Rick Reinhard Interview, October 12, 2021

Okay, cool.

You said you're at Georgetown?

No, American University.

American University, right?

Yeah. Okay, so The obligatory first statement: this is Evan Michales on October 10 no 12th, 2021, interviewing -

Rick Reinhard.

Do I have your permission to record?

You do.

Excellent. So I think to start off, would you tell me a a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, I thought you were going to ask the questions. You know, I tell stories really badly so because they wind around. So I grew up in outside of Boston, Massachusetts and lived in the same house until I left that part of the world. I went to Catholic Elementary and high school and then went to Boston College, lived at home. And when I graduated from BC in 1967, I applied to the Peace Corps and spent two years in Honduras being a math teacher at the Escuela superiordo professorado Francisco morazán in Tegucigalpa. And when I finished the two years I put in for a third year because when I left Boston, left Boston College, I was pretty much the all-American boy. I thought that the United States should bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age. How dare they fire on our vessels and the Gulf of Tonkin. At that time I thought that was real. And, but it wasn't, it wasn't long into my Peace Corps training that I did about a 180 and sort of the core principles of Catholic Social teaching, sort of allowed me in a way to make that 180 switch. And so, in my time in Honduras, I became a committed Anti-Imperialist. Became very critical of US policy in particular US policy with respect to Vietnam and the outreach into Latin America by the US government. And so at the end of those two years of Peace Corps, I put in for a third year to stay out of to, try to minimize my chances of having to deal with military option. And so I got an extension to that the Peace Corps director very diligently secured for me to Paraguay in conception, the second city. And I came home for one month leave which was standard and Fred Hampton was murdered, assassinated in Chicago, Black Panther leader. And so I was extremely angry about that. And I had done one other thing while I was in Honduras, in terms of a follow up to Peace Corps, and that was to - a lot of my Peace Corps friends who had come back against Peace Corps regulations to the US to take the Regents exam or to do oral interviews, to continue teaching in urban areas. Well, I had friends in Washington and turned out that DC, you could do it all by mail. It was all written. So I applied to DC public schools and didn't hear anything. So, here I am. I'm back in Boston, Newton, Massachusetts and Fred Hampton was assassinated. I'd come down to hitchhike down to DC, go to the presidential building where DCPS was and they offer me a job right after Christmas break at Cardozo High School. I walked from there to, which is at 12th and Pennsylvania, basically, the mile or so up 14th Street to Cardozo High School. Cardozo High School was the closest DC high school, for sure, maybe the closest DC school to where the riots after the assassination of Dr. King began at 14th and U. And so, I met the principal and math teachers. And when I was talking - who were mostly Urban teacher Corps folk, mine was a normal position, it wasn't Urban teacher Corps, that I would have. And the young woman chair of the math department introduced me to other folks. And then said there's a desk in the back in the corner of the classroom office, where three students are putting out the underground student paper that is called Off The Pig and which is being published at the Black Panther Party office in DC. So, I just was like, lightning hitting. I mean, this was like, too weird because the reason I came down was because of Fred Hampton. So I wrote a letter to Peace Corps and told them would they please send my trunk back. I was very honest in that about why I had decided to do what I did. Got this horrible letter back from Peace Corps saying, I had destroyed the Paraguayan people. I dashed their hopes. What an ugly American I was and truth be told, was that I was very, you know, politically anti-American in Honduras. In terms of talking with my students who were my age. Actually, it was a teacher's college sort of where I was teaching at and but my net effect on those students was a net positive for the United States who I continually talked about against in terms of foreign policy because I was a nice guy. So the only way that you could be in my opinion, like a bad rep, a representative who told people this is a bad place, you know, there was bad stuff happening in the US was to be a jerk. And so basically what this Peace Corps director in Paraguay who I never met said was you're a jerk. And you know, you just destroyed the image of the United States for the Paraguayan people. So be it. And then this funny story happened where the Peace Corps got my data confused. And so they had me in Paraguay, they made those changes because I was going there. And so I get a letter from Peace Corps thanking me for my service to the Paraguayan people. And then I have this other letter from the Peace Corps, director saying quite the opposite. So, okay, so now I'm in DC and I'm teaching at Cardozo High School, which - this is also the heroin epidemic and pretty violent police assaults on or - you know, every student in school with the only non African American students were a small group of African students. Other than that, it was all black African Americans. Every student in the school fit the profile of whatever perpetrator was out on the street. So it was not unusual to be missing students in class because they had been picked up and detained and held for a day or two days because they fit the description. And so it was pretty interesting time, and I met my wife at Cardozo High School. She's white. And she was an English teacher. I was a math teacher, so sort of up the down staircase. And so I've stayed in DC, I moved about four times in the first two years and on Nixon's inauguration day, his second inauguration day, January 20th, 1973, we moved into this house in Mount Pleasant, and we've been here ever since. We stopped that move in, we were moving from right by Dumbarton Oaks in Upper Georgetown and friend of ours who was living - was going to live with us for a while had a flatbed truck, and we were moving the stuff and this was a group house. We moved as a group house to a group house. And we had created a card section like in a football stadium sort of but much a, you know much miniature version. And unlike inaugurations now, it was totally easy to get down there. There was no security, you know, you weren't supposed to run into the street, there were kind of police monitoring that or something. But basically you could go down there. You could pretty easily we went down by Unemployment which was up 5th and Pennsylvania, sort of, and we were able to get ourselves to the front line of the parade route. But by the time we got there, we timed it badly and President Nixon had already gone by, but Spiro Agnew his Vice President was coming down the street and sitting on the back of a convertible up on the, you know, feet in the back seat. And so we yelled out to Spiro, Spiro! and he turned any wave. And so we pulled up our sign and it said, Stop The War. And then we clapped and we turned it around and it was Nixon Sucks, and Spiro immediately went to the other side of the street. And then we came back here and continue the move in. We got our loan from Independence, Federal Savings and Loan Association, which was a black owned bank with I think maybe only one office or two offices and they were very friendly. We became good friends with some of the officers of the bank and and I have not a great recollection, but someone told me recently that the reason that - because we're kind of hippies, and we weren't didn't have the best resume on paper. I mean, there were lawyers and legal workers and a former teacher and Peace Corps person and things like that, so, we weren't criminals, but we had a hard time getting a guest, getting a loan from standard mainstream banks and plus we wanted I think to get a loan from a black bank. And so, we did, and we ended up with a long-term relationship with that bank. So that takes us to this house which remained a group house for a long time. And then, over time we - myself, my wife, our two daughters - bought people out. We had a complicated system of shares and stuff and then we had, then we redid the basement so that it was a standalone apartment. We rented that and we lived upstairs in a variety of configurations, sometimes