He would pick out children with his lens and somehow make us feel their experience, from trading comic books in Paris to making bricks in Mexico. His eye ranged from city dwellers to farmers sowing grain to fishermen pulling their boats onto the beach at night. Within a negative, he would sometimes see only a small portion that interested him, that captured a mood, and he would print only that portion of the shot. Demonstrating his artistic power, it has been frustratingly difficult to try and recreate some of his photos, to match the feel and mood he could bring out of a print.

Walt and Janine were married in Combs-la-Ville outside Paris in January 1950, and I was born in October of that year. After the couple began a family, Walt decided that it was time to give up the Bohemian life of a freelance photographer in Paris and find a more stable job in the United States. The family eventually arrived in East Los Angeles where they lived in a rented an apartment next to Hollenbeck Park. He later found a job teaching photography at Pasadena City College. With job stability, the family grew. Marianne was born in 1953 and Claudette in 1956.

Walt had a good voice and one thing all of the children remember is singing in the car on family trips. He sang in musicals in high school and college and told me he had a very brief stint in a choir with the San Francisco Opera. But he was quickly sent off because no shoes in the wardrobe would fit his size 14D feet. When he took the family on a cross-country trip in the early 1960s,

I well remember the image and the emotions invoked when we pulled off the road to camp in an area of clean, light, river gravel laying around two huge, dark rocks. They were unusual rocks, elliptical in shape, like giant eggs set on end, with a surface of black layers overlapping upwards. There, by the firelight, he put a hand on one of the great rocks and boomed out the gospel tune, “Rock of Ages.”

During a 30-year career teaching in Pasadena, he influenced many students who frequently came to visit and who remained loyal friends over the years. It was common, when we were out for dinner or running errands in Pasadena, that a former student would hear my dad’s voice and come up to talk. One highly successful psychiatrist tracked him down very late in life to tell him that when he was a PCC student, he did not know what he was going to do with his life, and it was through talking with my father that he gained the confidence to pursue his ambition.

Walt’s years of teaching photography were interrupted in 1964 by a two-year stint with the U.S. State Department as a cultural affairs officer in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa. He traveled extensively through that African nation and took hundreds of photos. One of his strengths with the U.S. mission was that he had no interest in limiting himself to the cocktail circuit of professional diplomats. Instead, he initiated friendships with the Guineans, inviting them to dinners and parties at his house in Conakry, the capital. He took advantage of trips into the interior to shoot photos and talk with the people he came across.

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