Christopher Harris:
Swapping global adventuring for academe and textbooks

Harris covered the Jimmy Carter presidential primaries in 1n1976, shooting Carter's first national color coverage in Newsweek. His Mexico bull fights had the largest spread ever in Sports Illustrated -- other than Super Bowls and World Series. He's photographed Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Jorge Luis Borges and Alice Walker. He was Elton John's tour photographer and did the opening United States coverage on the Rolling Stones.

After earning a photojournalism degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969, Harris returned to his hometown of New Orleans. In August that year, Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf coast, and his career was launched. He began shooting for Newsweek and would later take photos for as many as 39 publications. He was assigned to the American South and South America and traveled from Dallas to Atlanta to the Panama Canal, where he covered the Panama Canal treaties. He did a lot of work in Central America, where he became friends with several dictators. One of them was General Anastatio Somosa, then president of Nicaragua. "He became a good friend of mine while I was there trying to do coverage on Howard Hughes," Harris said. "Somosa, known to his friends as Tacho, was later in Peru in his armor-plated Mercedes Benz when he was blown up with a surface-to-air missile by rebel forces from Nicaragua."

In his travels as a photojournalist, Harris said, he had wonderful, graduate-like studies in sociology-anthropology. He learned a lot about the American South and Central and South America in his 20 years of taking pictures. "I was able to witness both cultures," he said. "New Orleans obviously has its own type of culture, but traveling in the American south from the 1960s to the 1990s really helped establish for me the wonderful aspects of our heritage. I saw people making their lives more lively. People who enjoyed life without having to have all the high-priced cars and multiple homes."

Harris had a gift for inserting himself into people's lives without being intrusive. "As big and boisterous as I can be, I can also become invisible," he said. "I got along very well with the people I photographed. They will often call me back to spend more time with them." In 1976, he worked this magic to cover Jimmy Carter. "Easter Sunday was coming up and being a southern boy I knew that if this guy claimed to be a Southern Baptist he was going to at a Easter Sunrise Service somewhere. I literally called Plains, Georgia, and talked to Brother Billy before Brother Billy was even well known, and he invited me over. I showed up and was the only still photographer there. After the photos appeared in Newsweek, I became one of the good ole boys, and I can certainly pass for a good ole boy with the best of them." Later Harris' work on Carter appeared also in Time.

For four years, Harris traveled the Mexican border cities covering matadors. Doing this as a freelancer, he was able to sell stories frequently. Sports Illustrated hired him to do a story on a Texas matador. He was sent down for a weekend, and Harris thought he would get the regular daily pay -- about $300. "A couple of weeks later I checked with them to see how the story was going and when it might be scheduled and they said I should come up there and see how they're laying the story out. My matador story ended up being the largest spread they've ever had other than for the Super Bowl or the World Series -- 14 pages of color." He made $10,000 for the United States issue and another $10,000 Sports Illustrated's Japanese edition ran them too.

Harris went on to co-found a major photo agency in Paris and New York: GAMMA/Liaison. His photos appeared in Der Spiegal, Paris Match, the Sunday Times of London..

But then, after more than 20 years freelancing, his life changed. He was married and a son was born. "I realized I couldn't put myself in harms way anymore," he said. In Central America covering insurgent, he had been beaten up, jailed, and held against his will several times. "When I had a child, I knew I had to come out of that."

So at 42, Harris returned to college to earn his master's degree. He was graduated from the University of Alabama in 1991. "It was at Alabama that I met Jay Black, an ethics professor," he said. "He would end up meaning more to me as an academic than anyone else in my life. He hired me and brought me through the process of understanding journalism ethics. I am forever in his debt for that. He has been a positive person throughout my career. I joined TAA without knowing that Black was so important to TAA. When I realized that, I thought I must be in good company."

