Artist Bio

Ira Gardner has taught photography at Spokane Falls Community College for the past 10 years and serves as chair of the Applied Visual Arts department.

Ira studied photography at SFCC and went on to complete a degree in Communication Studies and Journalism at EWU. He is currently studying multimedia and filmmaking in the Media Studies Graduate program at the New School University in New York.

He has worked full time as a professional photographer since 1989 and was nationally certified as a commercial photography by the Professional Photographers of America in 1995.

Ira has served on the board of directors for the Professional Photographers of Washington and is a past president of Spokane Camera Club.

Recently Ira has placed greater emphasis on Fine Art Landscape Photography and Commissioned Portraiture and has over 20 years of work to draw upon.

"My Story"

I was born into the world of photography. My father had owned a portrait studio in L.A. and eventually became so enamored with the technical aspects of photography he started his own camera repair business. He was amazingly talented and became the only authorized repair center for many of the major camera manufacturers like Canon, Nikon, Bell & Howell Projectors and movie cameras.

I loved hanging out at the shop. It was large enough that I had a half court basketball hoop set up in the back. As you can see from the photo above, I had my own work bench as well. My dad would let me tear apart junker cameras and sort the parts. He loves to tell the story about how a man came in with a camera he had just dropped and he needed it repaired super fast before he left for a vacation. His eyes bulged out when my dad looked back at me and said "Ira, do you think you can fit another one in today?" He didn't know I was Ira Jr. and appparently the man saw how efficient I was at taking cameras apart, but was a littled frightened at the prospects of whether or not I would actually be able to put them back together again.!

By the time I was nine years old, my parents had decided to relocate back to Spokane where my father was born and raised. It was quite a culture shock to go from living in L.A. where I was already having a street fight every day after school and where playgrounds didn't have grass, only blacktop and painted lines, to coming to this green and dusty town. 30 years ago we moved into a house on a dirt road that was lined with maple trees and my father returned to the profession of teaching and started the first high school photography program in Spokane.

In high school I decided I was tired of taking physics, calculus, and chemistry and wanted to do something fun my senior year. My father talked me into taking photography from him. He had started teaching my junior year in high school and I can tell you that it was definitely embarassing to show up at my senior prom only to find my parents dancing on the dance floor and serving as chaperones!

Anyway, I took his class and fell in love with making black and white prints in the darkroom. I did more work than anyone and came in early and stayed late. I got a C grade though, because I never managed to work on the assignments, just my own work for fun. Two of my all time favorite prints were made during this first year of photography.

After high school I had decided I wanted to go to Europe and backpack for a year. My parents disagreed with me and argued bitterly about how I needed to go straight to college. I relented but defiantly said "Fine, if I have to go to college it's going to be for something fun instead of all this math and chemistry! I'm signing up for photography!" I finally went backpacking in Switzerland this past September with my wife. It's never too late!

While my parents would have preferred I chart a different course, they supported my academic decision and have grown to appreciate it over time. I started in the Fall of 1987 and studied photography at SFCC with Bill Campbell, Merle Brown, and Mike Rojan. It was such an intense and wonderful experience. Bill Campbell revealed his personal side to us by showing up in a kilt and playing the bagpipes while also occasionally inviting students over to his home darkroom to demonstrate dye transfer and cibachrome color printing.

Merle Brown was the instructor I related to the most. He was a commercial shooter who had been in the business a long time. When the time came for me to decide between working for someone else as an assistant or starting my own studio, Merle told me, "Ira, your good enough to go out and do it on your own. If you run into trouble, give me a call and I'll be glad to help."

With that, I launched my own photography business in 1989. Although my father hadn't been too happy about seeing me struggle to start a self employed career, he did loan me a lot of equipment and agree to be a silent partner. Thus my business name was Gardner & Gardner Partners in Photography.

