Photographic memories

Jerry Muller has a colorful story to go along with each of the black-and-white photographs in his exhibit, “Faces of Yesterday,” on display at the Mesa Verde branch of the Orange County Public Library in Costa Mesa.

Muller grew up in the Long Island suburb of Lindenhurst, N.Y., and his dream had always been to be a painter. That is until one day during his senior year in high school when Mullerasked himself, “How the heck am I going to make a living as a painter? I don’t know how I’ll do that.’ ”

Photography seemed like a better choice, and since his uncle was a photographer in New York City, he decided to go that route.

Muller graduated from high school in 1950, and at 18 figured he would probably never go to college because in his mind, “College was just a bunch of fraternity jerks, and I was dead serious about photography.”

Most photographers didn’t go to school to learn their craft anyway, Muller said, so he began teaching himself what he needed to know.

Muller credits his uncle with teaching him a few things about photography, and the rest he says he learned by reading day and night, and on the job.

In the early 1950s, Muller worked 16-hour days as an assistant to photo illustrators and a theatrical photographer, commuting from Long Island into Manhattanwhile taking his own pictures in his “spare time.”

Those portraits, shot in New York and Lindenhurst from 1951 to 1955, comprise one part of Muller’s photographic exhibit at the library.

Some of the people Muller photographed, he knew personally — his sister was a frequent and willing subject, and several of the photographs on display — including “Little Miss Lindenhurst” and “Dream Girl” — are of his sister.

Most of the photographs, however, are of men.

Muller shot mostly men “because I knew I couldn’t compete with the other photographers shooting in a more Hollywood style. If you were going to shoot beautiful women, you needed lighting, equipment and a studio,” Muller said, adding that he couldn’t afford any of those things.

“The thing about men is that as they get older, they get more interesting looking. They develop character,” he said.

As a photographic assistant, he recalled getting the opportunity to photograph Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in 1955, and Muller said the photograph of Ekberg on display is, “the library’s favorite, everybody’s favorite photograph.”

Muller worked as a photographer for more than five years in New York, and his decision not to go to college ultimately resulted in getting him drafted in 1956. He served in the Air Force, and when he got out he had a change of heart about college. He attended Marquette University.

After college, he went to work for Teen Beat Magazine in Milwaukee, where he was a “one-man operation.” He was editor, art director, production manager and fashion photographer.

“It’s a heck of a way to learn the magazine business,” he said.

His next job was at a magazine called Country Beautiful, but after working in Wisconsin for five years, Muller realized he “wanted out of the East Coast because of the weather.”

Muller was at the movies — watching a Bob Hope comedy with cute girls in bathing suits and guys in little red cars driving around the Hollywood Hills, when, he said, “I had an epiphany, bought a tennis racket, threw that in the back of my Dodge station wagon,” and at 26, with $600 to his name and no job prospects, headed out to California.

Muller had subscribed to the Los Angeles Times in Milwaukee, so he headed to an ad agency in Beverly Hills and was sent to Newport Beach, where a small start-up magazine was looking for an editor.

It was October in Southern California, and Muller landed at a little motel in Corona del Mar called the Jamaica Inn.

At that time, it was the off-season, the motel had plenty of rooms available and for $100 a month he had a room with maid service, a heated pool 12 steps from his door and the Jamaica Tennis Club close by.

“It was like I had landed in paradise. I had died and gone to heaven,” he said.

That little magazine was Orange County Illustrated, and Muller worked as an editor and art director there for 10 years, where he met cartoonists Dick Shaw and Frank and Phil Interlandi, whose portraits are featured along with Rex Brandt, Walter Knott and A.J. McFadden in the second part of Muller’s library exhibit — Southern California in the ‘60s.

Muller’s show is also being presented by Orange County Fine Arts, and its creative director, Marie Taggart, said Muller’s exhibit is a “window into the past for Orange County and the East Coast. It’s nostalgic, well done and [the photographs] are beautifully framed.”

For Muller, this retrospective exhibit is a way to showcase a style of photography that isn’t seen much anymore. He says digital technology has put a lot of photographers out of business because, “Everybody’s an art director today. It’s [photography] becoming a lost art. Craftsmanship is dead — it’s obsolete. Old cars, old buildings, it’s all gone.”

When Muller looks back at the “Faces of Yesterday,” he says, “What strikes me is I wish I would have shot a lot more. I regret what I didn’t shoot, not what I shot.”