Although it looks like the product of much planning and special lighting, this portrait of Florida State University Head Coach Bobby Bowden at the 2009 Garnet and Gold game was one of Wallheiser’s “lucky” shots. At 6-feet, 6-inches tall, Wallheiser often had a unique high perspective when he was taking photographs, but he also spent a lot of time on his knees looking for a lower angle. “(Bowden) is lit only by camera flash. I dropped to my knees as he was walking past. At that moment he is hollering at another photographer.”
Chris Paulette walks along a 5-foot in diameter oak tree that split the house he rented in half as Tropical Storm Jeanne passed through Tallahassee in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2004. “The dude, he was in his bed and it was under the tree and his roommate came over, dug him out in the dark and got him out from under the tree.”
Wallheiser worked for eight months in 1988 on his “crack project” which was the scourge of the black communities in and around Tallahassee at the time, taking photos of users in Jefferson County and spending time with law enforcement officers in Tallahassee who were trying to catch crack dealers.
“This picture is from Charlie Crist’s second inauguration in January 2007. I got stuck on what the still and video photographers call the side riser, or cutaway riser. It’s ... not the prime location. Mike Ewen, another Democrat photographer, had the front riser to shoot from, which is where most of the photos that get play come from. You don’t get as many photos from the cutaway but I got a nice frame from there.”
“This is my truck. He pulls up, he’s wanting to see the rocks. When the flash went off I thought he was going to detach a retina. He was running like a scalded dog and they caught him three or four blocks away. They had to find him and arrest him for us to use the photos.”
The young hunter holding the duck is Wallheiser’s 21-year-old son, Justin Wallheiser. “I went duck hunting with him one day. I hadn’t been hunting in years and years and years. He shot (at) about 12 ducks and didn’t hit any. I said ‘Gimme that gun.’ A duck flew by — one duck, not a bunch. I shot one time, killed (the) duck, gave him back his gun and said, ‘That’s how it’s done.’ He’ll remember that and tell it all of his life. Because I had the same thing happen to me with my dad. Floating down a river, he shot a squirrel with a pistol.”
This photo illustrated a story about a married couple in Monticello who were creating sculptures for FSU’s legacy walk. “It was just a regular daily story. I shot there all day. They were nice people, both of them artists. They did these sculptures (in the background) but they also did sculptures of each other — she did his and he did hers. You’re just looking for creative ways to tell a story.”
This photo was shot as Hurricane Kate made its way through the Apalachicola boat basin in November 1985. As Wallheiser was interviewing the missionaries who were trying to save the vessel, the water rose, covering the walkway to shore. “I didn’t know where the walkway was. I had my cameras in plastic bags … jumped out and crawled all the way to shore in the dark. I will never do that again. There were 13 boats in that boat basin. There were three left after the hurricane. They were one of them.”
The Klan was recruiting in 1990, starting with a daytime rally in Tallahassee. Later in the evening, the group would travel to a secluded area in Gadsden County for a cross burning. “As dark fell, I’ve got a picture of them putting the kerosene on the torches. Then they light the cross — and it’s so engulfed you can’t tell it’s a cross — and doing more of their thing. Then, when the cross is over and done I go up to the Grand Wizard — this is the grand pooh-bah, the big cheese — and say, ‘Hey I’d like to get a picture of you.’ They stood there and let me take pictures.”
Wallheiser had a unique perspective on the launch of the space shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005. It was the only time he ever photographed a shuttle launch, which resulted in two pictures he sent to Reuters news service. “I never could decide which I liked better,” he says. “This picture is me transmitting to Singapore — that’s where Reuters circulated out of — from a kayak during the shuttle launch. I am sending pictures on my cellphone, which is probably laying in my lap.”
This photograph of linebacker Kirk Carruthers was taken in the moments after the infamous “wide right” field goal kick that cost the Seminoles a shot at their first national championship in 1991. “The picture I’m more famous for is the kicker walking off the field with tears in his eyes. But to me this is the better picture. One of the reasons it’s my favorite is it’s on the field. The score’s in the background and you don’t normally see football players cry. There was a lot of emotion. That cost them a national championship that year. (Carruthers) lives here. I run into him every now and then.”
