BLOOM Former pro shoots golf through her lenses Joann Dost is the "Ansel Adams of golf photography," but few know the long road she took or the many roles golf has played in her ride to the top. Spring 2008

Dan Shafer

If you've played golf at any of the best-known golf courses in the world, odds are pretty good that you know Joann Dost's work even if you aren't sure about her name. Increasingly, her name is becoming as widely known as her intensely real photographs of great golf holes‹photographs that hang in hundreds, perhaps thousands of museums, galleries, gift shops, and private collections throughout the world.

Dost, the creative juice behind a thriving fine-art golf photography business bearing her name in Monterey, has reached the pinnacle of her career in a strongly male-dominated field thanks to her knowledge of the game, her insatiable curiosity, her keen powers of observation and a lot of hard work. Oh, and thanks also in large part to her friends, colleagues and business partners, Bob Reade and Sarah Joplin, CEO and President, respectively, of her company.

The de facto "official" photographer at Pebble Beach for many years has traveled the globe in pursuit of her passion of "enriching peoples' lives by creating a round of golf they can play forever."

Before There Was Ansel...
Just about everybody who knows Dost or has read any of the articles that have been written about her over the years knows what is referred to somewhat reverentially as "the Ansel Adams story." How a friend of hers who worked as the famed photographer's assistant introduced her to her boss as a candidate to work on a golf course project with Clint Eastwood for the U.S. Open being played at Pebble in June of 1982. How Adams looked at her portfolio and told her, "You can handle this job. I'm going to tell Clint he should hire you." While that commission ­ which produced a new kind of golf book for the tournament ­ certainly gave Dost's photographic career a huge boost, it was hardly the beginning of her interest in and mastery of the art of the camera.

For that, you have to go back to the years she was growing up in suburban Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia. Her grandmother was an artist, so Dost had a certain amount of exposure to the world of art during her childhood. She gets her athletic genes from her father's side. He was an Olympic speed skater in the 1940's and her older brother Dickie was a professional baseball player in the Mets' organization. Her parents, both octogenarians, are still living and still married.

The family had a neighbor named Meyer Rubin, who worked as a geochemist for the U.S. Geological Survey. Rubin and his son loved to travel around the country, visiting and photographing the National Park System.

"They'd come back from a trip and have all this film and then they'd go into their darkroom to develop it. I thought it was absolutely magical the way a picture would just come to life in front of your eyes on these ordinary-looking pieces of paper," Dost recalls.

A couple of years later, Dost, who'd been an excellent high school athlete (basketball MVP and later inducted into her high school's sports Hall of Fame), decided to try her hand at touring golf. In those days, one did not simply show up to qualify for the rights to play on the LPGA tour. Most female golfers started on the mini-tour circuit, which in many ways resembles minor league baseball in today's sports world.

In 1973, as she was launching her run at a pro golf career, Dost found herself in Australia. "I figured if I was going to be in this strange and exciting new place," she remembers, "I'd probably better have a nicer camera than the Instamatic I was carrying around." She bought a Yashica Rangefinder camera and carried it with her for the nearly one year she spent on the Aussie tour. "That was the spark that got me going in photography," says Dost.

The Rangefinder was one of the best 35mm cameras of the day, and Dost spent much of her spare time on the tour studying its use and practicing with it.

When she returned to the United States in 1974 she landed in the San Francisco Bay area where she hooked up with a woman who was to play a significant role in her future career. Judy Horst was a partner in a company called Bo Tree Publishing and she was also the founder of the mini-tour on which Dost was about to embark. Horst had become famous ­ some would suggest infamous ­ for publishing a calendar called the "Ladies Home Companion" which featured tasteful nude men carefully positioned and photographed. Bo Tree specialized in calendars, Dost recalls, "so there were cameras all over the place" when Dost and several other touring pros stayed at the Horst house.

"I bought a camera at a pawn shop," Dost recalls, "and one day Judy took me out to Mt. Hamilton to give me a chance to shoot some scenery and landscape stuff. After we got the shots developed, she told me I had an eye for this work and that I should keep it in mind in case I ever decided to leave the tour."

As she played the mini-tour the next year or two, Dost often combined her golfing with her photography. "I was getting some of my shots accepted and actually getting money from my photography," she says, shaking her head at the memory.

Comes the LPGA
Finally, after several years on the mini-tour, Dost earned her LPGA card and began a five-year career as a touring pro golfer. The women's tour was less than 20 years old at the time and still suffered from a number of image and prize-money problems not faced by the men's circuit.

