Everyone who knows Tom Ferderbar knows his favorite story to tell.
In a booming voice, Ferderbar, now 95 years old, smiles good-naturedly, and recalls how as a teen, he got a job as a busboy at a steakhouse called Joe Deutsch’s. His starting wage was $1 an hour (equivalent to about $15 in today’s money). The other busboys were always goofing off, flirting with waitresses and taking cigarette breaks while Ferderbar worked away.
At the end of a shift, the boss pulled Tom into the back office and said, “I see how hard you’re working.” He raised Ferderbar’s wage to $1.50 an hour.
“He loves telling that story because then he’ll say, ‘When you work hard, people notice,’” according to his daughter, Pam Ferderbar.
Hard work was the ethos on which Tom built his career in photography. From the time that he was gifted a Kodak Box Brownie camera from his sister on his 12th birthday, his fascination with the medium has never waned. Tom knew it was his life’s calling, but there would be a lot of hard work if he wanted to master the medium.
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At a one-night-only private showing last fall, eight decades of Ferderbar’s hard work were on view.
The show was organized by art collector Andy Nunemaker and photographer Tim Keane. The latter used to work with Ferderbar in the advertising business and considers him a photography mentor. Keane showed Nunemaker some of Ferderbar’s images and Nunemaker says he “immediately fell in love with the work,” buying two of his photo prints for his collection. Nunemaker and Keane worked with Ferderbar to introduce his work to other collectors.
“He’s had a little bit of an unconventional photography career. He started doing commercial and industrial photography, but he also always did these beautiful landscapes that you’d want to put in your home,” Nunemaker says. “I was really attracted to his work. The quality is outstanding.”
“I wanted it to look foreboding,” Ferderbar says of the dark cloud composition of this photo of Bridalveil Fall, taken during a 10-day study retreat with Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park. He and another student hiked up a path and waited for the right light composition before snapping the photo. “It’s planning before you take the picture, not after.” Ferderbar says this ended up being his “favorite shot from that whole trip.”
As soon as Ferderbar became acquainted with that Brownie camera, “every step forward was toward becoming a photographer,”
says daughter Pam, an accomplished photographer herself. Pam’s husband, photographer Tom Bamberger, met Tom Ferderbar in the early 1990s while curating a show called “City Stories” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which featured Ferderbar’s photos.
“He is unbelievably tenacious,” Bamberger says. “Back then in photography, it was all about invention – you had to invent your lighting, invent solutions to your problems. There was no easy way to fix things.” These days people can pull a phone out of their pocket, point, click and edit, but Ferderbar had to learn the art of lighting, framing and how to develop film.
AFTER TEACHING HIMSELF the basics of his camera and contributing to student publications at North Division High School, Ferderbar sought a job at the Milwaukee Journal after he graduated in 1947. He didn’t meet their requirement of two years of college, but the paper offered him a job as a “copy boy,” running pages between desks. After hours, Ferderbar would visit the photography department to learn what he could. The Journal gave 18-year-old Ferderbar vacation time which he used to take a trip with his aunt, uncle and mother on Route 66, a photo subject he would revisit many times.
All told, Ferderbar says, he’s probably driven Route 66 “15 or 20 times.” His daughter, Pam, lived in Los Angeles for a time, so Ferderbar would meander on Route 66 to explore on his way. This California business caught his eye on a trip in 2008. “It’s funny because it says it’s a sportsman’s club, but it’s just a dump in the middle of nowhere.”
“I had never been out of the state before,” recalls Ferderbar, still spry and sharp for his age. They traveled for three weeks, sleeping in a trailer hauled behind their car. Best of all, his uncle understood his love for photography. “He stopped anywhere I wanted to take pictures.”
Back from Route 66, Ferderbar got in his two years of college at UW-Madison but then was drafted by Uncle Sam into the Army. There he became somewhat of a medical mystery – he was having a strong allergic reaction to something, but the doctors couldn’t figure it out. “I was in the hospital for about 80 days,” Ferderbar says.
During this time, he found instruction books by renowned photographer Ansel Adams in the hospital library, which he pored over to pass the time. Ferderbar was soon discharged from the Army – they finally discovered he was allergic to his wool uniform.
“I was in the car late afternoon, pulled up to a stop-n-go light and there they are. I grabbed my 35mm and click!” Ferderbar says of this shot, taken in Oklahoma. When he revisited in 2000, he discovered “the whole block was gone, bulldozed. Now it’s a shopping center. That’s why it’s nice to have some of these.”
He used the GI Bill to attend the Layton School of Art (which later became the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design), where he met another photography student. In 1954, they started their own studio. After about six months, his partner left and the business became Ferderbar Studios.
In 1958, an opportunity to study under Ansel Adams, the photographer whose books had inspired him in the Army, helped bring Ferderbar’s work to a new level. The workshop spanned 10 days in Yosemite National Park. Ferderbar, who got along well with Adams, thinks of it as “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” Some of his shots ended up in the master photographer’s selections for his Center for Creative Photography collection at University of Arizona.
“My philosophy on photography, and I guess I learned it from Ansel Adams, is to keep it sharp and keep it detailed, try to have a nice range from the deepest values to the lightest values,” Ferderbar says. Back home, he had other things to consider – the year before the retreat, he had gotten married (his wife, Helen, passed away in 2016), and a couple of months after returning from the trip, they were expecting their first and only child, Pam. “I had to make a living to support my family, so the idea of doing fine art as an occupation was dismissed,” Ferderbar says.
