Chad Hunt is an award-winning photojournalist. During his time as staff photographer for Virginia Style Weekly, he received 38 Virginia Press Awards. Since moving to New York in 2004, Hunt has made three journeys to Afghanistan as an embedded photographer with the U.S. Military, creating photo stories for Men’s Journal, Popular Mechanics, and the cover of Time Magazine. Last year, Popular Photography featured his project, Porch Portraits, photos of trick-or-treaters that he has done every Halloween for the last six years.
Hunt received his BFA in photography from Columbus College of Art and Design, and studied at Virginia Commonwealth University's MFA program. Other training includes the Eddie Adams Barnstorm VII Workshop and working with Mary Ellen Mark.
Prints from his project, “Soaring Above,” a series of studies of Hudson River boat traffic as seen from from a drone are included the exhibition, “1000 Miles Per Hour” at Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) that showcases the powers of space and perspective through contemporary photography and lens-based practices.
Chad Hunt spoke with Darren Lee Miller via Zoom on Thursday, September 22, 2022.
Dee Miller: It’s so nice to be talking with an alum of CCAD’s photo program. I saw that, among other things, you worked with Mary Ellen Mark in New York before landing the job at Virginia Style Weekly, which really launched your career. Share some highlights from those early years, and what you learned along the way that helped you get to where you are today.
Chad Hunt: I met Mary Ellen when she gave a talk at Kenyon college. I had one more semester left at CCAD before I would graduate, and I had no idea who she was. I really liked her presentation and then I thought, I've got a box of prints in the car, ran to get them, then I'm pestering her. “Hey, Mary Ellen, can you look at my pictures?” She was like, “come to the student thing tomorrow.” And I said, “But I'm not a student here.” I just bugged her, “can you look at these please,”. So, she opens the box, looks through the prints, puts the lid back on without saying a word, flips it over and writes her name and phone number on the back of the box. There wasn’t email back then. And she says, “I really want you to come to New York and work with me. Call me.”
I come from a blue-collar family and couldn’t afford to go to New York City for an unpaid internship. I worked hard all summer and saved the money to go. Every week as my internship approached, I would mail Mary Ellen a note with a print of one of my recent photos. When I finally showed up, I wasn't just Chad then new intern. I walked in the door and everyone said, “Chad's here!” and she immediately took me on as one of her assistants. I think that choice might have had more to do with the fact that I could carry big bags full of Hasselblads and film backs and lighting equipment. I learned a lot that summer. We did everything from advertising to editorial work. My first day there, I was showing Patricia Arquette her contact sheets. My one big takeaway from working with Mary Ellen was how to take pictures, the consideration of what to leave in and what to leave out of a photograph.
There's a well-known photo from her Streetwise series of two runaway kids. The main subject is pulling a gun out of his pocket. The way the gun is tilted makes it look shiny and bright, there's a reflection coming from it that sets it apart from the rest of the images on the contact sheet. When I viewed the contact sheet, that image was the only one where the gun was reflective. None of the other photos were as interesting because in that one the kids are sort of receding and space, and the gun really pops out at you. What it taught me was it's really about the editing and about spending enough time with your subject to get the one shot that transcends all the others. It also taught me that Mary Ellen Mark is a normal person working her way through her vision, trying things and figuring out what works.
Miller: I feel like I tell students all the time to spend more time and shoot more, that the statistical likelihood of getting a really awesome photo increases when you shoot all 36 frames of the film on one thing, or, you know with digital, make hundreds of captures instead of just taking three or four and moving on.
Hunt: I saw all of Mary Ellen’s contact sheets from her work as a still photographer on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” and, you know, there’s that one shot of Marlon Brando that we all know, but there are also about 30 other photos of him on the contact sheet that aren’t iconographic. Looking at the images, I could see how she was working. She would take the time to figure out what worked and what didn’t and how to zero in on the part that’s working. I've tried to adopt that approach throughout my career.
Miller: It sounds to me like Mary Ellen Mark needed to keep her cool and remain calm, even in places where she felt unsafe. You've made three trips to Afghanistan as an embedded photographer with the US military, and I can’t imagine a more dangerous assignment. I'm curious how you made that happen.
Hunt: After I left Virginia Style Weekly, I moved back to New York and resumed working as a photographer’s assistant. I missed the editorial and documentary stories – everything from shadowing a homicide detective to photographing kids eating ice cream cones – and I wanted to make a difference with my work. One day I came across a soldier’s blog where he was writing letters to his family. The images he was posting were nothing like what I was seeing on the news. And I thought, no one else is telling that story. I want to do it. I started by emailing him, “Hey, I've been reading your blog. I would love to come over there. How do I make that happen?” He put me in touch with someone who put me in touch with someone, and they said, “If you want to apply, here’s how you do it.” That was how my morning started, and by the time my wife got home from work I had all this stuff printed out. I remember one webpage I had open was bulletproofme.com. And my wife was just like, “Okay, what is happening here?” At the time, I was a freelancer so I couldn’t go to an editor's office and ask them to reach out to the military like, “We're Time Magazine sending Chad to do a story.”
