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By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff Washington
A black beret is his trademark.
Cameras hang from his shoulders like a revolutionarys cartridge belts.
But theres nothing warlike about Rick Reinhard. Hes image-maker to
the antiwar community and more. More than two decades ago, he set his course to
become camera artist to the movements against racism, poverty, oppression,
homelessness.
Its a visual world we live in, he said. I
wanted to provide slick, magazine-quality images to the movements. If I could
do that for the broad sector of the opposition, that was the role I
wanted. And for two decades, he has been doing just that in the pages of
NCR and elsewhere -- adding the image that gets the reader more
immediately, more knowledgeably into the story.
A magna cum laude graduate of Boston College in the 1960s,
Reinhard went on to Honduras as a Peace Corps volunteer. Among all the things
he learned there, the most life-changing was learning the limitations of a
Kodak Instamatic.
If its been Reinhards goal to shoot images that make a
difference, some certainly do. Take, for instance, his version of the
predictable Madonna and Child.
It was a simple image of a Palestinian woman holding her daughter
that Reinhard shot in the late 1980s. But somethings missing: the
childs left eye. Two days earlier, it had been blown out by an Israeli
rubber bullet.
It had happened during the intifada, or uprising, that began in
the Gaza Strip in 1987. Reinhard was in the Gaza hospital room with the mother
and her young daughter. In the hospital room, he smiled his customary
self-effacing smile at mother and child, monitored the available window light
on his exposure meter, focused his Canon F1 35 mm and made the picture. Four
clicks in all, just to be sure.
The result is one of Reinhards photos that are worth 10,000
words. That Gaza Madonna and Child was airdropped over Lebanon, fluttering into
the streets. In pre-addressed postcard form it was mailed by the thousands to
the general secretary of the United Nations begging him to ask the Israelis to
cease using rubber bullets in the Israelis general get-aggressive
policy.
I wasnt part of the campaign, said Reinhard
during a Washington photo shoot more than a decade later, but the image
became a contributing factor. Thats always his hope when he does
his periodic work for Sojourners or Mother Jones, The Christian
Science Monitor, The Washington Post, or NCR.
Reinhards usual beat isnt the Middle East. Hes
more often dogging events on the streets of the nations capital, the
marches, the demonstrations, the sit-ins. One of our conversations for this
profile took place in a corner coffee shop near Capitol Hill. Reinhard was
photographing Navajo whod come to Washington to oppose uranium mine
drilling through the aquifer that supplies their drinking water. The photos
were used in the Nov. 19, 1999, issue of NCR.
Reinhards life as a photographer began hesitantly in
Honduras. His first photography lesson came through an observation there: If
two people stand in the same place, and take the same shot, the one with the
good optics produces a better image than the one with the Instamatic. He headed
to the Panama Canal Zone and bought a Pentax and a couple of good lenses, duty
free.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world, a war was on. In those
days, avoiding Vietnam, Reinhart said, was one of the first reasons male
volunteers gave for joining the Peace Corps. Reinhard was different. He was in
the Peace Corps because he didnt qualify for Air Force Officers Candidate
School on physical grounds.
As the only person among the volunteers in Honduras with a math
degree, he was assigned to teach math at a teacher training college. Meanwhile,
the United Fruit Company was teaching Reinhard Spanish for free. (He had
connections. As a mathematics major at Boston College, hed done his
thesis on banana distribution.)
Honduran school strike
Two things happened. The first was a strike by Honduran
schoolteachers. The second was a dawning. Reinhard realized that the Peace
Corps was the good face of a U.S. foreign policy waging a bad war in
Vietnam. The Honduran school strikers (quickly joined by Honduras
transportation workers) impressed the students at the college where Reinhard
worked. They seized the institution, gave the faculty an hour to leave, then
departed.
Once theyd gone, Reinhard, in the faculty room, raised his
hand.
I said, I know Im an American Peace Corps
volunteer and not supposed to get involved in political issues. The
acting director of the college said, No, no. You are Honduran. Say
anything you want. So I said, Before we go down that road, leaving,
why dont we decide whether we support the students or oppose them.
The faculty voted to support the strike, and the Honduran
government decided to oust Reinhard for speaking out. But on a technicality it
couldnt -- Reinhard had been invited to state his views.
