Every wall in his Grandview Heights house has at least one photograph on it. The family room wall is covered, from floor to ceiling, with art – most of them pieces Tony Mendoza himself shot during the 41 years of his photography career.
In some of the more recent works, giant flowers tower against the skies. All these flower landscapes were shot in the same manner – low angle, with a flash – in the same location – at Wallace Community Gardens. These photos, as well as some of the images of Mendoza’s dog, Bob, will be on display at the Grandview Heights Public Library throughout September.
There are a handful of exceptions hanging on Mendoza’s wall, too: a print of an oil painting depicting Mendoza’s family more than 100 years ago and a giant painting of his wife, Carmen Mendoza, by former Columbus College of Art and Design President Denny Griffith, among others. The painting was a trade, Mendoza explains. He took some photos for Griffith and got the portrait in exchange.
Mendoza’s years an art professor at The Ohio State University began in 1988, shortly after he and Carmen married and started a family.
“Teaching became a necessity the moment I got married … started a family, needed health insurance – and that was the end of the freelance life,” Mendoza says. “I figured, ‘OK, I really can’t afford to be a freelance artist,’ and how else do artists earn a living? And a very good way to do that is teaching, which gives you a salary, but also you have free time if you teach at a university, and you can keep doing what you like to do, which is do your own projects. So it kind of worked out.”
The tenure-track position was a stark difference from the beginnings of his art career, living in a Boston commune and subsisting on less than $8,000 a year. Mendoza, a native of Cuba, had been a Yale- and Harvard-educated engineer-turned-architect, but decided just three years into that job that he’d had enough of the corporate life.
“In 1973 I quit my job as an architect and became an artist. I hated the routine of having to go to work every day and, particularly, having to get up at seven in the morning,” Mendoza writes in Stories, one of his books, on a page accompanied by a black-and-white photo of a clock. “On my last day of work I walked to the tip of Lewis Wharf and threw my wat
ch and alarm clock into Boston Harbor.”
Though he had started taking photos young with a Brownie camera, he had delved deeper into photography as part of his architecture training, taking photos of buildings and developing them himself in the darkroom.
“I thought I was good at it, and people really liked my work and plus (I was) having these little shows,” Mendoza says. “Everybody really liked the shows, so I kept getting reassured that I was good at this, and I plugged away and kept at it, hung in there and had a little bit of success – enough so I could stay in the profession.”
But that success didn’t come until the 1980s. After seven years in the commune, Mendoza decided it was time to make a big move to New York City, where he shared an a loft with a darkroom in Tribeca with a roommate and the roommate’s cat, Ernie. His rent was $600, and he had difficulty making ends meet.
“I didn’t have money to go out, and I basically started looking at this cat,” Mendoza says. “I’d never lived with a cat before. It was like going to a foreign country, looking at this thing and its antics. I became fascinated by it and started photographing Ernie every day. After about two years, I had so many pictures of the cat that I put it all in a box and started taking it to publishers.”
He couldn’t find anyone to accept it until he added words. A simple story – told alternately from his and Ernie’s perspectives – won over a publisher and the hearts of readers. Ernie: A Photographer’s Memoir sold over 100,000 copies.
It seemed he had struck upon a winning concept. His next project, Stories, followed a similar formula – black-and-white photos and short, straightforward tidbits about his life, family and friends.
He shot exclusively in black and white for years, until the advent of digital
photography. Mendoza, who is colorblind, didn’t trust himself to properly develop color film. With the help of computers and Adobe Photoshop, he made the switch to shooting with a dSLR in 2003 and hasn’t looked back.
“I don’t miss it at all,” he says of his years in the darkroom, breathing in developing chemicals. “Digital kind of revitalized my interest in photography.”
After 25 years as an OSU professor, Mendoza retired last spring. His novel, A Cuban Summer, a fictionalized memoir of his coming-of-age years in 1950s Cuba was published last fall. Making the transition to telling a story words only after so many years working with both photos and words was a challenge, but an enjoyable one, he says.
“The novel was an outcome of actually doing a lot of photography work that involved combining photographs and writing. Writing had always been something that I knew I could do; at least, I could do it in a very short form. I was very good at writing paragraphs. So all my books involve very short writing with photographs,” Mendoza says. “In 1996 I went to Cuba and I tried writing a little more. That worked out.”
His book, Cuba: Going Back, has 80 pages of text and 80 photographs.
“It was a more sustained writing effort,” he says. “That book was a revelation to me because I didn’t know I could write for at least 80 pages, and then I became curious if I could write a novel.”
He started writing A Cuban Summer shortly afterward.
“Cubans just seem to have a hard time forgetting Cuba, and that seemed to be operating with me, too,” Mendoza says. “I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed growing up there, so why not set a story in that culture and try to recreate what that was about? And I kind of looked at it from the point-of-view of a 13-year-old boy, mostly because as a 13-year-old boy, I did a lot of crazy things.”
He still shoots photos for his various projects; animals are among his fa
vorite subjects. In his home office he shares images and stories with friends on Facebook. A large-format printer gives him independence and relatively low overhead for his work.
Currently, Mendoza is seeking a publisher for The Book of Bob, a book in the vein of Ernie, featuring images and stories about his long-haired dachshund from 2006 on. He and Carmen also have a cat and two children, Alex and Lydia, both adults. Carmen teaches Spanish at Grandview Heights High School.
Mendoza’s hobbies include playing tennis. At age 73, he plays three times a week when his back isn’t bothering him.
Lisa Aurand is editor of Tri-Village Magazine. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagorup.com.