I had recently done some work for Le Monde that was published on their website, so I reached out to that agency and asked, “Can you write a letter?” And then, when the army got that letter, they asked, “What do you want to do?” I asked them to put me on the smallest base they had. I got the reply email and it just says, “Mr. Hunt, we'll see you at the base on September 22. Bring your own body armor.” When I helicoptered-out to the first forward operating base (FOB), it was 3am so I just slept on the ground outside the PR tent. At sunrise my contact comes out, shakes me awake and says a Humvee has been hit with a RPG. I was going into a firefight. And he got really close to me and asked, “This is what you wanted, right?” I jumped into a Humvee. There was a soldier in the turret up top loading the gun. I looked at her and said, “I'm here to take pictures, to tell your story, but if you need me to do anything, ask and I will not hesitate.” That was my way of saying I understand the environment we're in. When I came back with that body of work, Embedded, I immediately got a Men’s Journal assignment to go back. This time it was with a writer. My goal was never to be a war photographer, it was just to make good pictures from a war zone.
Miller: I imagine that a lot of these situations can be stressful, you can be in a hurry, you might be worried about your own safety or the safety of others. How do you keep your cool and remain present in the moment to see and capture what’s happening?
Hunt: The work I did at Virginia Style Weekly was good training for how to look through the camera. I became even more aware that while I was seeing what was inside the viewfinder, I also had to see outside of that. I’m not really a tough guy but I was surprised by my lack of fear in that environment. I worked so hard to get there and put myself in that position, so when they said, “We're gonna go on a six hour mission right now,” I felt it was a privilege to be able to jump in and walk with them through the valley. And it made me feel close to my dad who was a medic in Vietnam. It helped me relate a bit better to who he was. As far as the safety goes, I put myself into some positions that weren't so smart. I'm a little hard of hearing now because I didn't use any ear protection when I was photographing firefights and mortar fire. But I didn't think about that at the moment. I was excited to be doing something other than assisting a photographer doing advertising work, and it was nice to make my own art.
Miller: I don’t want to make it sound like I presume the US military is using you to create propaganda for them; but, on the other hand, would they consent to your embed if they felt you would portray them in a very critical light? How do you find a balance between what you feel needs to be seen and what our armed forces would prefer you not show us?
Hunt: They were protecting me and that would by nature give me an immediate bias, right? But the reality is the Army rarely looked at any of my images when I was taking pictures. They only once asked to look at what I photographed when I was working on a sensitive story on my third trip that was about how missions are planned. The only parameters were that I was not allowed to shoot sensitive material. Like, let's say I'm in a Humvee and there's a computer screen open and it has a map on it. They didn't want me to take that picture because the enemy could say, “This is what they're looking at on that screen,” or, “This is how close they can zoom in.” They also didn't want me to document the base in a way that could be used to attack it. Everything else I could do. It didn't change the kinds of pictures I made. It didn't make me think, I can't take this photo, because the army is never going to allow it. On my third trip I noticed that soldiers were more aware of my presence. They’d want to make sure that they had their eye protection on so they wouldn’t get in trouble. But overall they would say, “Thank you for coming out. No one knows what we're doing here.”
Miller: We usually think of documentary work, especially journalism, as a kind of index of real events, that the photographs act as a kind of witness, a record of history. But I think most of us also intuit that effective images communicate stories to which we can relate and that evoke emotional responses. What role does narrative play in your work?
Hunt: Narrative is a huge part of my work, even when I don't have words next to my pictures. I like for my images to have some sort of other layer to them. In my portraits of victims of priest molestation – they're grown up now, they're adults – there’s one photo of a man closing his eyes and he said, “When I close my eyes, I can still feel his whiskers on my cheek.” That quote with that image says so much. I've always worked to give my photos a narrative, whether it be the environment, artifacts, or even just the way they're looking or smoking or whatever.
Miller: What would you tell the students in my Lens Based Narrative course who are making stand-alone images to suggest a narrative or sequences of photos to tell a story?
Hunt: Shelby Lee Adams said, “When I look into my subjects’ eyes, I see my own reflection.” I take that to mean you have to have a connection with somebody, you have to take a minute to not take pictures and relate to people. I'm trying to make a connection, to find some empathy between us. I took a photo of a kid I met on the subway. We got off at the stop and I took the photo. He told me his name was Tony, so I titled the work, Tony in Brooklyn. About four years ago that image ran in a magazine and the kid in that photo looked me up. Now he's 30 years old, married, and has kids. And his name is not Tony, he just didn’t feel comfortable telling me his real name back then. We have plans to go back to photograph him in the same spot. My point is that even in that moment I made enough of a connection with a 12 year old kid that he wanted to look me up. Photography starts to become secondary to building relationships. You have to spend time with your subject. You can't parachute in and out, and you can't photograph something that's totally foreign to you.