Wallheiser calls this photo of what appears to be an offended nun “a found thing on the street” that he saw while walking with his wife, Jeannie, in New York City. “She’s waiting on a bus, is what she’s doing. This is something I’ve done at the newspaper a thousand times. You sit there and when they wipe their face or drop their head, you’re shooting. So much of photojournalism is luck, but it’s less than you would think. You put yourself in the right place at the right time, expecting things. But then you’re just lucky that she bowed her head. That means you’ve got to have the camera up to your eye the whole day. The only thing better would have been if she was in there digging through the underwear.”
Wallheiser photographed George Wallace at the start of his career in Alabama, but says he never did enjoy covering politics. He and the other Democrat photographers avoided the Capitol fray by leaving the day-in, day-out coverage to Mark Foley of the Associated Press. The high point for him — and pretty much every reporter in Tallahassee — was what he calls “the 2000 presidential election situation.” Said Wallheiser of the photo on the opposite page, “Obama came through on the campaign trail in March of 2007. He was working a room off of Kleman Plaza and the place was packed, mostly with media. As I was shooting, I was stooped over and walking backwards and the media folks refused to yield as I followed Obama. It was a tough room to work but I never was much of one to give up, so I stuck with it and got this shot of him with Mayor John Marks.”
Wallheiser now lives in Shell Point and many of his post-Democrat photos are taken there. In this one, he happened across a group of beach volleyball players as he was tooling around in his golf cart. “I go to the beach every day we have a good sunset. This is one that is retouched. If you look at the original, the ball is black. I got a volleyball, photographed it in my living room and put it where this ball was, so I’d have a little bit of light on it. This is not a journalism photo, this was in an art show at the airport. (But) very, very, very few pictures on my site aren’t as I found them because of my journalism background. I had to take a Photoshop course at TCC … because we couldn’t use (Photoshop at the Democrat). Nowadays I have to do it to compete.”
Wallheiser had a unique perspective on the launch of the space shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005. It was the only time he ever photographed a shuttle launch, which resulted in two pictures he sent to Reuters news service. “I never could decide which I liked better,” he says. “This picture is me transmitting to Singapore — that’s where Reuters circulated out of — from a kayak during the shuttle launch. I am sending pictures on my cellphone, which is probably laying in my lap.”
The St. Mark’s Lighthouse is a popular subject for Wallheiser’s art photography. This photo is actually more than 30 exposures “stacked” atop each other. Wallheiser carefully placed the camera with the star Polaris behind the top of the lighthouse so the other stars appeared to be swirling as they moved across the night sky. “This is the culmination of four night shoots all night …. It is a series of two-minute exposures over the course of several hours. I go around and shine my flashlight on the buildings, trees, … but I also put strobes on the ground with blue gels — basically I paint (with light) what I want to show up. That’s all trial and error. I’ve got to go back when there is no moon. This is a lot harder than I thought and taking a lot more reshoots. I’ll go back a little further and use a wider lens so I can get the top of the circle and the star trails reflected in the water.”
While covering tornadoes that left a path of devastation in the South Georgia communities of Cairo and Camilla on Valentine’s Day 2000, Wallheiser happened upon a state ranger comforting a distraught man whose fiancée had been killed, capturing a compelling, painful moment (opposite bottom). “To me, my strongest work over the years were the (photos) that got the most complaints. And not from the person in the picture, I considered those complaints legitimate, but photos like this, that would draw emotion from the readers. They didn’t like that with their breakfast. When they would call and complain … that told me I’d done what I was supposed to do because I wanted them to see that. This is reality.”
“In July of 2000, Gov. Jeb Bush did a stint in the dunk tank in a Lowe’s parking lot in Tallahassee, but I don’t remember for what cause. I do remember it was certainly earlier on Saturday morning than I wanted to be working. Apparently he had some accurate baseball throwers, because the water made his eyes really red.”
Although it looks like the product of much planning and special lighting, this portrait of Florida State University Head Coach Bobby Bowden at the 2009 Garnet and Gold game was one of Wallheiser’s “lucky” shots. At 6-feet, 6-inches tall, Wallheiser often had a unique high perspective when he was taking photographs, but he also spent a lot of time on his knees looking for a lower angle. “(Bowden) is lit only by camera flash. I dropped to my knees as he was walking past. At that moment he is hollering at another photographer.”
