Oxford American | Andrew Kilgore’s Arkansas

_As a younger man within the Seventies, the photographer Andrew Kilgore as soon as spent months unsheltered within the Ozark woods, impervious to bugs and rain due to the lulling results of pot. A lover’s goat farm and associates’ couches helped cushion him into his thirties. October 2025 discovered him confined in a Fayetteville, Arkansas, rehab facility, maybe his knottiest state of affairs but, struggling agonizing gum ache and a crabby roommate who urged nurses to kick out Kilgore’s guests for speaking an excessive amount of. Doses of oxycodone weren’t serving to. Ice water was about all he may abdomen. Would he make it to eighty-five in November? 

“He talks about mortality every time he gets a cold,” Joshua LeMasters, his studio supervisor for the previous two years, reassured me.

A slideshow of Kilgore’s black and white pictures from the Seventies got here to life on the tv display screen going through his hospital mattress. LeMasters had tethered his laptop computer to the TV and scrolled by means of the eighty pictures that he and Kilgore had just lately developed, printed, and delivered to Special Collections on the University of Arkansas’s Mullins Library to make them out there to students and researchers. The assortment was culled from 1,400 negatives they unearthed from one in every of Kilgore’s a number of file cupboards, so there was lots extra to reveal if he may get well his well being.

Kilgore started to smile, to snicker, despite the ache from three tooth extractions. After the dental process in early October, he had returned to his little home and cat, Geeto, on Fayetteville’s south facet. Failing to eat or hydrate sufficient, he ended up within the emergency room and was then hospitalized.

But now he was wanting to get again to work, to recount his arrival in Fayetteville in 1971 and his first printed images in The Grapevine, another newspaper. Few of Kilgore’s pictures from this period have been exhibited publicly, a cross part of hippies and artists, audacious kids and enigmatic tableaus.

Kilgore’s hooded eyes peered by means of the spherical, brass-framed glasses he has sported since his days within the Peace Corps in India within the late Sixties. The recollections behind every image he examined clearly delighted him.

His vagabond life has been wealthy with eccentric associates, 4 wives, and two beloved stepchildren. His digicam captured the highly effective (Bill Clinton) and the susceptible, that includes faces lined with highway maps of grief, hardship and psychological sickness, bar fights and drug dependancy. It is within the eyes the place he illumined the sweetness, humor, pleasure, defiance, and hope of his topics, regardless of their circumstances. The hardest pictures are from a group he known as A Reluctance to Engage, through which he supplied folks in want a twenty-dollar invoice for the correct to {photograph} them.

“I treated each person with an equal measure of respect and dignity,” Kilgore stated of his disparate topics, “a photographic utopia.”

Kilgore has a religious facet, aspiring to turn out to be a pastor after incomes a philosophy diploma in 1963 from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. While attending New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, he detoured into appearing and studied with the legendary Stella Adler, who instructed him he was good. That buoyed him, however life interfered—avoiding the Vietnam draft by going into the Peace Corps, marrying his first spouse, Linda Jean, and dealing in Austin the place the images he took of institutionalized blind folks have been so haunting and vivid he knew he’d discovered his calling.

Ad hoc darkrooms and inspiring associates led Kilgore to pioneer the pictures division on the University of Arkansas in 1973. After 4 years, he was “ignored out of the building,” he stated, because the program turned well-liked and directors employed an instructional with the suitable diploma to interchange him. By this time, he was married to his second spouse, Meg, whose younger kids, Kathryn and Jack, he endeavored to assist. He turned a janitor at Burger Chef, on occurring Dickson Street, whereas specializing in making portraits of Fayetteville folks, hundreds of them.

Drugs and consuming have been within the image till 1990, when he acquired sober. A weak point for sweets has not been vanquished, and LeMasters has labored to make him eat more healthy.

Last August, needing new skilled headshots, I booked a session with Kilgore whereas visiting my brother and associates in Fayetteville. I don’t take pleasure in being photographed, and he will need to have sensed it, so he loosened me up with entertaining tales. That narrative has continued. I’ve transcribed Kilgore’s phrases to caption this number of images, that are from early in his profession and in addition amongst his finest.

In time for his birthday, the rehab facility despatched Kilgore again dwelling, the place he was reunited along with his anxious cat.