Candid Camera

Street photographer Bob Gates captures everyday people at Fayette and Salina, Syracuse’s crossroads

The New Times Interview By Molly English-Bowers

Bob Gates is a people person. He needs to be in order to have been so successful taking photos of Syracusans standing at downtown’s Common Center, the corner of Fayette and South Salina streets. While that’s been commonly the domain of bus riders and the main transfer point for Centro, not everyone there is on, ahem, official transit business.

But none of that matters to Gates.

Common Center forms the basis of a long-term photography project that has busied him since March 2010. The news that a new transfer hub is under construction along Warren Street, to replace Common Center, sparked his creativity.

“One day I was at Fayette and Salina, our center of the city, and I remembered seeing the article about the new transfer station and thinking, this is going to change,” Gates says. “This is going to disappear. These people won’t be here, these shelters won’t be here and having been in Syracuse for 42 or so years at that time, I knew that corner; we all do. So I started talking to people and taking pictures.”

The resulting thousands of images formed the next logical step for Gates, 70, already plugged into the Syracuse University community by virtue of his career teaching in and chairing the English department: a photo exhibit, lecture and presence on SU’s Connective Corridor buses.

“There are three Connective Corridor buses,” says the now-retired Gates, who lives in Jamesville, “and in the panels that usually have ads around the inside of the buses you can have artwork. I was able to secure sponsorship for two of the buses— I needed to pay for the printing costs of what’s going inside the bus. In one bus I’ve got about 38 photos, and in another, about 34, one sponsored by Bersani Gallery and the other by J. Michael Shoes.

The photos will stay inside the buses until at least Oct. 17.”

Robbi Farschman is the director of Community Engagement and Economic Development at SU. Part of her job is overseeing the Connective Corridor and it was her idea to install art on the empty spaces inside the vehicles. At the same time, Gates was looking for more exposure for his work. “He said to me, ‘How can I do this?’ and I told him that was one way,” Farschman explains. “Personally, I would love to have lots of different types of work on the buses, but we need to work on the funding piece. We need folks in the community to value art.”

It costs $300 to prepare and install color photos inside the buses, $250 for black and white.

The project also figures in SU’s Humanities Center’s annual symposium with the theme of “Identity.” Gates will lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 7 p.m., inside Gifford Auditorium, Huntington-Beard-Crouse  Hall on the SU Quad. Following that, at 8:30 p.m. will be an opening reception for his photo exhibit, Last Transfer: Identity & Liminality, in Panasci Lounge on the second floor of the Schine Student Center, 303 University Place. The exhibit will remain up until Nov. 14.

Gregg Lambert, dean’s professor of the Humanities and founding director of SU’s Humanities Center, feels that Gates’ work fits perfectly with this year’s theme. “This began from a conversation about Bob’s project on Salina Street,” says Lambert, who once worked with Gates in the English department. “It became clear to me that this would be a very good project to feature this year because it concerned the identity of people in Syracuse who are more or less invisible.”

Last Transfer will also receive some downtown exposure, through the Urban Video Project, a joint project of Light Work Gallery and SU, which will project Gates’ images on the outer wall of the Everson Museum of Art, 401 Harrison St. You can check it out Monday, Oct. 10, through Wednesday, Oct. 12, and again Oct. 17 through 19, from dusk until 11 p.m.

“Bob Gates was proposed to us by Light Work,” explains Steven Kern, the  Everson’s director. “He’s doing important work with them on the Connective Corridor buses. He has done a lot of work that is exploring the people and place of Syracuse, and it meshes up nicely with the stand that we take. The whole idea of identity is so important to me because you need to understand who you are and where you came from.”

Gates, originally from New Jersey, couldn’t agree more. “I’m preparing this talk that I’m going to give at SU, and I’m thinking of things I’m going to say and one thing is that I could not have done this project if I didn’t grow up in a housing project in Newark, N.J. You never know when your background is going to serve you.”

Q: How did you get started in photography?

A: I attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, earned a doctorate in English. In my last year there while I was doing my dissertation I wanted to have something interesting to do. I had kids already and I started taking pictures of them. And a friend of mine said, “Oh, you should have a 35mm camera,” and I said, “What’s a 35mm camera?” He showed me, I took a one-year course, black-and-white, printing, developing, the whole thing, and I fell in love with photography: “This is what I want to do with my life.”

But it was a little late, I was writing my dissertation in medieval literature. So I did the smart thing: I got my degree completed and came here. Syracuse was my only job. Came here, set up a darkroom, did photography for a little while and then other things took its place, and I lost interest. I always took pictures but not seriously. And then about nine years ago my daughter was pregnant in California and I thought it would be nice to send her one of those new little digital cameras. So I went out and bought one and played with it before I sent it to her. And I thought, wow, this is really great. So I went out and bought myself a better one. And that took off and I became totally back into photography.

