Kyle Kellams: Andrew Kilgore died this week. Loved ones announced his death on his Facebook page. For decades, he photographed us, if not literally all of us. Certainly he photographed the best of our spirit, almost always in black and white. In December 2022, Andrew came to the Anthony and Susan Hoy News studio to talk about his then about to open retrospective of one hundred photographs that would be hosted by the Walton Arts Center.
Along with the exhibition’s curator, Kathy Thompson, he discussed the process of selecting the pieces and also about his career. Here is part of our conversation from that winter.
Every photograph I’ve ever seen that you’ve taken, including the one that’s on my office wall of Donald Harrington, the one of my niece that you took. Every single one has a story behind it. Maybe the story is in the eye of the viewer, but if you give me a camera and I take pictures of these folks, I don’t get the same result. There isn’t that three dimensional story that you, Andrew Killgore, get? Well, how do you do that?
Andrew Kilgore: I had someone one time, they had come over for a sitting, and I invited them to sit, and we chatted for about a half an hour and they said, ‘Oh, I bet you have these conversations with people. So that you can make that story’. And I said, actually, you have it exactly backwards. I photograph people so that I get to talk to them. I don’t talk to them to make a better photograph. So I think somewhere along the line, maybe born with it. I just have been fascinated by other people and partly my experience in the Peace Corps. Partly my experience moving to El Paso, Texas, when I was sixteen. I discovered that people who are vulnerable and who are most desperately vulnerable are just… I just fall in love with them. A kind of, I don’t know, maybe an ability to see people more deeply and clearly than…
Kathy Thompson: Maybe that they just open up to you, Andrew. And that is what you’re seeing when you’re looking at the photograph that’s different from others, is that they have because you’ve spent time with them and getting to know them, they are more open to you, which means that they're more open when you photograph them.
Kilgore: I think sometimes people, they show up for a sitting or they or they’re part of a project and they expect me to have a certain kind of power aura and I don’t. I’m just a really goofy old person. And even when I was young, I was kind of a goofy old person. I used to put on clown shows for the other kids in my neighborhood when I was six and seven years old. I was the soft, pudgy, non-athletic kid who survived by being able to entertain people by just being kind of well, goofy.
Kellams: What’s the sensation? I don’t know if you ever use film anymore, but what is or was the sensation of seeing that image come up through the solution?
Kilgore: That’s when I became a photographer.
Thompson: Yeah, that’s the magic.
Kilgore: I bought my first camera on the way home from the Peace Corps in Hong Kong, and for a year or two, it was just kind of in the closet, and I’d get it out every now and then and goof around with it. And then I was living in Austin and I had this job working with totally blind, what we then called severely retarded, institutionalized children at the state school. And, my next door neighbor built a darkroom and invited me to use it. And I thought, oh, well, why not?
So I, I took my camera out to the, to where I worked, and I shot a couple rolls of film of those kids, two of them are in this show, and developed the film and then put a negative in the enlarger and having read the instructions, kind of slid the photographic paper into the developer tray and watched that image materialize. And in that instant, I knew that I had found my home, found my way through the world. And I haven’t been in a dark room now in, God, ten years probably. and I find the digital process of photographing as magical. The darkroom and the and all that chemistry. That way of making images was really wonderful.
Kellams: I’ve selected five photographs from the collection that I want to ask you about specifically. That’s all right. I’ve got them marked here. This first one is a young black child who looks forlorn. He has there, a couple of, maybe volleyballs or some sort of athletic ball behind him. It’s from the sunrise 1970 collection. Is. How is it labeled? Yeah, I know that. Okay. What can you tell me about that?
Kilgore: Sure. That was one of the first pictures that I took in Austin. That child was totally blind. He was developmentally disabled to the point where he didn’t know that language was happening. He didn’t hear words. He was one of the kids that I worked with the most, mainly just helping him to find his way around the place where he lived. There were 22 kids on this little ward, and what we were supposedly doing was developing a curriculum, a way of working with kids with that multiply handicapped thing. And he was just this incredibly beautiful child. He was twelve years old when I took that picture. And just a beautiful kid.
