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Douglas Busch is celebrated for shooting large-format photographs that capture reality more accurately than you can actually see it. (Image by Christina Gandolfo)

Douglas (Doug) Busch, ’74 FFA, now 73, is still lithe in a tucked-in, black, long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, red New Balances and stylish glasses with circular frames. His thick hair has gone gray. The photographer—whose work is shown in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art—has spent half-a-lifetime shooting strikingly crisp photographs on homemade, almost impossibly large-format cameras. A standard film camera’s negative is 24mm by 36mm, meaning the final image is quadrupled in size by the time it becomes a 4-inch by 6-inch print. Busch’s printed images are the same size as the negatives, which in his largest camera are an unprecedented 40 inches by 60 inches. So, nothing is lost in development. You can read license plates, see shoelaces untied. Every detail is crystal clear.

The process to capture those images is a grueling one. That 40 by 60 camera—the largest portable camera made—weighs about 300 pounds. The 12-inch by 20-inch and 20-inch by 24-inch cameras are not light either. That means to take a shot, Busch lugs the large-format camera to a position, sets it up, finds the perfect view, and then sits through a 30-minute to 2-hour-long exposure. It’s not until he’s returned to his dark room to develop the film that he knows whether it’s all been worth it.

As we sit in his studio, connected to his ranch-style home in a still rural part of Calabasas (the city near Los Angeles is also home to the Kardashians, Will Smith, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus), I ask Busch, if as he approaches the end of his career, he wishes he’d taken more pictures. Busch has been reclined, one foot up on a long wooden worktable that sits between us. Now, he leaps from his chair, searches for the right key, and unlocks a door I hadn’t noticed behind him. “You’ve seen all the photographers that have all these flat files full of unsuccessful photos,” he says. He beckons me into the hidden closet and points at two medium-sized file cabinets. “Here’s all my work.”

For Busch, each photograph is a commitment. Over the years, he dragged the heavy cargo to many places, set up, looked at the ground glass under a dark cloth and decided the shot just wasn’t right. His is the antithesis of the democratized, and perhaps cheapened, iPhone photography of today. There is no snapping 100 to find the right one. There is no cropping. There are no added filters. Busch’s process is closer to that of a portrait painter. All of the composition is done on the ground glass.

He says he once talked his wife into a trip to Yosemite, set up his camera at a vista, went under the cloth to look through the viewfinder, didn’t like what he saw, and then tore down the camera to get ready to leave. “She said, ‘Why don’t you take the picture? You already set up,’” Busch recalls. “And I said, ‘Because it doesn’t work, so why take the picture?’” The weight of the camera, the taxing set up and the length of the exposure all serve to alter the photographic process. “You see people walk around and take a picture of the same thing from different angles. Well, there’s no commitment there!” Busch says. “My attitude? You walk. You look. You figure it out. Negative space. Positive space. And then you make a commitment to that image.”

Doug Busch leads a photography workshop at Big Sur, Calif. He custom builds his own large-format cameras, the largest of which shoots an image 40-in. by 60-in. and weighs 300 pounds. Busch’s expertise in large-format cameras led him to launch de Golden Busch Cameras, which designs and builds them. (Images courtesy of Douglas Busch and by Christina Gandolfo)

Busch spent a summer at University of California, Berkeley as a teenager, and when he returned home to Illinois, with his hair down his back, he told his mother and stepfather that he’d either be pursuing photography or going to Berkeley to study architecture. “My mother said, ‘No, you’re not, because I’m not paying for out-of-state tuition, and you’re not gonna be out there with all those fruits and nuts,’” Busch says. He complied, as much as possible for someone like Busch, arriving at the U. of I. in the early 1970s. Already committed to his vision, Busch went to the dean of the College of Fine & Applied Arts and pitched his plan for his college education. “I became the first independent study student. I majored in photography, cinematography, graphic design and a minor in architecture,” he says, grinning. “They actually gave me my own dark room.”

Soon enough, he found his tribe at Illinois, living in a house with the famed conceptual photographer Hal Fischer, ’73 FAA, and Terry Pitts, ’72 LAS, MS ’74 IS, who later ran the photography program at the University of Arizona. “We partied hard and we worked hard,” Busch says. “I look at some of these kids now, and they just don’t get it. There’s no fervor.”

During a break, Busch returned home and signed up for a workshop with the legendary photographer Al Weber. Busch made an impression—“I think he knew I was serious”—and Weber “put a tie on and a coat and went to talk to my parents and talked them into sending me out to Carmel, Calif., for a Friends of Photography workshop, which featured many notable photographers.” Weber picked up Busch at the airport and let him stay at his home in the coastal California town. It was there that Busch met Ansel Adams.

Adams’s large format shots of Yosemite are iconic American art. For Busch though, Adams did not exist in a legendary space. He, Morley Baer and Al Weber were just mentors who shared with Busch the secrets of shadow, exposure length and the dark room. Adams was a generous man who always had a hot toddy ready to pour at 5 p.m. Well, generous to a point. “You didn’t get paid. It was about the privilege of working for Ansel,” Busch recalls. “So now, when I have interns, I pay them. Because it was hard to survive. I didn’t have any money, right? I couldn’t do anything!”

Over the years, Busch has taught as a visiting professor, but finds that the teachers are more interested than the students in his dying art form.

When I ask Busch what he knows now that he wishes he knew at 18, he shakes his head. “I mean, I wish I knew this when I was 30: See, I would never really go past ninety percent,” he says. He’d shoot the photographs, develop them, put the projects together, but then he wouldn’t do the final sales pitch. “I hated that part,” he continues. “So, I don’t have the reputation I probably could have if I would have really pushed it with the galleries and pushed it with the museums. I just didn’t care enough. I was doing the photography for me.”