with another family and eventually just our nuclear family - our two daughters both went to what was originally the Columbia Road Children's Center became Barbara Chambers Children's Center, which was an intentionally multi-generation multicultural multi-economic. So if you think of a tic-tac-toe square with nine squares, you have a third of the students, in a third of the teachers were Latino, a third were white, third were black. And that the other columns say, were economic level and a third of the families, were low income a third, the families were getting by, had jobs, and a third of the family is were doing reasonably well, kind of upper middle class for DC sort of so it was it was an amazing place. It was very intentional in how they approached early childhood education, and had an amazing cast of who those families were. I mean, just remarkable, as well as the teachers. And so I became a teacher there for two years which was a way for me to get to know how to be a parent and when our two daughters finished the five-year-old class the local elementary school, which is now an amazing place and my grandson who's 7 is in second grade there, but that time it wasn't it targeted school. It was overwhelm, well, it appeared to be overwhelmingly black and with very few white families and a couple of the white families who went to that preschool who live largely in this neighborhood. The school was that at the intersection of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, so it was right here. And they - a few families sent their children there in like first grade and then they all decided that their kids had special needs. And those needs weren't being met at the school. And so, in the end, there were really two families. Two white families, the other family knew quite well, also came from Columbia Road Children's Center that sent their kids to Bancroft. And that was a, in my mind, a really pivotal experience because the - Willa and Rachel grew up basically culturally black. And that early training has led them to the rest of their lives. And so, it was really formidable. The other thing about that was that I was photographing at that point, sometimes for the German magazine Der Spiegel and they asked me to do a minority-majority story. And at that time, Rachel was in the third grade. She's the older daughter, and so I went to the school and I hadn't been in the classroom, I think prior to that. But I knew the teacher a little and my wife was on the PTO. And so the teacher knew me by reputation sort of and so she came up me and there were like 20 kids in the class, 25. That's probably too low. Probably closer to 30 kids in the class. And if you looked at the class, it looked like a black class with a few others, like an Asian and Latino and my white daughter, but it looked eighty-five percent black. But it turned out she said, you know can I tell you tell you anything about the class and so I said, well you know sure like where do the kids come from? And it did turn out that the plurality of the class were African-American, but there were also Dominicans and Panamanians and black Puerto Ricans. And so there were a number of black appearing children, who actually weren't African-American. There were a couple of Africans and then there were a couple of Vietnamese and a couple of, you know, a few appearing Latinos. Your kind of standard whatever Latino mestizo kind of person and my white daughter. And so that was interesting that even though the school looked black, it really wasn't as black in terms of like again culturally African-American as it at first appeared. So my daughters go to the the - this area had been gerrymandered into the West of the Park Educational Zone. And so Bancroft was a feeder to Alice Deal Junior High and then Wilson High School, two of the better schools of those levels in the city and when Rachel went to Deal, we wanted her to be in the whatever they call it the gifted and talented or, there was a special track at Deal. And the key thing was that they did two years of math in first year, so we wanted her to be in that. And the principal was really, you know, long-standing good principal or the guidance people, whoever, they wouldn't let her be in. They said, You know, it wouldn't be good for her that, you know, she's coming from Bancroft and Bancroft basically had been redlined and what wasn't, you know, they didn't think those students were prepared for the rigorous special track. Even know DC wasn't tracking, it was a track. And so, we said, well, we think that she can, she's tested really well. And they said well, if you, you know, mortgage your house or something to say you'll accept the responsibility of any harm that happens to her, yeah we'll do that. And we said well, but we'd also like to get rid of the redline and because several of her friends we thought were also possible candidates for being in that. And so we worked with the principal of Bancroft who was a really good guy at that point and managed to get that lifted. So that students from Bancroft could not be just rejected because of where they were coming from. And so when Rachel goes to and then Willa later goes to middle school and then subsequently to high school, Willa goes to School Without Walls and Rachel goes the Wilson, they kind of bring their black friends. Their group is people of color and it makes them very unusual. Even though those schools were both quite mixed. The, you know, in school segregation, self-segregation, was quite high. And so that led to some interesting interactions in a couple of cases. And so, during that time, I'm photographing. And I, there was a guy who lived in the neighborhood two big white dogs, lived on 19th Street, and he was a photography professor at Northern Virginia Community College in UDC and he had studied with Harry Callahan at RISD and so he would walk - his dog walking route took him past the front of our house. And I remember asking him two different - and I knew he was a photographer and I was just like a street photographer sort of. And so I asked him at one point, what - I was going to upgrade from my Pentax Spotmatic and I had a 28, 50, and 150 lens. I said, well, you know do you have any suggestions? And so he suggested Canons. And so I ended up getting the Canon F1 and we talked about lenses and those are the lenses were little bit off. So my standard set of lenses became a 35, an 85, and a 200. And so that was what I used for really long time. And then the other thing that he - three things actually, I guess - the other thing he did and maybe that was at the same time, he said, you know, I think that you should think about taking, because I had done some of those summer workshops, I had gone to the main photo journalism workshop and taken a masterclass. Maybe that was afterwards but anyhow I eventually took a masterclass with - one week - with Mary Ellen Mark, and that was pretty interesting and I'm going to get back to Chip some more. But Mary, I asked Mary Ellen at the end of the week, you know, do you think that I could be a photographer and she said that, I think that the work that you did during this week would be a fine portfolio for trying to, you know, get assignments. And so I I took that seriously. So Chip said - and I think that was maybe the only workshop because there are hundreds of right around the country and but he said, you should do the Missouri Photo Journalism Workshop. And he said, that what you have to do is you have to apply on the very first day that the applications become, you know, that you can postmark your envelope. And so I did and the other part of that Missouri school was - Missouri Workshop - was you only submitted three photographs. That was it. I mean, it wasn't even much of a statement. I think like a paragraph, but big deal was get it in early. And so I ended up being accepted into that workshop and my roommate there became an important friend, was Phil Younger, and Phil was the shop steward, I guess, for IATSE, the stage workers union, and he photographed for them. And he had DC police credentials as a result of that. And so, he made me an honorary member without paying dues of IATSE and I was able to get my DC police pass and so that gave me a little standing in the street and then the third person from DC who was at the workshop was Jim Thresher and Jim Thresher the following two years following the year that we were there, I forget what year was, was White House photographer of the year. That was sort of interesting. We were the only three DC photographers. The other thing that happened at the Missouri Workshop was that most, there were like 45 students or something. And