Chris Paulette walks along a 5-foot in diameter oak tree that split the house he rented in half as Tropical Storm Jeanne passed through Tallahassee in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2004. “The dude, he was in his bed and it was under the tree and his roommate came over, dug him out in the dark and got him out from under the tree.”
Wallheiser worked for eight months in 1988 on his “crack project” which was the scourge of the black communities in and around Tallahassee at the time, taking photos of users in Jefferson County and spending time with law enforcement officers in Tallahassee who were trying to catch crack dealers.
“This picture is from Charlie Crist’s second inauguration in January 2007. I got stuck on what the still and video photographers call the side riser, or cutaway riser. It’s ... not the prime location. Mike Ewen, another Democrat photographer, had the front riser to shoot from, which is where most of the photos that get play come from. You don’t get as many photos from the cutaway but I got a nice frame from there.”
“This is my truck. He pulls up, he’s wanting to see the rocks. When the flash went off I thought he was going to detach a retina. He was running like a scalded dog and they caught him three or four blocks away. They had to find him and arrest him for us to use the photos.”
The young hunter holding the duck is Wallheiser’s 21-year-old son, Justin Wallheiser. “I went duck hunting with him one day. I hadn’t been hunting in years and years and years. He shot (at) about 12 ducks and didn’t hit any. I said ‘Gimme that gun.’ A duck flew by — one duck, not a bunch. I shot one time, killed (the) duck, gave him back his gun and said, ‘That’s how it’s done.’ He’ll remember that and tell it all of his life. Because I had the same thing happen to me with my dad. Floating down a river, he shot a squirrel with a pistol.”
This photo illustrated a story about a married couple in Monticello who were creating sculptures for FSU’s legacy walk. “It was just a regular daily story. I shot there all day. They were nice people, both of them artists. They did these sculptures (in the background) but they also did sculptures of each other — she did his and he did hers. You’re just looking for creative ways to tell a story.”
This photo was shot as Hurricane Kate made its way through the Apalachicola boat basin in November 1985. As Wallheiser was interviewing the missionaries who were trying to save the vessel, the water rose, covering the walkway to shore. “I didn’t know where the walkway was. I had my cameras in plastic bags … jumped out and crawled all the way to shore in the dark. I will never do that again. There were 13 boats in that boat basin. There were three left after the hurricane. They were one of them.”
The Klan was recruiting in 1990, starting with a daytime rally in Tallahassee. Later in the evening, the group would travel to a secluded area in Gadsden County for a cross burning. “As dark fell, I’ve got a picture of them putting the kerosene on the torches. Then they light the cross — and it’s so engulfed you can’t tell it’s a cross — and doing more of their thing. Then, when the cross is over and done I go up to the Grand Wizard — this is the grand pooh-bah, the big cheese — and say, ‘Hey I’d like to get a picture of you.’ They stood there and let me take pictures.”
Wallheiser had a unique perspective on the launch of the space shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005. It was the only time he ever photographed a shuttle launch, which resulted in two pictures he sent to Reuters news service. “I never could decide which I liked better,” he says. “This picture is me transmitting to Singapore — that’s where Reuters circulated out of — from a kayak during the shuttle launch. I am sending pictures on my cellphone, which is probably laying in my lap.”
This photograph of linebacker Kirk Carruthers was taken in the moments after the infamous “wide right” field goal kick that cost the Seminoles a shot at their first national championship in 1991. “The picture I’m more famous for is the kicker walking off the field with tears in his eyes. But to me this is the better picture. One of the reasons it’s my favorite is it’s on the field. The score’s in the background and you don’t normally see football players cry. There was a lot of emotion. That cost them a national championship that year. (Carruthers) lives here. I run into him every now and then.”
Wallheiser calls this photo of what appears to be an offended nun “a found thing on the street” that he saw while walking with his wife, Jeannie, in New York City. “She’s waiting on a bus, is what she’s doing. This is something I’ve done at the newspaper a thousand times. You sit there and when they wipe their face or drop their head, you’re shooting. So much of photojournalism is luck, but it’s less than you would think. You put yourself in the right place at the right time, expecting things. But then you’re just lucky that she bowed her head. That means you’ve got to have the camera up to your eye the whole day. The only thing better would have been if she was in there digging through the underwear.”
