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Artist with SMA evolves from film-based photography to electronic imaging
by Richard Senti
Life was good for Carl Yeager back in the 1970s. By day, he was a master mechanic at a large Philadelphia hospital. By night and on weekends, his talented hands played a different tune … literally. As a pianist, he played professionally in bands opening for big-name rock groups like Chicago, Iron Butterfly, and Blood Sweat and Tears.
It was during these heady times that Yeager’s visual side also got a creative boost through his new-found appreciation of photography. His boss at his day job was an avid amateur photographer whose enthusiasm for the medium inspired Yeager to buy a camera and eventually outfit his own darkroom.
“My job at the hospital funded my passion for art and music,” he says. Carl Yeager was living large.
Over the next decade, he continued to pursue his various creative outlets, including his love of photography. He considered himself a “purist” photographer, shooting 35mm film with a pair of classic Canon F1 single lens reflex cameras with a full array of lenses from wide-angle to telephoto. (He later traded up to a Canon A1 35mm SLR and even purchased a medium-format Bronica camera.) Yeager would regularly disappear into the amber glow of his darkroom — complete with jugs, tanks and trays containing all the requisite chemicals — to process his film, then to print his images using his trusty Bogen enlarger. Photography by definition required lots of tools and many supplies.
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