there were probably you know as many faculty. So it was this kind of, it was a very heavy relationship between photo editors, photographers, and I think there were only five freelance spots open out of those 45. So the New York Times had a slot. The Washington Post had a slot. The Christian Science Monitor had a slot. Times-Picayune, Minneapolis Tribune, you know, the Air Force, the Navy, the Army had slots. Anyhow, all the slots were taken except for like five. So Phil and I got two of those open slots. I had a horrible time there. I hated it. I just couldn't, and so up to this day I don't know whether they were smarter than I thought or whether it just was a bad fit. But I - so you get to, you get to Missouri - it's kind of gentrification too - get to Missouri, and every year it's in a different place. So it's sponsored by the University of Missouri, but they have a small town or medium-sized town where they host it. And so, you arrive, and on the first night there's an exhibit up from the previous year and it's kind of what, you know, it's kind of like a National Geographic exhibit. I mean, they wouldn't think that was a slur but it was a little quirky, you know, Missouri people in some form or another, you know, from outside of the big cities. And so I hadn't done enough research in a way. So I go out and I find - so our job is to go out and find a story and then develop it during the week. And so I found the last blacksmith east of the Rocky Mountains had a shop there. So I come back and tell, and I've got - we've got a three, at that point broken up into a three panel. Three, three, you know, real photographers, and so I had the editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, Brian Lanker, kind of Nobel-winning, you know, major photographer. I forget who the third person was. And so they sort of said to me, Yeah, you know, it's all sparks. I mean, what are you gonna do? Once you, you know, okay. So the guys hitting the thing and as sparks and you know, what's the story, go find another story. So I go out and I look around and I find a co-op of hippies who are living on the land and they're not survivalist, but they're, they've got this kind of intentional community and they sell organic stuff and they're, you know. But the problem was, I was only there a week and the market time had already happened and I don't know and then getting permission from them or getting to the people who I would have needed to do weren't there. And that was, so it seemed like a good idea but that didn't go anywhere. Then I had another idea, forget what it was. And I come back and now three days have gone by and I haven't approved any of my stories, you know, so finally they said, you know, there's a, the first McDonald's in town just opened. Go do that. And so I hated it, you know, it was like, that was stupid. And so the place where I give them maybe some credit, maybe they knew from based on my three images that my eye was okay, but where I didn't have experience was in storytelling, so they maybe kept sending me out there to investigate possible stories to do the investigation part as opposed to doing the story part. Anyhow, I was wigged out and so there was a traditional football game at the end of the - like a tag football game. And so I wanted to hurt people, particularly the people on my panel, and I remember throwing elbow, you know, blocking for the quarterback or something, and throwing elbows at the editor of the Minneapolis Tribune and I just was like, I had a bad attitude. So I come back from that, and not quite sure what I - but I made a good friend and sort of a friend, Jim Thresher. And so, I talked to Thresher and he told me about the, that there were openings at the Washington Post Weekly and they still have the Weekly but the Weekly back then was different. There were - and I don't know how many Weeklies there are, but there were four Weekly's then - it was the DC Weekly, the Montgomery County Weekly, Prince George's County Weekly, and the Northern Virginia Weekly. So four sections that came out on Thursday and they were soft news, but they were very heavy in photos. So I freelanced for the Post for about five years. And probably during those five years, I had as many, maybe had as many pictures in the Post has any Post staff photographer. I didn't have many memorable photos in terms of like breaking news or you know, big issues. But you know, I did a whole bunch of stuff, and the way it worked was you get paid by the picture. So I think you got 25 bucks for the, if they ran one picture from your from your effort, you know, they had assignments. And if you got two pictures, then you got 25 plus 15. If you have three, you got 25 plus, 15 plus 10 and 10 for each of those additional pictures. And so, the idea was to be able to make it so they had a seven pictures story. And I had a number of those. And I was out in Buoy, out in Maryland, I was in Annapolis, Maryland, I was out in Frederick, Maryland, I was down in Manassas, Virginia, and all eight Wards of DC. And so it really was a pretty interesting time. And so that was kind of my AP experience of doing a lot of scut work, public, you know, kind of community interest stuff, field days, profiles. I did one issue of the Weekly was on the valedictorians in DC and so I photographed every valedictorian at their house of all the high schools in DC. And so then after that, I was just, you know, and at that same time, I was also building experiences. One of the things that I did and is a continuum through my photography was, because I had been in Honduras there wasn't much about Honduras that was happening, but El Salvador was very much in the news and so CISPES, the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador was a remarkably, I think it's the best solidarity organization that has existed in the US. And it was made up of hugely over qualified people who went on to many, many different things. And it was remarkable. If you think about CISPES in terms of the ANC in South Africa, the ANC had Nelson Mandela and there was this or even though Mandela was in prison and Mandela had been part of the armed wing of the ANC, African National Congress, the - it was like revolution done the right way. It was like - and even though Mandela was a a communist, he wasn't really, he wasn't actually a communist. The communists were part of the ANC, but he wasn't. But in El Salvador, the revolution was made by communists and there were - as part of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. And so, there were, there weren't a lot of fuzzy character, you know, warm and fuzzy characters. And yet CISPES was able to humanize the war and build a solidarity movement that was quite substantial with support for an obviously armed insurrectionary Marxist group. And so, I did a lot of work on protest in Central America and that led me into - plus I, from the time that my kids were at the Columbia Road Children's Center, which was that multicultural thing, which was also hugely over qualified staff, they were not normal preschool teachers, I was able to become involved in a number of the social movements in the Latino community at that time. And so I built this sort of network of some jobs and also just following the issue. I was also a, I was photographing regularly with the the Guardian in New York, which is a Marxist left-wing paper - weekly - and I would photograph every week for them, generally on my own, not usually assigned. And I would, and so that was a, that went on for years, and it turned out that the photo editor for a good part of that period Michael Kaufman decided he wanted to create an agency, sort of a working-class Magnum or an alternative Magnum and called it Impact Visuals. And so I became a founding member of Impact Visuals. Nancy was also a member, later, of Impact. And so that was a really pivotal experience where I made a number of friends who became friends for life, including Nancy, and it gave kind of a home to progressive photojournalism, we weren't nearly as successful as Magnum. And so it was frustrating of sorts. We couldn't, I was freelancing, so I wasn't trying to live from what I could make from Impact. There were a few photographers, very good photographers, who tried to make a living as an Impact photographer, it was almost impossible, and so they would leave at some point and go to Sigma or Gamma or Contour, you know, wherever, because they couldn't make, couldn't get enough guarantees, couldn't get enough assignments out of Impact, but it was a very formative experience for me. Where does that take me to? I know, why don't you stop me, and where would you want to go from here?

