Awakin Call With Bob Sadler
ServiceSpace
--Chirag Medhora
23 minute read
Sep 13, 2014

 

This is a transcript of the call with Bob Sadler which took place on August 16th, 2014. For more information on Bob or to listen to the conversation, click here: http://www.awakin.org/forest/index.php?pg=guest&cid=164. This call was moderated by Bela.

Bela: Could you share a little bit about your first experiences with photography? It seems like you had carried your camera out there to Vietnam when you went to serve (in the war). What really prompted you to take that up and capture what was happening around you?

Bob: Well, I was very young - just about 20 years old – and had not seen much of the world. Suddenly, I found myself halfway around the globe in very different place and I was just awestruck by the beauty of that country and very quickly I decided I would get a camera. So I went to the local exchange and talked to the guy behind the counter and he said, “Why don’t you take this camera? It's only $35.” It was a twin lens reflex medium format camera, which is much different than a 35mm camera. I knew nothing about cameras at all so I just took his advice, it certainly wasn’t very much money and he sold me a couple of rolls of film and showed me how to use it. I just went out into the local village and started taking pictures. Of course, in those days you wouldn’t see the photographs for weeks, because you had to send it away to get developed. They came back as these beautiful medium-format colour transparencies. Although I had no way to show them - no slide projector - you could hold them up to the sky and see them. I was just stunned by the richness of those transparencies and the sharpness of those photographs! I just started taking pictures everywhere I could and compiling them and sending them back home. Just about that time I went off to Philippines on rest & recuperation and ran into William Humble. In the period that I was with him I basically got a workshop in photography 1-on-1 from somebody who had shot for National geographic and other great magazines. He took me seriously because he saw that I was shooting with a medium-format camera, so I was somehow elevated in his mind beyond what I really was. He spent a lot of time [doing that] and then I still had 6 months to go in Vietnam. But now I had the instruction of a good photojournalist and a reasonably good camera. I just kept shooting pictures the whole time.

Bela: I'm imagining the context that you were in and I'm thinking of the juxtaposition between being in Vietnam and all the beauty that you described being behind this camera and experiencing Vietnam as a soldier with death & blood & fear around you. I read that you shared about your time in Vietnam in your personal blog. How did this juxtaposition impact your psyche and your eye while you were there?

Bob: It's pretty hard to explain, but I just see things that I feel passionate about and that tends not to be war; it tends to be the best of life. While I had the camera in my hand I used it at things I found beautiful and uplifting. I was not an experienced photographer. If you see the portfolio on lightmoment.com, in the Awakin portfolio I've put a couple of those images - one is called Vinh Long Sunset where obviously I'm struck by the sunset. Of course, there are helicopters on the runway in the pictures as well, but to me it's all beautiful.
Vinh Long Sunset
Vinh Long Sunset

There's this girl is also from that same roll of film. It's not anybody I knew; somebody saw me walking around with a camera, I did a number of sign language gestures and she posed for the picture. It was this nice portrait, but when I saw it about 10 years ago doing Photoshop for the first time on that photograph, I closed up on the hands… and if you saw it on your screen you can enlarge that and go to her hands and see she has a rifle cartridge in her hands! I didn’t know it at the time, but it alters the image considerably because there's so much beauty in that picture and innocence and at the same time a reminder of war.
Vietnamese Girl
Vietnamese Girl

I think almost all the pictures I took during that period ended up with the same thing - I went for what I love about life but there's this little tinge of war throughout them that I didn't even notice in many cases at the time.

Bela: That picture is astonishing, just the contrast of the expression on her face and the rifle [cartridge] that she's holding, as if it's a toy that she came across while she was walking. I'm wondering, before you went to Vietnam did you have the calling within you to find an artistic way to express what you were experiencing in your life? Or was it just being in Vietnam, in such a different culture and incredibly different context that awakened this within you?

Bob: I think it was the dramatic shift in location that turned me on to doing this. I always dabbled a little bit with sketching & music and so forth, but didn’t really put myself out there.

Bela: That makes me wonder because something that I dabble in sometimes is writing and I always find that whenever I step outside my box and find opportunities to travel, that writer in me is awakened again because my senses are alert. Everything is just so different; it's almost as though my senses come out of their slumber. Even when Ii travel and then I come back to my regular routine and my home here in Berkeley, everything looks new to me for a couple of weeks, or if I'm lucky a couple of months! After your service in Vietnam, how did you keep that inspiration alive? I know that you went into management consulting and that allowed you to travel quite a bit. Was that a part of what kept the inspiration alive, and if so, can you talk a little bit about some of the countries that you traveled to and what you captured during those trips?

