The Best Shooter In the Bunch

I remember the first time I met Barton…

Growing up like most kids, I loved baseball, and the New York Mets. And like most kids, I collected baseball cards, but I had another collection I was very proud of. I cut out newspaper pictures of all the games. Sports photography was my first appreciation of all things baseball. Photos with names like Ernie Sisto, Dan Farrell, William Jacobelis, Nury Hernandez, & Frank Hurley, fascinated me and I had photos by all of them in a thick folder. And there were many by Barton.

Baseball Photography was different in the 1960’s and 70’s. You had the Daily News and Post always running sequence photos on the back page, showing players crashing into the catcher and amazing catches in the outfield. And lots of photos inside, the visual over the headlines, as those photos drew you into the story of the game in the paper.

But the Times always had special pictures…and they were mostly Barton’s.

In the early 1990’s I started photographing with the group who worked for Yankees Magazine, and one of the results of that was meeting many of the shooters whose work I had always admired and in some cases, the pictures I have cut out of the papers when I was a kid. Barton was one of them…

Sometime during my first year at the stadium, I had built up enough chutzpa to walk up to him and introduce myself. It went something like this:

“Mr. Silverman I just want to say how much I love your work.”
“Yeah, so what else ya got?”

I had no comeback. I soon found out you had to spend time around these guys, have them get used to you, before they would open up. Sure they were a little difficult but they were pros, all of them, and they were there to work the way the guys before them had done, since the beginning of the game, turning out exceptional sports photos day in and day out.

At one point, sometime later, Barton would chat with me always opening with ”Louie, can I sit here?” There was a rotation in the old Yankee Stadium, as the photo box was only big enough for 7-9 shooters depending on the TV camera configuration, and you were always right on top of each other…like a can of sardines. But he would always manage to shoot the key moments, or as another longtime pro shooter, UPI Photographer Jack Balletti, once told me, “Make sure you tell the story of the game with your pictures”.

One night, as we were shooting, and I sat next to Barton, we were just chatting about something, maybe how had just worked shooting a golf open. He turned to me and said very seriously “Remember, Louie make a picture, don’t just take a picture.” I think it was the only advice I ever got from him. I didn’t understand what he meant by that at that point. But I watched and learned, and always listened. Of course he was spot on and he was the best in the bunch at what he did.

Barton is Barton Silverman who was the longtime staff sports photographer for the New York Times.

He recently took a buyout and has packed up his gear...