Phil H. Webber, 1938-2006: For 50 years, he captured Seattle with camera, style

Click. In the instant it takes to shoot a frame of film, Seattle has lost one of its most colorful, prolific and fearless photojournalists. Phil H. Webber, who was in his 50th year as a photographer for the Seattle P-I, died unexpectedly Saturday of complications of emphysema. He was 67.

Click, click. That was Webber shooting Seattle history one day at a time -- the Beatles and the Stones, presidents and Seafair Queens, the viaduct going up and the Kingdome coming down.

"Taking pictures was a really deep-rooted thing in him," said his son, Kevin Coryell. "It was him wanting to be a part of what was going on in the city.

"He really cared about people," he said. "He knew everybody. He was like the heart of Seattle."

He was a newshound from the age of 9, said Patricia Coryell, who met him at Seattle's Lincoln High School and became the first of his five wives. In high school, he bought a police scanner, then would get his mom to drive him to accident scenes so he could sell his photos to the local dailies. He's had a scanner going ever since, buying his most recent one a few weeks ago.

"He was just a natural with a camera," she said.

The P-I snapped him up as a shooter at age 17 during the pre-35 mm, pre-color era when photographers had to rush back from the scene and into the darkroom under unforgiving deadlines. His M.O. was to be the first in and the fastest out.

"You'd send Phil, and he'd always come back with a picture," said P-I photographer Jeff Larsen.

Where another photographer might come back and say there was no picture, Webber got one, anyway, said P-I photo editor John Dickson. "That was the news business. He understood that."

Even decades later, he was as slick as a gunslinger at changing the searing hot bulbs on his beloved 4X5 Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic camera with the side-mounted flash. You got one flash out of them, then you'd have to flick the hot one off, pocket it and flip a fresh, cold one into place before the charge went out to get the next shot, said P-I librarian Lytton Smith, who watched Webber demonstrate the trick for an exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry recently.

"The P-I family has lost one of our most accomplished, inspiring members. Phil's work reflected Seattle and helped to define the P-I for a half-century," said P-I Managing Editor David McCumber. "His images are with us forever, and his personality will never be forgotten."

Born a twin in Seattle in 1938, Webber grew up the son of a homemaker mother. His father died when the two boys were 22 months old, leaving their mom with a double handful of trouble.

"My mom used to always say whatever one of us didn't think of (doing), the other one would," said his brother, Bill Webber.

The young Phil soon discovered something that would put him in the middle of the action he craved.

If Webber was best known as the "historical registry" at the P-I, and for being on the spot for many of his native Seattle's formative moments, his second signature was his eccentric sartorial style.

A rival photographer once got a shot of Webber, clad in clashing stripes, nose to nose with a tapir he was photographing at the zoo. It was hard to distinguish which species had the more colorful markings.

"My God, Phil, is the circus in town?" quipped another photographer when the garish-meter hit one spectacular high.

If his job was occasionally a circus, he was its gentle clown. His special sleight of hand was his ability to enjoy his life and make the life of others around him enjoyable during the sometimes chaotic, always deadline-driven, occasionally blood-pressure-pumping trapeze job of news gathering.

Webber saw a lot of gore through the lens of his camera, especially in the early days shooting shootings and accidents. It got to him sometimes, which is one reason he liked to make people laugh, said Barbara Downs, his partner. His all-time favorite photo was of two men belly-laughing at a political rally for Vice President Walter Mondale. "It was such a hearty laugh, and they were very dapperly dressed," she said. "He just loved that picture."

Downs first met Webber 35 years ago when she worked the night shift on the old P-I switchboard.

"It could get pretty boring," she said. "Until Phil would come by and talk."

Webber did love to talk to ladies. And his cheery "Hey good-looking" or "How's the lovely lady?" didn't stop even when he was lugging around his oxygen tank in recent months at the P-I as he battled lung disease.

"To Phil, there were no ugly women," she said.

Perhaps fittingly, Webber also holds the distinction of being the first male inducted into the Washington Press Women, an organization that honored him with the "Sugar Daddy Award," during its Sugar Plum luncheon in 1973. The organization has since become the Washington Press Association.

That didn't surprise his longtime colleagues, who said Webber always looked at life through a slightly different lens.

And filter.

Webber maintained that he was colorblind -- a fact he discovered when he was 16 as he proudly showed off his "white car" to his friends, who informed him that, as it said on the title, the car was beige.

It wasn't colorblindness that accounted for his love of incompatible patterns, however, and he famously owned more than 50 pairs of shoes, at least one pair of which has already been enshrined at the Museum of History and Industry. On what turned out to be his final day of work -- Friday -- he wore one red and one yellow tennis shoe, set off by a fuchsia corduroy jacket.

His signature style evolved partly in response to the dress code of the 1960s, when photographers were required to wear white shirts and ties. But he also grew up with a fraternal twin brother, and their mother often dressed them alike when they were boys. His latter-day outfits may have been a little latent rebellion, Downs said.

"Plus, that way you could see him coming."

And remember him. It's not uncommon for P-I staffers on assignment to introduce themselves, and be asked, "Oh, you work at the P-I. Do you know Phil?"

"Phil had a great ability to set people at ease," said longtime P-I columnist Joel Connelly. "He could defuse the most tense situation."

P-I columnist Susan Paynter, who worked more than 30 years with Webber -- often covering volatile issues of the day from abortion rights to lesbian custody issues -- recalled how Webber would "sniff the air" of a situation and know exactly how to get people to relax in front of the camera.

"His whimsical presence could put even the most self-important people at ease and kind of without them knowing it could deflate their sense of stuffiness," she said. "Because they could laugh at him, they were less concerned with anyone laughing at them."

Webber loved newspapering and wanted to pass that along to new generations of photographers.

One of them, Dan Berman of Seattle, shadowed Webber for a class project two years ago.

"He showed me around, took me out on a half-dozen assignments," said Berman, now 18. "He had so much passion. I thought, 'This is cool.'

"If it weren't for him, I might be a lawyer now," he said. Berman is currently a freelance photojournalist.

"He had friends everywhere, in all walks of life," said P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby. "His passing is a loss that will be felt by more people than anyone can imagine."

Webber's charm was not lost on working folks.

For decades, Webber knew most of the cops and firefighters, tow-truck operators and ambulance drivers in the city by first name. Saturday, 10 paramedics and two police units responded to Downs' 911 call. Webber was as usual already on the scene, but this time he was the center of it. He died at home soon after. The kitchen at the Magnolia home he shared with Downs, which is painted 14 different colors -- "even the house is dressed like Phil" -- is strangely quiet, she said Sunday, just then noticing the absence of the static and police chatter that formed the white noise of their lives.

"One of the paramedics must have turned it off," she said.

Click.

The scanner is silent.