The other reason he didn’t go all the way in was that photography was never his main source of income. After graduating from Illinois, Busch went to New York City and became a gemologist. He’d shoot photographs of the jewels and of the city with an 8 by 10 camera. One day, he bought an 8 by 20 camera. “I had to tape the film in the film holder, and the lens didn’t have a shutter,” he says. “You’d pull the lens cap off and then put it back on.”

Always mechanical, Busch started tinkering with the “flimsy old cameras.” He quickly discovered how to build a better one, designing new lenses and film holders, for which he now holds the patents. Busch also spent years as an architectural designer, creating sustainable and healthy homes and buildings. “I’m right brained and left brained,” he says. “I made my money with architectural design and construction of the vision.”

One of Busch’s oldest friends, a photographer and former professor named Peter Le Grand, recalls first meeting Busch in Rockford, Ill., inside an old Salvation Army Store. This was the early 1980s, and Busch had bought the building, and was using it as his home, studio and gallery, while also renting out a few apartments on the second floor. At the same time, he was starting his own company to manufacture and sell his large-format cameras. “Doug undertook both the projects of starting a business and doing the rehab of that building at the same time. Why not?” Le Grand says through a smile. “It only takes effort, and he loved to be busy.”

Later, Busch moved to Los Angeles, spending a fortune turning a compound-sized property in Malibu’s Trancas Canyon into an architectural showcase that garnered media attention around the world. “He had that house there with an infinity pool that literally went to infinity,” Le Grand says. “It was an incredible place.”

Still, what most impressed Le Grand about his friend was that he was undeterred. Busch sold it for a loss, walked away, and said, “let’s just go to work tomorrow and see what we can come up with. And he’s recovered beautifully.” I ask Le Grand if he sees a connection between Busch’s architectural design and his photography. Is the obsessive streak that leads one to lug a camera up a hill for one shot the same that’s needed to build an estate with a 4,000-foot studio that sits above a massive koi pond? “That’s always been Doug’s forte,” Le Grand says. “Risk does not instill fear in him at all.”

In his studio on that summer afternoon, Busch hands me a brochure describing his latest project: The Genos Center Art Museum and Gardens. The project, which will “teach tolerance and inspire reflection through education and the power of art,” will feature exhibition halls, gardens and a non-denominational chapel inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston. “I think we’re getting 40 acres in Simi Valley, not far from the Reagan Library,” Busch says. “Then I have to raise $45 million to build it.”

Busch is also an architect, environmentalist and social activist. His architecture firm, Busch Design Build (BDB), designed the eco-friendly home, (1) Trancas Canyon Malibu, which includes the (2)Trancas Turtle & Koi Rescue, a 40,000-gallon, multi-pond habitat. Other BDB projects include the first “art” solar project for (3) Malibu City Hall and the (4) Genos Center, a “multi-cultural art gallery, non-denominational chapel and reflective gardens focused on eradicating genocides worldwide.” (Images courtesy of Douglas Busch)

As Busch began to search for his own style within the format of his mentors, he found himself moving away from the grandeur of Ansel Adams’ photography. “I kind of looked at Ansel as a majestic photographer. And the longer I photographed, my images became subtler,” Busch says. I mention a quote he once gave: “I am interested in presenting reality more accurately than I can actually see it.” He nods, and points to a black-and-white shot from Chicago, where you can see a streetscape in crisper detail than if you’d been there. “I wasn’t interested in majestic.”

Busch says, over the years, he started to question his mentors’ project of capturing beauty within a frame. “Where’s the socially relevant stuff that makes people think about what their feelings are? Their bigotries?”

So, he’s started focusing on genocide, with the Genos Center Foundation, but also with his other work. The door to the closet that held all his negatives is covered with collages of Holocaust iconography. Busch points to another canvas on the far wall. “The blood dripping down there is really my blood,” he says.

As our conversation nears its end, Busch asks if I’ve been to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. He says that’s where the Navajo believe heaven and Earth come together. He quotes the photographer Minor White: “Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.”

“So if you believe that,” Busch says, “then there is no picture you’re wanting to take that you haven’t taken.” The last five times he was at Canyon de Chelly, he brought his camera but never took a photograph. “I just sat on the rim and watched the walls go golden,” he says. “Certain pictures are just for you.”

Busch walks me out to my car, parked in the gravel lot adjacent to his home. As I open the door and sit down, he tells me he knows the perfect topic for my next story. “What’s all this work we do for when you’ll only be remembered by your kids and friends and grandkids if you’re lucky?” he says. “Like, what are they gonna do with all my photos when I’m gone?”

He says that his best friend, the painter Stephen W. Douglas, had died the week before. His wife had asked Busch where she’s supposed to put all his canvases. Busch is silent for a moment, and I wait in that strange limbo, seated, half-turned, holding the door ajar. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about, I guess: our legacy.” he finally says. Then he waves goodbye.

PORTFOLIO
A sampling of photographer Doug Busch’s work

Busch’s photographs are displayed in major museums and collected in numerous books.

“Abandoned Aviary (2005),” Villa Arvedi, Italy, Italian Gardens (Edition Braus, 2006) (Image courtesy of Douglas Busch)

“Little Rocky Glen,” Tunkhannock, Pa. (1984), displayed in the Smithsonian (Image courtesy of Douglas Busch)

“Wave 3145 (2003),” published in Silent Waves (Paper Mirror Press, 2006) (Image courtesy of Douglas Busch)

“Railroad Tracks 270 (1986),” In Plain Sight (Rockford, Ill.: Photo Department, 1992) (Image courtesy of Douglas Busch)

“Trailer, Salton Sea, California (1994),” Retrospective (Edition Braus, 2005) (Image courtesy of Douglas Busch)