We’re looking forward to introducing you to Bob Barry. Check out our conversation below.
Bob, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
As a lifelong artist, I have found that for me, the most creative part of the day are the first two hours.
Part of that I am sure is that morning jolt of energy, and the creativity just seems to ride the wave.
I am a music industry, jazz and art photographer. Much of my work is at night. I bring home the images, lay my camera bag on the floor and leave the fruits of my labor to wait for me in the morning.
After the morning coffee, I open my camera bag, take out the memory card in my camera and plug it into my card reader. The file opens on my computer desktop, and this is the beginning of the most exciting part of my day.
While I am shooting, I make mental notes of images I feel are the best from the shoot.
Viewing them the next morning, it always surprises me when it doesn’t turn out to be that way!
After I open my app that stores the images in files that I have previously created,
the images upload on my monitor and now the fun begins.
It’s almost like treasure hunting!
I wander through the RAW untouched images and pick out the best and then whittle those down to the best of the best.
Without getting too techy, I clean up the images and make needed adjustments to strengthen the chosen images. My work is varied, (club or theater concerts, recording session, festival), I prepare the images for my clients and send them the proofs digitally and wait for them to make their choices and sometimes ask me to retouch some of them to a higher level.
Other mornings I would work on special images that I feel would make a nice addition to my catalog.
My music catalog is quite large now after 30 years of shooting in the music industry,
I love B/W! It adds so much more emotional impact to the work, but I also keep files of many color images.
My website has a nice selection of all genres of my work and can be found at jazzography.com.
There are mornings where I just stare at the monitor without any clear idea of what I am going to do, but thankfully, for the most part, these moments are short lived, and I get back into the groove.
Every day is a new day with new challenges, and I have found that if the first hour and a half to two hours go well, so goes the day.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
As far back as I remember I have always been fascinated and interested in photography. I recall my father taking the family photos and dropping off the film to be developed at the local camera shop. Days later he would come home with an envelope filled with memories that could be re-lived and enjoyed over and over again. For me it was magical! And seventy + years later, it still is!
Although, in my youth it never was my goal to be a photographer it was always with me, and photography has always brought me a great deal of pleasure.
During and after college, my passion was drama and “the stage”. I lived, breathed and was totally consumed with the goal of becoming a “working actor”. After college I worked with the community theaters and then to local summer stock houses. After a few years I got my first big opportunity when I got hired to do a tour of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi with a bus and truck CO. performing musical comedies.
Things kept moving ahead ever so slowly it seemed, but I began to get parts in “Off Off” and “Off” Broadway shows.
Over the years it led to my Broadway debut in 1976 playing opposite Bobby Morse in “So Long 174th St. All this time every week, at least once, I would be walking through the parks and streets of Manhattan photographing everything and anything that grabbed my eye.
Like most actors, there was never quite enough work to keep me busy and financially solvent, so I needed an alternative career that would fill in the time and the coffers. I had picked up the guitar in college. After all it was the sixties. If I wanted to be popular and do well with the ladies, playing guitar was a good way to accomplish those goals.
I decided to put together a nightclub lounge act and began to work the corner bars, small lounges and restaurants of Manhattan. As an alternative career it was perfect, and I worked my way up to the biggest and finest hotel lounges in NYC and the surrounding area.
And so it was that I was bouncing from one art form to another for years.
Most of my actor and musician friends knew about my love of photography and had seen my work at some time or other, I began to do “head shots” and PR photos and photograph shows for my fellow artists who didn’t have enough money to have a professional photographer do their photo work. I think at one time in the seventies a good number of actors and musicians were getting work from my photos.
It was in 1980 I came to LA and of course my camera came with me.
After several years of working in film & TV and in the gaming industry, I fell in with an amazing group of working musicians and started to photograph them at performances, concerts etc. A chance meeting and friendship with legendary guitarist John Pisano and his wife Jeanne opened doors for me within the LA music community and gave me a great many opportunities to meet and photograph some of the icons of the music world.
When John Pisano started his Guitar Night in 1997, he invited me to come to his opening night and so I did, with my camera! It was an amazing moment for me after getting the proof sheets back from the lab and looking at them realizing that this was something I wanted to do a whole lot more of. For the last 30 years, I have been archiving the music community here in LA and around the country, photographing club performances, concerts, jazz, and R&B festivals, recording sessions and so on.
My work is now in the permanent collection of The American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, MO, and also in the Henry Mancini Building. (Sound Dept) of NBCUniversal Studios. Twenty pieces of my work are on loan to the Truman Hospital in Kansas City, MO. I have been shown in several galleries, The Brand Library of Music & Art, several nightclubs and art studios around LA.
My work has been described as “Performance Portraits”, as I shoot all my artists while they are working and in available light.
I have to say that I have probably enjoyed the last 30 years of my life working with and photographing the music community more than all the previous years of work in all the other art forms I have worked in.
My “Guitar Night” book which was published in 2018, is a project that is very close to my heart as it has been from that first night in September of 1997 when John Pisano created the “Guitar Night. I photographed almost every Guitar Night which was held once a week for over twenty-two years. It celebrates a valiant group of brilliant guitarists and sidemen who have given nothing less than their best, thrilling their devotee’s week after week.
