Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 2)

SM: Where did you go to college, and what did you do there?

TM: I first started off at the University of Nebraska – Omaha. I was the first one in my family to go to college. My dad said I did not need to go to college and that I could stay back and work in the family business.By 1961, we had moved back to Omaha and my father had started a dime store of his own, and he expected all four of his sons to be in the family business.

I worked there in high school and during the two years I was attending the University of Nebraska – Omaha. I realized that I did not want to spend my life working in that business. My older brother was more of an entrepreneur. He was reading the Wall Street Journal when he was 12 and started an import/export business when he was 14. I was always outside.

The first two years of college I studied business because that is what my dad wanted me to do. I did not like business, and I really wanted to learn more about biology and wildlife biology. I transferred to Doane College and changed my major to biology. In 1969 when I graduated, I was looking at being drafted and going to Vietnam. Fortunately, I got a high enough lottery number that I squeaked by without getting drafted so I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska.

That is where I met Paul Johnsgard, who was the world’s authority on waterfowl. He was also an avid writer and had written a couple of books on animal behavior. He took me under his arm and taught me about photography. Before I became his graduate student he looked at my transcript and told me that he usually only took straight-A students, but that he would take me anyway because I had won the World Goose Calling Championship twice. We became great friends and he taught me how to take my first pictures of birds in flight. That was from 1969 to 1971.

SM: Camera technology was a lot different back then.

TM: It was very different. We had some of the first reflex cameras where you looked through the lens at the subject. They had just come out, and everything was manual focus and all shutter speeds were manually set. It was quite difficult comparatively. It took me 20 years to figure out how to manually focus on flying birds and then they came out with autofocus, which I thought was cheating. Of course I use it now and think it is a great piece of technology.

After a year and a half as his assistant I decided to move to Colorado so I could be in the mountains. I did not know what I was going to do with my life. I was interested in photography but was not sure how to make a living with it. I was interested in biology and animal behavior research, but most of those jobs were government jobs. I was not too interested in working for the government. I was essentially a hippie in the mountains around Boulder, Colorado. For about five years, I lived in a mining shack that had no running water or electricity. I had two dogs, a raccoon, and a garden.

I met a man named Bert Kempers who was doing educational films for the University of Colorado. I was taking a night class at CSU and Burt saw some of my still photography. He asked if I would be interested in working for him as a cinematographer, so I did educational films with him for five years. In 1978 I moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and opened my first gallery.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen's Images of Nature
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