That's been perfect. Let's see - so you said you started off as a teacher.

Say what?

You said you started off as a teacher.

Yep.

And how did you fall into photography?

Well I, okay, right that was on the question list. So goes back to Peace Corps. I, back in those days, late 60s, the cheap camera was not a throwaway camera. It was almost like the throwaway cameras that you know, one time use, you turn the camera in and they develop the film you never got the camera back right, it's plastic, was the Kodak Instamatic. And so that's what I took with me to Peace Corps training, point-and-shoot, no adjustments. You do you put the film in and it figures out what to do. I don't think you even set, maybe you set the ISO And so I get to Peace Corps training. It's in San Diego, and there was this one guy in particular, who I didn't like, and he had a Nikon and he was also very good, you know, much about Latin culture? You ever - the Latins often - you used to - I don't see them doing it anymore. But snap your fingers, you know, and so Craig would do a double snap. He'd fix his watches or whatever and he go BOOM you know, and then he had his Nikon. I didn't like Craig. And so I go to Honduras with my Instamatic and it was a fairly sizable Peace Corps group in Honduras. Over sizable actually, and got much bigger because of geopolitics later on, but we, so, but I began to notice that we'd get together and we'd share pictures of where we'd been, you know, pictures that we'd taken. And it turned out that the kind of standard long-term vacation from Honduras was to go to Machu Picchu in Peru, and on the way you would stop in Panama, a nice territory of the United States and a Duty Free Zone in the Canal Zone, and you would go to a place called Photo International, buy tax-free cameras, and then continue on the vacation and learn to use your cameras while you're while you're doing that. And so, I went to Photo International that's where I bought the Spotmatic, with the 28, the 50, and the 150. And when I came back - and so I did that because that was, a number of Peace Corps volunteers who had arrived in Honduras without a camera or with an Instamatic had done this. And so now I'm looking at people were taking pictures with whatever kind of decent camera, probably largely the Spotmatic, and it was clear that if you took the same picture, you're standing the same place, not talking about with your creative photographer, but and you point your camera over there and you have as an Instamatic and someone else has decent piece of glass with some controls and they know a little bit about what they're doing, that picture is a better visual picture than the Spotmatic. So I decided to get the cameras. It also turns out that the Peace Corps doctor - there's a resident American Peace Corps doctor for the volunteers - and he was a photographer. And you know, a fairly serious amateur photographer. So I would go and do my, you know, dysentery checkup and then ask him photo questions and when he left I ended up buying his enlarger and so we set up a dark room in our kitchen, myself and my roommate. We both became photographers as a result of that, just reading the packaging and buying our chemicals and stuff at, I don't know, maybe the only photos supply store in Tegucigalpa and we did it all wrong. And actually he was still there and did make a medical determination of our mistakes. And so what we were doing, this is safelight, developer, stop bath, fixer and a rinse thing, and we had little trays you know, and so w,e would make a decent print, you know, in the developer. We'd take it out, put it in the stop bath, stop the development and put it in the fixer and then go back, make another print and you know, putting in the stop bath, put it in the fixer. And so we'd leave, we'd leave the prints as a holding thing in the fixer and then wash that batch of prints, 10 prints, 20 prints, for like 10 minutes or something, with running water. Well, it turned out, we did that wrong because we were leaving all of the fixer, a lot of the fixer onto, on the paper after it dried. And so what I was teaching at the Escuela Superior and I - a lot of what I was photographing were related to my students. So, I'd make prints, I like the prints, I give them, they like getting the prints and they like what they look like, and then they come back, and they'd say, you know, what's happening? It's disappearing! And so, you know, the pictures were getting leprosy, they were just like spot here, spot there, bigger spot, bigger spot, growing spot. And so, that probably took some of the evidence to the doctor and get an evaluation and he said I was doing it wrong. Fix it for like five minutes, and then, you know, put in a wash, water bath, let it sit in the water bath, not in the fixed, so we got better at that. And so that was early development. And then I told you about getting - upgrading from the Spotmatic to the Canon and going to those workshops. I guess that's it. Instamatic, having a bad attitude to a guy with a good camera, but eventually following, well following that route.

So then what other cameras have you owned?

