The Eyes of the Beholder

Rick Stafford peers through the window glass at 17 Quincy Street and raises his eyebrows in alarm. "Oh boy! We've got a function going on here," he says, pressing the buzzer firmly. No one responds so he knocks on the door, waits and buzzes again. Finally the door opens and he strides in and over to a small room where fancily dressed people are sipping cocktails. He spots Helen Gilbert (chairman of the Radcliffe Board of Overseers) whom he is supposed to photograph, and moves away to attach his flash to his camera. He thought Gilbert would be alone, waiting for him.

"I thought I had a fixed set-up," he says, "they never give you enough information on these things." "This would be the one time I didn't wear a tie," he says, smoothing back the thin black strands of hair on his balding head and buttoning his top shirt button. The guests begin waltzing into dinner and Rick follows cautiously, pausing at the dining room door. Finally he approaches Gilbert at the table. He gets a couple of shots of her there but must return after dinner for more. This shatters the smooth schedule he envisioned of processing the film immediately, getting it in the mail to the New York Post where it's due tomorrow and picking up his wife at the grocery store at nine. "This by the way is not very unusual," he says.

In an hour he returns but an after-dinner meeting is in progress and he must sweat it out for a while longer. When the guests start dribbling out Rick approaches Gilbert again. "Oh, you wanna take some more pictures, Rick?" Gilbert announces to the room with a wide smile. She asks a friend to wait for her, "Rick is only gonna take a second."

"Quick!" she says to Rick while she corrals two students for conversation. "You have to be taken with the chairman of the Board of Overseers," she says, maneuvering one student on each side of her for the pictures. She grins and talks to the students in a booming voice while Rick clicks pictures repeatedly. "Rick is the official photographer of everything to do with Harvard," she begins. "He once took my picture skidding along the ice, for a charity show. He's gotten thin! I think he must have eaten nothing. I've been putting it on while you've been taking it off," she says to Rick, gleefully.

"It's very simple," he answers, "I just got sick."

"Now that's enough, Rick," Gilbert says, smiling goodbye to the students. Rick takes their names for cutlines (the captions beneath pictures), then hurries to the door.

"Now that's better than nothing," he says, "I think I'm gonna get one of her as she comes out the door." He positions himself in front of the door and stands in the chilly night air waiting for her. He checks his watch and figures if he runs like hell to his car he can make it to the grocery store in time to meet his wife.

"Okay," he whispers as Gilbert appears in the doorway. The flash goes off, shocking her out of conversation--he had caught her.

"Damn, damn, damn, damn!" she cries, then she grins, touches Rick's arm gently and walks off down the path. "Rick," she calls, not turning around, "that picture of me in People was awful."

"But that wasn't mine, don't blame me for him," Rick calls lamely to her disappearing form.

If it weren't for Rick Stafford's quiet grin and easy manner of breaking into conversation with everyone he takes pictures of, for and with, nobody would notice him. It's his job to be at every Harvard event but not to be part of it--he must be off to the side while people have their great moments in life, as he must record their glory for them. His is a lonely job, so he always chats with those around him. He gets to know everyone from professors to administrators to football players in his travels. They all remember him the next time he pops up, and they smile and call him Rick. He shoots some pictures and usually takes off long before an event is over, never even spotted by most of the people he photographs.

Rick Stafford came to Harvard when he was 18 but he never took a course. Instead he's been working here full-time for the past 25 years. He feels he grew up here--he loves Harvard. His grandmother told him, "you either go to a big university or you work for one," but Rick hasn't gotten the education she hoped he would absorb from hanging around these ivy walls. He worked his way up from a caretakers job in the animal labs to his present position as photographer for the News Office. He wanted to be a photographer for years, but he couldn't figure out a way to start. "It's not a poor boy's profession," he says, "because you need to be able to sustain yourself for a while to get established." He finally got his break when Harvard exploded in political violence in 1969.

When University Hall was taken over, the Gazette was founded as a public relations organ for Harvard. They had a P.R. photographer already, but Rick convinced Harvard there was a need for someone to shoot the demonstrations and street action. "I wasn't a journalist; I was a photographer--I took what they told me to take. Now, after I switched to the News Office, I do much more P.R.--we avoid demonstrations, especially using pictures for identification. Chuck Daley [vice president for government and community affairs] decided we should get out of the police business. That was a very good decision," Rick says.

When he started at the Gazette he ran himself ragged covering several simultaneous events and evening events each day. "It didn't matter that I had pictures to take at the field and the Science Center and Bok's office all at the same time. You have to move quickly and figure how long something is going to be cooking and can I afford to be late for that or will I miss it," Stafford says. Now life is a little easier--he can send his lab assistant, Dave Bailey, on assignments if he has a real conflict. But he still can't do his job on a 9 to 5 schedule, so he misses his family often and feels bad because, financially, he says, "they haven't had the easiest time of it."

Because Rick moved from one job to another for 25 years at Harvard, he has a broad social circle. He'll chat in the yard with John Finley about the resident birds or discuss his last assignment with a Harvard cop. "I have a very deep vertical cut because of the way I came up in the university," Rick says. "I still have a lot of friends who are engineers and janitors and I talk and eat lunch with them--they're old friends. But I've come up a little."

He says that in the old days the professors were more democratic--they would talk to anyone. "The younger ones now don't have an aristocratic arrogance, but they don't feel that they can talk to a janitor," he says. His friends in the lower level jobs have complained about this to him, but he doesn't get snubbed very often. "As a photographer you're nowhere on the social scale," he says, "you're off to the side--you're not challenging anybody."

