The story behind JohnMaddenPhotos.com, the charming, hilarious creation of a Bay Area photographer - SF Gate

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Ted Kurihara has a secret.

He tells me he can only convey it off the record. After a little coaxing, he changes his mind. “Ah, what the hell,” he laughs. “I’m retired anyway.”

First, some context. Kurihara, 75, is a Bay Area photographer. About a year ago, a friend of his helped him start his own professional website, because once the pandemic ends, Kurihara wants to seek out assignments again. Many of the photos on his website are previously unreleased. He captured the Delano grape strike, migrant workers in Modesto, unhoused folks from San Francisco’s Skid Row and the 1967 San Francisco Peace March. All are beautiful, powerful black-and-white stills.

One portfolio piece stands out from the rest, though: It’s a watermarked photo of Hall of Fame Oakland Raiders coach John Madden, now 85 years old, circa 1995. Click into that picture, and you’ll see a message about visiting the other website Kurihara’s friend helped him create last year, appropriately titled JohnMaddenPhotos.com. If you don’t want the watermarks, you can buy the photos off Kurihara directly, though it'll cost you a pretty penny. The website is full of exactly what it sounds like, and many of the stock photos have unintentionally aged into the funniest images I've seen in forever.

John Madden participating in one of his many '90s photoshoots that were orchestrated by Ted Kurihara, who now owns the website JohnMaddenPhotos.com.
Courtesy of Ted Kurihara

Which ... I have no idea how to tell Kurihara when we get to chatting. I don’t want to offend him. He’s an accomplished photographer, and it’s my fault — certainly not his — that my brain is filled to capacity with internet memes and pre-baked, impossible-to-articulate conceptions of why stuff I see online is funny. I know a meme when I see one, and I need to find a way to relay to him, hopefully artfully, that his Madden collection is almost certain to go viral.

It takes a while to get there. We spend nearly two hours on the phone talking about Kurihara’s upbringing on a farm in Hawaii, the “magic” of photography that he discovered when he was 12 and his early years in San Francisco (he moved when he was 19 with $200 to his name). We cycle through his favorite shoots, his best stories and the tutelage he sought to improve as a businessman and photographer. Eventually, we arrive at how his relationship with Madden formed.

“John Madden and I hit it off really well from the first shoot,” he remembers. He can't pinpoint exactly what year that was — he had lots of clients, after all. That first shoot was a referral from an advertiser. Afterwards, Madden specified that Kurihara should photograph his future advertisements. “I’m very grateful for that,” says Kurihara, a Raiders fan.

Madden was a prolific commercial pitchman in the '90s. He wasn’t a coach anymore, but he was famous for his broadcast booth color commentary alongside play-by-play man Pat Summerall. Soon, he’d become synonymous with football video games, too. Madden was all business, and that’s why he liked Kurihara, who showed up to his shoots in custom-made suits and never really got flummoxed around celebrities or politicians. “Putting [Madden] on a shoot schedule was tough because he was taking a bus all over the country during football season,” Kurihara says. “It took a lot of synchronization with the ad agency and his staff.”

For Ace Hardware, for example, they lined up a date for an all-day shoot, and Kurihara knocked out the whole slate of ads for an entire year. “We were doing maybe 40 ads in a day,” he says.

Their routine was a model of consistency, like Marcus Allen running for a first down on third-and-one. They had a great makeup artist. Madden is a large man, so they’d get his clothes tailored in advance. He’d take five to eight minutes to get dressed and prepped for the shot as Kurihara set up lighting and props. After that, he’d be on set for five minutes tops. “It was like, ‘bang, bang, bang,’” Kurihara says. “You could tell he took pride in knocking these out in one or two or three takes. I never saw him go more than three takes.” Kurihara photographed Madden for both right-hand and left-hand pages in print, and when appropriate, the advertiser would add text above Madden’s hand gestures.

The results speak for themselves, and they speak far more than 1,000 words. Madden, with his occasionally enormous pleated pants, posing with an unfathomably odd collection of items, many of which Kurihara doesn’t recall the circumstances behind anymore.

The humongous scissors at the top of this article? No idea. A hockey stick and a football? Doesn’t come to mind.

We do know the muffler is from Walker Exhaust Systems.

This hypebeast outfit looks to be an American Rug Craftsmen joint.

These snacks are from a Sunshine Biscuits shoot, during which Madden got annoyed with a pushy ad agency guy, Kurihara says.

“I never really thought about it, but I guess you’re right, yes, he was endorsing a lot of things,” Kurihara says to me. “I was having too much fun with the shoots.” Kurihara’s favorite part was lunch, when Madden would eat catered food with everyone and answer their football questions. Kurihara peppered him with real-world scenarios, and Madden broke down exactly how he’d respond if he were still coaching. “He never got tired of talking football,” Kurihara says.

Around this point in the conversation, I ask Kurihara if he's familiar with internet memes, and if he's on social media.

“No, just basic iPhone stuff,” is his reply. I am jealous, and I attempt a coherent definition of memes before cutting myself off. Why subject Kurihara to any of this nonsense? I restart: “John Madden is an eminently likeable, very famous man, and he’s holding up some funny items: Cheez-Its, a muffler, big scissors,” I explain. “So I think these photos are going to make a lot of people on the internet laugh. Not at you, and not at Madden, necessarily, but just the absurdity of the situation.”

There’s a pause. “Thank you for that. I never gave it a thought,” he says. He tells me he’ll “look into” memes, but Ted, when you read this, I’d recommend you not do so.

As for Kurihara’s secret? It’s a hot tip. Kurihara determined the perfect word for the subjects of photoshoots to repeat when they need to crack a semi-natural smile. Kurihara made this discovery while working with Madden, who wasn’t so great at nailing a grin. Nobody is, to be fair. “At least half or more of the photos you take of someone aren’t going to have the right expression,” Kurihara estimates. So aspiring photographers, take note. The word to utter isn’t “cheese,” it turns out. It’s “testing.”

Kurihara repeats the word “testing” to me over and over in different octaves and voices. He’s as animated as he’s been the entire call. “With ‘testing,’ you have a reasonable mouth position and you’ll look pleasant,” he says. Apparently, Madden was “all for it.”

I can’t tell you why this anecdote is so endearing to me. Imagining Madden gripping a grocery bag and repeating the word “testing” dozens of times in a row only makes me laugh more.

But I do take Kurihara’s recommendation seriously. I plan on breaking out the “everyone say ‘testing!’” line for the next birthday pictures I’m forced to snap. And I might just buy the birthday-haver an American Rug Craftsmen jacket.

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The story behind JohnMaddenPhotos.com, the charming, hilarious creation of a Bay Area photographer - SF Gate

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