Becker, William – ‘Bill’

WXYZ: TV News Writer/Producer, Investigative Producer and Copy Editor.

References:

• Photography Museum

Recent Sightings

• The Daguerreian Society

In The News:

• Bill’s website, Photography Museum, has been featured in USA Today’s “Hot Sites”, April 24, 2003.

Bill Becker have fun during a heavy news day in the newsroom – From the Terry Pochert retirement collection

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• Newsroom Under Construction at WXYZ

  Temporary newsroom while new facilities are being constructed and remodeled. The entire newsroom operations including production, editing, writing and anything else seemed to be piled into a single studio for about three months. It was a time where we really got to know each other.

  

• Amazing Number One Newsroom

  

• Daguerre’s American Legacy: Photographic Portraits (1840 – 1900) from the Wm. B. Becker Collection

  by Wm B Becker

  

  The first photographic portraits were objects of wonder. From tentative beginnings in 1840, the practice of capturing a person’s “perfect image and identity” with a camera became an industry, an art form, and a means for Americans from all walks of life to send personal and often intimate messages about themselves into the future.

  Based on the first-ever public exhibit of photographs in the home of photography’s inventor, Louis Daguerre, this selection of more than 200 American portrait photographs includes images of abolitionists and slaves, firemen and flirts, brick-makers and literary women, crossdressers and chicken-pluckers. There are superb examples from America’s first masters of photography: Southworth & Hawes of Boston, Jeremiah Gurney of New York, and M.A. Root of Philadelphia, as well as outstanding works by obscure and unknown artists.

  Daguerre’s American Legacy also investigates the secret codes used to send hidden messages in some of the world’s earliest portrait photographs. It explores the collaboration of sitter and photographer in the creation of images that project the subject’s identity and personality.

  These compelling portraits, collected over a 45-year period by Wm. B. Becker, also reveal much about American life in the 19th century, including the roles of work and family, of affinity groups and leisure, of faith and humor. From its origins in recording the unadorned appearance of the human face, American portrait photography evolved into a means of communicating personal attributes beyond the merely documentary: by the end of the century, people were shown conversing with ghosts, struggling through faux blizzards created in the studio— even confronting their doppelgangers.

  (328 pages, over 200 color photos, 7 x 9.4 inches.)

• Edwin Hale Lincoln: Ephemeral Beauty: The Platinum Photographs

  Editor: Wm. B Becker

  

  In this first book-length appraisal of his work, Edwin Hale Lincoln is revealed as a devoted chronicler of boats, oaks and orchids

  Affiliated with the American Arts and Crafts movement, American photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848-1938) began his photographic career in Boston, specializing in interiors. In the 1880s he started documenting yacht races, using then new technology to freeze the glorious motion of sailing ships, including the famed yacht America. Lincoln later moved to Western Massachusetts where he captured the motifs for which he is best known: centuries-old trees, delicate wildflowers and orchids. These subjects had something in common with the great wooden sailing ships―they were vanishing. As engine power replaced the elegance of sails, millions of elms and chestnut trees would soon die off, and fragile flora risked extinction. Lincoln sought to eternalize them in his work.

  Based on 30 years of research, Ephemeral Beauty: The Platinum Photographs reveals the strikingly modernist character of Lincoln’s work, and explores his influences, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gustav Stickley, as well as rediscovering the publication of his photographs in illustrated popular magazines and books.

  Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848-1938) served as a drummer boy in the Civil War and later became a national leader of Civil War veterans. He began photographing in Boston around 1874, documenting yacht races and the extravagant summer homes of the Gilded Age in the 1880s. Lincoln’s photographs were awarded numerous medals at photographic exhibitions (including one that put him on a par with a young Alfred Stieglitz in 1891), but two years later he stopped exhibiting and moved to Western Massachusetts. There Lincoln photographed ancient trees and endangered wildflowers and orchids, which he self-published in elegant volumes of mounted platinum prints. His photographs have been printed in many books and magazines, among them Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman.

• WXYZ Newsroom circa 1980s

  WXYZ: An amazing group of people making WXYZ News number one in the market during the 1980s.

  Nelson Burg, Fran Victor, Marv Rockford, Audio: Greg Karrer, Val Clark, Cheryl Chodun, Bill Miller, Jeff Rundell, Bill Becker,  Garrett Glaser,  Terry Frisco, Mark Zahnow,  Denny Shleifer, Andrea Parquet-Taylor, Garry Kelly,  Dean Erskin,  Al Volker, Jim Powers,  Pat Elnicky, Phyllis Eliasberg, John Gross, Charles Munro,  Judy Miller, Tom Cleeves

• Jerry Rimmer and Bill Becker

  

• M2 Screening Postion at WXYZ Television – Circa 1990s