Simultaneous to this, groups in the United States opposing the
Vietnam War had declared the first moratorium against the war.
Peace Corps volunteers in Chile, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic
independently issued their own statement.
Honduras and Vietnam shared the same latitude, said
Reinhard, and the Peace Corps operation in Honduras increasingly looked like
the good face of that immoral war. Reinhard and two colleagues
decided to float their own antiwar statement and see if a majority of the
Honduran Peace Corps would sign. A slight majority did, stating, among other
things, that as volunteers of peace, we condemn the actions of our
country in Vietnam. The local Peace Corps director at first supported the
trio but then warned that if they sent the statement to President Nixon and the
newspapers as planned, theyd be sent back to the United States.
The three, with only months left on their contract, replied that
if ordered home theyd instead seek political asylum in Honduras. The
director backed down; the statement was sent.
Reinhard sought to extend his time in the Peace Corps with a year
in Chile. Instead he was accepted for Paraguay and shipped his stuff down
there. But almost immediately, after assessing what was going on back home, he
decided not to follow. Reinhard applied for a teaching job in District of
Columbia schools.
He returned home to Boston in 1969, at Christmas time, just as
20-year-old Fred Hampton, Black Panther and community leader, was shot dead by
the Chicago police. I was outraged, said Reinhard, who immediately
hitchhiked to Washington to check on his job application in the city still
charred from the riots that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther
King.
With a job offer at Washingtons Cardozo High School in hand,
Reinhard asked the Peace Corps to return his belongings from Paraguay. It would
take him two-and-a-half more years to become a full-time photographer. During
that time, he taught school and photographed students and life around the
city.
Its the early 70s, Im 26 and clear of the
draft, said Reinhard. Im draft counseling and involved
peripherally with the antiwar movement. I made picture frames, took pictures of
demonstrations and alternative stuff. There was a womens theater group I
was close to.
One day, going up the down staircase at Cardozo, he met part-time
teacher and artist Judy Byron, later his wife, who at the time struck him as
a white proximity to Angela Davis, the radical black leader.
Communal living
Reinhard was also organizing a group home for communal living on
Park Road Northwest. Byron became part of the group. (More than a decade later,
Rick and Judy bought the house and raised their daughters, Rachel and Willa, in
it. They still call it home. Rachel is a third-year doctoral student in
American history at Berkeley; Willa a paid intern on the National Trust for
Historic Preservations magazine.)
Still largely self-taught, Reinhard took a photography course at
the Smithsonian. Next he attended a summer workshop in Maine. At that
point I considered myself a serious photographer, he said. He studied
with a photographer neighbor, and in 1979 went through a University of Missouri
photojournalism workshop.
Back in Washington, no longer teaching but surviving as a
one-day-a-week child-care provider, he was taking informal kid shots by the
bushel and shopping his work to organizations that dealt with early childhood.
He got a break. The Presidents Commission on the Year of the Child liked
his work.
I became sort of their staff photographer, he said.
It was an interesting introduction to Washington photography at the
non-community level. Mainly photographing meetings.
Still living in the group home, and without a lot of expenses, he
started to build a career. Hed already made one decision, he
wouldnt do any work for the bad guys -- the publications of
corporations, military-industrial complex outfits or firms operating on
government money, the general stock-in-trade of many Washington area
freelancers.
Through friends involved in social justice and his own involvement
with children, he was soon shooting for the Childrens Defense Fund; the
Child Welfare League of America; the Latino community; Luther Place on Thomas
Circle, fabled epicenter of much Washington activism; and the Community for
Creative Non-Violence led by Mitch Snyder. I was really close to the
homeless issue when Mitch was there, he said.
Not long after the University of Missouri workshop, and with the
help of a fellow photographer, Reinhard began shooting for The Washington
Post. It was that experience, doing five or six stories a week for the
weekly news sections, that really honed his news skills, he said.
Then came Reagan, followed by Bush. Twelve years with plenty of
people finding plenty to protest about. Reinhard was in his element, making
something visually different out of events that to many others were visually
the same: people, placards, protests, vigils, hunger strikes, silent
marches.
