John Gaps III passed away on October 17th of this year. He was 63 years old.
John was a photojournalist, a good one to be sure, who was known for taking chances and being outspoken.
If your goal is to make good pictures of people acting naturally and ignoring the camera, there are two ways to get there. You can try to be a fly on the wall and hope to go unnoticed, or you could be loud, and let everyone know you’ve arrived. Maybe knock over a lamp for good measure. The idea being that once the waves settled from the splash you’ve made, the act of making pictures would go relatively ignored.
John loved to make a big splash.
One time, in the hope of getting a better angle on Hillary Clinton, he made one in the reflecting pool outside of the Taj Mahal. He got the angle, fried a couple of cameras and spent a long flight back to the States on her plane in damp clothes.
That’s how John rolled. Anything for the picture, and if a good story came along with it, all the better.
A note from John’s family reads (in part):
“Our father’s death came as a shock to us. His best years behind him, John’s final years saw him struggling deeply with addiction, PTSD, and complicated relationships. Left with few end of life plans and little money, we have done our best to honor him faithfully and in a way that reflects his unique spirit.”
John struggled. Not only would he be the first to admit it, he often did just that. From what I could see, he never tried to hide his problems.
I must have been eighteen when I first met John. I was attending The University of Nebraska at Omaha and hanging around the darkrooms of the Omaha World-Herald. I knew nothing about photography or journalism. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to make a living doing it. John arrived on the scene, as the new hire from Iowa State, who had not yet graduated. He was twenty-two, already a “name”, married, seemingly grownup and with knowledge and knowhow that he generously shared.
We quickly became friends. He mentored me, and in return I listened to his stories. I wanted to learn and he enjoyed talking, so we were a good match.
True to form, John made a big splash upon his arrival. He was a good twenty years younger than anyone else on the World-Herald’s photography staff. He was well schooled on the newest and best way to go about photojournalism. Information that he wasn’t shy about sharing. He was competitive as well. He disrupted the place that hired him along with all the other papers in the state as well as the Associated Press.
To offer just one example, at the time, photojournalism was proudly represented on the walls of the Omaha Press Club with a picture of a lamb jumping in midair. This image was made by the very respected and the historic leader of photojournalism in our state to illustrate a story in the Omaha World-Herald on the arrival of Spring.
The photojournalism scene in Nebraska needed a good disruption and John was the perfect man for the job.
I spent a lot of time with John and learned much from him about our craft. When it came to sharing knowledge or opinions, he simply did not have a filter. He could read people, but he couldn’t read a room. He’d share whatever was on the tip of his brain whether his audience wanted to hear it or not.
John rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
At that time, a typical Friday evening for us would involve shooting two or three high school football games. Processing, editing, printing, captioning and delivering the selects to the Sports Desk by 11:00pm. To be clear, this could be anywhere from ten to thirty black & white 8x10 prints, sports action, shot on film, at night, pre-auto focus on Tri-X processed to within an inch of it’s life (we’ll call it 3200 ISO, which didn’t even exist at the time), on deadline.
The level of difficulty was high. The learning potential was great.
After turning in the prints we’d hurry to catch the last set of whatever band was playing that night. When the house lights came up we’d head to the Olympic Diner in downtown Omaha for a late night meal and rehash the day's events. Bright and early the next day we’d be on our way to Lincoln to shoot a college game. We’d both finish up by eight and then see the same band and then eat the same late night meal we had the previous night.
The late nights probably weren’t the best thing for his young family. Meaning, I know they weren’t, but John was competitive and driven. Photography, photojournalism to be precise, was his passion. He was determined to be successful. That’s all that mattered to him. There was no monkey business, no drinking (besides the occasional beer), just the pursuit of excellence.
He moved up the ladder quickly. John left Omaha in less than two years for Kansas City, which gave him a bigger paper, more money, and better opportunities. A couple years after that he moved up again, this time to the Associated Press staff position in Des Moines where he was in charge of their photo coverage for Iowa and Nebraska.
I’d moved on as well. We remained friends but didn’t see much of each other. He was a wire/newspaper guy. I was an agency/magazine shooter. In many ways this is only an academic distinction, but in reality, we were on different paths, moved in different circles, and pursuing different goals.
I’d run into him at an Olympics or maybe in the middle of a desert somewhere, but we never revisited the late night conversations we had in the Olympic Diner in the past.
I guess we’d both found our own path at that point.
Working out of Des Moines, his de facto home town, he traveled the world for the Associated Press. He took a bullet in Israel. Got into a few scraps of the near-death variety, covered more high profile stories than anyone has a right to, and took more risks than anyone, in their right mind, would have.
After that pressure cooker of a life, he took a job at the Des Moines Register. He made the paper better, but he didn’t do the same for himself. I don’t think he knew how. That would have been the time to straighten things out.
Instead, he got downsized. Which was, I believe, quite hard on him. He’d invested, given up, sacrificed so much for this profession and his place in it. In some ways, the job defined him.
To lose that job, and this is just my opinion, was to lose himself.
John was never afraid of working hard and he put everything into his work. Sadly, the work never returned the favor.
I was surprised to get a call out of the blue from John. He was calling to apologize to me for being an alcoholic. I’d pretty much lost contact with him by that point, so this came as a surprise. I had no idea, and that’s on me.
I think his apology was some kind of prescribed therapy, but instead of getting better he got worse.
With the help of some of his former colleagues, his family and some friends he got some more aggressive help. For a time there it seemed he was back on the right track, but what do I know? What could anyone know? When it comes to addiction and mental health most of us aren’t qualified to judge how it’s going. I know with me, I only looked on the surface and believed what he said.
