FALMOUTH – Rowland Scherman is smoking “really good tobacco” in his ever-present pipe on an outside patio at a Mexican restaurant when a very patient waitress tells him that “this is a completely no smoking zone.” Smoke from his pipe, she says, has been wafting into the restaurant.
The waitress has no idea who Scherman is.
Scherman, holding his pipe visibly in his hand while insisting he is not smoking, worked for Life Magazine and many other publications in the 1960s. He’s taken pictures of The Beatles, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Arthur Ashe, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Woodstock – including Janis Joplin and his favorites at the time, Crosby Stills & Nash.
Rowland Scherman looking at his self portrait that he took reflected in his famous Bob Dylan photo.
He has won a Grammy Award for best album cover – Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits.
His work is in the National Archives. Scherman was the first official photographer for the Peace Corps, in its earliest years. He was the official photographer for the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom, in which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech.
The waitress asks him again to please not smoke. “If you arrest me,” he says, “I’ll go quietly.” She doesn’t want to see him arrested, just to stop smoking on restaurant property, she said.
Rowland Scherman
Drinks are ordered but just before she leaves, the waitress turns and says, “If I come back here and you are smoking again…”
“Kill me,” he says.
Smiling and telling him she doesn’t want to kill him either, the waitress walks away. He puts the pipe down.
And so it begins – a life in photography told in the moment.
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