I spent the first five years of my career doing commercial and industrial advertising photography. I had worked for a printing company and hung out in the darkroom and back where the designer did traditional paste-up layout work. Desktop publishing had just started to emerge as the new paradigm for photography and graphic design. During my first year in business I purchased an HP Scanner for thousands of dollars that now would cost you $50. I marketed myself to small manufacturing companies and managed to make a living providing photography, layout, and prepress services. I was working out of my apartment at this time and I fondly remember my first cell phone that was known as the "brick". My cell phone freed me from having to have a storefront an enabled me to pursue my mountain climbing and skiing. Clients would call and then ask" Ira did you run to the phone, your breathing hard!" when in fact I was up on Mt. Spokane cross country skiing!

After the first five years in the business, my father decided that since I had managed to show him I could make a modest living at photography, he would like to help me grow the business. We ended up leasing a retail storefront up in Lincoln Heights.

While I continued to pursue commercial and industrial photography assignments, more and more walk in traffic showed up wanting portraits. It didn't take long for me to realize that I actually preferred photographing people and having my work end up framed and hanging on their walls instead of in an advertising brochure that often got tossed with junk mail. Our business more than doubled our first year and I realized I didn't have a clue on how to manage all this growth. I ended up developing a network fo five computers and a database management system for tracking sales and the production work for all our orders. I even had a Mac Color Classic stationed in the darkroom with an amber gel over the monitor which acted like a safelight as I printed the many business portraits and wedding announcements that were published in the newspaper. We hired employees (including Mom) and worked 7 days a week during the busy summer months.

In 1995 I was approached by a large photofinishing lab out of Tacoma to start marketing and selling my homegrown business management system. I launched Gold Management Systems that year and began selling software entitled "Studio Gold P.O.S." For the next five years I traveled around the country working with some of the largest and finest studios in the country, providing business and software consulting and programming. One of my largest projects was developing a production management system for Coldwater Creek. Thirteen years later people are still using Studio Gold around the country.

Having grown my business from a basement studio apartment with a Murphy Bed folded up in a closet, to a larger home based business, all the way up to a studio storefront with multiple employees, I have been blessed with many opportunities. In the Fall of 1997 I accepted the position of instructor at SFCC and set about working with many industry leaders to rewrite the curriculum. I've had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors of the Professional Photographers of Washington, and earned my certification from the Professional Photographers of America. I had never planned on doing anything my father had done for a career, but some how I didn't fall too far from the tree and my interest in photography and teaching has grown on its own. Everyday offers new and exciting challenges at the college.

In 2002 Life took a major change and I decided to slow down. I was teaching full time and doing a tremendous amount of free lance photography and consulting work when my health took a nose dive.

Fortunately I survived and it has taken me the past six years to slowly change my life in a manner that will sustain me spiritually and physically. As the mother of one of my students told me after she had gone through a similar experience, "It's a bitter blessing in disguise!" She is right. I have never really had a bad day since I recovered. I am so blessed.

I married the woman of my dreams in 2006 and together with my 11 year old son Ian we have a wonderful time playing baseball, camping, and fishing and traveling.

We recently moved to a small farm house just outside of town and I have been able to refocus my energies towards the type of photography I enjoy the most, fine art and custom portraiture. While the business of photography has switched to digital, I am free to take the slow road and continue to work with large format film.

It's like coming full circle. My first opportunity to work full time as a freelance photographer was the result of a fine art exhibition I did at the Met Theatre in 1989. The work was a series for the Spokane Ballet Company (later renamed Aponte Co.). Since then, I have had the opportunity to exhibit my work in a variety of venues and to participate in an MFA artist residency in Vermont, and to study photogravure printmaking in Brooklyn New York, which has opened many doors of opportunity.

My father has retired from his career teaching photography at Ferris High School and from our business which has also enabled me to step away from our family history of retail business and to chart this new independent course in photography. I hope you enjoy the work and take time to stop by and say hello.

Ira

"I teach everything from basic black and white photography, digital photography, and documentary video production. However, for my personal work, I still prefer to work with large format film. In this day of pixels that can vanish with a power outage, I see intrinsic value in an image that is captured and archived into a precious metal silver halide print. The additional cost, time, and effort required to manufacturer such a traditional image tempers my choices of what images to present and insure that only the most significant images that reflect my strong inner feelings about places and people are revealed."