Bob: It was about a 10-year period after Vietnam - I went back to college and got a degree and taught school for a few years - and that experience led me to doing community organizing and I moved around the country quite a bit, so I got to see a lot of cities in the US as a community organizer. I didn’t have much time to take photographs but was always interested, always being at galleries, always being at photography stores and talking to people. Then my job as a community organizer morphed into management consulting and I started working with other organizations and corporations around the world. So I got to travel more in the US, Europe & Asia and for the rest of my career I flew around to all of those places. I was never able to take enough time to photograph. It was so hard managing a family and doing that kind of travel that I didn't take any extra time in those cities that I was traveling to. But I loved being in different cultures, the rapid succession of being in different places & situations. I felt very alive in the world. Whenever I had a camera I would get out and start taking pictures and then that would serve to train my eye more and then even when I didn’t have a camera in my hand I was still taking pictures. Every hour or so I would see something and say, “If I had a camera I would shoot that” and it’s still in my head. I realized that photography was primarily a way of seeing better and the more I had a camera in my hand, the more I saw better all the time. As I got older I took more time and started to do a little bit more, went to workshops, got even better equipment - a large format camera - and it just is something that has grown throughout my life. It's always been my second thing to do - I have a career still - but whenever I have a chance I do more photography.

Bela: I'm struck with what you said about being able to see better through the lens of a camera. Could you elaborate a little, maybe with examples of some of the images you captured? What are you able to see when you were behind that camera lens that you were not necessarily able to notice in just the day-to-day movement of life?

Bob: As soon as you look through a camera lens, you're now creating something abstract. You're not capturing reality - reality is too big and when you're experiencing reality you're experiencing [it through] all senses. When you're looking through a camera and getting a photograph, you're framing a very small part of the world and when you frame it you're bringing something to it because you've chosen that to show. You could tilt a camera one way or another or back up or move forward or change the lens settings, you could dramatically change what is in that frame, show textures, show perspective. As soon as you’ve done that you’ve now brought your personality, your life, your uniqueness to that image. You’ve brought the world's attention to this little thing that was within your range of eyesight & within what the camera can do. It calls attention off to something that no one would look at normally. Your eyes might be averted or you just wouldn't see it. It's such a delight for me to do that to myself. Part of it is in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck had that magic potion that he would put on the eyes of sleeping people and then they awoke they fell in love with Puck or whatever they first saw. To me working with a camera is like working with that magic potion. You're sort of putting it on your own eyes when you take a picture and if the picture works and causes a response form the viewer you're basically doing the same thing with the viewer. You're helping them fall in love with what’s in the world.

Bela: That's so poetic and so beautiful! I think about my own experiences with going to photography exhibits and sometimes I would wonder if photographs were altering reality, but the way that you describe it, it's not altering reality, it's just bringing another layer of reality to your consciousness and to the viewer. We don't really see what's before us; we filter it through our own experiences and our own senses in that present moment. What you're able to do is bring a whole new perspective to that moment which might have escaped many of us is really amazing.

Bob: I find it amazing. If you look at the photograph called Red Cheeks taken in 1986 in China, you don't see the whole room that we're in, you see a very small fraction. The way I choose to frame pictures is very intuitive, not very academic. I was just in love with this girl and her red cheeks and I wanted that.
Red Cheeks
Red Cheeks

When you look at the whole room, you couldn’t notice it but when you look at the photograph (this is a really good camera that I used) in large print, you can see every vein, every capillary in her cheeks that make it that red. It’s just gorgeous, framed with her red outfit. Behind her is a kind of line of kids at a moment in time which is no longer - you wouldn't see the communist star on peoples’ heads and probably wouldn’t necessarily see them dressed as warmly because there was no heat back then. Then the picture takes on to me this march of history; it looks like a march of 3 of them in a row with some perspective at a moment in time. If you just looked at the room - it was an interesting place to be in - but you would never have that experience without a camera.

Bela: She’s really adorable and at the same time looks really serious and intense.

Bob: She had not seen a westerner, so I was the oddity in the room. If she had a camera she'd be taking my picture.

Bela: Did you do that when you were traveling to certain places like this, especially with children, allow them to capture what they were seeing through the lens?

