One day in October 1979 I was flipping through the American edition of Geo, sadly no longer with us, when I was stopped dead in my tracks by a photo essay called The Badlands: Glory Days in North Dakota. At this point in my career as editor of World magazine, I had worked with and carried bags for a number of fairly good shooters—e.g., Eliott Erwitt, Bruce Davidson, Burk Uzzle—so I had some sense of what a decent picture looks like. These pictures were different. Because the subject was the American West my first thought was William Albert Allard but something was amiss. Allard’s pictures are romantic and pretty, the Old West of John Ford. These photos were murky, drained of color, brutal, the frontier of Robert Altman in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Another striking thing about the pictures is that a couple of them were impossible; no “professional” would have attempted them because they went beyond the realm of mere technical competence into the mysterious area of serendipity. Clearly, these pictures were the work of an inspired “amateur,” in the good old-fashioned upper class English sense of the word “amateur,” as in Charles Darwin was an “amateur” biologist.

I dialed up Alice Rose George, a nice Mississippi gal who was the picture editor of Geo, got the photographer’s number, rang him up, gushed about the Geo piece and asked him if he’d like to do a three or four-day assignment for World. “Geez, I don’t know,” he says. “I worked on that Geo piece for six months. You’d probably be disappointed. Why don’t you get somebody else.” In my then decade-long experience in working with photographers, not one of them had ever said that before. Naturally, this called for lunch, a little wine, and some serious negotiations.

And that’s how I met Tomas Sennett, aka Inky. That was several hundred bottles of vino ago.

What I quickly learned about Tomas was that he had been everywhere, done everything, and could pronounce none of it. He had a kind of linguistic dyslexia that could turn Cannes into Con and Meursault into Meersalt but oddly enough he did it in a way that foreigners found charming rather than irritating. He could, for example, show up at the Delta or American ticket desk in Geneva with a two-year-old expired $100 coupon for an airline that was no longer was in business and talk his way onto the next flight to Jakarta.

Another thing I learned quickly about Tom is that he liked to do dangerous things. Climb mountains, ski downhill like Franz Klammer, paraglide. I remember his description of the first time he tried paragliding. I got a chill. I should have said something.

I’m sure there is more to the story than this but the legend is that Tom got into photography by walking into the National Geographic office in Washington, without an appointment, with some pictures he had taken while he was a Peace Corps volunteer in India. It’s such a good story that I don’t much care whether it’s true.

We have shared many great adventures. Behind me on the wall is a photograph taken by Richard Kalvar of two younger versions of us smoking Cuban cigars after a meal at a wonderful little family restaurant called Allard, just around the corner from the old Magnum HQ at 14 Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. On another wall is a beautiful, stylized print of a trout called Cubby’s Fish that Tom took one glorious summer a few years ago when his lifelong friend Cubby led me, Tom, Peter Deutsch and Osvald Bjelland to a high mountain lake in Montana for a perfect day of fine wine and fly fishing. Cubby caught the only fish but that’s okay because he is no longer with us and was the only person who knew what he was doing anyway. There was also Verbier and Georges Blanc and Paris when Tom kindly loaned Madame Tourvel the Nikon lens with the scratch in it.

On October 16, 1996, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton had a Presidential debate in San Diego. Late in the afternoon before, if I recall correctly, Tom—who then lived in San Diego--decided to take one last paraglide off a nearby mountain. The wind took a nasty turn and slammed him into the side of the mountain where he lay semi-conscious overnight while rescue workers crawled up the steep hill and stayed with him until dawn when they could bring him down. The fact that today he walks, drives, and still runs off to Italy and other exotic places to shoot pictures both defies his doctors’ initial expectations and is a tribute to an indomitable spirit who loves living too much to go gently or quickly into the great long night.

Jerry Bowles
Writer/Marketing Consultant
(212) 582-3791
_______________