I met Sam Abell last night.
I have two impressions of him.
One was when I walked into the UNC Viscom Suite to retrieve a bag I left there. I walked in to see this austere gentleman sitting slightly back from a computer screen, hand to the chin and white hat laid in the chair behind him. It was a striking, thoughtful moment.
The word that came to mind was “weathered.” He had a presence about him, that he had been through hardship and knew the meaning of pain on a visceral level. There was a maturity in his posture that suggested he was somebody. I was intimidated and excited in the same moment; here was a man with something to say.
Later that evening, we heard him talk, during which the audience sat entranced, mesmerized by the pace and intentionality of his words, and with the soft deference with which he handed us his story–the story of a photographic life.
During that talk, I saw one of Sam’s signature pictures–a frame of some pears gently ascending a white windowsill in Russia; the Kremlin in the background, highlighted by the waning sun, just so; a lace curtain adding a surreal level to the piece. At that moment, it clicked. “That’s…Sam Abell,” I said to myself, because I had seen that frame in my photojournalism textbooks and marveled at it. It was held as the epitome of layering a scene, of creating a symphony in composition. And there before me was the man who made the photograph.
I could have said everything about those two impressions in two simple sentences. So, I’m going to say them now.
Sam Abell is one of the most arresting and sincere individuals I’ve ever met. And he is a great photographer.
There’s a reason for that order.
After his talk, he took three questions. One was about whether he shoots digital or film. The other was about who he chooses to edit his books.
Digital. I don’t remember the second.
The third was mine. Sam earlier mentioned days when he would travel for an assignment in some location most of us young photographers would kill to have. And he would stay in his hotel room and not leave.
And not the next day, or the next day.
He took pictures of a televangelist on his TV while in a gray cinderblock motel in Newfoundland, I think it was–in February. Dreariness comes by no other definition. He named it photographer’s block. I raised my hand. “When you’re in those situations, when you’re in the motel room,” I asked, “what makes you leave?”
He gave me a real answer. “Go to the Yellow pages,” he said, “and call a pilot. Arrange for a flight the next morning. At dawn. With the door off. And now that you’ve made somebody else get up before you, to refuel a plane and take its door off in the dark, you’ve got to get up. And when you get up in the air, all your problems go away. The same problems in the hotel room don’t exist in the air. Aerials aren’t hard. And before you know it, you’re taking pictures.”
“In other words, if you’re trying to break photographer’s block, get high!” We all laughed. He said he got more laughs in San Francisco where he first shared the joke. We laughed again.
I thanked him afterwards, and he wrote me a personal note in the book I bought, “The Life of a Photograph.”
This story has a point.
If you’re a student, particularly if you go to UNC, then come to PhotoNights.
If you don’t have nights like these, where photographers come from all over to offer advice, truth, encouragement, and wisdom, then still find a way to meet photographers. Listen to them talk about their work. Listen to them talk about their mistakes. Listening to Sam’s story of a broken back, frostbitten hands, of muggings and losses, of stolen gear and lost photos, I stopped. I couldn’t understand why I considered all that glamorous.
All I knew is that it was worth it. Sam Abell did something for me that nobody else has. He unveiled how a moment can still your breath and he displayed photography not as something vapidly taken, but something dearly made. Photography to him is art, it is to be cherished, waited for. It is wonder.
And the photographic life, as Sam said, is right.
“It was the right life for me,” he said, his eyes closed in the dark room, and ours one hundred strong gaped open, gazing over his uncovered head at the pictures on the screen above him, transfixed. “And it is the right life for you.”
Brenda Phillips, 
ross, 
daniel, i could not agree more with all of this.
sam absolutely blew me away and inflated me with dreams and determination. seriously hope he comes back for another photonight before we graduate.
p.s. you’re a kick-ass writer.