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Photo Grand Trunk Station by Lawrence Kestenbaum My father, Justin Kestenbaum (1925-95), was born in NewYork City. FoUowing the separation ofhis parents, he grew up in a series of foster homes and (after he got into trouble) in PleasantviUe Cottage School, in PleasantviUe, NewYork. It was there, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, under the tutelage of German refugees from Nazism, that he began his lifetime passion for photography. In 1943, following graduation from high school, he lied about his age to join the army, and was sent to the Pacific to join a unit already in the thick of hostilities. After the war, my father and his brother Al, who also had photographic skiUs, worked in nightclubs from NewYork to Buffalo to Chicago. "Photo girls" would go from table to table taking pictures of patrons, whüe my father and his brother worked behind the scenes in a tiny darkroom, developing and printing the photos. Later on, they settled in Chicago, where the two brothers worked at places like Lakeview Photo. In those days, photo processing was still done largely by hand and required a lot of skiU. EventuaUy my father, with the help of the GI BiU and a William Randolph Hearst feUowship, pursued graduate work in American history at Northwestern University. In 1963, he accepted a faculty position in the history department ofMichigan State University, where he remained a professor for the rest of his life. But aU this time, in each of the apartments or houses where we lived, he always had a darkroom fuU of sophisticated equipment and plumbing that kept the water at exactly 68 degrees Fahrenheit, considered ideal for developing black-and-white photographs. He mixed his own chemicals and even formulated his own developer, which he caUed "Justinol." I disappointed him by seeing photography as a pragmatic means to an end, and took little interest in the details of darkroom work. But he generously 174 Photo Essay175 Grand Trunk Station—Lansing, Michigan. © 1995, Estate ofJustin L. Kestenbaum. shared his skiUs with many others, who came to our house and to his darkroom to learn. I remember the Uttle aphorisms he often repeated, such as: "Expose for the highUghts, develop for the shadows" (he always scoffed at the recommended settings) and "Film is cheap!" (that is, go ahead and make multiple images with different exposures). He took pictures, too, but at first the picture-taking was almost casual, an adjunct to his darkroom work. We have boxes and boxes ofhundreds ofpictures he took of my sisters and me when we were kids. By the 1960s, he was snapping candid, unposed pictures of his friends and coUeagues, using only available light. Some of these portraits became quite memorable. One of the greatest was his picture ofJohn Robison, founder ofJocundry's bookstore in East Lansing, showing John in a wide- 176Fourth Genre brimmed hat with a twinkle in his eye. No other picture quite captured that twinkle. When John and more than two hundred others died in a 1979 plane crash, my father's portrait ofJohn Robison became one of the main images used by the national media. By the 1970s, he took a great interest in the photographers who traveled the country for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. They made documentary photographs that transcended documentation, often unpeopled images ofbuildings and storefronts and signs that expressed the poverty and dignity and humor ofAmerica at that time. He made a slide show of many of these images, accompanied by music and commentary about the United States in the 1930s. And pretty soon he and I were driving around the countryside looking for similar kinds of images he could photograph: abandoned barns and houses, the paint weathered off, old windmiUs, schoolhouses, and cemeteries. He would take the pictures; I would carry cases and lenses and film. As I became more interested in architectural history and preservation, I guided our tours toward the most interesting (and threatened) old buildings of the region. He and I visited both of the old railroad stations in Lansing while they were stiU in use for passenger trains: the Michigan Central station...

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