Sam Shernoff

On and off over the past year I've been looking thru a lot of old film for various reasons, and recently I came across this. No, I'm not old enough to have photographed President Kennedy, but I am old enough to have known a guy who did. His name was Sam Shernoff, and he gave me a print of this image that he made of JFK at a ceremony at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1963. In 1980, I was working at a camera store a block away from that same historic site, and Sam, a retired Philadelphia police detective and photographer, was one of my customers.

One day he came into my store and told me he wanted to sell his Hasselblad, a highly prized (and more highly priced) Swedish medium format camera made famous for, among many other reasons, accompanying Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon. He wanted $1100 for the camera and 80mm Carl Zeiss lens, a steal at the time, but way beyond my meager means. That night, I told my mother about it. She knew that I was dreaming of a life as a professional photographer, and she gave me the money to buy it. My dad had just died a couple of months earlier, his life insurance had come through, so I knew where the money had come from.

The next day I drove excitedly up to Sam's modest ranch house in Northeast Philly to seal the deal. This is where it got a little weird, because Sam answered the door in his boxer shorts and a wifebeater. (Years later, when I first saw Rodney Dangerfield's brilliantly perverse cameo appearance in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" I said to myself "holy shit– he looks just like Sam Shernoff!")

We sat down at his kitchen table so he could show me the camera and how it all worked. I slid my mom's check over to him, and he wrote me a receipt guaranteeing that he'd give me her money back if the camera wasn't perfect (it was).

As I got up to leave, he said "Don't go yet. I want to show you something". I suppose I hadn't watched enough creepy movies at the time, because I followed him downstairs to his dark, wood paneled "rec room". He flicked on a light, went over to a closet, and brought down a shoe box from a high shelf. Inside was a stack of small black and white prints, and like an Atlantic City blackjack dealer, he slapped them down, one at a time.

They were crime scene photos that he had made over many years as a homicide detective, and each one showed a different horribly murdered woman. He told me the story of each murder and her murderer, and while I'll spare you the details here, let's just say that Sam did not have a very positive, inclusive or diverse view of society.

Then he dug through another box, found the JFK print, and handed it to me as a gift. I thanked him profusely but couldn't get out of there fast enough. And while that was the last time I ever saw him, the pictures he showed me burned a black scar in my memory that's never gone away.

Anyway, back to the Hasselblad. Some of the first pictures I shot with it, just a few weeks later, were of soon-to-be-President Ronald Reagan! I'll save that story for another time. Then I went off to Rhode Island to be a wedding and portrait photographer, and I used that beautiful piece of equipment over the next 5 years to shoot hundreds of happy couples on some of the happiest days of their lives. But when that chapter of my fledgling career was finally over, I sold it. It smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat.

And Sam Shernoff.