Three decades through a lens

“I came in with the best and I?m going out with the best,” said Darden, 62, referring to Govs. Marvin Mandel and Robert Ehrlich. As he retires this month, Darden sat down with The Examiner to share some of the opinions about Maryland?s chief executives that he?s kept hidden behind his lens.

Opinions are something official photographers best keep to themselves, Darden said. “That?s how you survive ? I?m not a policymaker.”

“My description of my life is being outside of the inner circle,” said Darden, who began as a contractor for the governor?s office in 1972 and became a state employee in 1983.

Favorites

Ehrlich is clearly his favorite, the only governor who ever asked his opinion about anything. “There will never be another Ehrlich,” Darden said. “The man is decent, he believes in his people, his troopers love him.”

“All of us volunteered to do things personally for him,” he said. “Every one of us would walk through fire for him.”

At events, Ehrlich “would use me as a foil,” making fun of Darden to break the ice with corporate executives he had never met.

Darden said he is “still very, very good friends” with Mandel, and despite his political corruption trial and 1977 conviction inoffice, “I still respect the man. He brought modernization to state government” in the early 1970s. But he also recalls those “friends of the governor” who would come down to the basement darkroom to use a special green phone to make calls that “could not be traced.”

Black and white

There were still darkrooms in those days of black-and-white film. “Everything was hand-processed,” he said.

Darden was born and raised in Annapolis when it was still a small city of 18,000 and the phone numbers had just four digits. His own neighborhood in West Annapolis was “half black,” he said. “We knew no color,” but blacks couldn?t ride in taxis or eat in restaurants.

After graduating from still-segregated Annapolis High School in 1962, he became a hot-metal printer for “all the major newspapers” in the region, some of them now out of business, such as the Washington Star and the Baltimore News American. Besides stringing for wire service, he took up photography as a freelancer for the [Annapolis] Capital and public officials. But it “didn?t really pay the bills,” Darden said, until photographer Lee Troutner brought him on board as a contractor photographing for the governor and other agencies.

Darden never went to college, and his photography was “street learned.” His teachers were the old- school teachers, people who shot with large-format Graflex and Leica cameras, he said.

Other governors

Acting Gov. Blair Lee “never did anything” worth photographing, Darden said. Lee was filling in for Mandel after his 1977 conviction for mail fraud. Lee was “a man who felt this was below his dignity,” Darden said, “something that was thrown on him.”

Darden sharply remembers overhearing Lee comment negatively about his “dirty” beard, which he?s “worn since day one,” a remark that “hurt me deeply.”

Gov. Harry Hughes held few public events, other than “very formal” dinners he and his wife, Pat, hosted two or three times a week for eight years, Darden said. But “he had the guts to put the moratorium on [catching] rockfish” in the Bay.

With William Donald Schaefer in charge, “we knew for eight years that we were going to come back with a photograph,” Darden said. “He was a doer. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He was a real person.”

The two terms of Gov. Parris Glendening Darden remembers as “eight years of hell.” But he is reluctant to badmouth his least favorite-governor. “The man was more comfortable with college students and students in general than with the public.”

Trust and rapport

During a rambling two-hour interview in his Statehouse basement office, as the Ehrlich administration winds down, Robert Ehrlich Sr., the governor?s father, wandered in for a chat with Darden. Then communications director Paul Schurick popped in to access some photos on a computer. Schurick, who held the communications job for both Ehrlich and Schaefer and is ostensibly Darden?s boss, called him “the most talented and creative photographer I?ve ever worked with” and “an incredible marriage of personality and skills.”

“This is a guy who moves comfortably in any environment,” Schurick said. “The governor and the photographer need to have great rapport. They have to like each other. They have to trust each other.”

Most of the images a governor?s photographer produces are what people in the business call “grip-and-grins” or “line-em-ups.” But they are the kind of photographs that pols, chief executives and average Janes and Joes hang on their walls and treasure for posterity. The postage bill for sending out photos had been $3,000 a month, Darden said, but “the governor has said we?ve saved over a $1 million on the Web site,” where a gallery of shots has been posted for hundreds of official events.

After the Preakness, for instance, Darden said there are 35,000 to 40,000 hits on the photo Web site, with people viewing or downloading images of themselves with the governor and first lady at the track.

At the end of the day, when people remember their contacts with the governor, “it?s the photographs” that count, Darden said.

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