Bob: No, I hadn't done that - the camera was really hard to operate. It was before the age of throwaway cameras.

Bela: This brings me to a more recent exhibit of yours where you have this opportunity to capture men that are homeless and help them realize their own dignity through the photograph. Can you tell us a little bit about that and tell us about the seed that led to it 30 years prior.

Bob: I go back to the mid-80s. I had my large-format camera and ran down to the river where I was living in Connecticut. My son was taking judo so I had an hour. I ran down to the river bank and I was trying to capture a picture of Wesleyan University boats coming by in the fog. I could hear them out there, but I couldn’t see them. But I knew one would come by. So I set up my camera and waited nearly 45 minutes for one to come by. Out of my left side I could hear somebody coming down the bike path that I was standing near and heard a squeak, squeak, squeak. I was curious and I looked and coming out of the fog was this homeless man pushing a shopping cart. I didn't want to be disturbed and so I paid no attention to him - I really wanted to get the picture I was trying to get and he came out of the fog and came up next to me. I stayed under my black hood (which you use for large-format pictures) so I wouldn’t have to deal with anybody. He started talking to me. "Oh that’s quite a camera you’ve got there, you must be an artist.” I kind of grunted, but didn’t engage him. He said, "Well, I'm also an artist. I'm a writer” and he pointed to his shopping cart and said, “Well all my manuscripts in life are in this cart." Well that got me out from under the cloth and I looked and sure enough there was a whole shopping cart of hand-written large 2-inch bundles of work. I said, "Wow, that’s a lot of work," and he said, "Yes, and I'm still working on it." So I got back under my hood quickly. It was a little quiet. Then he said, "I’ve come to the conclusion that I'm not an artist, that really what I am is an observer with a pencil." Then it was quiet again and then he walked around behind me, I could hear him. Then he said as he was leaving, "I suppose the question for you is: are you an artist or are you an observer with a camera?" and he kept going. I came out from under my hood thinking either he's schizophrenic or he's the smartest person I've ever heard. I'm not sure which, or maybe there's no difference. Then I looked up at him as he was just disappearing into the fog and he looked back over his shoulder and had this wry smile which is one of those photographs that I didn't take but is still burned in my head. I really, really regretted not taking that picture, but I did turn my attention back to the river and said "You know, what I'm trying to do here has been done before. I'm not really creating anything; I'm just mimicking art that I've seen.” I took a deep breath and just stopped and decided I wouldn’t take a picture and then right in front of me was this dock. In the portfolio it's called Grey Dock.
Gray Dock
Gray Dock

That picture had been in front of me for an hour and I was so busy looking for something that was already pre-determined in my head that I had not been in the moment enough to see the dock, which in the end is a much better picture than I would have taken of a landscape. I love that picture and I've had it up ever since. I have to credit him with that. And then there's this picture I didn't take. I didn't see myself as a portrait photographer and so I didn't even think I could have taken it, but I think it gave me in the back of my head a desire to get portraits of homeless men. Sort of like the war - I don’t want a picture of the war, I want a picture of what’s beautiful - and that man’s face was beautiful. I wanted that picture.
Almost a year later I was in Washington DC in the mid-80s and someone asked if I had seen the Karsh exhibit and I didn’t know who Karsh was. I went down to this museum. It was a really big exhibit and it was his 50 year anniversary retrospective. Magnificent, in the Washington gallery, and I was stunned by his photographs. They're very dark, very important looking. I just said "Wow, I would really love to be able to do that, but it involves all kinds of technique. I'm not a perfectionist, if anything I’m an imperfectionist. I didn’t see myself doing that, but I always loved the legacy of the Monterey photographers. I was so influenced that when I had a chance I moved to Monterey and as soon as we moved I started meeting people who were associated with all those folks. They were very generous with their time and the craft got better. Then I met Daniel Dixon, the song of Dorothea Lange, the prominent photographer in the Depression era. She was working with Depression people and capturing the horror of the Depression, but her faces and hands carry a nobility beyond the normal photograph of a human being and I think that's really what works in those photographs. Although the technique is different, Karsh was capturing the powerful people of the world and capturing their strengths, she was capturing the most destitute people and capturing their strengths. I think in the back of my head of this homeless man whose picture I missed. I was predisposing myself to a moment that happened 2 years ago at which I was asked at my church to photograph some of the men who were in a homeless program that uses our church one night a month. They come in, we serve them dinner, they sleep on the floor, they're up & gone the next morning. Another night at another church the next night. 28 churches providing a safe, warm place and a good meal every day and as long as these men are trying to make their way back to society they can use that program. The program has been going on for 20 years. Most of us in the church, although we do it we don't have much to do with it, we don't know who these men are, we may be deliver food and someone serves it. It's there and we're happy we're doing it but there's no personal connection. They wanted a personal connection. I said, "I’m not a portrait photographer but I’ll take some pictures". I went to a dinner with these men and asked if any would volunteer and 3 did. I took pictures and brought them back the next month and gave them prints & electronic copies. They were so thrilled and I was so thrilled because the camera became a tool for conversation. It was a tool for an intimate moment with them that happened very fast. Once they volunteered I was then with them and I was in that moment and so were they. We were working on something together and we succeeded in getting who they were on paper. They were so thrilled because no one had taken their picture except maybe a photojournalist who was trying to make them look as bad as possible. And I, without even thinking, took it to see the best in this person. It turns out no one had done that in 20 years and so the whole experience just became magical for me and for them and they began to say so.

