PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Andre Lambertson: Engaging the World
Six months after graduating from the International Center of Photography, Andre Lambertson pawned two of his cameras. His first year out of school was a rough one, and the work came in fits and starts.
But he kept one, and he continued to work on a number of personal projects he had started as a student. He had no buyer, no place to publish. At that early point in his career, Lambertson took photographs because he felt he had to. “They were all issues I was concerned with — particularly stuff in the black community,” Lambertson says, referring to his early photos, including a series he did about Vietnam veterans who lived on the streets of Coney Island. Thirteen years later, he’s among the most sought-after photo essayists in the country, and his work has appeared in Time, Life, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. His cameras still pay his rent, but these days he gets to keep them.
From the beginning, he was driven to tell stories about people who enter the mainstream consciousness only as objects of pity or sources of fear. He’s drawn to lives that are damaged and destroyed by poverty, crime, drugs, and familial decay. Many of his photos feature families in very private situations: a son helping his mother shoot heroin, or a brother watching his sister die of AIDS. Shadows haunt the corners of many of the frames. “It became my way of being in the world,” he says.
Lambertson’s youthful features and short dreads belie his forty years. He originally wanted to be a writer, but that changed when he took a photography class at the University of Virginia. “The thing I liked about photography was that it brought me into contact with people,” he says. A year studying at the ICP, an internship at The Village Voice, and freelance assignments for The New York Times followed. Much of the work he did for the Voice reflected his social concerns, and that in turn led to a job at the Baltimore Sun in 1995.
“A lot of the stuff I wound up doing was sports and fashion,” he says of his three-year stint at the paper. “It was fun because it was a challenge for a while. But after a while you want to keep growing.” His desire to return to more serious themes reasserted itself after an assignment for a Sun fashion feature. Lambertson went to take pictures of a woman who had a flair for hats at the funeral home she owned. Trying to get the right shot, he says, “I backed into a casket, and in this casket was a young boy, like twelve or thirteen years old” — a victim of violence. “I freaked out, and she said this isn’t all that rare.”
Lambertson began to research Baltimore crime and found a side of his adopted city that he hadn’t experienced. “I found out that Baltimore was near the top in youth violence,” he says. “I’d read the paper and if there was a shooting or a stabbing and a youth was involved, I would try to go to the hospital. And if it was a funeral, I would just show up.” His editors at the Sun had no idea what he was doing outside of work hours until one day, while he was shooting at a local hospital, a p.r. representative contacted his editor to verify his identity. “My editors were like, ‘Andre, what’s this mysterious project?’” Lambertson showed his personal work, and his editors liked it so much they ran a few of the photos. (Go to www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0004/andreintro.htm to see these and other photos by Lambertson.)
That photo series won second place in the 1996 Pictures of the Year International competition, sponsored by the Missouri journalism school, and it wasn’t long until colleagues were encouraging him to return to New York to try to sell some work. It was good advice. He returned in 1998 and has worked consistently as a free-lancer ever since.
“His execution is almost always moving and imaginative,” says David Friend, editor of creative development at Vanity Fair, who gave Lambertson one of his first magazine assignments, in early 1996, when he was the director of photography at Life. “I liked his attitude,” Friend explains. “He’s got a bright personality, a spiritual side that comes through.”
Among Lambertson’s favorite assignments is a series he did for Time on Bill Tomes, a Catholic priest who has worked with kids in Chicago’s worst housing project. “If two gangs were at war with each other, Tomes would stand in the middle of them while they were shooting. He said he would love the guy who shot him more than anyone else,” says Lambertson. “I said, ‘I’ve got to meet this guy.’”
While he shares with Tomes a desire to help people through his work, Lambertson admits that it’s not always easy to reconcile that with his role as photographer. “There was a time when it really messed with my head because my career could change, but nothing happened to them,” he says. “Their lives didn’t change.
“Photography becomes so personal. When does it become ego? When does it become about yourself?” He says he came to understand that he couldn’t help everyone, and that his photography wouldn’t — couldn’t — change the world, but along with that came a realization that even having a small positive impact on another person was enough. “If I could offer a guy some friendship or a couple months of sobriety . . . whatever’s possible, you know?”
Lambertson is concerned with being pigeonholed as a chronicler of poverty and pain, so he welcomes assignments that give him a chance to tell stories without the vocabulary of despair he usually employs. “I happen to think there’s an over-saturation of negative images, and I know that in my soul I need to see more positive things,” he says.
He got the chance to do just that on a number of trips to Sierra Leone earlier this year. The West African country’s brutal civil war had ended in January, and Lambertson decided to document one child soldier’s path back home to the family from which he’d been torn. He found what his soul needed. “You start meeting like minds,” he says, referring to the other aid workers, photographers, and journalists who are helping to mend the country and tell its story. “There are all these people whose hearts are in the right place. It’s kind of beautiful.”
Lambertson teaches a class titled “Passion, Purpose and Personal Vision in Documentary Photography” at the International Center of Photography. He considers the field much more difficult to break into than it was in the late eighties and early nineties — tightened budgets, fewer magazines buying fewer photo essays — and he doesn’t sugar-coat that reality for his students. He knows that only the most determined students can find success.
He’s careful not to sound too discouraging, though. “You
just have to believe in what you’re doing,” he told
his class one warm spring night recently, after running through
a litany of the challenges they are likely to face. He speaks
from experience: back in the beginning, a month after he pawned
his cameras, he bought them back with money he made from some
of his photographs. He said he wasn’t worried about losing
them because he never lost faith in what he was doing. He may
have had little choice in the matter: “Photography is the
language I’ve chosen — or, it chose me.”
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