Not much, other than my iPhone. I had, there was this, when I was in my kind of art phase of photography, the idea of people photograph - well, Jim Simone who studied at RISD with Harry Callahan, who had a large format camera, Chip had a 8 by 10 Deardorff. So you set it up, you know, you make your calculations and you put your thing in the back of the, your plate in the back of the camera. You make one exposure and then you figure out what your next picture is going to be. So, you know, very different process than that, but sort of the mid-range was there were all those people, all these people out there with Hasselblads getting that two and a half inch square - two and a quarter - square negatives, about, I I think, three times bigger space than a 35-millimeter negative. And so, you know, it allowed photographers to have the ability to blow up images larger. Not as large as you had an eight by ten or five by seven camera, but nonetheless. So I got, I didn't get a Hasselblad, I didn't have that much money, but I got a Bronica, which was sort of a, had a Zeiss lens. I never got comfortable with either processing the two and a quarter film or feeling like I understood the optics of a two and a quarter. So, you know, I probably only shot 20 rolls of film or 30 rolls of film through the Bronica over, you know, bunch of years, just kind of mostly just messing around. And then I bought a Polaroid that wasn't the Polaroid where the thing gets spits out. It was a Polaroid, now I forgot even how it worked, you put a pack in the back like the other but it was more like a sheet film camera than a Polaroid camera. And so, and I had a couple of interesting things that I did with that, but basically I didn't use that very much. And I think one of the reasons that I got it was as a test because you could, you did have settings on that Polaroid, unlike the simple push the button thing and so you could use it and it had a connection to fire external strobes with it. And so I, from my friend Phil sold me my stand-up lights that which I still have 40 years later, Dyna-lights, but I could connect them to the Polaroid and I could get a sense of what the image of what I was going to photograph might look like. That was I think the reason that I got that Polaroid to kind of be like a visual light meter and I had a light meter but this was a way to visualize a little bit more. And I guess, I never had a Leica. You know, I went through a range of Canons, the workhorse F1, and then the A1, which was a lighter more automated version that I used a lot and there was some other Canon model, Canon EF, whatever, that was probably before the A1, and then I had this experience where I had my freelance career, I was doing okay, and one of my clients with the AFL-CIO. I wasn't a big player at the AFL-CIO, but I did things for them. And I don't remember what year it was early digital and they said, It, you know, you have to have to go digital, we need images to be able to move right away. We don't have time to have you processed it and make contact sheets and make prints and yada yada. And so I bought, it was a Canon and I think at that point the digital, you had the compatibility of mounts and so from the F1, which was a screwmount, no with - somehow it seems to me that I had - oh, the Pentax was screwmount. And I guess when I went to Canon they were they were bayonet mounts. But at some point the bayonet mount was different in a certain series than it was at another and then you had to buy different lenses. And so with the, I think that lenses were compatible that I was using with the Canon, I think was - the D, I had a D60 and a D30. I forget which one was first and which one was better. Neither of them were great and one of the things, but it was like - they were professional cameras, but they had issues and the big issue was delay. There was a lag time between when you press the shutter and when it actually clicked and it was very, it could be very frustrating for example at a congressional hearing where you're photographing a witness or a testifier and you keep getting the eye, and you always get blinks But I mean, you get all blinks! It's like because you couldn't, you couldn't time it because you thought you had it timed. And then, by the time the camera decided to take the picture, you know that well, the person had blinked and so that was frustrating. It wasn't as frustrating if you were doing something in the street, then, you know, well, what was the magic moment? Well, was it an eighth of a second before, or a 30th of a second before? Lag was a little different, but lag time was an issue. And so I eventually moved up to the - 30 60, like the D, I forgot what's called, maybe was a D1 - and after that, that was significantly better. And then I went to the Canon Mark 3 - Canon Mark 2 which I still use and also, I don't even remember what the other ones were called, but, you know, totally serviceable workhorse digital cameras, and that's my collection. Little bit of a mist. So I think that's it about, does that answer the camera question?

I think so. So then you switched over to digital. Have you stayed digital since then or have you've gone back to film?

No. Well, I guess that's not quite true. For some reason, well, I haven't gone back to photographing with whatever they call it. There's a word for it that - analog, I guess or something. But I have had, I have made some prints - not recently, and I had to jerry-rig a temporary dark room and it was clunky. I didn't do it very well. I mean, it wasn't a working dark room, but I needed to do a couple of things. And then I just decided that if I needed that, then this would be making prints from existing negatives, you know, and I would just pay the price and get prints made. So that's yeah, basically I haven't gone back.

So what are your thoughts about proliferation of cameras with, on cell phones?

So basically I didn't use - you know, I had an Android. It was decent and then it got old and I really didn't use the camera on the Android very much. It, in a way, I think it had the issue of lag time that annoyed me so much with the early Canon digitals. And so, when I finally decided - I had a lot of street cred with my Android because it had a cracked screen and didn't happen from the police. But, you know, it looked pretty good and I don't like to change things and so it was doing, you know, I could send texts and I could, you know, make phone calls. And that was kind of it, I'm not a tech guy so but it was really, it was hurting. And so I guess it's five years ago or three years before COVID or something, I got this one, which is the iPhone Pro 10, iPhone 10 Pro. And I got it because at that time, the cameras on this were as good as any, at least that's what I was told. And so, I have, mostly I've used the video. I mean, I use the camera. I think only one picture has been published, still picture, which is a portrait that I did of Ethelbert Miller, literary activist, at a restaurant in Adams Morgan and he's used that as his book jacket picture and you know a variety of, it's gotten a lot of use by Ethelbert. And so I think that's the only picture that's been in kind of publication circulation - I mean, I've made lots of other interesting photographs, and so much more than before. But what I have done is, I've gotten pretty good at iMovie and being older and living in Mount Pleasant there is a, this'll touch on gentrification too, there isn't, there's a group called the Mount Pleasant Village. Nancy is also a member of The Village even though don't really live in Mount Pleasant, but, and it isn't, what we used to talk about is being an aging in place effort, it's a part of a national movement, keep people - older folks - in their houses as long as you can so that they don't have to go to a nursing home or assisted living, you know, at some point you may have to but how can you build network, how can you build community? And allow people to provide, get enough support to be able to stay at home as long as possible. And so, there was the Mount Pleasant Village is about seven years old, six or seven years old and I was not an original member although we were involved tangentially I think in the, before the village was set up we had a book party. We've hosted a number of events here on on slavery and lynching, on other economic justice and social issues, but we had a woman friend of ours who wrote about aging, and she had a book that looked at villages, I think it was all villages, around the country, different models. Rural models where people lived in a compound sort of, model where I think it was in Co-op City, no, it wasn't Co-op City in New York, but it was a large apartment building in Manhattan where the village existed within that one building and it was a little bit multi-generational. The overall concept of villages includes multi-generational, but largely aimed at seniors. And so we went to the first holiday party, like I said, about six years ago, seven years ago, and at that party at one of the big houses up the street - and most of the House events have happened at big houses - most of the members of the Village, at that time it was about a hundred members of the, may be approaching a hundred members at that party, probably 80. I don't know, because we're about 200 now, we've been at 200-ish for a while. And so a very big house. a very redone house, aery gentrified house, and I didn't know the host. I didn't know the president of the Village, and they both spoke briefly in kind of a doorway between a big living room and a big dining room. And so the group could kind of be a semi circle, I mean a circle in there, an oval. And it was brief and it was fine and everybody paying attention and I was looking around the circle and I could only identify one person of color. and so race has been a major issue for me since Cardozo high school and since Fred Hampton, and so as people started to kind of drift away after the two people spoke. I said, Before you go. I said I have a concern. I said, As I look around the room, I can only identify one person of color who actually doesn't look like a person of color but she's Mexican and I know her, and I said, I don't want to be a member - I was a member - but I said, I I don't want to be a member of the old white folks Village of Mount Pleasant and so I just throw that out as a concern that this neighborhood is more multicultural than what's in this room and I think that we need to do something about that. And so then someone said, well, you know look to your left, and so there was an Asian guy to my left. I didn't know him. So I missed him and he presented. I mean, maybe he looks something like you. I mean you're not Asian, but he looked maybe something like you and so I missed him. But everybody was whiteish, including my Mexican friend who had Mexican features, but she was light Mexican, not dark Mexican. And so to the village's credit, they said, Well, why don't you start an interest group? That was how the village kind of began. There's a walking group and a bird-watching group and there was a gardening group and why don't you, you know, start up an interest group. And so, my wife and I did, and at that first annual meeting - I think it was the first annual meeting - after the meeting they had tables for people to go talk to folks about development or development in terms of fundraising kind of job. And they gave us space for, to talk. And so, a few people came up and we became an interest group and then about a year later, they encouraged us to become a committee and so in many ways I think we're the most active committee. We have been the most active committee in the village for a while now. And so kind of coming, well actually not exactly out of that, but someone came to me and said, you know, we like to make our sends. There are some group sends weekly from the Cillage and we'd like to include videos in those. And so, okay, I said, I'll be the curator of the video. So we set this up. Well, what happened was that probably 95%, this goes back about a year kind of early, early COVID, and it was a way to kind of animate people who are more isolated than they had been, less in-community. And so I've been doing weekly videos for the Village but probably, I have never tracked it but probably 95% of them - yeah, go ahead?

