The Photographer: Greg Bowl

A commercial photographer in Boston for 40 years, I nonetheless have always made personal photography projects a part of my life. I started shooting with a Kodak Brownie when I was about 5 years old, the following Christmas I “upgraded” to an “Imperial Lark” plastic camera (I still have it). But it wasn’t until after I got out of high school and went backpacking through Europe that photography became a serious habit and eventually a career.

One of my first decisions when setting out to photograph at the Garden was not to use an on-camera flash, which was how almost all of wrestling was typically photographed, but to work with the existing light in the Garden. This was difficult. Film cameras, unlike their modern digital descendants, are challenging in low light. Shooting 35mm with Nikons or Leicas, then “push processing” the film resulted in very grainy, “noisy” negatives. I tried various combinations of film and developing methods, with mixed results. Stopping action without flash is very difficult. (I didn’t then and still don’t like using flash) Available light lets the background come in, gives depth to the arena, and for me just looks better, but it was challenging to work with.

When I look back on these images a couple of things come to mind. First is that “I wish I could go back and do more”, of course. The second is wondering “how did they let me get that close to the ring action”. There were times, as in the photo of Stan Stasiak and Gorilla Monsoon, that I was probably hanging inside the ropes. Oddly, I was never pushed back, yelled at, told to back off …it was almost like I was invisible. (After the first time I went to an event and the Garden staff saw me, I was able to walk in and out of the Garden without anyone asking me what I was doing… imagine doing that today)

Being that close to the ring action in a full - house event, I also got to hear the wrestlers talking to each other, the refs talking …all the things that the crowd couldn’t hear because it was LOUD in there. And constantly being on the lookout for incoming “missiles” of soda cups and junk when a “heel” was getting his way over the crowd favorite Get hit once with a full cup of soda and you learn fast to “duck and cover”. There was a very intense energy level focused on the ring by a full Garden crowd, an intensity you could feel in more ways then one.

I wanted to photograph the wrestlers, of course, but I also wanted to document the Garden crowd, which meant turning the camera on the seats and getting in the back hallways, trying to get on film the atmosphere, the emotion. A big part of it was my personal interest in the psychology of wrestling. It was a great experience on many levels.