I never got to know Bill Jay, though looking at his site I found one small thing that we had in common; both of us were first published in Practical Photography. I got seriously involved in photography a little after he had given up editing Creative Camera and just after the splendid but short-lived year of issues of his own magazine Album. He had moved to America, at first to study with Van Deren Coke and Beaumont Newhall at the University of New Mexico, and then going on to Arizona State University where he founded the Photographic Studies program. I heard stories about him (few of which could be repeated in print) and later read many of his essays and several of his fine books on photography, and saw his portraits of photographers.
Bill Jay died peacefully in his sleep last Sunday, in Samara in Costa Rica where he had recently gone to live. His web site show the great debt we owe him as well as his great generosity, offerening free downloads of his many articles about photography, as well as 11 of the of 12 issues of Album. I’ve a few of the original issues, but I’ll certainly download the rest to complete my set (or rather almost complete it, as issue 9 is missing,) though they are around 15-20Mb each, so don’t try this on dial-up.
Jay had a great love for photography, and was a decent photographer, as his portraits of photographers and others show, but looking at the portraits of the perhaps 30 of so in his list that I’ve met, there are few that really seem to catch the person for me; his real strength was as a writer. Writing about photography well isn’t easy and many of his articles required a great deal of painstaking research as well as the actual writing. Thanks to him we know a great deal more about some of the less obvious aspects of our medium, but perhaps more importantly his writing has inspired others – photographers included – to think and appreciate the medium more deeply.
I tried to contact Bill about the missing Issue 9, but it was just about the time he moved to Costa Rica and, as he didn’t ‘do e-mail’ often (if at all), I never managed to get a reply.
I was offered a nearly complete set of Album a few years back; regret now not being astute enough to scrape together the necessary cash. The prices that issues command now are just plain silly – all credit to Bill for posting them online.
Interesting that you found the portraits of photographers that you’ve met to be ‘wanting’ in some respects; I enjoy his portrait style and the photographs of the handful or so that I’ve met always seemed to me to encapsulate their ‘essence’ rather well.