ALUMNI IN ACTION
Charles Cramer’s Tale of Two Mentors
By Julia Halprin Jackson Photography by Robert C. Bain
For pianist and photographer Charles Cramer, ’73 Music, practicing a Sergei Rachmaninoff concerto and composing the perfect landscape photograph tap into a similar set of skills: focus, attention to detail, patience and the relentless willingness to keep playing.
“The big deal about playing the piano is your interpretation,” Cramer says. “Almost anybody can play all the notes; that’s not the hard part. The hard part is imbuing it with emotion. That’s why Ms. Onishi was so wonderful.”
Trained as a classical pianist by Professor Emerita Aiko Onishi at San José State, Cramer remembers preparing for piano recitals in Onishi’s SJSU office, where she fit two pianos. She taught him to interpret music in terms of the images he could create with it, once telling him to play a Beethoven sonata while picturing the sound of “monks walking down the hall, chanting.”
This somewhat synesthetic approach helped Cramer envision the impact that he wanted each strike of keys to make on his audience — and later informed the way he composed photographs.
By demonstrating how to play a piece of music with feeling, Onishi showed Cramer how to present a work of art in compelling ways. As a pianist at SJSU, he couldn’t have imagined that decades later, he’d be quoting the great photographer Ansel Adams at a Meeting of the Minds conference — “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score, and the print to its performance” — a lesson he’d learned by none other than the master himself.
Charles Cramer (left) with the late Ansel Adams in Yosemite, 1977. Photo courtesy of Charles Cramer.
Framing a new perspective
Cramer’s attention shifted to photography while he was pursuing a graduate degree at the Eastman School of Music in New York, where he first discovered Adams’ body of work, whose iconic black-and-white images of Yosemite National Park have inspired generations of like-minded photographers. Cramer and Adams shared a belief in the synchronicity between music and photography; Adams was a pianist as well.
“When you’re at music school, you’re in these fluorescently lit practice rooms, and all you do is stay inside and play the piano,” he says. “After a while, I realized that if I did photography, I could be out in the world in a place like Yosemite.”
When Cramer enrolled in Adams’ photography workshop in Yosemite in 1977, he learned to use an 8-by-10 piece of matte cardstock to frame a photograph, a technique that Cramer uses to this day.
“Landscapes are three-dimensional, but photographs are two-dimensional,” he says. “To try to imagine what the viewer of the photograph will see, you have to ask if the scene communicates what you’re feeling.” A strong photo elicits a visceral response, such as raising one’s blood pressure or causing one to gasp in surprise or delight. The framing card helps him declutter the outside world and zero in on the details of a particular scene.
Armed with his large format 4-by-5 camera, several film folders and his framing card, Cramer learned to view the natural environment in terms of light and darkness, water and clouds, fog and drizzle.
Professor Emerita of Piano Performance Aiko Onishi (left) with Charles Cramer at his Mason & Hamlin piano.
A framed postcard from Ansel Adams addressed to Charles Cramer.
Charles Cramer performs ""Beside a Stream," from "Years of Pilgrimage," by Franz Liszt. The photographs accompanying the music are by Charles Cramer.
Capturing magic
Cramer built up an impressive portfolio over the years as he learned to make prints and dye transfers. In 1982, the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite took a few of his prints on consignment, and in 1987, he began teaching classes on dye transfer printing at the Ansel Adams Gallery Photography Workshop program. The National Park Service named him artist-in-residence at Yosemite in 1987 and again in 2009.
In the early 2000s, the Yosemite Fund, a nonprofit operated by the park, invited Cramer, alongside four other notable photographers, to travel the Yosemite wilderness, covering more than 1,000 square miles, and document the unforgettable vistas of the national park. Each summer for five years, Cramer joined Karl Kroeber, Scot Miller, Mike Osborne and Keith S. Walklet for 10-day camping trips, accompanied by mules who carried their cameras, tents and camping supplies. The result? Thousands of stunning photographs that later became “First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite’s Wilderness.”
Cramer describes the camping trips as wonderful studies of light and darkness, color and weather, friendship and camaraderie. He favored overcast days when the forest was backlit and could spend hours capturing the spray of a rushing creek as it cascaded down the rocks.
“Backlit water, as it drops, kind of looks like fireworks,” he says.
Cramer stayed connected to his mentors for years — the legendary photographer invited Cramer to his Big Sur home when visiting pianists were in town, including Adams’ 82nd birthday party, the night before the photographer’s sudden death in 1984. As for Onishi, Cramer is one of many mentees who meet up with her on occasion for lunch and to talk music.
“Professor Onishi was and is incredible,” he says. “She changed my life.”
