photo by jon w. sparks
Tom Gettelfinger is possessed of a curiosity that has taken him to extraordinary places, not the least of which is his home on the bluff overlooking Tom Lee Park.
“This is a very harsh environment down here, going from a hundred degrees to minus 10, and sometimes winds come in and blow rain,” he says. “It’s pretty harsh.”
You might be forgiven if you looked closely at him to see if he was kidding. He is one of the original residents of the Riverbluff Cooperative and has a view to the west of the Mississippi River, all the barges thereon, Arkansas, and sunsets. And he can look right down onto Tom Lee Park, which further means he’s witnessed almost every one of the Beale Street Music Festivals and enjoyed the aroma of the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contests for decades.
If it’s truly harsh, however, he’s sticking it out, tending to his eclectic collection of herbs and vegetables in a garden that he recently outfitted with a hammock. Minus 10 does not seem to be a deal-breaker. In truth, it would take a lot more than some lousy weather to slow down this retired ophthalmologist, skilled photographer, intellectual, art collector, adventurous chef and epicure, world traveler, and man with a mission to change the world. For starters.
photo courtesy of tom gettelfinger
The scene at Burning Man has always been an unending visual feast and thus a draw for photographers. But over the years, the organizers have sought to put limits on what can be shot (citing privacy concerns around nudity and illegal acts). Gettelfinger did, however, manage to secure a press pass that gave him a bit more freedom to capture the freewheeling community in the Black Rock Desert, 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada.
So what’s inside the abode of someone who has so much going on inside his head?
A lot of what you’ll see is the art, on the walls, on the floors, on shelves. There are Buddhas that are centuries old, there is furniture from the Memphis Group, the 1980s-era Italian design firm. He has local works, many from the early periods of the artists. He has pieces by Lyda Laneville, Tim Andrews, Nancy Cheairs. You can’t really do a quick run through his house — there are too many provocative works that stop you in your tracks.
“This one looks like a solar robot,” he says, pointing to a witty construction that looks like it was left over from a 1950s-era science fiction film, “but it’s an H-bomb lamp.” The lights didn’t quite work right on it, so Gettelfinger got the late Dan Spector to come over and fix it right up.
And he has his own work scattered about, including a mysterious and unusual image of the pyramids in Egypt, as well as pieces from Myanmar.
photo by tom gettelfinger
An early Gettelfinger photograph, taken from horseback, of the pyramids in Egypt.
Gettelfinger’s work is beautiful and far beyond the routine. But he’s self-deprecating. He’s quick to bring up one of the first notices from a local critic he got when he began showing his artwork. “Robert McGowan wrote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah; Tom Gettelfinger’s photographs, on the other hand, are so bad that they hurt the other people in the exhibition.” He laughs and ponders how that may have held him back. Yet he continues to produce.
But how did Gettelfinger even get to Memphis in the first place? It was a long journey, including some travel along the Amazon.
He went to medical school at Harvard, finished training in Boston, then did his internship and residency in Seattle.
photo courtesy of tom gettelfinger
The opening of the Ancient City Eye Hospital in Xian, China, with Dr. Meng Yong An, a former fellow in cataract surgery at MECA and now a prominent surgeon in China.
“I didn’t want to go into practice right away, so I took a trip to South America for a year,” he says. “I spent a month taking Spanish in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, went as far down as Puerto Montt, Chile, and worked my way back up, including along the Amazon River.”
Gettelfinger was content to continue his travels, getting the occasional medical gig along the way. “I learned that an ophthalmologist in Memphis was looking for a partner and I thought, since I was doing all this traveling, that I’d come here for maybe six months. I’d never set foot in Memphis and had no idea what it was, but I joined Dr. Jerre Freeman in 1976.”
That six-month tour became permanent, and Freeman and Gettelfinger formed MECA — Memphis Eye and Cataract Associates. “Jerre was doing some very high-level advanced stuff,” Gettelfinger says, “but I wasn’t into a permanent professional track. I thought it was time to stop doing that.”
photo courtesy of tom gettelfinger
Gettelfinger performing cataract microsurgery at Memphis Eye and Cataract Associates.
