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'Time capsule' comes into focus Photo by Jim Craven Photographer W. Scott Frazeur, of Grants Pass, has been taking pictures for almost 40 years. Photo exhibit depicts life's work By BILL VARBLE When they asked Scott Frazeur to put together some of his photographs for an exhibit, the implications didn't hit him at first. "It's like going through a time capsule," says Frazeur, 58, sitting surrounded by photos, frames, computers and photo stuff at his home near Merlin. Frazeur retired as a U.S. Navy chief photographer in 1983 and started a new career as a commercial photographer. Picking 80 photos to display wasn't easy. "I've gone through 42 years of negatives and prints," he says. The exhibit runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday in the Arts and Crafts Building at the Josephine County Fair. Admission is free. A Friday night party to kick off the event is by invitation only. Photo by Scott Frazeur Frazeur snapped this picture of flamenco dancer Mary Magdalena in a club in Spain 1960. After 40 years of shooting pictures in Europe, Asia and all over the United States, Frazeur looks at the exhibit and sees a record of a lifetime. "You start thinking what if ...?" he says. He shot Soviet ships after they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar as the Cuban Missile Crisis was heating up in October of 1982, and the world seemed to peek into the thermonuclear abyss. "Some of those shots of ships with missiles on them people saw in the news were mine," he says. There's the Essex, the aircraft carrier, caught in 1960 dockside in Rota, Spain, in the gathering darkness at a slow exposure. "I was going through my slow exposure phase," Frazeur says. There's Maria Magdalena, a flamenco dancer he shot in black and white in an enlisted men's club in Spain, also in 1960. "I was going through my club phase," he says. The 19-year-old beauty with the flashing eyes would be a woman of almost 60 now. There are lots of shots of planes, such as an S2F anti-submarine plane over the Golden Gate in California. There are mug shots of tropical fish (a Frazeur hobby) and a very large tarantula. There's Judy, one of his adopted daughters, at age 2 in a sink for a bath near Yokosuka, Japan. Frazeur says he greased official palms with cartons of cigarettes to cut through the adoption red tape. There's a young Frazeur in 1965 holding an F-56, a large, fixed focus aerial camera, facing a future that must have stretched infinitely ahead. Many of the photos were taken with large-format cameras such as Speed Graphics. Frazeur got started in photography when he got a little Kodak Ciro 35-millimeter single lens reflex camera in 1958. He found he loved taking pictures of horses. "Everybody else had Brownies," he says. "It was sort of cool." He joined the Navy to be a photographer and was on active duty from 1960 to 1969 and in the Naval Reserve through 1983. He started Oregon Image Masters in 1984. These days he does a lot of aerial photography. "I enjoy it," he says. "I'm good at it." His main customers are Realtors and insurance companies, and he shoots from a helicopter instead of the RC45-J Beechcraft reconnaissance plane he used in the Navy. He composes frame-filling images and usually has the printing done commercially. "I'm a technician, not an artist," he says. He says in the Navy he had the opportunity to shoot all kinds of film in all kinds of cameras in all kinds of conditions. "The education you get in the military cannot be purchased," he says. He likes black and white. "Color can be a crutch," he says. "What you see in black and white is what you get. I faithfully reproduce what I see." He uses a Nikon F-3 without all the latest automatic gizmos, a Pentax 6-by-7 for aerial work and a 4-by-5-inch Crown Graphic for studio work. He battled a case of burnout in about 1982 but found he kept going back to the camera. "It becomes a habit," he says. "Then it becomes an extension of the hand." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA