Advocacy photographer Andrew Kilgore of Fayetteville dies at 85, abandoning legacy of portraiture

Photographer Andrew Kilgore died in a single day Jan. 5, in response to a Facebook submit made by his studio supervisor, Joshua LeMasters.

“He will be missed beyond words by all of us who loved him, and we can take some solace in the idea that finally he is no longer in pain,” Kathryn Samalin, Kilgore’s daughter, wrote within the submit. “The community that he has built and been a part of has been such a beautiful thing to witness the last few months.”

Kilgore was 85.

Funeral service plans shall be introduced when the household and his studio supervisor know extra particulars, she added.

In the ultimate months of his life, as his well being declined and he entered hospice care at Willard Walker Hospice Home, Kilgore requested LeMasters make a quick announcement to buddies and followers on Facebook. It was characteristically easy. His physique, he said, had “continued to deteriorate.” Even ultimately, he remained targeted on the individuals he photographed and the work that outlined almost six many years of seeing.

Kilgore leaves behind one in all Arkansas’ most expansive and compassionate portrait collections. Across roughly 250,000 photographs, he pursued what he as soon as described as his deepest inventive want: “to create the most beautiful photographic fine art pictures of the most interesting people I can find — people whose openness and vulnerability create a window into the universal soul of us all.”

Kilgore was born in Charlottesville, Va., in 1940 and lived in varied locations earlier than settling in Fayetteville in 1971. He attended elementary college in Illinois and highschool in El Paso, Texas, then studied philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana and theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. While attending the latter, he additionally studied appearing beneath Stella Adler, the American actress and appearing instructor, and briefly served as a minister in Vermont.

In 1966, he joined the Peace Corps in India and married his first spouse, Linda Jean.

While serving, he skilled what he later described as a formative second of recognition whereas ready for a bus — encountering an aged, low-caste Indian man — which grew to become the philosophical basis of his life’s work.

“He was tiny, terribly thin, dressed in nothing but a rag,” Kilgore described on his web site.

Kilgore recalled being struck first by the extent of their variations — a 27-year-old American from relative privilege and a person whose life appeared to have been normal by profound poverty.

But as the person sat subsequent to him, each ready for the bus, Kilgore as a substitute discovered commonality.

“His most basic inner experience of himself and my most basic experience of myself, stripped of all culture and personal history, were exactly the same,” Kilgore had said.

The encounter caught with him.

He bought his first digital camera, a Pentax Spotmatic, in 1970 from Hong Kong on his option to Austin, Texas, the place he labored with the developmentally disabled on the Austin State School, in response to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. He took that digital camera to high school, photographing the scholars and creating the photographs within the darkroom constructed at his neighbor’s residence.

Kilgore arrived in Fayetteville throughout a interval when the world had few full-time, tremendous artwork photographers and opened a small studio. From 1973 to 1977, he was employed to show pictures on the University of Arkansas. He finally left the function and went on to the place as a janitor at Burger Chef on Dickson Street, in response to Oxford American.

It was then he started dedicating himself to photographing “the unseen.” Those dwelling in poverty or with psychological sickness, bodily incapacity or social exclusion. These have been the individuals who, as he put it, had been “stripped by birth or circumstance of the inclination or even the capacity for pretense,” which he believed permitted them to reveal one thing vital and unguarded in entrance of the digital camera.

But make no mistake, Kilgore by no means romanticized hardship. Instead, he sought to create photographs that have been thought-about tremendous artwork and, in his phrases, “iconic.” An icon, to him, was a conduit relatively than a holy object, even if his theological coaching lingered in his language.

“An icon creates connection — a link,” he mentioned. “A beautifully made picture that creates an empathetic feeling of connection to all of humanity becomes art. One can look at it over and over because it creates deeper and deeper levels of meaning.”

He believed {that a} tremendous artwork picture had enduring worth. But what he most valued was the shared act of seeing — the viewer confronting the topic with out concern or distance and probably figuring out themselves within the course of.

He moved to Little Rock, and there, he accomplished his “Fayetteville Townfolk Portfolio Project,” which grew to become one in all Northwest Arkansas’ most lasting cultural data on the flip of the Eighties. He acquired funding from the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities, the First National Bank of Fayetteville and the Arkansas Arts Council.

