Photographer profile: Eli Reed
Photographer Eli Reed’s incredible career led him around the world to document war and poverty, and later to Hollywood to shoot for some of the film industry’s most respected directors.
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By Steven J. Barry
In the early 1970s, Eli Reed spent years working nights for low pay as a nurse’s aid. He was broke most of the time, and he could barely sleep. Just before then, Reed, who held a degree in pictorial illustration, had a respectable job at an advertising agency in New York City.
But this is no sob story. This was a transition he made on purpose.
Reed was a photographer, and the ad job wasn’t for him. He needed time to explore his passion and had explained this to his boss and left on good terms. The night job at the cancer ward in St. Vincent’s Medical Center made sense since it was a job he knew something about–he had worked at a hospital while attending the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts.
“The cancer thing was intense, but it was a good experience for being very sensitive to working with people, and particularly people in trouble,” he said.
Reed started applying to dozens of newspapers, and with no luck. But he pursued personal projects in earnest, carrying his camera throughout New York City, shooting during the day until his shift started.
He describes himself in those early days as the “worst freelancer in the world”–he loved to shoot, but nobody had yet thoroughly explained to him the business aspects of his chosen profession.
“It never even occurred to me that what I was doing was crazy,” Reed said.
A kickboxer just before a championship match (Photo copyright Eli Reed)
Reed, who is African-American, believes racism–still a hugely prevalent problem on a national scale in those days–certainly played a part in the rejection of many of his applications. But he never allowed himself to see it as an obstacle.
“That was like in a way not fine, but fine, because you can’t blame people, you can’t make excuses–you just do the work,” Reed said. “Somebody’s going to want what you can do.”
Also, he said it was more commonly the case for him that people would be helpful. He mentioned that at one point, the renowned fashion columnist and critic Diana Vreeland, then working for Vogue Magazine, took interest in his work. While shooting a volunteer assignment at a senior center, he met a woman who worked for Vreeland, which led to Reed sending the Vogue editor a portfolio.
“She said, ‘Give the kid a job,’” Reed said.
Thus, his first freelance assignment was a portrait of an ambassador’s wife. He says he didn’t know how to properly leverage the prestige of having a clip from Vogue so early on, so it didn’t quite have the catapulting effect one might expect to stem from such an opportunity. Still, Reed says he was satisfied enough by the encouragement he received from being given the assignment.
Reed also accepted a volunteer position to help teach photography to inmates at a prison in upstate New York. He remembered reading in the paper but had forgotten until walking in to the prison that the Ku Klux Klan was heavily represented there and was openly attempting to recruit prison guards. In fact, that was such a problem at prisons in New York that, according to a 1975 article in The New York Times, it prompted the State Correctional Services to explicitly prohibit state prison employees from joining the KKK.
“The first day, it got real interesting, real quick,” he said. But he stuck with the program, and even befriended one KKK member. Reed described him as a nice enough man who had joined the KKK viewing it as a sort of social club.
Children behind a screen door in Louisiana (Photo copyright Eli Reed)
One day, after a special visit to the prison during which he followed one inmate around as he photographed life inside—this to prove to the state government that its funds for the program were being well spent—Reed was driving back to New York City when his car broke down in the city of Middletown, in Orange County.
While the 20-hour days didn’t wear on him that hard, the notion of losing his wheels, he said, did indeed get him down.
“I was really depressed, because, you know, I was broke,” he said. “There wasn’t much money at the hospital.”
He elected to take the bus home. He grabbed his camera and was walking around Middletown, taking photos as he waited. Reed passed a diner that was closing up shop and went to snap a photo of the activity inside. He saw a reflection in the glass of a smiling man standing behind him.
“I can see by your camera that you’re a man of distinction,” the man said. Reed snapped the photo and turned around to see who it was.
The man introduced himself as a reporter for the local paper, The Middletown Times Herald Record. After talking for a while, they walked to the newspaper’s office and Reed was introduced to the editor. While there was no immediate opening there, the editor asked Reed to send over a portfolio and told him to keep in touch. He did.
“I called at least once a month and had a serious talk with the executive editor, and finally, an opening came up. And that’s how I got my first job,” Reed said.
Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the one-time President for Life of Malawi, in his office (Photo copyright Eli Reed)
He was to start work on Aug. 2, 1977. Problem: He had been working on a photo essay about childbirth, following two mothers for months through their pregnancies. One baby had been born. The second was pushing the limit, and Reed worried he might miss it.
At 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 2, he received a call from the family telling him it was time.
“The baby was born at 6:30, and I went home at 7:30, took a shower, and then drove to my first day as a non-civilian, being a photographer,” he said. “It was amazing.”
Though finally shooting full-time, Reed had a hard time shaking the 20-hour day habit. He said he used his energy to continue personal projects during his free time, but he decided sleep might be nice, too, and saw a hypnotherapist in the hopes he could learn to catch some proper rest.
After such a long stretch getting started, Reed’s subsequent rise in the journalistic ranks was comparatively rapid: The same reporter he met at the Middletown diner moved on to the Detroit News and recommended Reed for an opening, which he later accepted.
In Detroit, he said, he enjoyed letting his curiosity run wild.
“I would look in the telephone pages. Meat packing—OK, let’s check out meat packing,” he said.
The next day it might be a violin maker. Or a man who makes artificial eyes.
