Taking a closer look at face value of money
Seth Dickerman’s inspiration as a photographer came from driving an ice cream truck during his college years in Pittsburgh.
A steady flow of coins and dollar bills while he was delivering sweets gave Dickerman a chance to study the currency imagery between ringing the bell and waiting for customers to come to the Good Humor Man.
His fascination with the faces on the money outlasted his interest in selling ice cream, and 40 years later Dickerman still loves to gaze at money — up close with a microscope-like view camera .
Dickerman’s pictures of loose change from everyday transactions compose “Currency,” an exhibit of enlargements of his photos of the detailed faces of the presidents who circulate on U.S. money. The show opens on Presidents Day at Dickerman Prints, a working press on Howard Street in the South of Market neighborhood; it is on view through March 16.
“You can look into their eyes,
and you can see them looking back at you,” Dickerman says, staring at a George Washington photo enlargement on the wall.
“I wanted to bring them back as portraits so you could see them as not just money, not just symbols, but as people.”
On Monday, Feb. 18, he will set up his 8-by-10-inch view camera so visitors can look through it and see the source for an image that is enlarged 10,000 percent on the wall. The portrait taken from a 50-cent piece reveals every strand of hair on the side of John F. Kennedy’s head.
“You can see all kinds of wear,” he says. “You can see where it’s been. Because each coin has circulated for years and years, it has a whole history.”
Though Dickerman is opening his show on the national holiday, he has the same opinion of Presidents Day as many Baby Boomers — that it is a phony abridgment. He can remember when Abraham Lincoln and Washington each merited a day off from school in honor of their birthdays. He is still unhappy about them being rolled into the generic Presidents Day holiday.
“February was the best month in school because you had two holidays off,” he says. “They changed it and they cheapened it. Presidents Day is now as much Nixon’s Day as Washington’s Day.” (Dickerman has had it in for Richard Nixon since he decided to photograph him on TV screens while watching the Watergate hearings as a high schooler on Long Island.)
Dickerman arrived at Carnegie Mellon University as an industrial arts major but switched to art halfway through to focus on photography. That was also around the time he got the job as the Good Humor Man.
His regular route went from Pittsburgh to Steubenville, Ohio, 45 minutes away. Dickerman remembers that one of his steady customers was a kid who paid in silver from his coin collection. Dickerman hung onto these rare coins and started studying the imagery.
“When I was a kid, there weren’t so many heroes around,” he says, “and presidents were a big deal.”
“Because each coin has circulated for years and years, it has a whole history.”
Seth Dickerman, photographer
Dickerman recalls that he had just gotten over his disappointment with Nixon when Ronald Reagan came along. He found the actor and powdered soap pitchman to be less than presidential, so he took solace in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on a dime.
“I remember looking at it and thought, ‘Wow, he’s so handsome and dignified,’ “recalls Dickerman, 62, who has been in San Francisco for 25 years but still carries a slight New York accent. “Roosevelt looks like a Greek statue.”
Dickerman exhibited his series once, in 2000, in Palo Alto. He thought he was finished with it and had gone back to landscape photography when he was disappointed yet again by the presidential election of 2016. He made a whole new set of archival pigment prints, darkening them to reflect the times.
Included are Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Roosevelt and Kennedy. Washington and Lincoln get two images each because they are both in profile on coins and full face on bills.
In addition to constantly fishing through his pockets, Dickerman dug up the source material for the images on the coins and bills. The Washington image on the dollar bill came from a 1776 painting by Gilbert Stuart. The Lincoln penny came from a photograph by Anthony Berger of the Mathew Brady Studio.
The $50 bill with Grant on it is as high as Dickerman goes. As a printer, he doesn’t see anything larger.
“Woodrow Wilson is on the $10,000 bill,” he says. “I don’t have that.”
Regrettably, Dickerman could not use the silver coins he had collected on the ice cream truck in Pittsburgh. They were stolen. But he prefers pocket change anyway. All of the coins on display had made their way to San Francisco when he shot them.
“I look for coins that have some character about them,” he says. “If you look at 10 dimes, they’re all different because of where they’ve been and how they’ve got beaten up.”