He created nearly 3,000 black-and-white pictures for the sequence. Sixty have been displayed in a touring exhibition, whereas lots of extra have been archived with the Washington County Historical Society earlier than being transferred to the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in 1996.

His work peaked publicly in 1986 with “Arkansas People,” a challenge funded by the state’s sesquicentennial fee. He spent the yr touring round Arkansas, photographing individuals of all backgrounds and circumstances. The challenge concluded in a guide and exhibition in 1987, serving to set up him as one of many state’s most prolific documentarians of on a regular basis life.

That physique of labor, which is presently on exhibit partially as “Andrew Kilgore’s Fayetteville Townfolk” on the Shiloh Museum till May 31, gives what historians more and more see as a uncommon civic portrait, a city seen by way of the faces of its individuals.

The museum needed to whittle down the gathering to 24 exhibited photographs.

“And that was hard, because they were all great,” mentioned Angie Albright, the museum’s director.

“I think in an era where we are all photographers, it’s important to see the professionals and what it really means to be an expert and to have a certain kind of design eye, and (Kilgore) has obviously a very specific kind of aesthetic.”

Among the 24 photographs are these of Lifestyles residents and employees from 1981; John Porter, the produce vendor related to the historic warehouse at 200 N. West Ave. in Fayetteville; the Calabash Potters of 1978; and the Seikguchi household, early Asian residents of Fayetteville.

After dwelling in Fayetteville intermittently since 1971, Kilgore returned there completely in 1990, in response to his web site. In Fayetteville, he continued to work properly into his 70s, photographing and taking commissions, regardless of declining mobility and energy.

Kilgore married Meg Kilgore in 1973. During their 15 years of marriage, he helped increase her two youngsters from a earlier marriage earlier than the 2 divorced in 1988, in response to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

His photographs have been extensively proven over time, however the 2014 documentary “A Lens to the Soul: The Photography of Andrew Kilgore,” produced by Dan Robinson, marked an vital late-career milestone forward of his 2023 Governor’s Art Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The hourlong movie included commentary from neighborhood members and an interview with former President Bill Clinton, whom Kilgore had the chance to {photograph}.

The movie aimed to teach the general public concerning the significance of advocacy pictures, mentioned Robinson. He praised Kilgore’s singular consideration to individuals usually ignored or misunderstood.

Robinson first met Kilgore by way of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, the place Kilgore was a member and volunteered for the Youth Group. Robinson mentioned he discovered what advocacy pictures was due to Kilgore.

“I would say I learned from Andrew that it is humanizing a marginalized community through photography,” Robinson defined.

At St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, Kilgore routinely attended the Community Meals lunch program; he paid members $20 to sit down for footage, a lot of whom have been unhoused or receiving minimal help.

“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 mentioned in a 2014 interview. “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.”

The Rev. Lowell Grisham, rector emeritus at St. Paul’s, additionally grew to become shut with Kilgore by way of the church.

“The vast majority of my time I’ve spent with Andrew, neither of us was speaking or looking at each other,” he mentioned. “We were sharing silence and meditation time. Which really makes you feel close to people.”

The man Grisham knew was “disarmingly present, natural, quick to chuckle, clever and responsive,” he mentioned. “A delight to be with.”

Kilgore had “a natural profound respect for humanity and for every human being,” Grisham continued, saying he believed Kilgore meant to see past simply the outer presentation of an individual, desirous to look into the inside soul and the deeper being.

The solely factor that created doubt in an artist like Kilgore is the monetization issue, mentioned Robinson.

“If Andrew never had to worry about money, then I don’t think he would have worried about a thing, and he would have done exactly what he wanted to do,” he mentioned. “And I think we would have had a lot more amazing Andrew Kilgore art as a result.”

His full archive is a key file of Arkansas life, spanning financial inequality, racial variety, rural and concrete identities, spiritual traditions, political figures and the deeply human experiences that bind these classes collectively.

Though Kilgore by no means attained nationwide fame within the conventional sense, he didn’t seem to hunt it. His targets have been easy and constant: to make use of pictures to deliver individuals collectively who may not have met in any other case and to spotlight the humanity of people who’re too ceaselessly disregarded.

In his bio, he mirrored on the which means of his work. “We are all so very different, and yet, we are all the same,” he wrote. “To hold these two insights together at one time is the beginning of true seeing.”

Kilgore spent his life pursuing that type of imaginative and prescient: quiet, unhurried and attentive. It is seen in each body he leaves behind.