photos in our home darkroom.

He favored the Rolleiflex camera with its 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ format – a big negative that offered extraordinary sharpness when enlarged. Later, he was devoted to his Hasselblad, one of the world’s best 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ cameras. He never converted to the 35-mm camera that took the photo world by storm in the 1960s and remains the most popular format among serious photographers, even in this digital age.

"I will probably use my Hasselblad to my dying day," he said in 1999. He did.

Ironically, his vintage photos of agricultural life in Adams County in the 1930s and 1940s were taken with cameras of lesser quality. Back before he could afford a Rolleiflex or Hasselblad, "I had a lot of different cheap cameras," he told me.

He learned the craft before a photographer could look into the viewfinder, turn a knob and bring an image into sharp focus. Instead, he had to estimate the distance to his subject and set the camera accordingly. "I’d carry a measuring tape for something close," he said.

His self-portraits were among his most remarkable photos. Many reflected the solitude of a farmer’s life, and his unique connection with nature. While working in the barn or field, he would stop for a few minutes and set up a photo, a portrait that showed Jim Lott as he wished to be remembered. Framed in the steering wheel of a tractor. Silhouetted in a barn door, pitchfork in hand. Sitting in the woods, the hunter with shotgun at the ready, his coat collar turned up to repel a chilly wind.

Those photos, as well as his striking agricultural landscapes, tell us much about a man with a remarkable eye for composition, and for history – his own and his county’s. Growing up, I probably took his photos for granted, but now I realize that their details and character became etched into my subconsciousness. He loved clouds, often using a yellow filter to enhance their definition above a landscape. He preferred high-contrast prints, but made sure to preserve the vitality of subtle detail in the shadows.

As I came to understand in my own early years, a farmer’s daily work left him alone with nature in a way that nurtured distinctive relationships with the soil, rocks, trees, sky and seasons. Working in the fields, whether with horses or tractor, provided a farmer with vast stretches of time to form lasting images of an environment that absorbed him in a unique way.

Jim Lott preserved those wonderful images for himself, his family and his friends. Thanks to the vision of some of those friends, especially Bob McIlhenny and Larry Knutson, those images can now reach a wider audience. The Lott family is deeply grateful for that.

John Lott

Toronto, Ontario

March 2005