I left [not identifiable]'s lacross stuff on the the bench.

Do I have something for that?

No, just Willa's going to be picking it up. Just don't put it away.

Oh, okay. Okay, and so, Where was I? Oh, the videos! So I'd become by default the videographer for the Village. I keep badgering people to send me videos, this is not my forum. But, you know, I end up doing the overwhelming majority of them. Then about six months ago, the same person came to me and said, you know, maybe we should, you should do interviews of Village members. So I began to do that, I've done 23. And each of those videos is longer than they should be. They range from, I don't know, the shortest is probably 13 minutes - edited - to 15, but it seems my norm is 20 plus. But amazingly, I am developing a following and people sometimes write to me, often more than anecdotally come up to me and tell me that they they like them. So I think this has become an actually important element of the Mount Pleasant Village and creating a sort of visual history, kind of like a snapshot a day kind of thing or something. And I've been enjoying that and so that I've been, and I do it all on my phone. So even if people send me stuff, I get it one way or another into the phone and I use iMovie on the phone, as my editing thing. So, it's limited. And originally, I didn't want it to be over produced because I didn't want to make it seem like I'm the only one that can do them. Mine are still the best videos that have been sent to me, but, you know, I try not to make it, you know, I'm not trying to be studio quality, I'm not - so I like it. And also, it takes a little less effort, take some effort, but a little less effort to make it perfect. Then it is to be good.

All right, so we're definitely gonna get to gentrification.

Okay.

But this is excellent. We're moving right along. So this wasn't on -

Would you put that on pause for a second.

Oh sure.

Let me try and do it this way. Maybe, I mean, I made some references to gentrification. I really haven't photographed gentrification, that isn't - but there is, there are elements of change that are woven throughout my journalism, my photography that put my two daughters through college and paid for renovations to the house and stuff like that was largely from organizations. So, you know, I've worked for a number of hospitals. The biggest ones being Washington Hospital Center and Children's Hospital, but also Suburban and GW and Prince George's County Hospital, Southeast Community Hospital, so doing that kind of nonprofit. I worked for a number of, I have worked for a number of law schools. But by far the biggest one being the Washington College of Law at AU where it was by far my largest client for years and years and years until kind of just before the year before COVID and then labor unions. So a little bit from the AFL but the big ones would be AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, United Auto Workers, you know, a variety of SEIU, SEIU 32BJ, and think tanks - the Inter-American Dialogue, Carnegie Endowment, a little bit for the Woodrow Wilson Center. And then a variety - Reading Is Fundamental was a longtime client of mine. I was sort of the, well, there wasn't money. Where was it? Very unusual client of mine was the American Council of Life Insurance, which had an interesting route of getting there. The Children's Welfare, ack! Can't remember the initials, the alphabet soup of DC, but child welfare, and anyhow, so a lot of that. So that was, that paid the bills, and then my journalistic work like I said came out of the Guardian, which was largely kind of left-leaning issues. And then there were issues related to solidarity, whether it was Free South Africa, or Central America, or more generalized anti-war anti-nuclear sort of stuff, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, the whole, racism, discrimination, and a little you know pieces, and those pieces - and the Latino community. And then pieces of those verge on difficult living conditions for marginalized folks, and then over time, of course those folks have been moved and this neighborhood when we moved in there were two white houses. Well, there was one white house when we moved in at the end of the block, just if we're talking about this row, right. And the end house, they're the folks who started them Mount Pleasant Montessori, which was actually out of Mount Pleasant, but at All Souls Church I think, it's kind of on the cusp of Mount Pleasant, and then we moved in here as a group and we minorly displaced. It was a house that was broken into four units. There were two units on the second floor, one unit on the first floor, and one unit in the basement. And there was a African-American woman and child on the second, one of the units on the second floor. There was an African American guy and his son in the basement. There was a white woman on the first floor and I forget what the other unit was. And then we, when we bought it, we took the whole house. The only person who had a difficulty relocating was the man and his son in the basement. So that was, you know, that was our piece of dislocation. Everybody else on the block, we developed friendships with almost all the people on this block. And the row behind you was, there was one white woman with these two weird guys that lived in one of the houses, all the other houses were black. Going down the alley here there were a couple of white families, maybe, but most of the houses down there were black, and the neighborhood was, you know, significantly African-American. And so that's no longer true, everybody over here is non-black. There are internationals, there's as an Indian, what do you call it though, Pakistani-american. A Central Asian-American, there are French and German folks on this strip. There's a couple where the guy who taught at Howard Medical School is Indian but grew up in Africa, as part of that migration, but overwhelmingly white with young children. And at some point, like I said, when our two daughters went to Bancroft they were two of five or six white kids in the whole school. And then, at some point, those are there was turnover in the neighborhood and a number of white families came, or number of non-black families, largely white families. A lot of black families left for Prince George's County for a standalone house and picket fence, or things like that, you know, as people died or as people got older and they needed one level or died and the children didn't want to be in the city, they wanted to be. So not many African-American, of upper-income who would be peers to the white folks who are coming in, chose the to come to Mount Pleasant. And so that first group of influx of youngish white parents had children, but they seem to as soon as their kids got to be elementary School age they split for either west of the park for the suburbs. And so there was a fair amount of churn in that group of white people. And then the second phase started it, there are a lot of - Hey, Patrick! Thanks! So there's a fair amount of internationals that living in the neighborhood, people who work for the world - internationals in the sense people working for the international institutions World Bank, IMF, things like that. And so that's been going on. And some of them had young children and then people unrelated to them but this turnover that first wave of turnovers made the neighborhood more appealing to more upper-income white folks, and the school, Bancroft, really increased its reputation. And so it is now a desirable school, not all the people with young children here send their kids there, but a large number of them do. And so that, the school that was, you know, like five or six white kids, is now 70 percent Latino, 25 percent white, and five percent black. So, you know, that that kind of shift. And all of these houses behind you sold for 1.2, 1.4, like that. Almost always with help from, you know, inherited wealth because they're all young 30-somethings largely 40, maybe. We bought this house in 1973 for 28 5.