And I loved him and I’ve always liked that photograph a lot because it really expresses what his life was like. He would find a place in that… It was a big old room and it had a bunch of stuff in it, and all 22 of the kids and the different people that worked with him would be in there and doing stuff, and he’d find a place where he could just sit down and listen to what was going on. And I have no idea what the world was like for him. But, whatever it was, we shared it.
Kellams: I want to ask you about this photo, and this is from 1981. “Drew A Circle” is the name of this.
Kilgore: “We Drew A Circle.”
Kellams: “We Drew A Circle.”
Kilgore: It’s from a poem. We wanted to draw a circle that would be a large enough circle for people with those disabilities. That’s a down syndrome man who is about 40, 45.
Kellams: He’s holding his arms out.
Kilgore: He just did that. I have no idea why he did that. But he was a wonderful subject. A lot of the special projects that I did, I only had a few moments with each person. So I would go to an institution, or people would bring a bunch of people over to my studio from some place where they were being served, a group home or an institution. And I would just have a few minutes with each one of them. So whatever they offered was, but part of that process was to photograph them with as much respect as possible, so that they felt for once like they were the important person in the room. So I think he felt that.
Kellams: All right. So this is from 1993. It’s a woman who has–
Kilgore: Oh, she was great. She had schizophrenia. And I love talking to people with schizophrenia. Really, extreme cases of it because they talk in metaphors and, and some people, even psychiatrists will say, ‘Oh, what they say doesn’t have any meaning’. It’s just garbled, stuff from their whatever. But I find that often it has a lot of meaning. She was a little tiny woman. I would be surprised if she weighed ninety pounds. And she sat there and she explained to us that she was Mother Teresa and that the woman who was known as Mother Teresa was actually Joan of Arc. And she went into some detail and explained to us that she was Mother Teresa. I think a lot of people would have heard that and would have thought she's a crazy old lady. What I heard was, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m really a nice person. I’m a good person, like Mother Teresa.
Kellams: In this photo, she has her hands right up by her face. She’s got a smile on and brightly colored clothes. It looks–
Kilgore: I’m mother Teresa.
Kellams: She’s just, what’s the word? She’s just beaming. Radiant.
Kilgore: Yeah. She was. She was great, I loved her.
Kellams: Was this another instance where you just had a few minutes with someone?
Kilgore: Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe ten minutes. Maybe.
Kellams: There’s a connection.
Kilgore: Yeah, yeah. One time I was photographing for this organization in Little Rock called Youth at Risk. And I had to photograph several hundred of these teenagers in the Little Rock school system that had been identified as being potentially in trouble or or victims of trouble. So I went to this one high school and the principal there who, well, I can’t use polite language to describe this man, I thought I was going to have to work all day with about 50 kids. He said I could do it in one class period, which was like 52 minutes or something. So I photographed all 50 kids in 52 minutes, and I had a couple of teachers helping and my assistant, and we just organized it.
And so each student would come in, they’d be seated, I’d introduce myself. And I had, like, literally 30s to establish that feeling of rapport. And I think Kathy would agree those photographs from that project are just amazing. So, the point being that sometimes we can find that connection almost instantaneously. It’s nice if you have an hour to do it, but if you have to do it instantaneously, then that’s definitely possible.
Kellams: Let me ask you about one that I find just so fun. And I believe that’s Pierre Walker and Ellen Gilchrist.
Kilgore: It is.
Kellams: That’s Pierre. Okay. Pierre, Ellen’s son is standing. He’s a young man
Kilgore: Sitting.