Harris joined Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro in 1991 to teach photojournalism. "I knew I had something to offer that was much different than the Ph.D's teaching photojournalism without having had real experience," he said. "I knew I had something unique to bring to the table." As a teacher, Harris discovered a love of history. He has written several articles on the history of photography and the history of the impact of photography. He is also interested in law and ethics. He has several articles in major law journals and has written about Tennessee Williams for literary academic journals.

In addition to ethics, Harris said Black also brought out writing for him: "He showed me that you don't have to be dull and boring when you write about an academic subject. You can make it lively and interesting and lovely and intriguing. And that if you've got a passion for what you're doing research on, which is usually the way you should do it, it becomes very easy to start doing the type of writing you want to get out to people."

Harris has found that writing for academic journals is more difficult than writing a textbook. "This is because it is blind-refereed in an atmosphere of almost attack," he said. "Either you're correct, or you're going to get blown out of the water. One or the other. Academic writing for a good, blind refereed journal is difficult." In college he was forced to write more than he had ever written before -- all on deadline and on many different subjects. "From that I quickly learned how to cut out most of the B.S.," he said. "To get down to the guts of the matter. Lay it out. Talk about it. Discuss what other people have said about it. Draw my own conclusions and then present them."

To new journal authors, he gives this advice: "You don't have to worry about any contract negotiations because they always get it for free and they end up with the copyright. But you can protect your electronic copyrights. I think that is something everybody should do with journal articles now. We don't need to give those rights to publishers if they aren't making any money for you. The economic incentive is always there. If an academic journal wants to pay you for certain rights then consider it. Otherwise they get the one time rights for the one time use in their journal and you don't have to speak of electronic rights at all."

In 1999 Harris signed a contract with Allyn & Bacon to publish his first textbook, Visual Reporting, co-authored with Paul Lester, a visual communication ethicist at Cal State, Fullerton. The book was originally slated to be published by Wadsworth, but within three years the book had three different editors. "It dawned on us that this was going no where," he said. "We requested and received everything back from Wadsworth including legal agreements that said we can go peddle it somewhere else." John Vivian, a TAA member, put in a good word with his publisher, Allyn & Bacon, to take a look at Harris and Lester's book. Harris attended another academic convention shortly thereafter, and there met Vivian's editor.

"Within a month and a half, Allyn & Bacon had signed us to complete the book," Harris said. "That points out one of the incredible things about TAA and why I like it so much. It is small enough that when you go to a convention you can network like a bandit and not only that, you don't have to go asking. It is the friendliest group I have ever been associated with. People aren't like, 'Gee, I'm going to guard my contacts so this other person won't go there.' It's much the opposite. It's 'Hey let's open up the doors and if there's anything I can do for you let me know.' Vivian went out of his way to help me just out of the blue and I am totally indebted to him." Visual Reporting was scheduled to appear in 2001. Harris was also working on a second textbook..

Harris met Lester back when Lester was working as a newspaper photographer. They were talking one day and Lester mentioned he had a book proposal that had already been accepted, but that he knew he had bitten off more than he could chew. Was Harris interested in co-authoring? "I asked him what the book was about and he said visual reporting," recalls Harris. "I thought it was an odd sounding name and Lester said what he wanted to do was not photojournalism but instead to cover all the visual aspects created by the convergence of new technologies: ethics, photography, infographics, web design and use, computers, typography and layout and design -- all in one book. It's been quite a challenge."

Because the book touches on about eight different specialties, Harris and Lester called in other people to write six of the 18 chapters. It's worked out well this way, said Harris, although working with several co-authors has its challenges: "Writing a textbook is very different from other types of writing I've done and trying to work with other people at the same time and meet deadlines becomes complicated. But this is a very good project. It's one of the things that keeps a fire lit beneath me. I am very much enjoying it and looking forward to doing several more of these."