That's pretty good deal.

Yeah.

Especially with the way things have increased.

I mean, we bought out people, so our investment and it has, you know, up, but I mean still sub a hundred and then we put, you know, we borrowed money for another, to do the deck to do the renovation of the first floor that may be another hundred and fifty but you know, it's bigger than those houses. So anyhow, that's my I guess take on gentrification. I haven't explicitly photographed that so much. Like I said the photographing of it relates to other issues and so like I created, by photo - I was working in the darkroom in 1991 in May when the Mount Pleasant Uprising happened and I didn't know about it and I had been working in the Latino community and new lot of people including street folks, and nobody called me. And I heard it on, I listen to talk radio when I'm in the darkroom, was in the dark room, and I heard that Mount Pleasant was on fire, are, you know, there was street, major street disturbances. So I left stuff in the chemicals and walked up to Mount Pleasant Street and for the next three days photographed the disturbances. And so my photographs became of sorts photographs of record at least to a larger, not the only record, but, and so we did an exhibit that we showed at the Centro de Arte because I was marginal photographer at the time. Someone got published in the Guardian, National Catholic Reporter, you know, and on anniversaries there have been displays of my work and this year was the 30th anniversary and so we displayed about 20 of them in, little more, in eight store fronts, eight windows, on Mount Pleasant Street for about three weeks. And Robin Bell, who's the major projectionist in the world, maybe major protectionist. He's projected onto the Trump International and onto the convention center, and he uses a white wall on the subway on Mount Pleasant Street, he has a studio across the street from it that projects on and so during that period of the 30th anniversary, he projected my images onto the that white wall. And so that was a, you know, that's a turning point where it happened because these two police officers - this the Cinco de Mayo - and there was a drunk Salvadoran man, and he ended up in an altercation with the police. And this rookie, I think they were both rookies, this rookie policewoman drew her weapon and shot him and didn't kill him, but he was seriously injured. And after - then there was dispute as to whether he was handcuffed when he was shot. Regardless he was left on the ground for kind of a long time and he, and because Central America had its share of, 91, share of revolutionary movements there were a lot of people from both sides of that Salvador and struggle, the military and the revolutionaries, that knew about Molotov cocktails and knew about urban warfare. And so the police, I think, were genuinely surprised with the reaction to that in the neighborhood as fast as it came. And so it was because of long-standing tensions between the Black and Latino community and two police officers were African-American, guy was Salvadoran and so it's probably some stereotyping or whatever. There's you know stories about whether he had a knife, didn't have a knife. Was it a phone? Was it a, was a belt buckle, was, anyhow, but a significant period of time, and there's now actually documentary that features - all the stills in that documentary are mine - called La Mon Plesa, and it's a, I think, a terrific, little bit quirky arty take on what happened and the implications of what happened. But one thing that did occur is that the leadership of the Latino community in 1991 was largely the old school. So it was Bolivians, and Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. And even though the largest group of Latinos in DC at that point were Central Americans, they had very little political power, very little control over organizations. They hadn't created their own organizations really. And so this insurrection largely moved a shift from the established Latino Community, the more mainstream, to the Central American community that, was a little more street, a little less well off economically. So that kind of a of a change in class and and composition, ethnic composition, you know, I did bring - in that list, there were things about well have there been other interviews done of me? And there is a significant one that has never been edited I think, it's at Georgetown in the Kalmanovitz Initiative which is a worker initiative and I was again sort of a photographer record at least in DC of Justice for Janitors, including the blockage of the 14th Street bridge and so there's a really lengthy interview about that and a large number of my Justice for Janitors images are included in their archive. Then the, I did a project about eight years ago or so, I guess, should know the year, with a Salvadoran, with this interesting group with a good friend who was in a dark room assistant of mine, one of the people that didn't call me when when the riots occurred and he's a performance artist - spoken word poet - and with the Mexican woman that I talked about at that Village holiday party, who's an ethnohistorian and worked for years and years and years at the Smithsonian on folklife. So we did a project on the the men who - largely men - who congregate at the 7-Eleven on Mount Pleasant Street, which is a long enough, it's been like 40 years. And if you say in El Salvador is something about La Esquina, so I met someone at La Esquina, that's the corner. And so we did this documentation, oral histories, and the visuals are mine. And Hola Cultura, which is a Latino community-based online publication centered in the intersection of Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, and Mount Pleasant, did an oral, did an interview with me in Spanish, and then the Salvadoran, this attempt at a Salvadoran museum from the perspective of the left came and did a recorded interview in Spanish with me about my take on that period. And the Smithsonian, because of Olivia's connections, when we brought the exhibit, the exhibit of La Esquina was supposed to have had its world premiere on the the corner, but we got bothered by wind and rain and things like that. And so we did it in other places. We eventually brought it to the corner and when we did the Smithsonian came and did a video journal of it and then Olivia wrote a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine. And so those things are documented. And then I had - this is Washington History, which is the Journal of the Historical Society of DC. So this is kind of my big thing. That's a photograph of mine. And I wrote the story inside which is kind of my life in the Latino community. It's the opening story and kind of goes through my history, and as it relates, largely to issues, Latinos, and shows that. And then in this one, it's really, I guess, there's a second photograph of mine, but this is on statehood. The cover picture is mine. I thought there was, but maybe there wasn't, so, I guess it was just, the, I think it's just that picture there was my picture, and then in here, there was a - this is on, this is another piece on the corner. Oh, written by Olivia. And so all the photographs in this piece are mine.

