Career Narrative

I studied history for four years at the University of Chicago. During that time, I went to England to study with the noted labor historian E.P. Thompson at the University of Warwick. Although a history career didn’t work out for me, my study with Thompson did. It strongly influenced my later career as a photographer.  

Thompson’s iconic book, The Making of the English Working Class, argued that all “righteous” historians should concentrate on recording and documenting the lives of the underserved and the forgotten. He argued that everyone deserved to be preserved, even if their culture or jobs or unique pastimes became lost to history. It made a lot of sense to a 1970s photography student, engaged by the work of The Photo League, the Farm Security Administration, and Magnum. I concluded that if I couldn’t be a proper historian, I could be a documentary photographer. A “historian with a camera,” as the University of Chicago Alumni Magazine called me in a recent feature article. 

I enrolled in Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), after a short workshop with Boston photography guru Minor White. At RISD I fell in with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, who instilled in me a respect for the world around me and a sense of modesty about my role in it. One day after class I naively asked Harry what I should photograph. He asked what interested me most in my life, besides photography. I said country music and horse racing. He said I should “shoot that stuff. Even if you make bad pictures, you’ll have a good time.” So, I did.  

I didn’t have much interest in commercial or editorial work, though I did some from time to time. I just wanted to initiate my own projects—say what I wanted to say and do my best. More lessons from Harry. So, teaching would be my source of income and my photography remained personal. More or less that’s the way my career has gone, with a few sidesteps.   

Even before I finished my degrees at RISD (BFA and MFA) I found small teaching jobs at night schools and such long gone places as Project Art Center, Imageworks, and New England School of Photography. At these places, arguably the beginning of photographic education as we know it, I taught students like Nan Goldin and Jim Goldberg and others, who went on to brilliant careers as photographers. But mostly I was honing my skills for a lifelong career as a teacher.

Once I had my MFA, I was able to get adjunct work at Harvard University, then the University of Massachusetts at Boston. With teaching and the occasional freelance job, I was able to pay my living expenses and photograph constantly throughout the 1970s. In 2016, I published a book of my 1970s work, called Histories: Tales from the 70s that sums up this period for me. 

In my first year of grad school I got the notion to write an instructional text for beginning photographers. It was published during my second year of grad school by Little, Brown and Co. Called Black & White: A Basic Manual, it went on to become the first or second most used text in the U.S. for photography classes. I’ve since written a few others which have also been widely used as texts, but mostly I’ve tried to concentrate on my personal photography. Making work.

I followed my love of music to country music parks, intimate dancing venues, musicians’ homes, and even Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. For horse racing I went to Santa Anita Park in Pasadena, Fair Grounds in New Orleans, illegal quarter horse tracks in rural Louisiana, and every August for 25 years I went to horse racing’s mecca—the Saratoga Race Course and photographed. And bet. 

I took jobs with small papers and magazines for press passes and other access. I shot Dolly Parton backstage at Boston's Symphony Hall for The Boston Phoenix in 1972, and Triple Crown winning jockey Steve Cauthen in the paddock at Saratoga for Turf and Sport Digest in 1977. With E.P. Thompson in mind, I photographed the people and places that I thought would be long gone, hoping they wouldn’t be lost forever. 

There were the sidesteps, such as a six-week gig in Rhode Island for the Library of Congress, supporting a folklife team. But by the 1980s, carving out a living in photography was getting more difficult. When adjunct teaching jobs became scarce, I went to work for Polaroid for two years, editing a magazine, curating shows of Polaroid imagery, and interacting and assisting photographers such as Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, and Robert Frank on their various Polaroid business.  

All that was by far the most interesting part of the job. I also went to a lot of meetings and wrote press releases and articles about Polaroid products aimed at magazine publication. I wasn’t getting much personal photography done, so when RISD called with an offer to adjunct, I took it and quit Polaroid. From then until now I’ve concentrated on teaching for a living and making books and films of my personal projects for creative satisfaction. A few years later I was given a full-time, tenured position as professor of photography at RISD. In 2014 I was appointed Chief Critic for RISD’s storied European Honors Program in Rome. I also went to Berlin to teach for RISD in 2016. In 2023 I was voted Honored Educator by the national Society for Photographic Education (SPE).