Ferderbar took this photo while studying with Ansel Adams. He thought the vertical orientation was too similar to Adams’ work, so he reframed it as a horizontal shot. Adams took a look and said, “Don’t you think that should be a vertical?” Ferderbar laughs. “So I made it a vertical, which is what I wanted to do to begin with.”
Ferderbar Studios eventually settled in a facility he built in the 1970s in West Allis near 102nd and Lincoln.
There, he employed dozens of people in a space so big that one time his staff drove two semi-trucks and a Cadillac into it for a photo shoot. One of his biggest clients was GE Medical Systems, which sent him on assignments around the world.
He pursued fine art photography during his down time. In 1980, for example, Ferderbar left 10 days early for a GE assignment in Texas to capture shots of Route 66 along the way. The once thriving road he had visited as a teen was now one abandoned stretch of ghost town after another. When Pam moved to Los Angeles, he drove out to visit several times, always taking Route 66 to explore and revisit – and document.
After running his studio for 40-plus years, Ferderbar retired and sold his business in 1997. But he continues to take photos to this day.
AT LAST FALL’S EXHIBITION, Ferderbar chatted away about his photos to fans new and old as they admired his lifetime of work.
Among the standout images were crisp black and white photos of Yosemite from his retreat in 1958; the rusty ruins of the changing landscape of Route 66 shot in 1980 and follow-up trips; and shots from the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, a subject he started photographing in 2012.
On Ferderbar’s 2000 journey on Route 66, he captured this photo in the town of Daggett, California. He woke up around 5 a.m. and waited until the sunlight was just right. “I thought the curves of the roof complemented the curve of the trailer by it,” Ferderbar explains.
Ferderbar still isn’t finished; he hopes he might be able to return to the Tetons again to work on getting a few more pictures. After all, even at 95, as a man once said, “if you work hard, people notice.”
Tom Ferderbar’s work can be found on tomferderbar.com.
Additional Photos
In 1980, Ferderbar took a trip down Route 66. It had changed drastically since he had ridden on it as a teen– highway development had left stretches of the road a ghost town– miles of abandoned motels, rusty cars, and crackled asphalt. “I was kind of disappointed at what’s happened to it. I guess somehow you think it’s not going to change, but everything changes,” Ferderbar says. “I just liked the pattern in the foreground here, it added mystique to the picture, I think,” Ferderbar says, pointing to the shadows on the ground. “When you look at it years later, it’s interesting not just because of the composition but because of the historic value of it. It was probably quite the station back in its day.”
Ferderbar compares Route 66 to the “terminal moraine of a glacier,” the point where a glacier stops advancing, but is still melting and changing the terrain. “That’s how 66 is because it’s constantly eroding, so there’s always something new to photograph.” Ferderbar visited this abandoned stretch of road in Oklahoma in 1980 and again in 2000 to take this picture. It was once part of Route 66, but later bypassed. “Chances are in 1947, when I made my first trip with my uncle, I probably rode on this,” Ferderbar says.
“I went out there two years in a row,” Ferderbar says of the Teton National Park. “My plan was to get on the internet and find what day there was a full moon, but you also had to get it setting, so I had to figure out what time the moon would be maybe 15 degrees above the horizon but also the sun was up a little bit. There’s roughly two days a month that will occur.” He says that more than once smoke from forest fires obscured his shot, but he finally got this one. Ferderbar hopes he can return to shoot in the Tetons again.
The Teton National Park in Wyoming has become another favorite shooting location for Ferderbar, he’s visited a few times in recent decades. “I just liked the way the branches dried out and curled up with the dark firs behind it,” Ferderbar says of this photo.
In 1947, 18-year-old Tom Ferderbar got a job as a “copy boy” at the Milwaukee Journal. “This was in somebody’s office, it was probably a Saturday night when the managing editor wasn’t around, so we would sneak in and take pictures in his office. I wanted to pretend I was a big-time reporter,” Ferderbar laughs.
“This is also from my first trip. That’s my Uncle Scotty, Aunt Mary, and my mother,” Ferderbar says (his mom is on the far right of the photo). They stayed in the trailer pictured here and Ferderbar thinks this was somewhere in Kansas or Missouri. Ferderbar’s arm is raised because he’s holding the flash for the camera for this portrait.
“He’s just a kid when he took this, but it looks like something you’d see in Life magazine,” says Ferderbar’s daughter, Pam. This shot was taken as part of a class assignment while he was a photography student at the Layton School of Art in 1953. The following year, Ferderbar started his first business, Manhattan Studios, with a fellow student.
Exactly 20 years later to the week, Ferderbar revisited some of the spots he had shot in 1980 to photograph them again in 2000. When he stopped by this Oklahoma house again, with a print of his 1980 photo to give to the homeowner, he discovered the house was gone and replaced with a trailer home. The owner told him he had some bad luck. “He said, ‘I made my last house payment, I tore up the mortgage, canceled my house insurance, and a month later a bolt of lightning hit the house and it burned to the ground,’” Ferderbar said.
In 1958, Ferderbar joined a ten-day study retreat with renowned photographer Ansel Adams in the Yosemite National Park. It’s there that he took this shot, one of his most popular photos. “It’s better than any Ansel Adams took of that location,” says collector Andy Nunemaker. A print of this photo is the centerpiece of Nunemaker’s dining room. “It’s like taking a half-court shot– you can take a thousand of them, one is going to go in– Tom was there at the perfect time with the perfect lighting and clouds with the right equipment and got the dream shot. When I look at Tom’s work, most of them look like dream shots to me.”
