A Parting Peek Through A Master’s Lens

Peter Hvizdak was driving around the Hill when he noticed a boy seeking to do the same — behind the wheel of a car with no tires.

He knew he had to stop to get that photo.

So he did. The photo appeared in New Haven’s morning daily newspaper — and four decades later continues to tell a story.

Hvizdak was looking for a photo that day. He was a staff photographer for the Journal-Courier, then New Haven’s morning paper, produced by the same company that published the then-afternoon Register.

It was one of thousands of pictures Hvizdak, who retired this month, would take over 45 years capturing life in New Haven and beyond for the city’s print daily. He crawled on the sidewalk on his back (for the ​“worm’s eye view”), hopped on highway dividers, wiggled his way through crowds, whatever it took to grab the ideal angle. Every day of those 45 years, he gave it his best shot — and came away with the best shot.

Some of Hvizdak’s photos captured momentous events, from the Newtown school shooting to the local 9/11 fallout. Some captured bold-faced names in action, from U.S. presidents to the Rolling Stones. Most — and many of the memorable ones — captured the rest of us, living another day in New Haven. Part of an ever-evolving team of talented photographers at the Register and Journal-Courier, Hvizdak turned down offers to shoot on a larger stage, instead investing in the connections he made daily with people of all walks of life.

For all the technical tricks of the craft he mastered, the key to his success lay in connection to people he photographed.

Hvizdak, who’s 70, shot his last work assignment on Sept. 10. He chose the retirement date on purpose, one day before he would have been called out to memorialize another round of terrorist-induced communal pain. He’d finally had his fill of daily drama.

“I had enough,” he said on a retrospective visit to WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“For every year I worked, I’ve experienced a lifetime of what life has to offer. I’ve lived 45 lifetimes.” And counting.

On ​“Dateline,” Hvizdak revisited some of those lifetimes, through randomly chosen photos that merited a place in his archives. In the process, he offered a taste of what it takes to excel at the craft. (Watch the full episode in the above video.)

Like with the photo at the top of this story. Hvizdak would pay attention when passing vacant lots, which proliferated in the city back in the 1970s and early 1980s. ​“Vacant lots,” he noted, ​“were the playground.”

He saw the boy pretending to drive behind the junked car’s wheel, and thought about the universality of the moment — how kids have always wanted to get a feel for what it’s like to sit in the driver’s seat and steer a car.

At the time Hvizdak took that photo, most people still got their local daily news largely from a print newspaper, and print newspapers were still an efficient conduit through which businesses could sell merchandise. As a result, the Journal Courier and Register had a lot of space to fill. So in addition to taking assigned photos of fires or speeches or football games, photographers like Hvizdak drove around at random looking for scenes of everyday life to capture.

“We could go anywhere in the city” on the hunt for photos, Hvizdak recalled.

It took a skilled eye to find the right scene. Hvizdak had developed that eye after discovering a love for photography in his youth. He took his first shot with a Brownie camera during a sixth-grade field trip. He hung out sometimes watching his next-door neighbor develop photos in a home darkroom. Then, in his senior year at Greenwich High School, an English teacher challenged him to illustrate Lord Byron’s poem ​“Darkness.” Hvizdak took a camera to New York City and fell in love with the hunt. Then, while studying history and political science in college, photos during a trip to Leningrad caught the eye of people who knew the field, and he was on the way to a career.

The photo he produced of the child behind the wheel was expertly framed, with context in the background, visible details in the yard, lighting just right. He took the car photo from a distance, with a Nikon 180or 300 millimeter lens. Its timelessness — despite the black and white framing, despite the outdated car models — derives less from the technique, more from what Hvizdak saw when he pressed the button on his camera.

In other cases, producing a memorable photo — like the one above of a woman shooting heroin in front of a mirror, with the framed image of Marilyn Monroe staring from a wall —involved getting close up, and taking the time to establish the connection.

Hvizdak took this photo at the Pond Lily Motel (if memory serves correctly) during the height of a heroin epidemic in New Haven in the early 1980s. Determined to tell the human story of the epidemic, he earned the trust of the woman in the photo, whom people paid in drugs for expert help in finding veins for injection that wouldn’t be visible after the fact. To the right of the woman in the photo was one such client, a sex worker who didn’t want her needle marks showing to potential customers.

Hvizdak wrote an article to accompany the story. He used a pseudonym for the woman, whom he got to know as a ​“reasonable” and caring person with a son living in Philadelphia. He accompanied her to drug buys, watched her share her expertise with clients. He had learned in his job never ​“to judge people by their looks or what they do,” but rather to respect them as human beings.

After the story came out, ​“people recognized her and beat the crap out of her,” Hvizdak recalled. He didn’t remember why they beat her. He did remember visiting her in the hospital. ​“I realized,” he said, the unfortunate impact taking a photo of someone’s life could have.

In addition to powerful portraits, Hvizdak has always managed to push right to the front of the action to capture the telling moment of a breaking news story. He did that when assigned to numerous Ku Klux Klan rallies held in the state.

In the above photo, for instance, the viewer doesn’t notice the scrum of photographers all angling for a view of anti-Klan protests seeking to prevent a Klan member from driving in to a rally. Just the confrontation, front and center, at a vivid moment.

“It’s all about the story, how to get close and get intimate,” Hvizdak reflected. He said he wasn’t afraid when placing himself in the midst of violence: ​“You’re impervious sometimes to what may happen” when so focused on the task at hand.

Since his start in the field in the mid-‘70s, Hvizdak always succeeded in getting the story, and then some. He inspired the rest of us fortunate enough to watch a master at his craft, who clearly loved every minute of the job and believed in it with every sliver of his soul. Every time I ran into Hvizdak on a story (and there were hundreds of times at least) made me feel great to be a reporter; his sense of mission, of joy, always rubbed off.

Pete Hvizdak has turned in all his cameras to his employer. He said he’s ready for a calmer civilian life. No doubt. And yet we won’t be surprised if somehow another camera ends up in his hands, and more memorable photographs make the rounds.