Photographing people is Magnus' love
By LEO STUTZIN
BEE ARTS EDITOR
(Published: Sunday, December 10, 2000)
Photographer Floyd Randal Magnus -- Randy to his friends and public -- shoots people: family, friends, new acquaintances and strangers alike.
He shoots Hawaiian surfers, counterculture revelers in the Bay Area, ethnic groups in the Central Valley and others.
He did it well enough in the early '70s to have several works accepted for the Oakland Museum collection when he was a teen-ager; he does it well enough right now to have earned a one-man show at California State University, Stanislaus. It runs through Thursday.
That work draws on the tradition of using photographs to record Americans and their way of living, as practiced by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Nicholas Nixon.
But Magnus differs from them in several conspicuous ways: One is his use of color since the early '80s; another -- the more-defining aspect -- is a breadth of focus that encompasses disparate groups, essentially at play, rather than searching for deep insights into their individual or communal lives.
The current show includes some 30 images, mostly large prints made in the past few years of people on happy occasions: festivals, parades, performances, recreation, relaxation.
"It's all documenting the things that I enjoy being at," he said recently, in the gallery. "I feel at home at a Chinese New Year's festival and at the West Coast Art Car Festival. I enjoy relating to these people and appreciating what they do."
That breadth, along with technical skill that brought Magnus the best-in-show prize at a Turlock art show last year, caught the eye of Stan State gallery director Sophia Isajiw.
"What sets him apart is ... his approach to going into communities and visiting them on a regular basis, and recording this special thing that happens between him and the people he's photographing," she said.
"Not many photographers do what Randy does very well."
Another reason for giving him the solo exhibition was demographic. Isajiw wanted to show someone local.
Tall and lanky, with hesitant speech patterns that suggest shyness, Magnus fits that bill perfectly.
He grew up in south Modesto, attended Modesto High School and Modesto Junior College before leaving for a few years to earn a degree in photography at San Francisco Art Institute.
He returned and established Leonard's Artspace, a small Modesto gallery that displayed modernist visual art, housed intimate concerts and provided a studio for his own experiments in sound as art.
For the past 13 years or so, he has produced the wide-ranging "Art Television" show on cable in Modesto.
He credits his mother for directing him toward art, a break from a family that was "pretty much farmers, and my dad was a mechanic."
In elementary school, Magnus tells, he always attended summer school, taking one art class and one academic course each year.
By high school, he was taking still pictures and making documentary films even though he didn't own a camera.
"I used to borrow cameras," he explained.
"My first camera was given to me by a local minister. He knew I was going off to college to major in photography, but I didn't have a camera.
"His son had a Sears camera that was broken. He took it to Sears and they fixed it for free and he gave it to me."
Fancy equipment never has been his thing. Even now.
Most of the current show was shot with a 1980s vintage Olympus XA, a pocket-size 35mm range-finder camera.
He feels it helps him get comfortable with his subjects.
"People react differently to the appearance of a big, pretentious camera," Magnus said.
But he doesn't use the little tool surreptitiously.
"I don't sneak pictures. I'm right up front where the action is."
Regardless of whom he's shooting, Magnus always connects first.
"I take the time to hang out with them and actually listen," he said. At staged events, like festivals, "Quite often I'll help them set up."
If a potential subject doesn't want to be photographed, he won't force the issue. If someone wants to control what Magnus shoots, it's "Thanks, but no thanks," and no hard feelings.
"That's fine with me," he said. "There are plenty of others that are receptive."
The current show demonstrates his ability to win friends in all sorts of environments.
Aside from his family portraits from the '70s, the most intimate photo was shot during a Chinese New Year celebration in a Modesto home.
Magnus joined the festivities as a guest of honor, in a hierarchial seating arrangement that placed him beside the patriarch's second-oldest son.
The image shows the 90-year-old patriarch handing a $20 bill to a gleeful granddaughter, who had won it by finding a coin. The gift is a traditional gesture of good luck for the coming year.
Other images touch on Cambodian New Year festivities and Indian dancers in Modesto, surfers on Hawaii's Big Island, Stanford's iconoclastic marching band and three color-filled events in San Francisco: a gathering of "art cars" decorated with all manner of objects, from small toy lions to other cars; a block party with a silver-hued old school bus, dubbed Cyberbuss, as its centerpiece; and a Latin street carnival with participants dressed like revelers at Rio's Carnaval, wearing very little, with lots of glitter.
Almost all have the spontaneous look of snapshots.
"People sometimes don't see the photograph as a piece of art, and that's good," Magnus says. "It means they're seeing right through the technique to the message."
Many of the same messages can be seen, in motion, on his "Art Television" show, at 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 9 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m. Saturdays on Cable Channel 8 in Modesto.
"Randy Magnus: Community Stories, Adopted Cultures" runs through Thursday in the California State University, Stanislaus, Art Gallery. Open noon-4 p.m. and by appointment. 667-3186, 667-3231.