» Photographer Ahlhauser dies:
Ahlhauser was Journal photographer
John Ahlhauser, a photographer for The Milwaukee Journal, newspapers and magazines who mentored and taught many photographers who won Pulitzer Prizes, dies at age 92.
John Ahlhauser photographed civil rights protesters and presidents, the famous and the unknown, but perhaps his most celebrated subject was a budding actress who visited The Milwaukee Journal in 1949.
Ahlhauser happened to be on duty in the Journal’s photo studio, where his first job was mixing chemicals.
A publicity manager making the Milwaukee media rounds brought the woman to the newspaper for an interview and then sent her to the photo studio, where an editor told Ahlhauser to “make a glamour shot of this starlet. There was no mention of her name because she was a nobody,” he recalled in an interview at his home at St. John’s on the Lake in Milwaukee four years ago.
Ahlhauser spent half an hour on the assignment, setting up three or four klieg-like lights and posing her on a gray box with a roll of newsprint. Using a bulky 4 by 5 Speed Graphic, he made seven black and white negatives, which he later kept in a bank lockbox.
“I don’t remember any conversation. But, boy, any time I was ready to shoot, she was ready to be shot,” recalled Ahlhauser of the day he met Marilyn Monroe.
Ahlhauser, 92, died Tuesday after a brief illness at home.
Not only was Ahlhauser a photographer for The Milwaukee Journal for more than two decades, but he managed to reinvent himself midway through his career and focus his energies on what he foresaw — a day when photos would no longer be on film but on computer screens.
Ahlhauser was a visionary who mentored and taught many photographers who won Pulitzer Prizes and worked for leading newspapers and magazines.
Born in Milwaukee, Ahlhauser graduated from Marquette High School and served as an Army radio intercept operator in the Pacific duringWorldWar II. After the war, he earned a journalism degree at Marquette University in 1948 and applied for a job at The Milwaukee Journal, initially hoping for a reporting position but when none was available, he was hired in the photo department, said his daughter Mame O’Meara.
He shot political conventions, presidential inaugurations, papal visits, poverty in Appalachia, civil rights workers and migrant farmers. He photographed Frank Lloyd Wright’s funeral and Eleanor Roosevelt.
“He loved it. He knew that he was covering, in many cases, everyday stories, but he said he always trusted he would get the exact right story,” said O’Meara.
C. Thomas Hardin met Ahlhauser as they stood on the photo stand at President Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in January 1965, shooting pictures for their newspapers, the Louisville Courier Journal and Milwaukee Journal.
They saw each other at assignments in Washington, D.C., and both got involved with the National Press Photographers Association, each serving as president. Their paths also crossed at the Kalish Visual Editing Workshop, which Ahlhauser and his wife, Lois, started many years ago and named after former Milwaukee Journal photo editor Stan Kalish.
“He was way ahead of the average person. If not the first, he was one of the earliest photographers to shoot color at the Journal, and I believe the first color photo layout at the Journal was produced by John,” said Hardin.
By the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ahlhauser noticed the growing use of computers and began to think about the future of photojournalism, which he thought would someday lead to digital cameras. After covering the 1972 presidential conventions, he took a leave of absence from the Journal and moved to Indiana to earn his master’s degree. His leave turned into a couple of decades as he eventually earned a PhD at Indiana University and was hired to teach.
“I wasn’t any great seer,” Ahlhauser said in the 2012 interview. “These were things I was hearing. I wondered what there was to this stuff. I had my own prejudices. I didn’t want to let go of film, but my interest was in getting the job done better with cheaper paper, faster film, not having to change rolls.”
Ahlhauser was being modest. He was a seer in a way.
“He was one of the first people I remember talking about digital journalism,” said Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer Rick Wood, one of Ahlhauser’s students at Indiana. “He talked about the day when information would be delivered on computers and how journalism would be packaged. This was in the late ’70s. He was very much a visionary in our field before publishers knew what would happen.”
Jim Brown knew Ahlhauser at Indiana University, where they overlapped briefly as graduate students and later when Ahlhauser helped
arrange visits by professional photojournalists for Brown at the University of Minnesota. Brown returned to Indiana University in1982, where Ahlhauser was hired as a tenure track professor after earning his doctorate. When Brown interviewed Ahlhauser for a yet-to-be released documentary, he learned Ahlhauser had a special knack for recognizing and mentoring talented photographers.
“He was an innovator while a working press photographer and one of the earliest people to recognize the changing tide in the way newspapers were going to be produced, that is — becoming more electronic and interactive,” said Brown, executive associate dean emeritus at Indiana University.
When photographer Michel du Cille, who earned three Pulitzer Prizes for the Miami Herald and Washington Post, was Ahlhauser’s student at Indiana University, he was short of cash and needed a car for a summer internship. Ahlhauser co-signed the car loan for him.
Later in life, Ahlhauser and his wife moved back to Milwaukee, where he decorated the walls of his floor at St. John’s on the Lake with photos he took as a Journal photographer.
He owned three digital cameras but took few pictures because he didn’t feel comfortable using them and asked his children to show him how to snap photos with his cellphone.
“When I pick up a digital camera now, even though I advocated for it, I have a terrible time,” Ahlhauser admitted in 2012. “It is nice but it’s not the routine.”