 |
| John M.Tiedtke |
John M. Tiedtke was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1907, where his father and uncle owned a supermarket and department Store. He graduated from Dartmouth College and obtained his master's degree from the Amos Tuck School of Business. After graduation, he worked for two years as an accountant and then took over his family's businesses.
In 1936, Dr. Hamilton Holt of Rollins College asked John Tiedtke to teach a 10-week beginner's course in photography. He wound up teaching this course for the next four years. A man of diverse interests, Mr. Tiedtke farmed 2,000 acres of sugarcane and iceberg lettuce in the the Everglades, was a State Director and Treasurer for the Florida Farm Bureau, taught economics and general business courses to returning GI's at Rollins College, was treasurer at Rollins College for over twenty years and was a member of Rollins College Board of Trustees, serving four years a chairman.
The quality and magnitude of John Tiedtke's influence on the cultural life of Central Florida is without compare. Tiedtke revitalized the Winter Park Symphony Orchestra(later the Florida Symphony Orchestra) and supported the "Singer's Concerts" which evolved into the Orlando Opera Company. He has been on the board of United Arts of Central Florida.
When the Bach Festival's founder, Mrs. Sprague-Smith, died, the future of the Bach Festival was uncertain. Mr. Tiedtke came to the rescue and served as its President from 1954 until 2003. He served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees until his death. John Tiedtke's son, Philip Tiedtke, currently serves as Society president.
Mr. Tiedtke married Sylvia Southard in 1949 and they had two children, Philip and Tina. Sylvia Tiedtke died December 5, 2004 and John M. Tiedke died December 22, 2004.
An Interview with John Tiedtke, at his home on the Isle of Sicily in Winter Park, Florida. The interviewer for the Morse Foundation was Keith F. McKean. It was done in the Spring of 1982. Click HERE to listen to Mr. Tiedtke talk about his Rollins College photography class.
Mr. McKean: Did you have good equipment?
Mr. Tiedtke: Well, I furnished it.
Mr. McKean: Did you?
Mr. Tiedtke: Yeah. That is, the enlarger. I had just one great big enlarger that would take negatives as big as anyone could use - up to nine by twelve centimeters. And what I had every student do was buy a view camera with a ground-glass back and tripod. I used to write, I think it was Willoughby's, one of these second-hand stores, where I would buy these cameras for very little. Every student had to do this. They got through the mechanics, so they could take a picture which would get what they wanted and be in focus, and also get the right exposure. Then they could also develop a negative and make a print from it. Then we'd get to the serious part of the course.
We would go outdoors to some scene or some building, or indoors. They would each be asked to find something they thought they'd like to photograph. And then they would set up their camera with a tripod, and open the shutter with a ground-glass back, and get what they thought would be a good picture. Then I would come along and look in the ground-glass back and see what they had. And then is when I would start trying to teach them something.
Usually I would start asking them, "What is it you're trying to photograph?" And they would tell me. I would say, "Well, how do you want it to look? What are you trying to do with it?" Usually, they wouldn't know exactly. Just thought it was something nice to photograph. Well, then I would say, "well, now, what are you doing about this?" And then ask them other questions about composition. Because on a ground-glass back you can point to different parts of the picture. And you would usually find that by asking them enough questions, they would find that they could move the camera to a different position, raise it or lower it, or make it closer or farther away, or something, until you finally built a good composition.
You know, when you get closer to something, the different objects look relatively different in size. You back up enough they get closer to the same size, and by changing the angles, or the height of the camera, you change the whole perspective and the impression of the picture. Well, I would try to ask them questions instead of telling them, getting them to see, on the ground-glass back, what they were getting and what was wrong with it, so that they could start moving their camera aound different places until they finally got the camera getting what they wanted, where it would make the emphasis where they wanted it.
Then the next thing - raising or lowering the camera changes the impression you get, greatly, just like the distance away from the subject changes it. You can arrange the different objects in the ground-glass according to where you put the camera. Then, if you wanted to emphasize part of the picture, you could put some of the other parts slightly out of focus by opening the shutter. In other words, if you have something ten feet away which you wish to emphasize and something else twenty feet away, you set the focus for the closest thing, ten feet. If the aperature is stopped way down, you get depth of focus, and everything's sharp.
But by opening the lens, you get less and less depth of focus. Well, the ten-foot item that's in focus stays sharp, but the twenty-foot on begans to blur. So you could gradually open the lens until you have made the unimportant parts of the picture blur to the extent that you want - never enough to be too spectacular. But you want them to be less important to the degree that it will help your picture. And then the lights and darks in it. You may be able to control the lighting, if it's inside. But, anyway, these are all the tools.
Mr. McKean: Did you feel that you were successful in opening their eyes to perspective?
Mr. Tiedtke: I think it was extremely variable from student to student. Some of them just caught on to everything and gobbled it up and went right on, doing a great job. And some of them, I think, had very little real interest in it and just liked to go and snap pictures, and didn't really care.
But when you're talking about this part of it, you're going from a technical ability to take a picture into artistic creation. And you know that there's a great variability in students, as to whether they have any artistic, creative ability. You'll find a few that do, and a great number who do not. Well, it didn't bother me too much if they had no artistic ability and they spent ten weeks learning how to take pictures, and getting something they liked. And if that was all they had the ability to do, it didn't make me feel it was any waste of time because they still learned something useful. So that, to me, it was not a failure. It just simply wasn't as good as if they turned out to have talent.
Click HERE to listen to a selection from the 2005 Smith Grant Heroic Measures. This interview was made just before Mr. Tiedtke's death. There is no transcript with this interview.