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dle of the gallery space. At 60, his
hair is still a boyish brown, and
he becomes animated and even
emotional when talking about
the subjects he photographs. "In
your arrogance, you'd like to think
you're contributing to a reckoning
of the times that you live in. The
photography means a lot less to me
than the story. It always has. It's a
portal into people's lives."
/iss's first pKotoMoXrnaOism
gigs may have been at The Quincy
Sun (where he actually lost money
taking those three-dollar pictures,
since he had to furnish his own
fiOm anG eTXipment anG at 8niteG
Press International, but he says he
learned about attention to detail
and the importance of production
values even before that, when he
designed the lighting for the Boston
Children's Theatre as a teenager.
As a Boston photographer, Liss
got to shoot the 1975 World Series
and the 1970s school-busing crisis,
but his years at Time opened the
world to him in a new way. People
were eager to invite in a photogra
-
pher from the world's largest news
magazine, and the massive budgets
of Liss's early days meant he could
get any shot he could dream up. "If
I wanted to hire a helicopter to get a
shot, I didn't ask anybody," he says.
"He was Time's go-to big-project
cover guy for many, many, many
years," says Brooks Kraft, who
worked with Liss at the magazine
for around a decade. "He would
be the guy they would send out to
Columbine after the shooting, to
approach the families and get por-
traits. And he was the person who
photographed Bill Clinton."
"He's not just a skilled photog-
rapher and a great lighter," Kraft
adds. "He knows how to talk to peo-
ple in grief, he knows how to talk
to PR people at the White House, he
knows how to talk to doctors, how
to talk to kids in a classroom. It's
pretty unusual to have someone at
that high level who can do all those
different things."
"He's lived his life in other peo-
ple's homes," says Bill Healy, who
was Liss's student at Northwestern
and has since collaborated with
his mentor. "He's probably most
at home in someone else's home.
He becomes part of the woodwork,
part of the furniture. He's the one
that told me not to take pictures on
tKe first Gay yoX Yisit someone.