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cameras and music tightened their holds on him. A philosophy major, he picked up a few courses in photography and journalism to widen his free-lancing-forspending-money options.
On the musical side, a, friend convinced Charlie he could play the guitar. Tompkins kept trying until "one day, my hand was moving and I was stuck.” A radio and shower singer from way back, he accompanied himself from the beginning.
“It’s still how I learn a song—singing with a record. I’ve had six or eight lessons but I’ve never learned to read music,” Charlie admitted.
Serious About
Photography
Fiddling with bluegrass music and growing serious about photography, Tompkins; dropped out of school and headed back to Washington, where he jumped into the commercial photography business. He worked for several years with the City News Bureau, a small UPI type outfit that sold photographs to out-oftown newspapers.
At that time, the East Coast school of photography focused primarily . on news shots of important events, using 35 millimeter film. The West Coast approach with its big negatives of still lifes—more art form than journalistic appendant—had just begun to reach the nation’s capital. Tompkins was one of the first D.C. professionals to feel its impact.
In 1969, he opened the Icon Gallery in partnership with Mark Power. "It was the only one in the city devoted to the exhibition of photography as a serious art form,” Tompkins said. “The whole idea was to promote good photography.”
In addition to exhibiting photographic works of art, Tompkins and Power put together a consortium of photographic talent to handle commercial jobs. “But it was too bureaucratic. I ended up taking care of the business end when I wanted to be a photographer. The art was much moth interesting than the commercial aspects,” Tompkins said.
The gallery folded in 1971. Charlie kept on with commercial photography in order
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