The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum are not only honoring seven well-respected talented photographers but are displaying some of their work featured in an exhibition there until Feb. 11, 2022.
The Hall of Fame recognized Pete Souza, Dawoud Bey, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Larry Burrows, David Douglas Duncan, Sally Mann, and Joyce Tenneson for their creative and visionary contributions to the art of photography.
The museum also presented Joel Sartore with the first-ever IPHF Visionary Award, in addition to the Professional Photographers of America, the world’s largest nonprofit trade association for professional photographers, with the Leadership Award.
“Despite the challenges we continue to face around the world as a society, we are proud to add these exceptional honorees into the Hall of Fame and celebrate their contributions to the art of photography,” Richard Miles, chairman of the board of IPHF, said.
Souza, a freelance photographer and best-selling author most known for his tenure as the chief official White House photographer during Barack Obama’s presidency, said he’s overwhelmed to be part of the IPHF.
“It’s the greatest honor to be inducted into this hall of fame,” he said. “It’s not something that I would’ve ever dreamed would be possible for me.”
Initially, he said he wanted to be a sportswriter during his undergraduate years at Boston University, but his dream job changed after completing a photography course.
He said there was something about the process of making and developing black and white photographs that felt magical for him, and that’s when he knew photojournalism was the better career.
After college, he transitioned from being a newspaper photographer into a junior official White House photographer during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
“I was in my 20s when I started that job, and it was quite overwhelming to go from a newspaper to suddenly be walking into the Oval Office every day documenting that presidency for history,” he said. “I was exposed to the most powerful people in our government in a very intimate way. It was a great experience for somebody that was as young as I was.”
He is best known for his role as the chief official White House photographer and director of the White House photo office during the Obama administration.
Surprisingly, he started working for him by happenstance. In 2004, when Obama was elected to the Senate, he documented his first couple of years in office for the Chicago Tribune. It was an opportunity he said was exclusive for working with Obama’s hometown newspaper.
He said since he developed a professional relationship with him and appreciated how he conducted himself, Obama asked him to be his White House photographer when he was elected president.
Obama making history as the first Black president of the United States was something Souza, said he as a white male, was very cognizant about when snapping photos of him interacting with Black people and other people of color. He knew the significance of Black youth seeing a positive example of someone who looks like them in a powerful position.
“On a day-to-day basis, though, I looked at him as the president, not as the first Black president,” he said. “He’s making decisions like any other president, but it was these interactions with other people where I was very cognizant of him being the first Black president.”
Dawoud Bey, a Black inductee who is also hearing impaired, is notable for capturing the daily lives of African Americans since 1975. His career launched as a street photographer taking photos of African Americans in Harlem and Brooklyn. His said reason behind the photos was because he wanted to make images he wasn’t seeing and showcase photos that conveyed the rich humanity of Black people.
“I didn’t want to portray them through a lens of sociology or pathology, as they often were but as fully and deeply human, like the people in my family or in my own Brooklyn neighborhood,” Bey said.
“For most of my career, I’ve made photographs of African Americans and young people; two groups that I think are not always given serious photographic attention,” he said. “The fact that I am truly interested in the people I photograph and using my work as a platform for amplifying their presence allows them to trust me. That trust leads to photographs that have a deep sense of interiority and calm.”
His current work explores history embedded in the landscape and how that history relates to the African American piece of the American narrative.
He said his creative process begins with extensive research before picking up his camera.
“So it’s not so much about “capturing” something for me—which I consider to be a very aggressive term for what photographers do—but being grounded and then seeing as deeply into the subject as possible, and giving that an interesting photographic form.” he said.
Bey has worn a hearing aid since third grade and credits him becoming a photographer for having to depend a lot on his eyesight.
“It’s science we compensate for the lack of one sense through the overdevelopment of others,” he said. “That hearing loss also causes me to pay greater attention, and that attention, and the connection that results, was definitely important to my early portrait-based work.”
Some advice Souza gives photojournalists interested in the work he does is to stay authentic and true to what they’re creating.
“I think more than ever today, photojournalists or documentary photographers need to make authentic photographs,” he said. “We live in a time when the technology is such that it’s so easy to manipulate photographs or to create a false narrative with photographs.”
Visit https://iphf.org/ for more information about the exhibition.