Some of his favorite images came out of those years: South Africa
and its anti-apartheid leaders such as Nelson Mandela, later its president.
Reinhard photographed the daily protests against apartheid outside the South
African Embassy in Washington and augmented that work with his own trip to
South Africa.
Photographer Reinhard was trying to capture and convey the face of
racism and discrimination visually, to show its scars.
He also worked on immigration issues. There were trips to Latin
America -- to Brazil where his brother Bill is an Oblate of Mary Immaculate
missioner in São Paulo. At one point, he wrote farewell letters for his
little girls as he prepared to accompany a rebel radio team into the El
Salvador war zone. The mission was to prove that, contrary to the U.S.
governments denials, U.S. planes were bombing El Salvador.
When Reinhard got to El Salvador, he learned that the project had
been aborted. The bombing was too intense. Instead he went to Salvadoran
refugee camps. (Much later, headed to El Salvador for the 10th anniversary of
the Romero assassination, El Salvador remembered -- and denied him a visa.)
It was from Reinhards anti-war convictions that two of his
favorite photographs emerged. I was trusted. I was known, he said,
by way of explaining how he was able to make images that made a difference.
The first evolved from the Veterans Fast over U.S.
involvement in Central America in the 1980s. One of his favorite images is of
the huge bags of supportive mail, in part the result of his photographic
work.
Four veterans, including Congressional Medal of Honor winner
Charles Liteky in his wheelchair, had been fasting on the Capitol steps. They
held out for 47 days. I spent a lot of time with them, said
Reinhard, I was almost the official photographer. From the vigil on
the steps, he picked up a lot of work for The Christian Science Monitor
and The Village Voice. The images from the Veterans Fast
became postcards and T-shirts.
People were visually forced to face the issue, he
said. He even wheeled Charlie in his dying days to deliver statements to
members of Congress.
Then a pilot named Eugene Hasenfus was shot down in his
clandestine cargo plane over Nicaragua with Oliver Norths telephone
number in his pocket. (North was the Marine officer masterminding the
Iran-Contra Affair. The Reagan administration was surreptitiously selling arms
to an Iran it was publicly pillorying, then using the money to fund the
Contras. Hasenfus had made regular flights out of El Salvador to supply arms to
the Contras.)
Shortly after the news about Hasenfus arrived, Reinhard was at the
final press conference to be conducted by the fasting veterans. The image he
made there was of huge bags of supportive mail in front of the fasters.
Reinhard recalled, Duncan Murphy, he was the only World War II vet among
the fasters, announced, Largely because of the outpouring of mail, and
mainly because of Hasenfus answering our prayers, we have decided not to
die.
Forced to face the issue
My greatest satisfaction, said Reinhard, comes
from having my images put a human face on issues of justice and exclusion,
issues about which I feel deeply.
The second of the anti-war photos came at the end of the Gulf War.
Sipping coffee nine years later, Reinhard recalled the image that gave national
prominence to an anti-war protest.
It was 1991. The Gulf War was over, and Washington was wallowing
in victory with a great parade and display. The machines of war were strung
along the National Mall. Because of his role in the movements, Reinhard knew
that the Catholic Worker and Atlantic Life Community folks had decided on a
course of civil disobedience.
When the peace advocates threw their blood on the Harrier Jump
Jet, the pride of the arms display, Reinhard was the only photographer present,
though a reporter for The Washington Post happened on the scene, too.
Reinhard asked him if the Post would be interested in a picture, and the
reporter said yes. Reinhard delivered raw film, and waited while editors
selected the picture they wanted.
Said Reinhard, It was an image that brought the blood, the
Harrier Jump Jet and the civil disobedience into the context of the great
national joy over the toys of war. (The photo ran in the June 21, 1991,
issue of NCR.)
Sure the incident would have been mentioned in the
Post, a couple of paragraphs buried in the story, said Reinhard.
But because the Post got that picture, they actually separated out
the story and ran it for a half-page.
It was one of those instances when I really felt Id
made a contribution, small as it was, to giving visibility to people who really
cared deeply.
Half pleased, half embarrassed, Reinhard tugged at his black
beret. Time to go.
Next stop: the darkroom. Another day. Another image.
Arthur Jones e-mail address is
ajones96@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, December 15,
2000
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