Harris also is writing a trade book, The Digital Dilemma. It focuses on the concerns about the verifiability of news images. Because of new digital technology, more and more manipulated news images are making their way into the press and then into books which are then used for reference years down the line, he said. "My concern is how did we get to the point that we now allow digital manipulation with hardly anyone objecting?," said Harris. "To those people who say 'So what, we don't care,' you have to understand that all of this is what's referred to as a slippery slope. If you allow this, what's the next thing you're going to allow? The change of subject matter or background? How about pictures made in Hollywood to describe the war in Chechnya?" Harris said the book will include issues of ethics and law and what society can do to try to safeguard the images it counts on so much.

Harris has initiated changes to the photojournalism department at Middle Tennessee State University. He helped to restructure the department, now called Electronic Media Communication. The traditional photography department was moved to the art department. The new EMC department has developed a new sequence, tentatively called Digital Media Communications or New Media, taking the department into electronic media -- the web, CDs, DVDs and corporate video productions. "It has been a total shifting of the traditional way of doing photojournalism," Harris said. "We are right at the cutting edge of this." Middle Tennessee is the second largest college of mass communication in the nation, second largest to Penn State. "We have decided through the incredible leadership of our dean, Deryl Leaming, and provosts that we need to be something unique, not something that is run of the mill," Harris said. "So we are constantly looking at developing new structures, new ways of teaching about new applications of media communications. We are the College of Mass Communication. We have insisted that we grow as fast as communication grows. That's really exciting to me as an academic."

As a kid growing up in New Orleans, Harris had a general awareness of other things going on in the world. "I never considered New Orleans as my pond," he said. "I knew there was a vast world outside of New Orleans. I found out that as a photojournalist you could travel to these other places and meet these other people and understand a little bit more about society." Harris dabbled in photography in high school, but he never thought he could make money at photojournalism. He just enjoyed it. "Basically it was just a love of seeing the newspaper and understanding that it represented for people who were not at the scene what had gone on," Harris said. "I found that to be very exciting, to have that kind of ability to explain for the world who wasn't there a scene that you were witness to."

Once he started working professionally, he discovered quickly that he could explain a story visually much better than he could through words. "I couldn't believe they paid me money to go hang out with Tennessee Williams or Alice Walker. I was Elton John's tour photographer in 1974 and did the opening United States coverage on the Rolling Stones. This is somebody who enjoys the Stones!"

Harris still writes on an old black and white Mac laptop, one of first ones Mac ever made. "I like to sit with distractions going on," he said. "Television, radio, or music. I can't write in silence. I'm one of those people who will think of an entire chapter over and over in my head and when I go to put it down I may come back to make corrections a couple of times but that's it."

Harris said TAA has been a great influence on his authoring career. He urges other authors to attend TAA conventions: "Pay attention to all the different aspects of contracts, negotiations, and rights that you can ask for. Be very aware of the cards you are holding. A publisher can't do anything without books. They can push you around and say you should do it for 8 percent, but stay true to what you believe in. If you feel as though somebody you are negotiating with isn't giving you proper support, then maybe it's time to search for a new publisher."

The best way to deal with publisher mergers and editorial turnover, Harris said, is to work it into your contracts. "If my editor leaves, they have six months to make a decision or the book in total gets returned to me. What I got out of TAA conventions, the thing that most turned me on to it, is the very clear cut business approach and business information given out at meetings. Anyone interested in writing a textbook should go to the next TAA convention and pick up the incredible information that's available there. You are going to come out of a convention much better than when you went in. As a member of TAA, I felt I had solid ground to stand on in negotiations with my publisher. That I wasn't this sole person saying no, no, I want you to change this or that. That I wasn't this lone voice but rather that is was a continuing exploration between us."

Harris and his wife, Katharine Farmer, a documentary photographer, were married in 1984. They have one son, Stephen, born in 1985. He is in the 10th grade at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. Katharine has a book coming out called Dogumentary: A Documentary on Dogs.

Harris also illustrated a book called A Bullfrog at Cafe DuMonde, and is working on a book of fiction about a photojournalist in Southern Louisiana.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 2000