The Eye of Cleveland

Overview

A documentary about photographer Herb Ascherman and an ode to his hometown. Herb has taken more than 9,000 portraits over the past 40 years.

Rating

1 Reviews

• 

  Don Iannone, PhD

  9 Oct 22, 2025

  The Eye of Cleveland Film Review by Don Iannone October 18, 2025 Jim Koenigsaecker’s short documentary The Eye of Cleveland is both a portrait of photographer Herbert Ascherman Jr. and an ode to the city that shaped him. Cleveland’s skyline opens the film and closes it, a quiet frame for a life spent looking and seeing. Between those bookends we follow Ascherman through Little Italy and out onto the Hope Memorial Bridge, where he photographs the Art Deco Guardians above the Flats, then sets up again to catch fireworks over downtown. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor and Nocturne in A-flat, along with Schumann’s Carnaval, score the images with a chamber intimacy that suits the measured cadence of large-format work. In my interview with Ascherman, he confided, “I’ve devoted my professional life to the other side of the camera. For the first time—and only because I was working with an exceptionally talented filmmaker—I spent forty-two hours in front of it, resulting in a captivating eleven-and-a-half-minute film. Jim turned the entire process into an unforgettable adventure. My heartfelt thanks to Don Iannone for writing this review and to all my friends and followers who took the time to watch and share their thoughtful comments about the film.” Koenigsaecker’s approach is restrained and humane. He shoots, edits, and writes with a documentarian’s steadiness, letting Ascherman and his circle carry the narrative. The thesis is simple and persuasive: “Explore anywhere and everywhere with a camera and you always have friends.” For Ascherman, that credo rests inside a deeper ethic. He calls the philosophical essence of his work the pursuit of quality. He attributes this to his Shakespeare professor, Melvin Goldstein, who instilled in him the elegance of knowledge. He brought that discipline into photography, building a personal library of photobooks that functions as a long apprenticeship, each volume a teacher, the shelves a living curriculum. Early on he found a touchstone in Alfred Stieglitz, not only for modernist clarity but for the conviction that photography is a full art with a community around it. The film’s most tactile passage follows Ascherman as he makes a portrait of Aubry Cline with a Deardorff 8x10 view camera, then later heads to the downstairs workshop in his Shaker Heights home to pull a platinum print. The sequence explains more than any narration could. Platinum and palladium are contact processes, the negative the same size as the final print, the paper hand-coated and exposed to ultraviolet light. The reward is a matte glow, a deep tonal scale, and remarkable permanence. Koenigsaecker lingers on coated sheets, contact frames, trays and tongs, and the quiet patience of the darkroom. Process becomes character, and character becomes argument. The community around Ascherman appears in finely chosen voices. Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, places his platinum practice within the renewed attention to historic processes and notes his generosity as a mentor. Sue Starrett, long connected with the Cleveland Orchestra, recalls the way place seeps into composition and memory. Michael Weil, photographer and gallerist, describes the grace of Ascherman’s wedding work at Severance Hall, the way he finds quiet, telling moments amid ceremony. These testimonies land with weight because the facts support them. Over more than forty years Ascherman has made more than nine thousand portraits. His work resides in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s permanent collection and in the book Fanfare: Portraits of the Cleveland Orchestra, which helped define the public face of a world-class ensemble. Ascherman’s voice gives the film its center. He has spent decades as one of Cleveland’s society photographers, although the subject in his best pictures is not status, it is human presence. He singles out two favorites. One is a self-portrait in the backyard, seated cross-legged with a cigar and his poodle, Barney, in his lap, an image that reads as a portrait of temperament, amused and exact. The other is a street photograph made in Paris in the mid-1980s, known as “Ten Children,” the kind of kinetic gift that sprints straight toward the lens and never stops moving. Together they sketch his range, from formal poise to spontaneous play. Koenigsaecker earns trust by keeping ego out of the frame. He builds the film from watchful scenes and clear testimony, then threads in Cleveland as a living partner. We see Ascherman on the bridge with his 8x10, in the basement workshop, and working the sidewalks where strangers become sitters. The city is not a backdrop; it is a collaborator, a studio with shifting light, wind, and weather. That sense of place is not accidental. Ascherman has helped build the region’s photographic culture, from organizing workshops to cofounding the Cleveland Photo Fest, where a wide range of photography styles are displayed. Music, craft, and temperament align. Chopin and Schumann float through the cut as if the film itself were a small recital in a room lined with prints. The platinum highlights breathe rather than gleam, the silver gelatin shadows carry detail rather than blur into romance. Even the rhythm of the edit mirrors the logic of contact printing: nothing rushed, everything deliberate, a steady accumulation of moments. The portrait of Aubry Cline anchors that rhythm, a single sitter standing in for the thousands who have stepped into Ascherman’s ground glass over four decades. If there is a limitation, it comes from the short form itself. At roughly a dozen minutes, the film sketches rather than argues. Newcomers to alternative printing may wish for a few more beats on the why of platinum in a digital age, or a closer look at negative and paper choices. Yet what the film leaves behind is exactly what endures—an ethic. Read widely. Look closely. Print well. Share the stage. In a city of bridges and smokestacks, The Eye of Cleveland suggests that the real monuments are relationships, the kind forged by a camera, a library card, and a lifetime of attention. After reading my review, filmmaker Jim Koenigsaecker reflected, “It was wonderful to see The Eye of Cleveland screened three times during the 16th Annual Chagrin Documentary Film Festival. The audience reactions especially moved me—they laughed at the image of Herb’s poodle sitting in his lap, and they gasped as the print of Aubry emerged in the darkroom. My thanks to Don Iannone for his review of my film.” Credits and context: Directed, written, shot, and edited by Jim Koenigsaecker. Photographs included in this review were provided with permission by the filmmaker. Featured interviews include Barbara Tannenbaum, Sue Starrett, and Michael Weil. The film follows Ascherman as he photographs Aubry Cline on a Deardorff 8x10 and prints the image in platinum, while also tracing his broader practice, his devotion to craft, and his long service to Cleveland’s cultural life. ~Don Iannone is a fiction and nonfiction writer, essayist, and poet in the Chagrin Falls area. Beyond writing, Don teaches business at Transcontinental University, a European Union-based higher education institution. He and his wife, Mary, are supporters of the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival. Don expects his new book, Cleveland’s Flats: A Symphonic Essay in Black and White, to be released in early November. The book contains two decades of Don’s photographs of the Flats, accompanied by essays and poems. Herb Ascherman wrote the foreword to the book. Don’s email is [email protected].