Bela: If I could jump in, can you delve into that process? When I read your interview with Richard, in the beginning as you first went in as a photographer and asked for volunteers most of the guys weren’t even enthusiastic about being photographed. And some of them reluctantly said, “Ok, sure”; in the beginning they had a rough exterior...

Bob: They wear a mask like all of us do.

Bela: I'm just really amazed by this ability to break through that mask and I'm getting a sense that it comes from your own innate desire to see the beauty in anything. Although you were in Vietnam in the midst of war you still saw beauty there. I don’t think anyone can stand behind the lens of a camera and transform what could be seen as a really terrible situation to be in and see the beauty in that situation and in that individual, or in bringing out that dignity and that feeling of self-worth. I don't know if you would talk a little bit more about that process of your capturing these images.

Bob: i think when I look back on it I have been predisposed all my life to be able to do this. Working in community organizing I learned really quickly that as a stranger in a community which was full of fear and anger and sometimes hatred it was very easy to not be accepted. I found and I learned actually fairly consciously that you're dealing with people of all status as a community organizer, everybody from bank presidents & the mayor to the person who's got the least and feel the most unempowered. And you communicate across all those statuses. Society is to see yourself. Think of society as a deck of cards. We have a society that has people of all those statuses. As a community organizer you have to see yourself as a 10 – competent, but not royalty, be able & worthy, nothing less, nothing more. Then you have to look at everybody else as a 10 and you have to predict everything you know about royalty and what to expect and you have to forget everything you know about unempowered people and what to expect. Forget about tall the stereotypes of colour and religion you have to deal with that person in the moment. That’s how i survived as a community organizer, there's no other way. No one wants to watch you suck up to royalty, no one wants to see you treat anybody as lest than a 10. When I got face-to-face with my camera with these guys, I had to forget everything I know. I'm good, they’re good, now let’s start there. They had a mask for sure; I could notice it. It was up when I was going to photograph. As I kept clicking and asked them to move in a different way, I'd say, "Move that shoulder in a little closer to my camera and take your chin up just a bit. That is a beautiful jawline." Just that admission that I feel some love or affection for that person - the way he looks - is such an unusual thing and they would show the jaw even more. “But I'm missing your other eye, so come on around, here it is... gorgeous!” And they think, “He noticed my eye colour, he noticed my jaw line, he’s noticed my nose, he’s noticed my lips, he’s noticed my hair, my hands”, all of a sudden this is a totally different experience and it feels safe. There’s no one else there. And then I'll say, “Ok, i really like where we got. Take a break, let me change the battery on my camera,” and then I talk to them. “Do you have kids? Are you married? What were you doing before? And then as they start talking they would have natural expressions and I'd say, “Whoa, stay right there. Say your daughter’s name,” and they say “Elise” and bam there's the picture! It's that sort of interaction. Then I'd get so excited I’d say, “Oh my goodness,” and they get excited and they have even more expression. It's circular until we get it. And then I run around with the camera and I show them the back of the camera, which is of course an advantage - never before in history could you do that - and they say, “Oh my God, that’s me?” But I say, “That’s the picture I want, but why don’t you click back and see if there's something you like more?” And they'll click back and they're clicking back the last 20 minutes and probably seeing a 100 pictures of themselves and when they get back to the beginning they see the mass they came in with.