So I started to do it semi-professionally, doing a lot of exhibits and shows. My work has been in a lot of publications, various magazines, locally and nationally, won some prizes and things. I’ve been pretty successful.

Q: What do you do when you’re not behind a camera?

A: Most of my active time is photography, that’s my business now, my life activity. I have grandkids I help my wife take care of every Thursday. We travel—biking in the summer, skiing in the winter. But nothing that takes up as much time and attention as this. I teach some courses at SU, at Community Darkrooms, and some workshops for the Syracuse Camera Club, of which I’m a member.

Q: Where did the idea for this project come from?

A: I’d done a lot of street photography, and street photography has a long and storied history, and it’s got a certain aesthetic. You’re taking pictures by stealth, you don’t want people to be aware. You’re not talking to them, you’re not asking permission, you’re just taking in the scene and taking pictures, which represent the urban environment but often have a kind of ironic or humorous or satiric effect—people in strange situations, different combinations. So I did street photography for a while, and I would always wander around downtown Syracuse.

Q: That sounds like it could be time-consuming because you have to wait around until something happens. Or are people as goofy as we think?

A: Well, yeah {chuckles}. Sometimes you’d have to wait around for a while but you’d be surprised how often you see something interesting or odd. This is a very different style, you’re asking their permission, getting them to look at the camera, they were totally aware that I was taking their photo.

I thought I would do that a little bit, and the more I did it the more hooked I became, the more engaged and excited about the project. The people were wonderful; the photographs, in my own humble opinion, are quite extraordinary. The people are just there. They were so open and so available. There’s a kind of intimacy in these photos and we’re strangers. They don’t know me, and in many of them I’m taking the photo within a minute of asking.

Q: How long have you been working on this project?

A: I started in March 2010, and it’s still ongoing. I was there on Monday {Sept. 19}. I will probably go down there a little bit after I visit with you today {Sept. 21}. I’ll probably continue shooting until it’s over—when the new transfer station is up and running {most likely next February}. At various times I thought, well, I’ve got enough. Is 500 people enough? Is 1,000 people enough? I’ve got plenty of pictures. And every time I go down there I’ll see somebody new, fresh, interesting, and I think, yeah, I’ll keep going.

Q: Does the weather get in the way?

A: I’m a little bit of a fair-weather photographer. I’m flexible. I’m retired. I only go down there twice a week, sometimes three days a week, for about an hour. I’ll look at the weather but I have some great winter shots. I prefer overcast because sun is not good—too many shadows. It’s not like my job where I have to be out there at a particular day or time.

Q: Do you pose people?

A: No. I might do a tiny bit of stage managing but that has to do with the light and not what’s going on. There’s so much down there for background. I will sometimes ask people to get a little closer together but for the most part I’m interested in the totally unposed, unscripted.

I will be aware of the background and will try to get an interesting juxtaposition with it.

Q: Do you have other projects running concurrently with Last Transfer?

A: I want a video display in one of the empty storefronts downtown. I want it to be part of the environment. I want people to walk by and go, “Oh, look, there’s. . . there’s . . . .” If you look at the whole catalog online, you’re bound to see someone you know. Everybody knows somebody. {Developer} Bob Doucette is in there, {artist} Wendy Harris is in there, {no description needed} Walt Shepperd is in there.

Last week only, I finally saw him.

If you want to take interesting portraits of people, you can go to India, you can go to Australia, you can go around the world, right? You don’t have to do that. You can go to the corner of Fayette and Salina. I tried to figure out how many square feet I’m working with there, but it’s not big, it’s just these four corners. All of this wonderful human activity and all of these people in that space, so that’s what’s special about it. It’s one of those bloom-whereyou’re-planted kind of things. It’s right here, it’s not foreign and exotic and special in that way, but it’s special in a very different way, in a local, natural way.

I give everyone this little piece of paper {with a brief description of the project, autobiographical data and Gates’ contact information}, and say if you’d like me to send your pictures, send me an email. Many, many people take me up on that, but many don’t. I’ve sent hundreds of pic tures to people on email. I’ve got a dozen people who use it as their profile picture on Facebook.

Q: And that doesn’t bother you?

A: Oh, no. It’s fine. This is a community service. I’m retired, I don’t need to make money off this, I can do this. And then for people I think I will see, I have their pictures in these little packs {plastic zip-top bags}. The next time I see them I’ll give them that. I’ve probably given about 300 prints out.

Q: Do people wonder what you’re up to?

