Bud Endress Interview
John Paul "Bud" Endress was a New York photographer during the commercial heyday of the mid-sixties to mid-nineties. He specialized in precise still lifes, starting with food and beverages before branching into cars and fighter jets.
As color separation technology advanced, advertising shifted from illustrations to photography, creating a surge in demand—and plenty of work for photographers like Bud.
Along with one of his proteges, Dan Gerdes, I interviewed and photographed Bud for The Photographic Journal. My next blog post will give the background to my involvement in this story, but for now, an excerpt:
What is the surprising part of being a good photographer? People know the obvious stuff, like composition, and the technical aspects, so what is the additional piece?
The technical shit don’t mean anything; especially today because the cameras are too smart.
Don’t ever get to be a fucking old man, that’s all I gotta say. I don’t know how the hell it happened. When I was shooting pictures, I just thought creatively. You know? And then I used to smoke grass almost every day.
One time an art director asked me, “What do you think about smoking grass every day?” I said, “You want the answer, the truth? It makes me smarter.” When I do a couple of hits on a joint my mind opens up. There is fucking no question about it.
And I’ll tell you something else, I am very lucky. My mother told me that I had a guardian angel. I quit school when I was 16. I was very fucked up because I couldn’t spell. I’m 89 now; I still can’t spell.
When I was young, in my mother’s house, there was a big mirror over the couch. Every Christmas I would paint Santa Claus and the reindeers on the mirror. And underneath it, I would write out “Merry Christmas.”
One year I took my girlfriend (and future wife) home to meet my parents for the holidays. We ate, and it was fun and nice. When we got in the car to drive her home, she said, “Can I ask you a question? Why did it say ‘Mary Chirpmes’ under the reindeers on the mirror?” I had written that; I couldn’t fucking spell, and my mother and father never said a fucking word.
Top Image: Bud Endress is concerned about lens flare. Portrait by Chris Buck, Summer 2024, Beaver Lake, NJ.
Second Image: Friskies print ad. Bud: “Everybody said, ‘Never in a million years can you get a cat do that!’ I called the animal wrangler, and described the shot, and she said, ‘Okay.’ I watched her on set: she took her finger, dipped it in peanut butter, and scooped it into the roof of the cat’s mouth. The fucking cat sat there for 40 minutes licking it off!”
Third Image: Eastern Airlines ad. Bud describes how they mapped out the position hundreds of airline employee subjects: “I went to a sailing store, and I bought $450 of soft rope. I went on top with the camera, with a copy of the layout on a piece of acetate. I was looking in the camera, and we talked through walkie talkies. I said to my assistant, “Keep the rope tight, and walk this way.” And he did, then the rope went to here, to here, to here, to here. [Gestures as if to indicate the oval outline in the layout.] Every time it would match the line on the acetate, I would say, “Tape it, tape it, tape it.” And we went around the whole thing.”
Bottom Image: Mercedes brochure. Bud: “I had an overhead light bank that was 20 feet x 15 feet wide. It was a Chimera bank that had eight heads in there. The instructions from this focus guy was like, “Don’t shoot it from the back. I hate the back.’ The car arrived, and the first thing I did was shoot it from the back.”