Dennis
Dennis

Bela: That is such an incredible gift that you’ve given these men, so inspiring & moving! The exhibit is about to... has it started already?

Bob: It's going to open September 5th in Carmel at Jerry's enter. We have taken the 25 images that I like the best and a lot of them, every one of these pictures has a story, it's just mind-blowing. Whenever I show anybody one of these pictures people would say, “How could he be homeless? How could that man be homeless? How could he be living alone?” A 14-year old girl form church interviewed all these guys 2 years ago and wrote essays on them. We realized we should have these guys telling their own stories, so we hired a video artist who has videoed 7 of them who were willing to go on video for 2 hours each and tell their lives and he's narrowed that down to 3 minutes, which will be accessible in the gallery by augmented reality, which means if you point your device at one my pictures, the video of this guy will come out and he'll be kind of live and telling his own story. Its’ a multimedia exhibit, it'll be there for 5 weeks and then we'll start thinking about where else in the world we can take the show.

Bela: It's been so moving, thank you so much, much gratitude to you. The more I learn about the exhibit the more I look forward to experiencing it myself.

Bob: Thank you.

Question: How has this entire experience impacted you personally?

Bob: It has affected me monumentally, I have to say. I never saw myself as a portrait photographer and now I am one. It makes so much sense. I'm not a landscape photographer, my whole life has been interacting and empowering people, basically. What happened in this project was the consolidation of my hobby and my vocation into one thing. This is an enormous empowerment tool - I had seen photography as an art of helping people see something different, but then I realized its importance is probably even greater as a therapeutic tool, as a way of bringing new life to people. Not just the person whose picture I'm taking or not just me, but if it works it will be to anyone who views a photograph, because it destroys stereotype of the homeless. Most of the time people will look at homeless people with either enormous sympathy or enormous disdain. But if you look at these photographs and realize these are homeless people also, you have to broaden and destroy that stereotype; it doesn’t work. You have to think of this person in a whole new way. The social implications of this are huge.

Question: As a photographer you mentioned that you have to keep an open mind to see things different from preconceived notions. What goes on in your mind? How do you stay in the moment?

Bob: Every one of these guys when I go get them… I have a special place set aside for a temporary studio. I bring them in and it's quite awkward - they walk into these big lights and it’s dark outside and I have to get a release form signed. It's awkward. But once they're behind the lights I'm in a different space completely. The rest of the equipment, the rest of the room is gone, all I can see is this human being in this gorgeous light and then I carefully begin directing and I just shoot for a while to get the lighting right. I no longer see a homeless person, I don’t see a famous person, I just see a person. I have no idea what he/she is all about. I am just completely into that moment; there is nothing else in my head. Then I'll see something I like or I suspect, I ask for a particular movement. Then I begin to understand this person's face and how it will look really good. Then I focus on their hands, which are interesting, and I get them in the picture. Then I give them a break and then I start a conversation. It is in the conversation that I see what I want really.

Question: One of the critiques of liberal photography is that it elicits an emotional response but doesn't really translate into any social action. Given your background in community organizing, I was wondering what your thoughts on that are.

Bob: What a great question! I've done about 60 of these portraits over a 2-year period and right in the middle when the federal government went into sequestration and then shutdown, federal money for this program just stopped dead. So these 30 men were about to be back out on the street and because the churches provide the place to sleep and the meal, which is about $1M contribution/year, the federal government was putting the money for the bus to get them here and a counsellor to speak with them at night and all though it wasn’t a lot, probably about $60,000 per year, it was gone in a flash and so I turned this into an opportunity and we took it on the road to the churches, to rotary groups, to everybody we could call and people saw these pictures and they said, "Oh these are the people that federal money was helping. All these people should get help.” Federal money is gone. We were able to raise enough money to put the program back in place before the money ran out. We realized this in late February and the program was about to close down and in 30 days we had a new corporation. We put enough money in place to get the program back in place for a year and this exhibit is a fundraiser, so everything we make on this, all profit goes straight to the program and then we'll keep moving the exhibit around to keep raising money. It has taken the program to a new level. We've turned a crisis into something that is really, really good and the photographs played a key role in eliciting public reaction and not a negative reaction, but empathy, and the empathy has actually led to a change.

You can listen to the complete call and read more about Bob Sadler here: http://www.awakin.org/forest/index.php?pg=guest&cid=164   

 

Posted by Chirag Medhora on Sep 13, 2014


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