A: People will ask, “What is this for? Am I going to be in the newspaper?” I explain what I’m doing. This is all upfront. If you don’t want to be photographed, that’s fine. Basically I tell people this is a documentary, a story about something important—the transfer stop—so that it will be saved when it’s gone. So I’m doing a documentary about this corner and about the special people who come down to this corner and make it what it is.

You have on TV “The Real Housewives of Wherever.” This is “The Real People of Syracuse.” These are just genuine, ordinary human beings who come to this corner every single day, some to take the bus, some to conduct business—some of it legal, some of it not {smiling}—and people who see this who live in Syracuse are like, “Wow, I thought that was a dirty corner. I thought that was someplace I would avoid where I would get in trouble, or get hassled or get asked for money.” And I say, “No, this is a part of where people live, where people spend their time, some people for a long part of the day, waiting for the bus or whatever.”

Q: Do you hope to change some attitudes with this?

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: I took the bus for years. Nobody ever asked me for money downtown.

A: Right. Exactly. It is a perception, it’s a stereotype. I don’t know what’ll change because this will be gone. It’s the most diverse place I’ve ever been, skewed toward the lower middle class, of course, but there are lawyers there. I want my presence at that corner to be accepted, and it is

now. Believe me, the first two months I was doing this I was nervous, because some of these people look pretty scary. But then I learned that they’re like sweethearts.

Q: Are people your favorite subjects?

A: At the moment; they’ve become so. I think it’s true of all artists that you go through periods of styles and techniques. I went through a period where most of my photos were abstract color compositions of various kinds. I went through a period when I was doing a lot of nature photography, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of photos taken at Green Lakes. I’ve done a lot; I’m a pretty eclectic photographer.

If you only look at a few of these photos it’s surprising how few of these people are saying cheese. It’s ingrained in us to smile for the camera. But down at that corner. . . . And yet some of them do. I’ve got some great pictures of people smiling, but the huge majority of them are not. I think that’s what contributes to the effect of these pictures, I think it’s what keeps me going back, a kind of OK-ness, a kind of just being there-ness, a kind of everyday comfort with themselves. I still haven’t quite put my finger on it.

I love the photographs of couples because they’re always different—one’s thinking one thing, and one’s thinking another. And I wonder, do they belong together? Are they really a couple?

I’m thinking about what I’m going to say when I give my talk. The title of this lecture is “Identity and Liminality.” That term is something that anthropologists started using, and it’s a sort of in-between space; I hope not too much gets into your story because I don’t want to give away what I’m going to talk about. So I realized that that corner is a liminal space, it’s a space where people are in-between. They’re not at home, they’re not at work, they’re often not with their friends and often they don’t have anything to do; they’re just waiting, and so certain aspects of their identity that they would normally rely on or exhibit aren’t necessarily present there. That’s my idea for my academic part of my talk.

Q: Why did you choose color for this project?

A: I’ve turned some of these into blackand-white because you can do that easily in Photoshop. But I think that black-and white abstracts things too much. This is much more of a photojournalistic project than most of the photography I’ve done in the past few years. Most of that can be called fine-art photography on the one hand, which is almost all in color, or street photography, in which I often made the images into black-and-whites, but this is more documentary and portrait photography and I think that people’s faces, their expressions, the color of their eyes, all of that comes across better in color.

Some of the people find the color distracting—there’s a person in the background with a red jacket, for example— but I’m willing to live with that. The eyes are just so crucially important to me in these photos. The online version of this is called Last Transfer: The Soul of Syracuse, last transfer meaning it’s going to go away. “Soul,” that’s a tricky word to use, it’s got all these connotations, like it should be strictly African-American or blues or Southern. But I kept coming back to that older notion of soul: The eyes are the window to the soul, and I see that. I keep seeing people’s selves there, and I sometimes think that’s a little grandiose, I may be fooling myself. I’m a little nervous saying that, it sounds a little self-important perhaps, but this project means a lot to me.

It’s been so gratifying. I just enjoy going down there. I used to be scared to down there, but now I’ll go down there and I’ll talk to people, I’ll hang out, I’ll take some pictures. I don’t take as many pictures these days as I used to. I’m a little more selective. Going down and giving people photographs and seeing their eyes light up and seeing their happiness when I give them a photograph of themselves that they can do something with.

One guy, I had taken pictures of him and had given him one, and he said, “I got a new hat; you like my new hat?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Will you take a picture of me in my new hat? I want to send it to my son. He’s in prison.” I said, “Of course, I’ll take a picture of you in your new hat.”

That’s one little story but it gets repeated. It’s nice, it’s really, really nice.

See the entire project online at bobgatesphoto.com.

You can contact Molly English-Bowers at menglish@syracusenewtimes.com or follow her on twitter @englishmolly.