He describes Freeman as “a great visionary in the field, and very conservative politically. I was more liberal politically but more conservative professionally — I didn’t want to do something until I was absolutely sure it was there.”
Gettelfinger was doing clinical research and was a clinical professor of ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, but one of the things of high interest to him and Freeman was international ophthalmology. “Jerre was doing that in Mexico,” he says, “and I got interested in the Amazon.” He’d go to clinics that weren’t accessible by road — taking a boat or plane were the only options to get there. And he served aboard the hospital ship Esperança on the Amazon.
“Then I met some of these people in the art scene here,” he says. “Rick Ivy was working in our office and going down to the Antenna Club, to Tav Falco shows, and I saw there was an interesting counterculture here.” Later, he would meet Danielle Shing Shaw, and they became a couple. “I just kind of settled in and it’s been good for me.”
Gettelfinger speaks with the deepest fondness of his life’s love for 37 years. “I’ll tell you what I liked about Shing,” he says. “She was very pretty, but I liked her values. She gave me a hard time on some things, you know. I should’ve listened to her more about so many things, but she valued work and she valued doing the right thing. She helped me a lot and I hope I helped her.”
She worked at financial institutions and was a cook, gardener, and tango dancer — what some might say perfectly reflected the relationship with her husband. She died six years ago of lung cancer.
Gettelfinger retired from MECA last year, but he’s not the retiring sort. He’s still committed to changing the world although, as he’s said, “I’m just not sure the world wants me to change it.”
One of his passions — he refers to it as his jeremiad — is to get the cost of drugs and medicines under control and make pricing structures more transparent. He’s been on this crusade for years and finds a lot of sympathy among colleagues, but he says the pharmaceutical companies are keeping anything significant from happening.
photo by tom gettelfinger
The desert is a tough gallery space to fill, but artists at Burning Man give it their best. below left: Gettelfinger took his camera to Big Rig Jig by Mike Ross, who reconfigured two tanker trucks.
And for something completely different, Gettelfinger has become something of a regular attendee at the annual Burning Man event in Nevada. The temporary city is a self-described nonprofit with global ambitions and is a center of creativity, music, and cultural expression.
He learned about it several years ago from different sources at about the same time, which he took to be something of a sign. He knew it would be a place where he and his camera would find amazing things.
“It’s like a big RV park and it’s all platted with cross streets and things like that,” he says. “But even if you know the cross street, these RVs and camps and tents are kind of helter-skelter around and to find somebody isn’t easy.”
But it’s a compelling place. As Gettelfinger describes it, “the whole thing is to promote interaction and there was no commerce. You couldn’t sell anything but you’re supposed to bring gifts or something. A lot of that fell by the wayside over all the years, but the outdoor art that they had, I’ve thought almost from the beginning that art museums should be collecting it. They are now, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and the Reno museum is buying some of the art.”
photo by tom gettelfinger
Another artwork at Burning Man. Passage by Karen Cusolito and Dan Das Mann shows a mother and child leaving impressive footprints (which burn with oil at night).
As Burning Man has gotten bigger, it’s adapted to its popularity. “There is some truth in that things change and evolve. It was easier to take pictures earlier,” he says. “There was a freedom and there was a lot of nudity, but the last time I went there, there’s much less nudity — they’re more prudish. They’re more reticent to have pictures taken. All of it changed. And there are more turnkey things where you’d just fly in and you’d get in this huge RV and you pay $10,000 and they have all your food. And that changes the character of it a little bit.”
Even with all his passions and pastimes, Gettelfinger looks to the future. “I still have the fantasy that I might do something in life,” he says. “Maybe I will, but I bet I probably won’t. The only person I once read that became a millionaire after the age of 65 was Colonel Sanders. But you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize.”
photo by tom gettelfinger
Gettelfinger’s photograph, The Man Burns, at the Burning Man Project in Nevada.
