As he scans the reception hall, Dave Schlenker seeks the familiar characters – the disheveled middle-aged uncle or the shy grandmother about to extinguish her second glass of champagne. Everyone else’s attention is on the bride, but Schlenker keeps his camera trained on grandma, anticipating the unrehearsed moment that will linger in everyone’s memory as much as the preceding nuptials.
While Kool & the Gang fills the room, the grandmother in the dusty blue gown slowly rises from her seat and grooves toward the dance floor. Her liquid courage having taken the reins, grandma playfully pats one of the groomsmen on the rear before taking over the spotlight with her own jive. The rest of the wedding party whoops it up, loving every second of the dancing granny.
“I’m always looking for moments,” Schlenker says. “I look for things a lot of photographers wouldn’t put in the final gallery – just funny stuff. I’m constantly on the lookout for things that are just funny and weird.”
Anticipating such moments long before others take notice is a skill Schlenker has cultivated for decades. Chronicling these moments today, he carries multiple cameras over his shoulder, but for decades it was a reporter’s notebook.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Schlenker wrote of Ocala in a regular newspaper column that showcased his self-deprecating wit and keen observations of everyday life in his family and in the community he loves. Today, his column still survives on a monthly basis in The Marion Mosaic, but his storytelling happens primarily from behind a lens.
“Right now, I’m probably more a photographer,” Schlenker says. “I do freelance the column once a month, so I guess I still consider myself a journalist.
“I always wanted to be the Dave Barry instead of the Carl Bernstein. I always liked that voice and wanted to have fun with the writing and newspapers were really the only place to do it.”
Schlenker first served as a beat reporter for The Ocala Star-Banner and covered serious subject matters that sharpened the observational instincts he relies on today. When space opened up in the Features section for a light-hearted column, Schlenker penned “Here Comes the Groom” that would typify his rather Joycean style the rest of his career.
With his column gaining popularity, Schlenker was asked to move to Section A where he became a morning fixture to Ocalans captivated by his world of growing pains and mischievous cats. His reputation as the man who read the pulse of life’s lighter side and revealed it in words grew while the instinct never changed – only the camera became his primary means of storytelling.
For most of his life, he preserved those moments in the written word and now has expanded it to include photographic images. Making the leap to photography seemed natural to him as the newspaper industry began to shrink exponentially around him. After having already earned his photo degree from Daytona State College, he was applying to graduate school to teach journalism at the University of Florida when it dawned on him that “I feel like General Custer going into a classroom and sending these kids into a failed battle, sending them into doom.”
At DSC, he had learned how poor was his early work – work of which he had been so proud. With his degree he jumped from the amateur ranks to professional where he has provided photos for album covers of several musicians and even for the CD liner note images of the band Sister Hazel. He has proven himself a stalwart at local weddings in addition to specializing in portraiture.
His stories have chronicled Ocala’s personality one anecdote at a time, and now his next project continues the story with photographs. For now, he simply refers to it as “Project Ocala” or even “Candid Ocala” – a photographic essay on the community as he chooses to see it.
“I think I have a Pollyanna view of a lot of things,” Schlenker says as he rifles through an album containing many of the images he will place in ‘Project Ocala.’ “I’ve seen the darker side of Ocala, but I always just look for fun. That’s what this project represents: all these different corners of Ocala. It’s a lot more culturally rich than people think and there’s a lot of stuff to do here. I like happy people, and I just love shooting people having a good time in Ocala.
“This is basically going to be Dave Schlenker’s Ocala.”
He pulls out a photo of the abandoned Wild Waters park months after it closed. Then there’s one of a Van Halen tribute band playing at The Reilly Arts Center, a perfect segue to his favorite image: members of Sister Hazel jokingly harassing their warm-up band during a sound check.
The images validate what Schlenker has put in writing all these years and now portrays in photographic imagery:
“Growing up in Ocala I’ve heard all my life – Slow-Ocala; Ocala is boring; nothing to do here; blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, most of my professional life was covering this town, particularly arts and entertainment. Especially now, I know that not to be true, just seeing the city that’s under your nose.”
Schlenker’s affinity for laughter and the lighter side of life has guided him in deciding which images he chooses to preserve. Yet, some of the most important moments he captures contain neither laughter nor celebration. They transpire in quiet hospital rooms where moms and dads meet and say goodbye to a child in the same breath.
The organization, called “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep,” is a professional photography group that provides remembrance portraits for families who have lost newborns. “The notion being that this baby is as much a part of your family as the ones (pictured) on your mantle,” Schlenker says. “No question, this is the most important thing I do.
“The first year or so I was a basket case. One of the reasons I started doing it was because (wife) Amy and I had trouble having kids… and I thought, ‘If I remember being that torn up over a miscarriage or something like that, I can’t fathom what these people are going through.”
For all those assignments that carry such emotional weight, they are just one part of Schlenker’s work behind the camera. Most of the time his camera finds subjects reveling in celebration and laughter, caught in moments that unfold when people forget they are being watched. Those are the moments he chooses most to preserve.
To this day, Schlenker is just as comfortable with a camera as he is with the notebook, the primary storytelling tool for much of his life. He is still telling the story of Ocala, or at least his version of it: one that is full of joy, promise, laughter and cultural enrichment. Whether it’s barefooted bandmembers kicked back in a moment of good-hearted teasing, a grandmother finding the courage to take the dance floor at a wedding, or even a somber mom posing with her stillborn child, Schlenker will make sure everyone not only sees the Ocala he sees, but comes to understand it as well.