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to pay the bills, but the work grew less and less appealing. “I’d do one job for a client and it would be kind of fun because it was new but when I'd get a return call, it wasn’t fun any more—it was boring.”
A workshop at Yosemite National Park with Ansel Adams, recognized nationally and internationally as one of the Michelangelos of the photographic art form, turned Tompkins around.
“I’d always had a conflict with commercialism versus art. Everyone at the workshop was into art, taking pictures without worrying about what a client would pay them. Their attitudes clarified my ideas," he recalled.
Tompkins kept on with commercial photography for a few years because he needed the money. “It’s where my reputation was,” he added.
Freed By Inheritance
Then an inheritance freed him from bill-paying constraints. “I canned the commercial stuff and concentrated on art. In the beginning, it was a problem of production. I’d shot millions of negatives but needed to spend time in the darkrootn getting together a cohesive set of prints. After that, it was and is a question of getting my name around to the people who buy that kind of stuff.”
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