Wallheiser photographed George Wallace at the start of his career in Alabama, but says he never did enjoy covering politics. He and the other Democrat photographers avoided the Capitol fray by leaving the day-in, day-out coverage to Mark Foley of the Associated Press. The high point for him — and pretty much every reporter in Tallahassee — was what he calls “the 2000 presidential election situation.” Said Wallheiser of the photo on the opposite page, “Obama came through on the campaign trail in March of 2007. He was working a room off of Kleman Plaza and the place was packed, mostly with media. As I was shooting, I was stooped over and walking backwards and the media folks refused to yield as I followed Obama. It was a tough room to work but I never was much of one to give up, so I stuck with it and got this shot of him with Mayor John Marks.”
Wallheiser now lives in Shell Point and many of his post-Democrat photos are taken there. In this one, he happened across a group of beach volleyball players as he was tooling around in his golf cart. “I go to the beach every day we have a good sunset. This is one that is retouched. If you look at the original, the ball is black. I got a volleyball, photographed it in my living room and put it where this ball was, so I’d have a little bit of light on it. This is not a journalism photo, this was in an art show at the airport. (But) very, very, very few pictures on my site aren’t as I found them because of my journalism background. I had to take a Photoshop course at TCC … because we couldn’t use (Photoshop at the Democrat). Nowadays I have to do it to compete.”
Wallheiser had a unique perspective on the launch of the space shuttle Discovery on July 26, 2005. It was the only time he ever photographed a shuttle launch, which resulted in two pictures he sent to Reuters news service. “I never could decide which I liked better,” he says. “This picture is me transmitting to Singapore — that’s where Reuters circulated out of — from a kayak during the shuttle launch. I am sending pictures on my cellphone, which is probably laying in my lap.”
The St. Mark’s Lighthouse is a popular subject for Wallheiser’s art photography. This photo is actually more than 30 exposures “stacked” atop each other. Wallheiser carefully placed the camera with the star Polaris behind the top of the lighthouse so the other stars appeared to be swirling as they moved across the night sky. “This is the culmination of four night shoots all night …. It is a series of two-minute exposures over the course of several hours. I go around and shine my flashlight on the buildings, trees, … but I also put strobes on the ground with blue gels — basically I paint (with light) what I want to show up. That’s all trial and error. I’ve got to go back when there is no moon. This is a lot harder than I thought and taking a lot more reshoots. I’ll go back a little further and use a wider lens so I can get the top of the circle and the star trails reflected in the water.”
While covering tornadoes that left a path of devastation in the South Georgia communities of Cairo and Camilla on Valentine’s Day 2000, Wallheiser happened upon a state ranger comforting a distraught man whose fiancée had been killed, capturing a compelling, painful moment (opposite bottom). “To me, my strongest work over the years were the (photos) that got the most complaints. And not from the person in the picture, I considered those complaints legitimate, but photos like this, that would draw emotion from the readers. They didn’t like that with their breakfast. When they would call and complain … that told me I’d done what I was supposed to do because I wanted them to see that. This is reality.”
“In July of 2000, Gov. Jeb Bush did a stint in the dunk tank in a Lowe’s parking lot in Tallahassee, but I don’t remember for what cause. I do remember it was certainly earlier on Saturday morning than I wanted to be working. Apparently he had some accurate baseball throwers, because the water made his eyes really red.”
He’s shot U.S. presidents and drooling babies. Society ladies and pregnant crack heads. Lots of happy people — and others in the depths of despair on the worst day of their lives. Hurricanes — 16 in all. Parades.
People working and playing. Seminole football games. Inaugurations and funerals and guys mowing the lawn. Cops, accidents, buildings, Klansmen, graveyards … and so much more.
It was all in a day’s work — or should we say 30 years worth of a day’s work — for Mark Wallheiser. Now a freelance photographer, the 57-year-old spent the lion’s share of those years as a photojournalist for the Tallahassee Democrat, oftentimes shooting four or five assignments a day.
Eight thousand of the images he captured can be found on his website, tallahasseestock.com. But Wallheiser estimates he has 50,000 — maybe even 100,000 — more on negatives filed in cabinets stored in a climate-controlled warehouse, just waiting for him to find the time to unearth the snippets of local history he has chronicled through the lens of his camera.
