Paper’s staff photographer was also its technical consultant

Text by Wiley Wood
Photo by Savage Frieze

Norfolk Now has always had excellent photographs. In fact, it stands out from the town papers in the surrounding area—at least in its editors’ opinion—for the high quality of its pictures. And that high quality was due in very large part to one man, Bruce Frisch, who has been the paper’s photography department for most of its existence.

This month, the editors of Norfolk Now learned that Bruce Frisch is retiring from his position on the paper, whose three-column layout he initially designed.

Frisch published his first photo in Norfolk Now in 2003, shortly after the paper’s founding. It was a picture of Keith Harvill, whom old-timers will remember as Norfolk’s pharmacist, standing outside his corner store and pharmacy having just announced its sale.

Yet Frisch’s memory goes back a lot further than that. “When I first came to Norfolk,” he says, “the pharmacy was selling liquor!”

Frisch bought his first piece of land in Norfolk in 1970, as an escape hatch from the city for his wife, Sue, and his young children. In the early days, their trips to Norfolk were camping expeditions; then, with the help of his father, Frisch built a one-room log cabin, on the site where his house now stands.

Frisch has published 569 photographs in Norfolk Now’s print edition—the count is much higher if one includes the pictures posted in the more expansive online edition.

Among the subjects he has memorialized, some repeatedly, are the extreme weather events that have battered Norfolk (hurricanes, ice storms, heavy snowfalls, droughts), the social gatherings that bring its citizens together (barn dances, bird walks, fitness classes, carol sings, trivia nights, chili cook-offs, quilting bees and knitting circles), the comings and goings of its public figures (state and local luminaries, business owners, visiting experts, standout students and teachers of the year, graphic artists and novelists). He has photographed such town events as classic car shows, canoe raffles, award ceremonies, road races, bonfires, marching bands and baseball tournaments; such infrastructure as the town’s brushfire truck, its successive ambulances, its houses of worship, its empty storefronts, its bustling country store and its sewer treatment plant; and such moments as ribbon cuttings for the new playground at Botelle, the wind turbines on Flagg Hill Road and the affordable housing units on Route 44. He documented the restoration of the Greenwoods Theater and its transformation into Infinity Hall, the trial of the Norfolk Curling Club arsonists and the club’s reconstruction after the fire, and the deliberations at town meetings over school regionalization. He has also shot dairy cows for the paper, as well as bears, bobcats and invasive plant species. In a particularly memorable photo, he caught the grace of a snowboarder negotiating the drifts on Station Place during the unusually heavy snows of 2011.

In addition to recording the visual texture of the town for Norfolk Now over the past 17 years, Frisch has overseen the general quality of the paper’s images, retouching spotted and faded photographs from the historical archive and balancing the tonality of the contributed photographs to print crisply and evenly.

Frisch has both a technical background—he graduated with an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—and a journalist’s training and experience, including a fellowship at the Columbia School of Journalism and 20 years as a writer, photographer and managing director for Astronautics and Aeronautics.

This spring, Frisch intends to use the time freed up from his duties at Norfolk Now stalking wildflowers and visiting the nesting sites of great blue herons.