"The hardest part about life as a touring pro," Dost says, "was getting the money together each year to start the tour. It cost about $1,000 each week to travel the circuit and that was a lot of money in the mid-1970's. In a good year, I'd just about break even. I did, however, meet a lot of great people and got a lot of great doors open to me, all of which has stood me in good stead to this day."

During Dost's five years on the LPGA Tour, she had several top-ten finishes, shot a low round of 66 and finished third at the Ping Championship in Portland, Oregon as well as at the 1976 tour stop at Lake Monroe in Bloomington, IN. At one point she held the ladies' course record at Lake Chabot in the Oakland hills with a 67.

As she began to shift her career to photographing golf, she started, quite logically, by shooting tournaments. "I knew what the players were feeling. I could sense their gut about their next moves, so I was frequently in position to get a particularly good shot," she recalls. While other independent golf photographers, who at the time were all men, were not very welcoming or supportive of this first woman to step onto their turf, the professionals were "really helpful," she says. "The guys shooting for the wire services, the national sports and golf magazines, were really good about helping me and showing me things."

Over the years, Dost says she's shot "probably about 400 tournaments" for the U.S. Golf Association and magazines. She also does player shots for the players' agents, advertising agencies and others.

A Different Kind of Birdie
These days, Dost spends the bulk of her time photographing golf courses. She is a licensed photographer at Pebble Beach, which sells many of her photos in its pro shop and elsewhere to avid golfers and collectors all over the world. The majority of her work is on assignment but she does find time to shoot courses just for the love of it from time to time.

Because many of her shots are aerials ­ a necessity given the size and scope of a golf course or hole ­ she spends a lot of time flying around with the birds, suspended out the door of a hovering helicopter by a strap, bulky telephoto lens in hand, waiting for just the right combination of light and shadow and moisture and cloud to get the shot she envisions.

For closer-to-earth shots, she often brings very tall ladders to her shoots. "I sometimes spend hours perched on the top of the ladder waiting to get just the right shot," she says, demonstrating a patience that also characterized her early mentor, Ansel Adams. While she most often shoots in natural light, she does occasionally use bounce and fill lighting to get a particular effect with ground cover and other features of a tee or green.

"I get the same kind of excitement from being able to get just the perfect shot as I did from qualifying for the LPGA tour," she says. "But I wish I had a way to write down the symphony I hear in my head when I'm shooting. I experience the course that I'm shooting on so many levels that I just love my work."

The challenge of shooting golf courses is never-ending and always shifting. "Architects today want the courses they design to fit into the landscape as if it were always there," she says. "They want to move as little dirt as possible in creating the course right into the terrain."

Even established courses that she has photographed repeatedly change over time. "Pebble Beach is being reworked for the upcoming U.S. Open," she says of the course's preparation for the prestigious 2010 tournament. "It really looks quite different from what it has in the past few years. They're reworking the bunkering, making slight changes to the greens and will be managing the rough differently. All of that produces a course that is quite different to my eye as it is to the golfers' games."

Weather of course plays a big role in her photography as well. You might think she'd be really excited by a totally blue-sky day but you'd be wrong. "I have plenty of clear-sky day shots," she says. "I thrive on storms. I love those little Œsucker holes' that often accompany storms on the Coast. Interesting cloud formations can really make a shot." Although fog isn't necessarily her friend, she says that just as fog is lifting, it can reveal some very interesting shots to her camera.

Dost has thousands upon thousands of golf course landscape shots carefully stored and cataloged in binders at her enterprise's corporate headquarters on Garden Road near the Monterey Airport. Her company, under Reade's leadership, produces custom prints of all sizes, products like notecards using her art, and books. She is presently at work on a book entitled "The Nature of Golf," about which she is quite excited.

While she mixes digital and the "old-fashioned" analog approaches to photography, most of her work remains in the traditional world of film, a world that is shrinking in terms of suppliers and equipment. "We do so much in large-format prints," Reade points out, that digital photography is going to have to scale up a good bit before we can even think about using it as our primary medium. It will have to get to 50 megapixels or higher resolution." Even the best digital cameras today top out at under 32 megapixels.

"I still can't believe that this has happened to me," she says wistfully, a twinkle in her eyes. "To be out on a golf course, often before anyone else is there or after everyone else is gone, to get to know it so well that I can capture its essence in photographs and then to be able to make a business out of it. It's more than I ever dreamed."

Her dreams help a great many golfers take their dreams of playing the world's greatest golf courses back home in memorable photographic records that capture the relaxation and thrill of that "round of golf that lasts forever." °

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