Photographer of Soul

Film explores Kilgore as advocate for poor

Noted photographer Andrew Kilgore has taken portraits of the likes former President Bill Clinton (when he was Arkansas governor), former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and a host of Arkansas-born stars who went on to make it in Hollywood. Kilgore's most recent project is photographing attendees of the Community Meals program at his church, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.
Noted photographer Andrew Kilgore has taken portraits of the likes former President Bill Clinton (when he was Arkansas governor), former U.S. Sen. David Pryor and a host of Arkansas-born stars who went on to make it in Hollywood. Kilgore's most recent project is photographing attendees of the Community Meals program at his church, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.

FAYETTEVILLE -- Noted photographer Andrew Kilgore is well-known for his signature black-and-white portraits of families and the state's prominent and wealthy. A new documentary about his life's work, A Lens to the Soul: The Photography of Andrew Kilgore, also includes some of his less famous subjects -- those whom he finds most endearing -- the downtrodden, abused and disabled.

"That's been my main mission, really, is to photograph people who have been stigmatized," said Kilgore, who turned 74 a week ago. "If I had the income, I would do almost entirely that."

The film, produced by Dan Robinson of Fayetteville and Robinson's Fiery Moon Productions, will be shown at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at 5 p.m. on Nov. 16.

The hour-long movie features more than 250 images from Kilgore's collection of 250,000 and was an official selection at the 2014 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. The film debuted in September at the Fayetteville Public Library, whose foundation funded the majority of the $50,000 project. Some of the images in the film have never been publicly seen before. Both previous showings were followed by question-and-answer sessions with the photographer and the filmmaker.

Beginning next year, Robinson and Kilgore plan to begin booking viewings of the movie at museums and libraries across the country.

Lens to the Soul was four years in the making and a spinoff from Kilgore's slide show, "Ineffable Connections," owned by Northwest Arkansas philanthropists Denise and Hershey Garner. That 16-minute presentation features 160 of Kilgore's photographs set to music. The images included a diverse collection of subjects, "from the most privileged to the least and all different ages and races," the photographer said.

Robinson and his wife, Amanda, have shown the slide show several times to the youth group at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville and decided it needed to be put before a larger audience.

At that point, Firey Moon Productions was well-established and looking to make its first film. Since 2010, Robinson interviewed several people for the film, including Kilgore, community leaders and former President Bill Clinton. Amanda Harrison was the documentary's producer.

"Our specific goal was to educate the public at large about the collection and the importance of advocacy photography," Robinson said.

Kilgore said advocacy photography as a genre has been around for some time.

"Photographers have often found a way of opening peoples' hearts and minds to the reality experienced by people who suffer from being pushed aside, out of the mainstream," Kilgore said.

He's been taking photographs since 1970, when he worked at the Austin State School for the blind and severely developmentally disabled in Austin, Texas. While previously in the Peace Corps, he encountered people in "radical poverty" in India, he said. In recent years, he's been an advocate for the mentally ill, especially those who are impoverished and live in abusive situations.

"They end up living on the street, basically," Kilgore said. During a twice-weekly Community Meals lunch at St. Paul's, he pays his subjects $20 per person to pose for him.

"They're living on such a minuscule amount of financial support that they know where every free meal in town is, from day to day," he said.

His heart remains with the underserved and the seemingly invisible people he photographs.

"I never was able to move beyond my concern for people whose lives were so desperately challenged," the photographer said. "I wanted to create a visual bridge between people who are in a position to actually change policy and create programs that would help people and the people who most desperately need to be helped."

From Kilgore's collection, 1,000 images were selected for Robinson to choose from. Just last year, the Fayetteville library became aware of the project and completed funding for the film. Robinson nailed down the interview with Clinton at his presidential library in Little Rock last April.

David Johnson, executive director of the Fayetteville Public Library, said the library foundation got behind the project because they thought the community still has a lot to learn from Kilgore, "both technically as a photographer, but also as someone who is very community-minded."

He praised Robinson for "staying out of the way as a director and letting the story tell itself. Johnson also lauded Robinson for getting and including the interview with Clinton, who is among Kilgore's famous subjects he's photographed.

"It adds a certain wave of legitimacy to the subject," he said of the former president.

Kilgore has seen the finished product just four times, and he said he likes it more every time he sees it. The library foundation, which owns the documentary, insisted that a series of 20 select prints from Kilgore's entire collection tour with the film.

"The beauty of that is that as a viewer, you're able to experience the film and then physically be able to go and spend some time with the pictures you were introduced to in the film," Robinson said.

"Being able to take a prolonged amount of time and spend it with the person in the photo really changes your experience of the photo."

NW News on 11/09/2014

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