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If he isn't staying with Howery while in Austin, his local residency remains a mystery. Musk told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that he splits his time mostly evenly between Austin's new Tesla Gigafactory and SpaceX in South Texas. Since his term ended, Howery has spent his time traveling, further making many believe Musk would stay there in the meantime. In the latter half of the Trump administration, Howery was U.S.
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The three men are part of the “PayPal Mafia,” a term for former executives who grew in success. Howery also co-founded Founders Fund- a venture capital fund that has supported Musk’s companies- with investor Peter Thiel. Chandoha’s response to a question about other cat photographers who inspired him sounds unbelievable to modern ears: “I was never aware of cat photographs at all,” he says.Friend Howery co-founded the multi-national financial tech company PayPal, which Musk worked at as an executive early in his career.
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With a seemingly infinite supply, demand for cat photos is now at an all-time low. Sadly for all the amateurs out there, Chandoha-level commercial success as a cat photographer probably isn’t possible in this day and age it was partly the novelty of his work that made it famous at the time. And then we’d take the cat and put him on the set and fire the strobes off a couple of times and finally the cat says, Hey, it’s just a light, what do I care? And then we’d begin shooting.” “After a while the cat says, Hey, this is not so bad, he’s not harming me, you know. In Chandoha’s case, this handler was his wife, Maria, whom he calls “my secret to success.” “We’d spend half a day with a cat, just petting him or fixing my lights or doing something in the studio,” Chandoha says. The eye contact has to be just right.”Īlso important: patience, and having an “animal charmer and handler” on set. It’s the same with cats! For example, if one cat would be looking out this way and another looking somewhere completely different, that’s no good. If there were two people, their eye attention was directed to one focal point. The nice thing about the Rockwell pictures is that the line of sight is always centralized. What’s the secret to a good, successful cat photograph? “I would say, for my photographs, I like the eye contact,” Chandoha says in an interview printed in the book. (“Due to their association with softness, my cat photos even ended up on a package for brassieres,” Chandoha says in the Aperture book.) Since the late 1940s, his images have also appeared in countless ads and on packaging for pet-food and other products.
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Chandoha has published over 30 books of cat photography, including All Kinds of Cats (1952), How to Photograph Cats, Dogs, and Other Animals (1973), The Literary Cat (1977), and Walter Chandoha’s Book of Cats and Kittens (1983). This isn’t the first book of Chandoha’s work, but it’s the first to present it as art, and the first to frame Chandoha as the godfather of a now ubiquitous genre. “They bear examination not only for their singular charm, but also for the way Chandoha established a vocabulary of the studio animal portrait with his signature look, utilizing clean, brightly colored backdrops and high-key ‘glamour’ backlighting of his tiny, fuzzy subjects.” Photograph from ‘Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer’ (Aperture, 2015) (click to enlarge)Ī new book from Aperture, Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer, compiles his best feline glamour shots, which straddle the line between commercial portraiture and fine art photography. “With the Internet awash in cat pictures, Chandoha’s images might be seen as the forefather to them all,” David La Spina and Brittany Hudak write in the book’s introduction.