Peter B. Kaplan Brought Down to Earth by Vertigo

Last week I got a call from Peter B. Kaplan, whom I’ve known for a couple of decades. Back in the 1980s I worked on a story about him when he was photographing the renovation of the Statue of Liberty. Kaplan was (and is) known as a photographer of heights—at that time he was doing a lot of work on the ledges of New York City skyscrapers as well as Lady Liberty. He had a great loft in the photo district, and a grey parrot that talked to a cat and turned on the TV by itself. In recent years Kaplan relocated to Delaware, where he could breathe some fresher air and avoid New York’s pricey rents. But he was still busy climbing up on things to take pictures. So I found it ironic when he told me he’d been brought down to earth with a case of vertigo.

Kaplan hasn’t taken his dizziness lying down. He ended up producing a unique project documenting his search for a cure.

When Kaplan first started suffering from vertigo a year ago, he was rightfully worried that it would mean the end of his career. He ended up going through three months of medical testing, all of which he recorded with a digital SLR. “I would hold the camera out to my side or above me and shoot blindly while the doctor did his exam,” he says. “Some of the doctors were kind of suspicious. But I guaranteed them I wasn’t doing it in case I needed evidence for a lawsuit.”

The photograph here is one from the series that Kaplan took during his testing. “These are the kinds of things that every older man has to go through—my annual physical, my dental and eye exams, and of course my colonoscopy—plus a lot of other tests” Kaplan says. “I actually made myself view the vertigo as an opportunity to document a health crisis.”

After months of testing, doctors couldn’t find any physical cause for the vertigo. “My older brother, who is a doctor, said, ‘Some outside source is causing it, so you need to be a detective. You need to see if your wife changed soaps, got new sheets or towels, changed breakfast cereals—anything like that.’”

Eventually the search focused on an over-the-counter remedy that Kaplan had been taking to improve his memory. Kaplan had been taking the pills, which contained the herbal medication ginkgo biloba, on the recommendation of his parents.

(On a personal level, I’d like to hear if anyone else had heard of this kind of reaction from ginkgo biloba. I’ve heard a lot about it but have never tried it.)

After laying off the medication, Kaplan’s vertigo disappeared. So did his fear of heights. But in the picture here you can see the fear on his face. It’s the look of a photographer with a career-threatening illness. No one ever doubted Kaplan’s courage on the top of a building; here he shows the same courage in a different setting.
--David Schonauer