Over the years, I photographed many different types of subjects, even animals and the human form, but I’ve always returned to my roots as a documentary photographer with E.P. Thompson’s voice in the back of my mind. “Save your subjects from oblivion, Henry.” Something like that.

Aside from country musicians and horse racing all over the country and abroad, I have photographed nightlife in Buenos Aires; wrestling and boxing in Caracas: old highways everywhere; the Malecón in Havana; burlesque and drag performers in Los Angeles; South American baseball; camel breeding in Dubai; thoroughbred breeding in Kentucky;  tri-racial families in Maryland; Cajun bars in Louisiana; dance halls in Texas; performers, theaters, and tourists in Branson, MO; and much more. I always had a book in mind as I worked.

My first monograph came out in 1987. Called Racing Days, it was the culmination of 15 years of photographing horse racing. Branson, MO was published in 1996; and Animalia, a diversion from my usual documentary work, was published in 2001. Honky Tonk, a book I had been trying to publish for 25 years on and off, was published in 2003, with a revised edition in 2012. Honky Tonk was another Harry Callahan enabled work. It explored the worlds of country music in the 1970s, but to me it was mostly a history of a particular time, about people and places not widely covered in mainstream media or consciousness. A history.  

Throughout the two decades of the 2000s, I continued to make work, mainly while traveling around the country and to South America (Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, Cuba) and to Europe (Italy, France, Germany). I photographed the burgeoning neo-burlesque world in the early 2000s, and published a book called Show in 2010, leading me to my first effort in movie making. The film, Murray, is still unfinished, due to disagreements among my collaborators, but I plan to return to it in a few years. It won’t be a contemporary story then, but rather a history of the early years of neo-burlesque. 

Then I made Spoke, a short film about the legendary Broken Spoke, one of the last dance halls in Austin, Texas. Funded by the Annenberg Foundation, it premiered at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, as part of They Shot Country Music, an exhibition where the film and photographs were featured. It was also screened on the dance floor for the 50th anniversary of the Broken Spoke. I especially like when my subjects embrace my work. I have shown my racing photographs at the Kentucky Derby Museum, as well as the International Center of Photography. And my honky tonk work has been in many art museums and also at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia.  

My next film effort was Partners, a 60-minute look at unusual relationships. It debuted at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and toured to several venues around the U.S. and Europe, before landing on Amazon Prime. I recently released a 60-minute bilingual (English and Spanish) documentary called Blitto Underground, about bohemian Buenos Aires. It had its South American premier fall 2022 at the beautiful Centro Cultural 25 de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Just before the pandemic struck in 2020, I spent a week in south-central Louisiana shooting stills and making a film on Cajun culture. It is tentatively called Where Everybody is Somebody; the town motto of Marksville, LA, where I did most of the filming. I plan to return to Marksville as soon as I can raise the funds.

From 2000 on I started to have many more shows in museums and galleries, again in the U.S., South America, and Europe. A highlight came in 2006 when I had a large solo exhibition (over 100 prints) at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. My work started to be collected and is now in dozens of museums, with especially significant collections at the Smithsonian, Duke University, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Harvard Art Museums.

All along I continue to travel and make still photographs and films and publish books of new and old work. In the Pandemic Years, from 2020 until 2022 I took time off from teaching and traveled extensively to photograph and show my still and film work around the U.S. and in Europe. In 2022, Stanley/Barker published Speedway1972, photographs of a stock car racetrack I made when I was in grad school. In 2023 Kehrer Verlag will publish We Sort of People, a book about a tri-racial community in southern Maryland I was introduced to by friend and writer Leslie Tucker. After that, I hope to publish books of my recent still work from Texas (2020-now), Buenos Aires (since 2009), and Louisiana (since the 1970s).