Kellams: Is he sitting? Okay. He’s sitting. And Ellen is sort of, I don’t know, curled up, sitting on his lap. And it’s just this marvelous image. And I want to know, because Ellen is a wonderful, bigger than life personality. Pierre is a wonderful, bigger life than personality. I think of you as a wonderful, bigger than life personality. What was the room like when Andrew Killgore, Pierre Walker and Ellen Gilchrist were all there together?
Kilgore: We were just playing. It was just fun. We were just having a good time. I knew Ellen really well. We were good, good friends. And I knew Pierre fairly well. Not real well, but well enough. And we were just all having a good time.
Kellams: When you’re having a good time, are you giving direction? Did you say, oh, try sitting on his lap or did that?
Kilgore: No, no, that was Ellen’s idea. Completely.
Kellams: Was there laughter during that session?
Kilgore: Oh, God. Yeah.
Kellams: Let’s see this. So this one.
Kilgore: Oh, that’s an interesting one.
Kellams: Let me set the context here. I don’t know the backstory at all. So I’m going to tell you what I bring as an observer. It’s a young man who has three children. I don’t know if they’re related to him or not. It’s from 2013, but my goodness, it looks like it could be from 2013 or 1933, and the range of emotions on the faces is all over the place. What can you tell me about this?
Kilgore: Okay, so I think that from my point of view and I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but from my point of view, I’ve done two major exhibits about people who, sorry young people, suffer from some form of mental illness. What do you guys like to call that anymore? I don’t know. Anyway, in the first one, they had been diagnosed and were being treated. In the second one, it was about people who lived on the street, often homeless, often traveling, who lived in extreme poverty and who were not… I call that exhibit “A Reluctance To Engage”, people who just had a hard time making those connections that most of us in this room make on a daily basis, to work our way through life, all of us in this room. I don’t know. I mean, most of us.
But anyway, this was the second of those. I photographed these people at Saint Paul’s church at the free lunches. People came there because that was the only way they were going to get fed that day. And while I would go in and photograph about ten people at the lunch, I’d go in, and pick out the people that I saw that I thought I’d like to photograph. And I would offer them a 20 dollar bill to participate in the project. And as I was going through that, this fellow that was working with me came up and he said there was always a police officer on hand there, and the police officer had come up to him and said, ‘There’s this young family here really, need the 20 dollars. And if there’s any way you could fit them in, that’d be great’.
Well, the story was that they had a newborn baby. He was just a week or so old. The mom had complications and had to go back in the hospital. So this guy who, I don’t know, looked like he was in his mid twenties with a baby that was like a week old and another baby that was obviously still in diapers and another child that was less than five years old. And this young guy, a tiny little guy, maybe weighed 120 pounds and he was just dealing with it, with these three little kids. And I took that picture. And at the time I thought, well, it’s such a chaotic image. I didn’t think that it was a very good photograph. But the more familiar I became with it and then showing it to other people, it’s like, it’s one you picked out. People are moved by that photograph, and I think they get the plight that this young guy with these three little kids was in.
Kellams: Andrew, I’m wondering because you don’t just have your heart on your sleeve, you have your heart on your lens, and you are so emotionally connected to what you do in these people. Does it ever affect you? Does it make you sad? Does it go with you?
Kilgore: Well, that’s a really good question. I think this is part of who I am all the time. There was a great cartoonist, the guy who did the Peanuts, Charles Schulz. Somebody asked him one time if he thought about his cartooning when he wasn’t at his drawing board. And what he said was, ‘Oh, there’s a part of my brain that is always cartooning’. And I immediately knew exactly what he meant. There’s a part of me that’s always doing that, whether I’ve got a camera in my hand or not. I look around and I look at people, and I’m moved by them, you know? I always want to photograph everybody just because it gives me permission to stare at people, to look deeply at people.
Andrew Kilgore in conversation at the Carver Center for Public Radio in December 2022, in advance of a retrospective of his work that would open at the Walton Arts Center. We also heard from that exhibition’s curator, Kathy Thompson. Andrew Kilgore died this week.
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