Daily Sitka Sentinel

He Has Seen Alaska Through a Camera Lens

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bob Hallinen covered news and sports throughout Alaska in his long career as a newspaper photographer. Here’s a personal look at the man behind the camera.

By KLAS STOLPE
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Anchorage Daily News photographer Bob Hallinen stood upright, a Nikon camera and 400mm zoom lens fastened to a mono-pod resting over one shoulder, another Nikon camera and 70-200mm lens slung from the other, and an artist’s smile from ear to ear.
    “I love what I do,” Hallinen said. “This is more than a job, it is a passion.”
    Always in his element, this particular day was the state swimming championships at Bartlett High School last November. This was his final official shoot before retiring from the ADN after 33 years.
    “Basically, this is the only job I have really had, photojournalism,” he said.

Anchorage Daily News photographer Bob Hallinen stands ready for action at last season’s ASAA State Swim and Dive Championships at Bartlett High in Anchorage. (Sentinel Photo by Klas Stolpe)

    This passion took Hallinen from Ketchikan to the North Slope, Northway to Attu Island, Prince of Wales to Barrow, and all points in between and on the horizons. Each meant something to him, and came to mean more to others.
    “I really was proud of a People In Peril project we did,” Hallinen said, taking time from athletes in his view finder to speak to the Sentinel. “The effects of alcohol in the Native community, which was a project the whole paper worked on. That was pretty interesting and a pretty important story.”
    The 1988 series won the ADN the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. 
    Hallinen’s eyes seemed to show what his lens had witnessed, flashing the decades like an antique Viewmaster, leaving a lasting impression but promising the viewer so much more.
    “And then the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” he said. “I was sent to Cordova for an overnight trip to photograph a meeting and a month later I was still up in Valdez.”
    He recalled traveling with reporter David Hulen on a project about village water and sewer.
    “We went to a number of villages that were at stake,” Hallinen said. “Photographing their water and sewer, which doesn’t sound very interesting but it was an important story. And if it is an important story I always wanted to be involved in it. We spent a lot of quality time hanging around honey buckets at Dylan Lake, waiting for someone to come and dump their honey buckets.”
    Of course he would be at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
    Musher Jeff King and his family provided Hallinen and company a place to sleep and get food for several days for one story. Musher Martin Buser had Hallinen over to spend New Year’s Eve with his family. Hallinen’s images of dogs bedded down, fed, and on the trail captured the love and spirit of musher and team.
    “I have done the Iditarod more than anybody else at the paper,” he said. “When they ask for volunteers for anybody to shoot the Iditarod I would always raise my hand and say pick me, pick me.”
    Hallinen has spent more than 45 years as a newspaper photographer.
    He was born in Marquette and raised in the upper Michigan peninsula  town of Trenary.
    “It was a small town, slightly smaller than this pool we’re in now,” he laughed.
    He went to Western Michigan University for a while, and then Northern Michigan.
    “I took one photography class from the art department and had a 35 millimeter camera,” he said. “I answered an ad in the school newspaper that the university photographer was looking for a student assistant, a darkroom job. He gave me a test, sent me into the darkroom and said ‘show me your printing skills,’ and I came out a few hours later with two mediocre prints, which wasn’t very productive but he gave me the job.”
    That man, Don Pavloski, became his mentor and one of his best friends.
    “That’s where I got my start and then I went into the newspapers, small weeklies and dailies in Michigan,” he said.
    He first worked at the Marquette Mining Journal as a freelancer and filling in for their staff photographer, then fulltime at a weekly paper in Marquette for sports editor Duncan Frazier. Frazier came to Alaska for a job at the Ketchikan Daily News, became the editor and offered Hallinen a job in 1983.
    “We figured we would move up to Alaska for a year, for the experience and that,” Hallinen said.
    Hallinen and family drove north and got on the ferry in Prince Rupert, but before they arrived Frazier had moved on to become city editor at the Anchorage Times.
    After working a year and a half in Ketchikan, Hallinen got another call from Frazier, now managing editor, saying the Times was looking for a photo editor.
    “I said sure,” Hallinen said. “I was there for six months and a new managing editor came in after Duncan left, and fired me. I came in one day and he said ‘you’re done, pack up and leave today, you’re gone.’ I was let go, no severance, so I called the (Anchorage) Daily News and talked with John Davidson and told him I was looking for a job.”
    The only job the ADN had was an internship. Hallinen took it and at the end of that summer he was hired by the paper fulltime.
    “And I was there ever since,” he said, snapping a photo of a swimmer climbing from the pool.
    I asked Hallinen what his favorite swimming shot was.
    “Swimming is a sport that you can get good pictures pretty easily,” he said. “But to get spectacular pictures it’s pretty tough. Probably a celebration after a medley is the cool picture because it has some emotion.”
    Favorite sports photos brought an unexpected answer.
    “One of the ones I really like is actually a tennis picture,” he said. “Which is another sport that you can get good pictures pretty easily but awesome stuff is a lot tougher than some of the other sports. There was a state tennis game, and there was a chest bump between tennis players, which you don’t see very often, it was a doubles match and they won state and they started came together and did this chest jump sort of thing in the air, which is the only time I have ever seen it in tennis.”
    That was in the days of film, and Hallinen went back to the darkroom to find that moment.
    In those days the photographer would look at the (negative) file and with a grease pencil underline the photo they liked and then the editor would come in, they’d look at them together and then decide.
    “So I was going through the film and when I saw it, and it was in focus and all that stuff, I marked it and didn’t look at the rest of the pictures,” Hallinen said. “I called editor Richard Murphy over and I said, ‘Right here is the picture.’ That is the only time I have ever done that.”
    Hallinen has made countless pictures of wildlife and Alaskana. Sleeping under beaver pelts hanging in an arctic trapper’s cabin at minus 30 degrees. Salmon at the fish camp of Roy and Ida Alexie on the Kuskokwim River. Sea lions at Chirikof Island. Wolf and deer in Southeast rainforests. Dall sheep on park mountains, and birds on Aleutian Islands. Moose and bear, sometimes in the Denali wilderness, or on occasion in downtown Anchorage.
    “One time at the paper a bull moose was right in the driveway to the paper,” he said. “I just drove up to it as it fed on leaves on a tree and shot from the car.”
    Having worked his way through the age of film and darkrooms to the rapid-fire era of digital cameras, he finds some things – like the eye for the perfect shot – don’t change.
    “Yes, you can shoot more with digital, it’s not costing you film,” he said. “With film you had 36 images on a roll and then you have to reload and film was expensive. You wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing. Digital doesn’t cost you more, other than time. You can experiment more, you can try different things that with film you wouldn’t normally do.”
    When he started shooting he relied on a quick thumb.
    “There were motor drives around – I just didn’t have one,” he said. “It was take a single image and I was pretty quick at cocking the shutter again with my thumb.”
    In fact, at one early state basketball game another photographer shooting next to him was using a motor drive and commented he was glad Hallinen had finally gotten one.
    “Nope,” Hallinen replied. “I just have a motor thumb.”
    Hallinen will never not make photos, and will always miss his colleagues.
    “I’ll still shoot,” he said. (His photos still appear with those special assignments the ADN acknowledges require his abilities). “What I really enjoy is working on stories, where you can spend some time and really explore the subject, no matter what it is, that ‘interesting people’ sort of thing.”
    Kind of like Bob.