Miller: Maybe to put an even finer point on it, if I'm photographing people whose lived experiences are different from my own, then I need to do my homework. I have to learn things, be humble, give people an opportunity to step forward, and use my platform to elevate their voices.
Hunt: I would also say you're gonna get better photos if you ask a question and then listen.
Miller: We need to take ourselves out of the center, because it's not about us.
Hunt: It’s absolutely not about us, and the sooner you let the person you're photographing know that you’re genuinely interested in them, that you're not faking interest but letting this person explain their experiences, then everything opens up to you. That’s when preconceived ideas go away. You have to go in with an open mind and not try to bend it into something that it's not. Maybe it's not the story you wanted to tell initially, so you find a way to tell a different story, one that’s more true.
Miller: I want to dive deeper into this idea of earning people's trust. A few years ago, your portraits of trick or treaters got a lot of attention. As a middle aged man, how did you negotiate permissions with the kids and their parents? And did you expect the project to be so widely published, or did that surprise you? In other words, what were your goals when you started doing that?
Hunt: When I lived in Richmond, I assisted a photographer who did the same thing, but it was pre digital. And I thought, what a great thing to give back to the community. If I ever have a house I'm totally going to do that. Now we live in a very creative community – a lot of people who work on Broadway – and some of the kids’ costumes are just amazing. If the parents are there, I’d explain, “I'm Chad, this is my wife. I’m doing this thing. Can I take a photo?” I would never ask if it was just a lone kid. But I don’t necessarily focus on just the best costumes. It's more about the kid. We didn't get many people the first year, but now everyone in the neighborhood knows me and they know about the project. After Halloween I do an email blast to everyone who participated, giving them the opportunity to download the photos for free. I had to stop doing it though, because last year Popular Photography ran a piece, and then local media reported on it. It seemed like it was everywhere all the sudden. I hired a few local teens to hand-out candy so I could just focus on the pictures. People told me the next day that the line for a picture was so long they left.” What started as a gift to my neighbors and friends became something different. Looking back, it really has become a sort of document, showing the same kids as they grow up year by year, chronicling the “year of the zombie” or the “year of Star Wars,” or whatever is the popular thing each year.
Miller: It sounds like that project is almost a victim of its own success.
Hunt: Yes, but I love those pictures so much. They’re going to be in New Jersey Monthly Magazine this month along with an interview. Maybe I’ll do it again this year.
Miller: Are you gonna hire an assistant?
Hunt: If I hired an assistant, I could do it. Last year one guy showed up and he was like, “Can you do my LinkedIn photo?” So it's tricky. I would love to bring it back but maybe it's run its course? I'm so fond of that project and it makes me happy that it has been so successful.
Miller: The project you’re showing in Beeler Gallery is called Soaring Above. Describe how you got started with that work, and explain what experiences you hope gallery viewers will have with the images.
Hunt: A friend saw the prints and said, “It's basically your Halloween photography, just with boats,” which I thought was hilarious. I am doing a lot of the same things in photoshop and spending a lot of time editing the photo to make it look how it looks. My wife bought me a drone for Christmas during the pandemic and it was an exploration. I’d always watched the barges passing on the Hudson river from the porch at our cabin in upstate New York, and now I'm able to look down to see what's inside the thing they're pushing. I compose them so the boats are always in the same spot, to look like they're flying through space. And I focus on the shapes of the wakes and the negative space around them. It's nice to pull back and look at something from a different angle, to discover something that I wasn't thinking about. Everyone brings something different to the gallery when they view the work.
Miller: Is there anything else you wanted to say? A thought you’d like to leave us with?
Hunt: Now that I'm a middle aged man (haha), I’d like to go back and reassure the younger me who was a student at CCAD. I remember being so worried about “How am I going to get a job?” and, “What am I doing next?” that I was almost too anxious to go walk through an open door. But I did. That's how I've approached everything. Let’s see what happens when I go to New York and work with Mary Ellen Mark. Let’s see what will happen if I take this job in Richmond and go to graduate school there. You really have to lean into the unknown.
Miller: You have to trust the process.
Hunt: Trust the process, and also know that you're gonna be okay. Buy the ticket to Afghanistan. Take a chance. What's going to happen if I take this job? Am I going to hate the city? Am I going to love it? That's what I've learned from coming back to CCAD and talking with students. They need to be reminded that they're in for the ride of their life.