Rick has a gallery of his pictures in his Harvard studio--one wall is filled with the Harvard Magazine covers he has shot from 1970 on, another has framed prints of Galbraith, Eliot Richardson, even one picture signed "Rick God! I'm happy--Bette Middler." And in the Harvard Neighbors Office he has another kind of gallery, six photographs that make him feel very proud. There's a picture of James Baldwin that captures something very gentle in him, something that came through to Rick when he read Baldwin. "I've got a lifetime's worth of association with graphics and taking and making pictures," Rick says looking over his collection, "and I know enough to be a serious photographer. And there has to be some time when I take myself seriously."

"I set up standards of quality and standards under which I am going to work and this comes through in public relations photography. You've got to have enough ego and skills and dominance of the situation to force the pictures you want. I can't undermine myself, I have to take myself seriously. One of the reasons I keep paying ASAP dues and sell pictures to major publications is to maintain a feeling of professionalism. On a personal level I feel like somebody."

Rick has some friends in galleries around town, and he often considers showing them his work. "I've been playing too close to my vest," he says. "I'm scared--no one wants to be rejected." The competition looks very good, he says, and it intimidates him. "There are some people who when I look at their pictures I wonder why I didn't take up hairdressing." There is an everlasting division between artist photographers and working photographers evidenced for Rick in his difficulty in making ties at Carpenter Center. After a while it can get to a photographer's ego, making him feel second rate. Rick says other photographers experience this fear of the artists. "A lot of press and working photographers share this. We tend to think of our stuff as too mundane, or not art--whatever that is."

Rick Stafford often thought of leaving his public relations job and finding one that was more journalistic, or trying free-lance photography. But in January he was told he has been ill with diabetes and hypertension for a long time. As he lay in the hospital he mulled over his goals and his work, and the old dreams faded. "I thought about it for a while and decided I'm well-suited for what I'm doing and I like it. I don't mind the words 'Public Relations.' I like the University." So he'll stay here and dream of vacations instead of the big move.

"God, this is run away weather!" Rick says, as he ambles through the Yard in the warm spring sun. "This is my 25th year here," he says. "This year I have to get extra vacation time. I'm thinking of getting my boy in the car and pointing it west." He marvels over the mountains and deserts and animals his son has never seen--Rick wants to show him everything. "I'm sort of looking forward to having him sprawling in the front seat and talking to him," he says wistfully.

"I always liked Santayana's exit from Harvard," Rick says. "He stood looking out the window then turned toward his lecture audience and said, 'Gentlemen, I have an appointment with April,' and he left."

Rick stops at the Office of the Arts to check on an assignment for the night. He was told to photograph Sarah Caldwell, conductor of the Boston Opera Company, but the Arts Office has been consistently giving him the wrong information--he gets to an assignment and there's no one there, so he's getting progressively less eager to work for them.

Myra Maymen assures him that he will get the correct time and the permission to shoot Sara Caldwell. Then, like everyone else Rick bumps into at Harvard these days, Maymen tells him how thin he's gotten. His illness caused him to drop to half his size in the last three months.

He says he's got 20 pounds more to lose and that he looks so thin because he's playing an old trick that Jimmy Curley originated. "When you want people to feel sorry for you, you try and look like a sick old man--you wear big clothes."

Sarah Caldwell does not like photographers around when she's conducting, so Rick Stafford, peeking at her from the balcony above, knows he has a tough assignment on his hands. Caldwell is seated on a throne-like chair on the ground floor of the Busch-Reisinger Museum with her orchestra and chorus amassed before her. She bellows out instructions to the soloists on the balcony and all heads turn upward. Rick brings his camera to his eye and is very tempted to shoot while he can see their faces, but he can't risk being heard and ordered out before he has pictures of Caldwell conducting. The camera's click sounds like an explosion to a musician's sensitive ears but Rick heard them warming up and thinks their music makes enough of a racket to conceal his.

Suddenly the hall is filled with laughter. Rick starts frantically snapping pictures. Click, rewind, click, rewind, click, rewind--until the laughter softens. Then he takes the camera down from his face, and gazing at Caldwell, he breaks into a broad grin.

He kneels down and braces himself against the pillar with his elbow. His face is tense with wrinkles as he squeezes his left eye shut to focus with his camera eye. Beads of sweat are forming on his head and under his eyes while he holds this position and waits for the conductor.

Caldwell raises her arms and begins to conduct. A hundred arms are set in rhythmic motion and music fills the hall. The roar grows louder as the chorus begins singing St. John's Passion. Rick snaps pictures rapidly. He switches to his long lens for closeups of Caldwell. From the balcony her facial features are indistinguishable--only the reflection of the chandelier lights in her glasses can be discerned as she bobs her head up and down in time to her deliberate hand motions.

After forty-five pictures he tiptoes down-stairs and crouches at the end of the hall, opposite Caldwell, trying for a final shot. She has stopped conducting and is listening to the singers. She gazes around the hall till her eyes meet Rick's and rest in a lethargic stare. He is frozen like a squirrel near a human but he doesn't shoot. He is waiting for her to perform again. After five minutes he gives up and walks out--he can't be late for his next assignment.

Rick steps out into the night air, relieved Caldwell wasn't the ogre he anticipated, and he walks briskly to the Science Center. The auditorium where he is to photograph a speech by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger '50 is almost full so he squashes out his cigarette and passes through the doors muttering, "My life is a session of half-smoked cigarettes." He moves to the front, the speech begins and Rick starts shooting.