“I really liked those pictures. It was a lot of fun,” he said. “I liked getting the feel of something moving under the surface that nobody knows about yet.”
From the Detroit News, Reed moved to the San Francisco Examiner. He was working there in 1982, when the tumult throughout Central America was in full swing.
Reed took interest in the war in El Salvador in particular and began telling his editors that somebody from the Examiner ought to go cover the situation.
“I didn’t think it was going to be me, because, you know, I just got there. I didn’t know how that worked,” Reed said.
Reed was set to use his vacation time to head to El Salvador on his own. But before he left, his editors hatched a plan to send seven people to the war-torn region. The result was a 52-page primer on Central America entitled “The Tortured Land.” Reed was among those sent to contribute.
Though he had been in plenty of dicey neighborhoods and had covered riots, the trip to Central America was Reed’s first to a war zone.
A young man with an RPG north of Tripoli (Photo copyright John Isaac)
Joining Magnum
He was later asked to do an exhibit at the International Center for Photography in New York. While there, he met someone who knew Rose Marie Wheeler, who he said was at that time the editorial director at Magnum, the prominent international co-operative photo agency founded in 1947. Reed says he wasn’t making a strategic career move–he was simply looking for constructive feedback when he asked whether it would be possible for her to review his portfolio.
“I knew that Rose Marie was a tough critic,” Reed said.
To his surprise, instead of receiving the feedback he was after, he was nominated to become a member. Magnum photographers start out in a nominee status, a period that lasts two years. If that goes well, they’ll continue as an associate member for few years before becoming full members, after which they’re with the agency for life and can vote at the annual meetings in New York, London and Paris.
Reed became a nominee member in 1983 and a full member in 1988.
“I had no idea how they did this stuff. I mean, a lot of people thought I planned it this way. I never planned stuff like that,” Reed said.
The Magnum membership eventually gave him the freedom to pursue a freelance career–something he had never aspired to, but, as evidenced by his volume of work, certainly ended up sinking his teeth into. Reed did several long term projects, including a four-year study of Beirut following the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing there that killed some 60 people. Reed himself was nearly killed several times during his trips to the region, which resulted in the publication of his first book, “Beirut: City of Regrets,” released in 1987.
A young boy north of Tripoli (Photo copyright Eli Reed)
His longest-term project, however, was his book, “Black America,” a compilation of images Reed took that spanned from 1970s Harlem to the Million Man March in 1995.
But his experience would not be limited to newspaper or documentary work. He was covering Jesse Jackson’s 1984 visit to Georgia Gov. George Wallace’s office, and in the melee in front of the building he met a photographer who later ended up working in the movie industry.
That man remembered Reed, and the connection would lead to work for major motion picture studios.
Reed said he had always been a movie buff, and recalls several movies inspiring him to pursue photography as a career, and particularly one scene in the epic film “Lawrence of Arabia,” during which Sir Lawrence stands on the crest of a hill talking with a photographer.
“I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to see what he was seeing,” Reed said. “I wanted to be right there in the action where all this stuff was going on, and so, that really impressed itself into my head.”
Already having fulfilled that dream—and that’s not to imply that he wouldn’t continue to travel internationally—Reed entered the world of cinema. He ended up photographing stills for films headed by famed directors like Ron Howard, John Singleton and Spike Lee.
Reed’s first movie venture was the 1991 film “The Five Heartbeats,” directed by Robert Townsend.
He was concerned about the noise the shutter might cause, and so he spoke with the sound director and checked with a few other personnel about on-set protocol.
“Now, I had to relearn some things and learn new things,” he said.
Actors Michael Rapaport and Adam Goldberg in a still from the 1995 film “Higher Learning,” directed by John Singleton. (Photo by Eli Reed)
Thankfully, he said the learning curve wasn’t too steep and his co-workers were friendly.
Only once does he remember ever having a conflict with anyone on a set. It was a director of photography who didn’t like how Reed had posed some people for stills during a certain dance scene. There remained a quiet tension that, toward the end of the shoot, started to boil over.
Reed doesn’t go into too many details, except to say, “He picked the wrong guy…I had been shot at, and kidnapped, and all this other nonsense working in Beirut and El Salvador and things like that–a hit squad trying to get to me. So I don’t think a director of photography is going to bother me.”
Reed, now 62, is a photojournalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin—a position he was offered after being asked to speak there.
Reed said he tells his students that while they should trust their instincts, they should also “listen to people. Listen to a hell of a lot of people.”
“If you really love what you’re doing, you’re going to advance. It comes down to that, because you can’t get into it because you’re worrying about how much money you’re going to make or if anybody’s going to like you or not.”
Reed said that at no time–not even during that long stretch of working nights in the cancer ward–did he ever consider abandoning his profession for something more conventional.
“No such animal,” he said. “That never even came close.”
“I love to see the results when you make something of beauty–something that’s like you’re there, and you saw that light and you captured it.”
A Magnum photographer and a member of the Olympus Visionary Program, Eli Reed has produced projects and books for a broad spectrum of clients: from Life and National Geographic magazines, to Doctors Without Borders. In addition, Eli has worked on many films for such directors as John Singleton, Spike Lee and Robert Altman. He has gained a reputation as one of the best photographers in the motion picture industry. Learn more about his work at www.magnumphotos.com/elireed
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