A friend of mine , photographer Mathias Thomas Oppersdorff, of Mantunuck, Rhode Island, died January 26,  2010 after a 12 year struggle with Parkinson’s disease.  He was 74 years old.

 

Mathias, always known as Mo, and never Mathias, was a friend in high school. Later both he and I became professional photographers although oddly neither of us touched a camera during our days at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, RI.   We took different paths with our photography; my day job was in the halls of academe while Mo ventured into the marketplace, becoming a travel photographer for Gourmet magazine for eighteen years. As he often proclaimed, it was a great job but somebody had to do it.

I looked around for some of Mo’s  Gourmet work  but all I could find was this sensitive study of women making batik cloth in Bali. Gourmet itself closed down shortly before Mo died.

 

 

 

Other Oppersdorff photos I remember from the magazine were epicurean repasts usually spread under olive trees in Sardinia or Tuscany. Oddly, despite lurking (a favorite Mo verb) in fine restaurants most of his adult life, and despite the constant consumption of  feasts spread under olive trees throughout the Mediterranean,  Mo’s physique never changed: he was thin, very tall, Teutonic in appearance and always elegantly dressed.  At our school’s 50th  reunion, most of us were follicularly challenged, somewhat overweight white men of a certain age wearing dark business suits. Not Mo; he wore tailored blue jeans and a white safari jacket, complete with an ascot, and he strongly resembled the youth he had been half a century earlier.

Mo and I  spent some time together after high school – it was a period in the late 50s when he was taking courses at Georgetown’s Foreign Service school. For reasons forgotten now, we ended up  sharing a room on Prospect Street near the University. He told me he needed a job, so I  enlisted him in my place of employment,  a parking garage in downtown Washington. For some reason, Mo thought the proper attire for a parking lot attendant were overalls topped by a large foam rubber yellow ten gallon hat that no  cowboy, much less a reputable parking lot attendant, would have been seen dead in.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

Mo’s talents were many, and among them was a linguistic ability that one could only marvel at. In high school, he was said to be tri-lingual (French, German and English) and the rumor was that he could learn a language after only a few weeks of glancing at a textbook. Mo’s version of the English language was also unique. It was not his accent which was all-American but rather his vocabulary. Mo had his own individual  syntax which had a curiously archaic Victorian boarding school quality. For example, with Mo people didn’t appear; they “hoved into view” as if they were sailing vessels rounding the Cape of Good Hope.  I mentioned “lurk”; you never stayed anywhere, you lurked after you hoved. In Mo’s world, the most innocent of activities seemed tinged with the possibility of ambush, either being ambushed or ambushing someone yourself.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia


 

Mo apparently had a lifelong interest in guns – I suppose I knew this all along but it didn’t really register until recently because in appearance and demeanor Mo was not your average gun nut. He was a gentle man who rarely talked guns, at least not when he was with me. But during our 50th reunion he mentioned hunting elk with his close friend Michael Sheehan, another classmate, and I suddenly remembered an episode on Prospect Street when I came home to find Mo on the floor sighting down the long barrel of a .22 target pistol. To make a long story abruptly short, Mo had decided to amuse himself by shooting cockroaches as they scampered across the floor and he seemed quite puzzled when this behavior caused the other occupants of the house to seek refuge in  the street.

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

Then another memory surfaced: a photograph I did of Mo when we spent the day on a Virginia farm. Alas, the picture only lives in the memory like many another lost photograph, all of which inevitably become more impressive with passing time.  In the picture Mo is wearing shorts so long they almost could be called pedal pushers. As he was around six feet five in height we’re talking very long shorts. I was not to see their like again until years later when Michael Jordan and company began burning up the basketball court;  Mo was always sartorially ahead of the game.  In the photo, Mo has the aforementioned target pistol in one hand; in the other he holds aloft a black snake he had just dispatched.  Two regrets: one, that I have lost this picture, and two, that I never saw Mo with a downed elk –that would have been a truly memorable image. I bet Mo sported a pith helmet. I’ll have to ask Michael Sheehan about that next time we cross paths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

 

 

But the real reason I remember Prospect Street is because one day Mo handed me an envelope he had just picked up from a film lab. In it were ten or twelve black-and-white photographs of a friend of ours, portraits that Mo had done with his Leica camera. I was bowled over by the quality of light on our friend’s face – that  afternoon sunlight so eloquently described character that I suddenly had an intimation of the possibilities of this wonderful medium.  I wonder now if I saw those pictures again if they would still be as magical. The likelihood is –- after fifty some years of looking at, writing about, and talking about photography –  they would seem little more  than competent portrait studies. So this is one time when I’m glad those pictures only live in the mind. But regardless of their quality, those images of a friend turned me into a photographer. I was hooked and a couple of weeks later  I was also the proud owner of a second-hand Leica 111f. A month after that I was in Baltimore being inducted into the Army. It was 1957, and now that he had succeeded in his life’s ambition – to turn me into a photographer – Mo went his separate way, returning to college rather than defending his nation against the Yellow Peril. (Actually, Mo was 4F due to a childhood bout with polio).

 

 

 

from Under the Spell of Arabia

(click to see entire image)

 

Years later, Mo would occasionally leave New York and spend a few days in Washington visiting various cousins.  Mo had a distinguished lineage. His father’s family were Silesian aristocrats and his mother came from one of America’s oldest families. Not that this background ever came up in conversation ( to my regret); Mo just wanted to be one of the fellows. But there were certain give-aways ( along with his undeniably aristocratic appearance) and one was the fact that when Mo came to Washington he would invariably stay at the “Cincinnati” which I took to be a hotel. But I soon discovered that the marvelous beaux-art building on Massachusetts Avenue  was the home of the Society of the Cincinnati, a very private club indeed – the only members are people directly descended from officers in George Washington’s  Continental army of 1776!

During these occasional visits, Mo and I would mostly talk photography, being well into our respective careers. In addition to his years of work for Gourmet,  Mo – who never married – traveled extensively, pursuing  fine art projects, some of which ended up as books. He did a book on Irish tinkers called “People of the Road” and he  also photographed  people in the mountains of New York, which resulted in the book  “Adirondack Faces“.

 

 

But the work Mo was most proud of, and justifiably so, was the result of a 12 week odyssey in the Middle East ( rumor had it he came out of this adventure speaking idiomatic Arabic) which he managed to get published some years later as “Under the Spell of Arabia”.  Most of the pictures which accompany this article are taken from that book and I think they eloquently demonstrate Mo’s talents as a photographer.

 

 

Mary Ellen Mark  said of Mathias Oppersdorff’s work that it has ‘a beautiful quality..that is honest and direct.” She might well have been speaking about the man himself.