I was recently awarded the President’s Award, by the California Jazz Foundation for my 30 years of work in the music industry. The foundation is a charitable organization that helps jazz and blues musicians in need. They have helped over 500 musicians to date, including all those musicians who lost everything in last year’s fires in LA. I have been a proud board member for the last twelve years.
I am working on a new book now and continue to photograph performances and concerts in LA
Through my work, I have tried to give you all a glimpse into these magnificent artists in the hope that you might get to know them as I have.
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. Who taught you the most about work?
I see life as a path through a forest of unknowns.
As you wander through this forest, you meet people along the way.
Some became friends, some not, and there were some people who became more than friends,
they become mentors.
I have been fortunate in finding mentors in all my artistic endeavors.
As a young actor in NYC, I had many teachers and acting coaches over the years, but my time as a student with Sanford Meisner was a turning point in my life. Sandy was a no frills, serious, focused and sometimes seemingly cruel.
He saw through his students, the defensiveness, the fear, and our limitations.
He saw through me like a newly polished window.
My efforts to amuse people was my way of protecting myself. If I made you laugh, then you were less likely to not like me!
I won’t bore you with the rest of my psychological profile.
What I will say is that Sandy ripped all my defenses from me, that were keeping me from being honest and truthful in my work. It was deeply painful and there were times when I felt that I was stark naked while doing scenes and exercises.
I got through the two years of his professional actors’ classes, breaking down and rebuilding me, and yes! my work was getting better.
At one point towards the end of my 2nd year, Sandy looked at me after I had just finished a scene with one of the other students and said, “what you did just now was what you must do from now on. Remember this moment!”. I did and still do.
Sandy once gave us a definition of acting that has stayed with me through my work as an actor and all other artistic endeavors, and that was, “acting is doing truthfully under imaginary circumstances”.
Seven words that have helped me face my challenges and reaching my goals.
.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
It’s an old adage, but one that holds a great deal of truth!
“You will learn more from your mistakes than you will ever learn from your successes.”
It needn’t be painful but often is, and necessary!
It is not the pain in the moment that is important, it is remembering the pain!
It is nature’s way of protecting the species!
Of course it doesn’t work for everyone.
I have heard about both men and women who get divorced and end up marrying the same person again.
They must have had terrible memories.
I have had several marriages and partners, but I always say, “I never married the same mistake twice”!!
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Whom do you admire for their character, not their power?
In my time working in and around the music industry, I have met a number of both wealthy and powerful people.
There are two people who I admire greatly, not only for their generosity, but their commitment to support the arts,
When I grew up and went to grade school in the forties and fifties, art classes and music classes were part of the curriculum in most schools in that time. Every student was given the opportunity to choose from a larger array of classes including the arts and music.
Those days are long gone now, and instead of art and music being available for all students, they are mostly available only to those families that can afford private schools and teachers.
Herb Alpert and his wife Lani Hall, believe that the arts in all forms should be available for all students as a human right, not just for the privileged.
Herb was quoted as saying, “Artists are the heart and soul of our democracy… They are the ones we look for when we want to feel something… It is a right. It should not be a privilege”.
Herb and Lani, through their foundations, have made major contributions to the arts by supporting all the arts, (music, dance, theater, schools, visual and media arts, and social services.)
You don’t define someone’s character by what they say, but for what they do!
Herb & Lani have made amazing contributions to the arts, and have earned not only my admiration, but the admiration of countless others.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. Are you tap dancing to work? Have you been that level of excited at any point in your career? If so, please tell us about those days.
First, I don’t tap dance!
At 82 walking can be challenging.
I am most fortunate that at my time in life, I am not only ambulatory, but I am still out working, photographing concerts and musical events. I wish I could say that I am keeping up to my old schedule of several shoots a week and all the work that goes into my photography after I bring it back to my studio, but these days I “cherry pick” my work and being as sensible as possible. Also, my wife Sharon, keeps tabs on me and can keep my ambitions from affecting my health.
I got my first camera at eight years old!
I have been in love with photography almost all my life.
For the first 50 years, I worked as an actor, a nightclub performer (singer guitarist), TV commercials, soap operas, and sitcoms. After moving to LA, more of the same and a few films.
In all that time my camera was always with me.
Whether it was street photography, landscapes, portraits, shooting rehearsals backstage while I was waiting to make my entrance, I have been constantly shooting.
For the last 30 years it has been the music industry and musical artists.
I must say that I am probably happier and more excited now than I was with any of the other art forms that I have worked in.
In most, if not all the performing arts, the actor has almost no control of their professional lives.
It is all in the hands of a few people and events that must take place before you are even made aware.
A writer has to write a play, a producer has to produce the play, the casting director has to accept or reject the submissions, that the agents and managers send in, and lastly, if you are fortunate enough to get an opportunity to audition, the whole sequence usually breaks down to 1-2 minutes of auditioning and then you leave and wait!
With my photography, I decide when I work, what my subject matter is, and everything else leading up to the finished artwork.
I deeply enjoy my work now and will continue to do as much work as possible. It is my intention to create an archive of images, of the artists and supportive people, reflecting a time and place in history that made these last 30 years so special.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jazzography.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jazzbarry
- Other: Wikipedia – Bob Barry Photographer -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Barry_(photographer)
Image Credits
Portrait of Bob Barry – Don Saban
Portraits of John Pisano & Nancy Wilson – Bob Barry
Broadway Show Portrait of Bobby Morse, Sidney Blake & Bob Barry – Martha Swope
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
