The assignments of a newspaper photographer are a bizarre mix. The portfolio of Sun-Times photographer Bob Ringham, for example, includes shots of Gary Dotson’s mother, a dog show in Donnelley Hall, cancer victims, baseball umpires, football players, a grain elevator deformed by a hurricane, a painting class for divorced fathers and their sons, a Mexican baseball stadium lined with corpses under dry ice, an orphanage in Saigon, a man whose job it is to turn off illegally opened fire hydrants in hot Chicago neighborhoods, and a father and daughter fishing at a suburban pool filled with goldfish.
Ringham went on to tell me that one of the first weather pictures he had ever taken had brought him considerable notoriety. Early in the winter of 1976, when Ringham was a rookie photographer with the Pantagraph of Bloomington, Illinois, he was dispatched to a local park to take a picture of some adolescents playing hockey. The game was unorganized, and when Ringham arrived on the scene, he sized up the participants as “one rich kid,” who was dressed in a complete hockey uniform, and a group of four other teenagers who had just the bare essentials–sticks and skates. “So I thought what I could do is I could get a shot of somebody hittin’ a puck at this net,” Ringham said. “I’ll lie next to this net here and he can shoot and I’ll get the kid in the background. So I told the rich kid to slap one in the net, because he had all the gear and it would look better. Well I didn’t realize at the time that he would be slapping one into my camera.
Ringham enlisted 20 years ago, leaving behind a blossoming career as a grocery clerk. “The manager of the store, George Baxter, would always greet every customer who came in, shake their hands, say hello,” Ringham told me. “You don’t see that anymore. Now you have computers that talk back to you. But old George, he had pride in that store. He claimed I was the best frozen food man in Indianapolis. I was in charge of the department, ordering, and when you’re 17, 18, and you have command–what power!–‘Let’s order two boxes of green peas this week.’ You’d always have the rep come out, you had an apron on, you had your stamper for marking prices, so you were somebody.”
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Ringham joined the Marines, not in any display of patriotism, not to fight the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, but because he wanted to learn photography. His uncle, a lifer in the Marines, told Ringham that the Marine Corps had the best photo school in the country, and a local recruiter said the same. Ringham, fearing the draft, enlisted in August 1967.
He was bandaged by another Marine, and the following day was being taken off the hill when a sniper opened fire on the stretcher-bearers. They dropped Ringham and fled for cover. The sniper didn’t shoot Ringham, but instead used him as bait, waiting for someone to come to his rescue. Rescuers got through four hours later, and the following day Ringham was taken away by helicopter. Ringham marked his 19th birthday in a hospital in Japan, his leg looking like a piece of raw meat, the bone and muscle exposed.
“I think being wounded affects things I want to cover,” he told me. “A lot of things I’ve photographed are connected to something that happened to me personally. I did a story about a successful Vietnam vet, followed this black vet on the south side for eight months. He’d also been wounded. I did another story about a high-risk nursery–my wife and I lost a baby about ten years ago. I’d rather be wounded again than go through that pain. The baby lived for three days. That was our first. Since then we’ve been tryin’, but it’s been real difficult. I went to Washington to photograph the wall, and I looked up the last two guys that were killed before I was wounded. I kind of carried this guilt about these two guys, ’cause one of ’em stopped and offered me some peanuts. I don’t know where he got them on this hill, but I said no, he went around the corner, the rocket round came in and killed him and another guy. Weideman and Szymanski. It always haunted me, what would have happened if I would’ve taken some of those peanuts and shot the shit? Maybe it wouldn’t have happened or maybe it would have. It’s just the way things are. The ranger there helped me look up their names, and all this emotion started to come up. I started crying, and I’m not a real emotional guy. It’s just all comin’ out. Some guy comes up out of the middle of nowhere, hugs me, and says it’s gonna be OK. And he’s right, it is OK. It’s just the way life is. We were all dealt cards, and my cards were that I was gonna survive, and their cards were that they weren’t. You just have to live with that. It kind of changed my outlook on photography. I started seeing more things. I had gotten rid of this burden.”
Lenahan, who had been at a fire off Wells Street while we were at Loyola, was sitting behind a typewriter when we walked in. He is 60, of average height, and wore a cardigan sweater and a tie. He is the son of Irish immigrants and the father of four sons and three daughters–all of them college educated, none of them photographers. “My son wanted to be a photographer,” Lenahan told me. “I disowned him. Would you want your son hanging out with a guy like Ringham?”
