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"Craftsmanship at the service of artistic vision." That's not a bad phrase to attach to Henry Gilpin's photographic works. His images are immaculately and precisely made with the kind of technical virtuosity we respond to in a very basic, visceral way. We delight in these triumphs of human capability, and are thrilled at the sense that one of us has done something that transcends the daily humdrum of survival.

The photographs of Henry Gilpin are like surpassing athletic achievements frozen forever in the moment. But to dwell on this aspect of his work is to avoid dealing with his photos as aesthetic wholes.

It is the selective process that makes art, and Gilpin's choices are always impeccable. Each image gives us a special view of a special moment from the stream of images that make up our reality.

His craftsmanship makes it just that much easier for the viewer to get to the important elements of his artistic vision; we can bypass the rational process. Thus we travel directly between the aesthetic values of the work and our sense of what is or isn't good and truthful.

Like many artists, Gilpin is not an entirely reliable commentator on his own work, especially when he starts talking about luck and its relationship to his photography. He makes it sound as if he has made a career out of fortuitous accidents. It's a pose he seems very comfortable with, his way of dissembling and keeping us from discovering all the arduous thought and preparation that go into his photographic work.

He is, at best, very evasive about how much dodging and burning go into his prints. When you are around him for any length of time the expression "straight print" keeps popping up like billboards on a Midwestern highway. His delivery is so wry that it's hard to tell if his tongue is in his cheek or out. It must have been torture for the poor suspects that ended up in his interrogation room when he was Captain of Detectives in Monterrey County. Gilpin's not above a little "pranksmanship". He is most fond propping up the "straight print" sign next to his famous, "Highway 1", a defining image, so aesthetically complete that it reminds one of a line from Shakespeare. Looking at the complexities of that particular image, one wonders. But who cares? Prank or truth, the result is what counts and that is a quote is right out of the Gilpin canon.

You must be getting the picture by now. Plain spoken with considerable grit behind a rather offhand exterior. Easy to see him as the wily police Captain. Or as the pilot of a stripped-down-for-speed B-24 ripping across European night skies making low level drops behind enemy lines during World War II. But it's a bit of a stretch to see him as the kindly photography professor with the Zen master's awareness of the sights and sounds of the universe. Nonetheless, he checks the answer, all of the above.

In 1942, he joined the US Army Air Corps and went to flight school. Maybe his sense of valuing preparedness had its origins in the training he received in the Air Corps. That discipline must have helped get him through the fifty-eight combat missions he flew over Europe in WW II.

Henry joined the Monterrey Sheriff's Department in 1951. In 1953, he was assigned to the Detective Division from which he retired as Captain of Detectives in 1964. Because, as he put it, he knew more than anyone else in the Division about the photography, they assigned him to do about 85-90% of the crime scene and autopsy photography.

The real turning point for Gilpin photographically was a workshop he took with Ansel Adams in Yosemite in 1959. He had read the books on the Zone System and was ninety per cent convinced it was the way to go. The workshop was the clincher. He says he threw out all his old negatives and started over. One has to believe he saved one or two. His camera, up to that time, had been a Leica, but Adams urged him to get a 4x5. That lasted a while and he finally settled in on a Hasselblad 2 1/4, which became his tool of choice.

Gilpin sees the Zone System as a general framework and believes that every photographer has to work out his own system. He tests his film for Zone I, with Zone III being the lowest shadow value. His developing time is based on a Zone VIII exposure. Gilpin tests his papers for shades of gray. It's all part of the preparedness package. Gilpin says he was lucky on two of his famous images, "Highway 1" and "Mt. McKinley," but luck favors the prepared.

Bob Byers, a long time friend and a companion on many field trips had this to say about Gilpin: "..a giant in American fine art photography with an international reputation." John Woods said about Henry and his work: "He never lets technique stand in the way of his making a good image. His technique is so simple and direct that it's never intrusive." In an essay that appeared in the booklet for Gilpin's show, John Sexton wrote: "In the interplay of form, space, light, and shadow that Henry's keen eye reveals, he celebrates the essence of a complicated world distilled into a concise visual statement."

He started teaching Photography at Monterey Peninsula College in 1963 and he is still there. Gilpin is still trying to do it better, still trying to push back his own horizons.