Maybe that’s just the easy way to do things.
I’m not blaming anyone or any of the places he worked for. I don’t think John would have put the blame on them either (though I’m guessing on that). At this point, I don’t know that there was an easy, or even a likely fix for him. The hellhounds had been nipping at his tail for a long time.
In one of our last productive calls (I say productive because the latter calls were anything but), John told me about how the counselors in his current facility treated him. It seems they continually called him a liar, both to his face, and in front of other patients. They insisted that he had to admit he was lying in order to get better.
They told him that he never rode on Air Force One. Never was shot, didn’t cover the Olympics, didn’t get himself almost killed here or there, that everything he’d witnessed or accomplished was just a figment of his imagination. According to them, his many unbelievable stories were just a part of his alcoholic survival mechanism.
By the end of the call both of us were crying.
Years before, a colleague of ours remarked that the best way to approach any of John’s stories was to either double or halve whatever he said. This observation was both an unkind and truthful way to deal with them. Everyone knew that John loved a good story and wasn’t afraid to embellish them a bit to make them better, but there was always a good deal of truth behind them, as well as a picture or two.
I cannot imagine a worse torture for a guy like John. His stories, experiences, life, basically his whole persona was negated when he was in treatment. I suppose, if it had worked we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but I don’t see the logic in trying to save a man by destroying him.
My last call with John didn’t go well. He was in Hong Kong looking to get himself killed and if the Chinese couldn’t get the job done he was going to give the Syrians a crack at it.
At least that’s how I interpreted it. I think he wanted, needed, a defining moment that would somehow reclaim his life experiences, his stories, his work, and glue them all back together into the same person that he had worked so hard to become.
It shouldn’t have come to that.
We’re all disposable. Whether its the person getting your lights back on after the hurricane, the soldier coming home from active duty, or the journalist reporting on that duty, they are all disposable. They’re reminders of things the general public would like to forget.
Self-medication, lasting stress and trauma induced wackiness, are all behaviors that proper folks like you and I don’t want to deal with. We want our toilets to work when we flush them and our flights to arrive on time.
That’s why I stopped answering my phone at three in the morning.
One night, back in the day, John introduced me to a green, nasty looking potion inside a glass jar that was sitting in his darkroom sink. It was called potassium ferrocyanide. It’s a strong acidic salt. Poison of course, but also a crucial tool to making photographic prints that could reproduce in a newspaper. It was essentially used as a bleach to lighten specific areas in a print. You’d paint it on with a tiny brush. Watch the spot get lighter and when it got to the right point you’d plunge the print back into the fix to stop the process. You couldn’t shoot high school football at night without this stuff.
John told me that W. Eugene Smith used this concoction all the time. I replied, “W. Eugene Who?”. I was greener than the ferrocyanide.
Gene Smith was a good storyteller, a great photographer and a messed up, pill-popping alcoholic who dealt with wounds he suffered covering World War Two for his entire life. Like John, he also threw a lot of important things away in his life to pursue his craft. In the end, also like John, he outlived his usefulness to the corporate world of journalism.
Maybe it’s just the natural progression of things. The people you worked for retire and the ones who replaced them don’t have a personal connection, the time or a budget to help the leftovers.
Now, for the photography critics out there, I’m not comparing John’s work to Gene’s. That’s something John would have done on his own while alive and likely planning to do with Gene in the Great Hereafter.
Don’t come at me for saying this. Everyone who knew John was already thinking it.
At his core, John was a teacher. I learned a lot from him when he was alive and I’d like to try and learn something from his death.
I know nothing about PTSD or substance abuse, but I refuse to believe that one needs to have a self-destructive personality to do meaningful work. There does seem to be a correlation there, especially with artists, but it happens with many who do tough jobs that go unappreciated. Those who are trying to do the right thing, make sacrifices and are then forgotten.
This is my takeaway, John’s Last Lesson:
As a photojournalist, when you’re working, always give it your all. The lives you’re documenting are important and need to be seen. They deserve your best and you won’t make it in this business doing anything less than your best. When you’re not working, give that “all” to your family. They deserve much more than that and they are the ones that won’t eventually dispose of you.
Don’t work that much. If you spend a month on a story, spend the next month at home. Even if you’re not that useful and are always getting in the way, your family will overlook these shortcomings. Remember, they won’t dispose of you.
Bury your ego. Fight it every step of the way. We all know that you can’t make it in this business without having an unrealistic belief in yourself, so use it when you need it and forget about it the rest of the time.
Don’t let your profession become your persona. What you do for a living is not who you are.
That’s all I got.
My heart goes out to John’s family. Their father followed a tough path. I believe their love is what kept him going for as long as he did.
John’s family has posted a memorial and created a memorial fund as well. Please take a look here.
At The Curious Society we’re working to make documentary photography excellent again. Please take a look. And yes, we could use the help of concerned viewers like you.
Gutted by this. Became acquainted w John in Little Rock, AR, late 1992, while we covered President-elect Clinton’s transition proceedings. A wonderful fellow. Funny and focused. My deepest sympathies to his family.
Damn, Ken, I had no idea all that John had gone through in recent years. I have always thought that in the wire service business some of our best teachers are our competitors and John taught me some of the best lessons ever in terms of how driving, motivated and endlessly energetic he was and frankly some of the worst lessons, in terms of things NOT to emulate. But I definitely learned from him, and to anyone that has been true of, I am profoundly and eternally grateful. I can't tell you how much of what you wrote here rang true and struck home. This was a tough tough read for those of us who knew John and had fallen way out of touch with him, but also smart and revelatory and wise, as your writing has always tends to be. THANK YOU for the honesty and the power of what you shared in this essay.