That's very cool. Have you been published elsewhere beyond?

Yeah, I was a regular, from my days at Impact, I was a regular appear in the New York Times Weekend Review, which is now the Sunday Review. I've was the only staff photographer who's ever worked for the the National Catholic Reporter. There was the Guardian. I was kind of the DC photographer for the Village Voice for number of years. You know, I had book covers. Some facilitated by Impact Visuals, others just you know, just because or people that I knew. The Issues, you know, I was published very frequently for five years in the Washington Post in the district weeklies. So, you know, it's a, I was a photographer for the Christian Science Monitor for period just before they made the conversion to color. Other venues of mine, but no, I've had, I had a two page spread in Vanity Fair of a picture of Anita Hill during the Hill-Thomas, Clarence Thomas hearings, that was facilitated by Impact. Probably my biggest sale from Impact. But, I've created, you know, a lot of images and they've been used in textbooks and various books done by Latinos about the history of Latinos in the US. About the history of Latinos in the DC Metro Area. Oddly enough. I'm sort of the Latino photographer of record even though I don't photograph everything Latino. And, you know, there are Latino Publications, Latino newspapers, somehow, it appears that either their archives aren't so good or they don't have systems or I don't know what but I get, I think to a large degree, at least that's how it seems. And it's been a through story and you know, I keep most of my images, at a another place. And so, this was a set again for the folks at Washington History. They were doing stuff on voting rights. And so, these were kind of things that I had, that I pulled together and then because of COVID we never got to kind of transfer them. So then I don't know. I mean, I they could end up in their their archives. I've given a lot of things away. I gave my, basically my archive of prints of the Inter-American Dialogue to them. I gave my archive of prints which were largely the visual history of Reading Is Fundamental to them. I forget how many, who else I kind of in trying to downsize and moving my images to some place where maybe they, you know, can handle it. I thought I was better organized in my files than I was, you can see that. Let's see if I pull over the first image and this is done right. Okay, so this one was done right. Well, first of all, this was an image that I sent to Impact. So that's the best documentation I have, but ideally every time I made a print I put this on and so this is 1995. It was the 394th role that year and this is image 9A. And so, my images are filed chronologically so I could go, I can easily go to this negative with no problem, but I thought I did that with every eight by ten print that I ever made, or had people on my dark room make. And so here, you got 1077 1/3 is before I moved to that system. So, this is October 77, roll one, frame three, and this is marked. But there are, there are - these are all marked. Okay, so bad sample. And then I've got like these things which, you know, don't really. I mean some I scanned and so like this one I could probably find but, you know, I haven't really scanned much of my archive. So it, I'm looking for a home for it, but it will take some work.

Okay, so I think we're kind of nearing the end, but I would like to ask you before we get to the final question of what have - who has been you're photographic hero or your influences?

In early years, Mary Ellen Mark was one of them. From Impact Visuals my best friend photographer who I really admire his Donna DeCesare who right now is a professor of, has been for a while longer than, she used to live in New York and but, at the University of Texas in Austin, and Donna, we met at Impact and we connected because of Central America and she became like a sister to me and I think that her imagery, her ability to make images and to gain access to images and then to kind of walk that line between being an advocate and being an outside photojournalist observer, I really, really respect. I think she does it as well as anybody I've ever known about, you know, she's not as famous as, other people, she's known but she's not as famous as other people, but I think she's one of my heroes. Another person from Impact that I really look up to is Earl Dotter and Earl kind of cut his teeth as sort of the staff photographer for the United Mine Workers of America, and his mining pictures are - pictures of miners and mining related stuff - are pretty remarkable, and he's also a historian and so he, and an exhibitor. So he's like a one-person exhibit machine. And so he's got a number of things on occupational health and safety and he partnered with Harvard School of Occupational Health and did a number of projects with them with migrant workers in the blueberry, and when you call it, the sharp things in the ocean that that are edible. Whatever they're called. They're mollusks, kind of they got spiny -

Oysters? Yeah, I know you're talking about, can't remember.

Yeah, they're not oysters, and they're not clams, they're these other things. And so he would photograph and he pays a lot of attention to the story part of it. And then he is very good on doing the background and being able to create a presentation whether it's a slideshow presentation or exhibit, and then he had a whole, he's got an archive of his, you know, he's a good place to go to buy prints to gift, right? I have hardly any of that, right? And I don't do stories and so Earl and you also in his historian kind of way he delved into the scrip of mineworkers and he's got a massive collection of the different kinds of kind of slave labor, slave wages script that the mining companies would do and it kind of tied you to the company store. And then there are like badges or buttons or something that some, so stuff, you know, archaeological or historical archival stuff of mining that he has that I don't do. So he's one. I keep it close to home and those are some people. You know, I wasn't a war photographer, so I don't kind of look up to those people. There was a group in in South Africa, this goes back to Impact as well, that was called, it was a collective, and it was similar, it was a kind of similar version of Impact Visuals, but it was South African, largely white. South Africans, or light skinned South Africans, but they were kind of a Magnum of South Africa and there was another group and I knew a couple of these people in Brazil was called Efe Quattro, F4, and again, they covered social movements and had very good photographers, which reminds me - I guess another person I really do appreciate is Sebastian Salgado, you know, I think some of his work is pretty, pretty remarkable. But I never tried to emulate him, he was like maybe too far above me. Donna and Earl are closer to me, more real life models.

All right, and, all right, is there anything that you've liked to talk about that I haven't asked?

I rambled about a lot, so, that's a good question, but I don't know if I have anything there.

All right. Well, I believe we've kind of reached the end -

Did I get you, did I get you the box to check, you can now?

Yeah. I think so. Alright, well, thank you very much.

Sure. No, it was a pleasure talking to you.