Usually, photojournalists who work for news outlets give up the rights to their photographs. But a policy born out of necessity at the Democrat allowed photo staff members to, after three years, get back the copyright and the negatives. “Because they only had one filing cabinet,” Wallheiser explains. When a photographer’s drawer filled up, the letter-sized envelopes were transferred to a box on a high shelf and ultimately moved out of the photo studio completely. Even after the newspaper embraced digital technology and began saving photos on discs, the policy continued.
For the first two years, Wallheiser gave his negatives to the state archives “because that’s the only people I could think of that would have long-term interest in documenting the city,” he said. “Then, I realized there’s some value here for me before they ultimately end up in the collection — because they’ll end up there — so I started keeping ’em.”
In the three years since he left the newspaper, Wallheiser has created his website and uploaded the digital images from the latter part of his career. Now, he’s going back to the old envelopes from his earliest days on the Democrat staff — containing the photo negatives, a printout of the assignment and his handwritten notes — and working his way to the present day.
The task is daunting — and tedious. He has to scan each negative, “tone” the image, write a caption, create keywords and upload the photo to the site. Wallheiser estimates he works 30 or 40 minutes on each image, usually in the evening when there’s nothing interesting on TV.
While he hopes to make a living off of photography assignments and his stock art site, Wallheiser says “the purpose of tallahasseestock.com is to support my photography habit …. my newer stuff supports the historical stuff.
“Certainly a lot of the old stuff I’m scanning now I don’t make a dime off of, but it’s part of history and it’s better seen than not seen,” he says.
It’s a labor that brings back decades of memories for the Shelbyville native, whose deep voice still retains a Tennessee twang.
Although his work has brought him “a truckload” of awards, including being named Florida’s News Photographer of the Year in 1988 and a team Pulitzer for his work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Wallheiser is basically self taught. He took a few photography classes while attending Western Kentucky University in the ’70s, but “I really couldn’t grasp” the methods for using the non-automatic equipment of the day. “F stops … it was so confusing … it was very mathematical. I hated being in the darkroom.”
After college, he was first hired as a reporter, but quickly moved to photographing Tennessee Walking Horse shows. He then worked as a photographer for the Montgomery Alabama Advertiser Journal for three years.
“I made a lot of mistakes when I was young,” he recalls. “I stayed on the s— list pretty much for most of that three years. But I got a lot of my mistakes done.”
Reviewing his work from the early ’80s has given him a few “if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now” moments. “I can track the progress. If I was editing another young photographer, I’d be telling him how to progress past that point,” Wallheiser says. “Early in the Democrat (years), what really helped my career was we had the ability to fail and not get into trouble. That is a big thing for growth.”
He recalled one lesson learned after his arrest — one of four during his career — at an accident scene. His then-editor Walker Lundy bailed him out of jail and asked for his photo of the accident. “I told him I don’t have any … (the police) came over and started messing with me” before he could take one. His boss’ reaction? “You were right to be where you were, but if you don’t have a picture, they win, you lose. Always get the picture.”
He waxed philosophical about his role as a photojournalist in the newsgathering process:
“It is my job to make people stop,” he says. “Eye track studies … say the first entry point for the page is the photo. They’re going to go to the photo first, headline second and the story’s the last thing they look at.
So if I can stop them and make them look (at) a cool picture, they’re going to start reading the story.”
Wallheiser speaks about his years behind the lens as a vocation.
“If a person is meant to be a photojournalist — if it’s truly meant to be — they’ll find a way,” he says. “A true photojournalist, they leave being a medical doctor and start shooting. They’ve got no choice.”
But the calling has a profound downside. Three decades of lugging around heavy equipment and the contortions sometimes required for on-the-spot photography led to shoulder surgery, two back surgeries and knees that are pretty much shot after years of getting down on them to take photographs. “It’s hard to get workers comp. They say, ‘What date was he injured?’ How about the 1980s?,” he says. “But, whatever, I was doing what I loved.”
There’s another darker side that has to do with the long hours and photographing grim subjects that Wallheiser refers to as “the underbelly” that can ruin relationships and lead to destructive behavior, like his three-pack-a-day smoking habit. “Living and photographing the underbelly will drive you to worse things than smoking,” says Wallheiser, who has now cut down to about a pack a day.
“Looking back, what a great gig. It was a great ride. What I got to do, the presidents I got to see … but I spent a lot of years on the shrink’s couch because of the underbelly side.”
