The Mind’s Eye: Karen Pulfer Focht

Taking pictures, 1,000 words at a time.

by

Karen Pulfer Focht may not have the most recognizable face in town. She’s no pop star, no seven-foot power forward on an NBA court, and she’s not running for mayor. But what she sees and captures through her camera — the faces, the places, the good and bad — is known the city over. A homeless white man sits on a curb eating a free lunch with curious black children. A man on the interstate chases a lone, renegade chicken. Paul McCartney and Carl Perkins share a moment backstage. A shirtless man is handcuffed and held to the ground by police while his family looks on.

At a recent showing of her work at the WKNO-FM offices on Cherry Road in Cordova, Focht moves from wall to wall, gesturing at the framed pieces and talking a bit about each. Along one wall is her photojournalism with its grittiness, its shock, its 1,000 words of information. The opposite wall is art, the images she sought out for their beauty and inherent interest. In the center of these two collections are the stories, and that’s where Focht is at ease because each photo — whether originally printed in newsprint for pay or for her private portfolio — is about the story it tells.

For 25 years, Focht was a photojournalist with The Commercial Appeal. She has carried her camera like the most vital organ, ready to shoot, ready to save the memory, and eager to share that memory with the world. In those years, she was granted access to the famous — Bill Murray, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis — but she was also put in harm’s way, a caveat to a front-row seat on the edge of the news cycle. She knocked on doors of known drug dealers and gang bangers, and covered the aftermath of a tornado while nine months pregnant. She’s traveled the world — New Zealand, France, Peru, China — and clicked her shutter in the most powerful house in our nation.

“I’m more of a street photographer,” Focht explains. “I’m capturing fleeting moments that are around us, it’s more about the way I see.”

How does she see what she sees and, more importantly, know when to freeze a frame? “I don’t know, I just think it’s a gift,” she says. “I think it’s why a singer can sing, why somebody can sit down at a piano and play by ear, why somebody can do great math, which I can’t. There are an awful lot of things I can’t do, but I can see. I was given a gift of seeing in a special way.”

Focht has memorialized the obscure, the fantastic, and everyday life in a world that, these days, moves much too quickly. She is a master at knowing when and where to capture an image, of what French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, considered the father of modern photojournalism, called “the decisive moment.” Yet she worked for a quarter of a century in an industry that was changing and evolving as well, one that will squeeze out the veterans in an attempt to save a few dollars. But being laid off from the CA in 2014 may have been Focht’s “decisive moment” after all.

“I was pretty much ready to go, I was positioning to leave anyway and probably would have left within the next year,” she says. “I was wanting to teach and wanting to create more art and wanting to freelance and wanting to be home with my daughter. Just wanting to grow and evolve.”

She had become discontented with the direction her industry was headed. Where the newspaper’s reach had been regional early in her career, the focus was shrinking while Focht’s worldview was expanding. Her style of working had always been to take several hours for quality photos that could tell a front-page story on their own. “There was a time where we would just be in relentless pursuit of the best moment and the best picture that would reflect whatever the story of the day was.” But more and more of her time was being used up with tweeting, a necessary evil in today’s press, and with a shrinking staff there was more pressure to get a photo, upload it from a laptop, and move on to the next assignment. “I couldn’t do the quality of work I wanted to do,” she says.

Focht made her name working the big projects, those that might take a year sometimes. Those that, with the smaller staff and smaller news hole, didn’t afford the time and space for a professional to stretch out any longer. There had been projects on infant mortality in Memphis and brain surgery at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. “Those are very important to me because they changed the world and they changed the community, and that’s what I love more than anything is storytelling, community-changing journalism,” Focht says. “I thrive on that, being able to open people’s minds and eyes, and show them opportunities and engage them.”

Being out of the photojournalism game at a city newspaper hasn’t slowed her down in that respect. “I always have projects going. I always have two and three and four projects going in the background. I do still.”   

This love of photojournalism, of storytelling, began early, when Focht was only 8 years old in Glenview, Illinois, a small community outside of Chicago. “I was always that focused,” she says. “As a kid I would take my camera and go out shooting. I kind of thought I was documenting history; nobody would ever see this moment again if I didn’t shoot it and share it.”

Her first camera was a Polaroid Swinger bought at a garage sale. Her father was in business and necessarily pragmatic, warning her that she’d have a difficult road ahead if trying to make money through photography. It was her mother who supported the dream, but it was high school where that dream would ripen. Because no photography course was available at Glenbrook High School, Focht was allowed to leave campus to attend a photo class at a neighboring school. It was an unprecedented policy, but still she wanted more, and the progressive Glenbrook created classes and allowed her to do an independent study for three years.

What she had, though, wouldn’t show up on any report card or be mirrored in a GPA, and it would set her on the path to photography, and photojournalism specifically, rather than shooting catalogues or products in a sterile studio. “I’m a people person,” she says. “I knew that I wanted to tell stories and I knew that I wanted to tell stories with my pictures, and most of all that I wanted to shoot people. I love shooting people.”

Teenagers can be wary of jumping into new situations, diffident as their bodies and minds are learning to work together. Focht, though, says she “never met a stranger. My mother used to say, ‘Karen, you can’t go up and talk to just anybody.’ It would freak her out because I would pick the most unusual character in the room. I was just compelled to find out what their story was. I’d pick a street person. I’m still like that, but even when I was 10, 11, 12, 15 years old, I’d go pick a street person, shoot their picture, and talk to them.”

Her precociousness led her as a teenager to write to National Geographic and ask what she had to do to work for them. She was told she needed to work for a newspaper for at least 10 years. She needed life experience, she needed education, and that education would begin at Columbia College in Chicago. A fine-arts school, Columbia turned out to not be exactly what Focht was looking for, but she did have the privilege of falling under the tutelage of Chicago Sun-Times Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John White, and Myron Davis from Life magazine.“I took a roundabout way and it was really more my tenacity and persistence that got me here than anything,” she says.

White made his students get their work published, teaching Focht the ropes of becoming a freelancer. “That set the wheels in motion. It’s like I always knew what I wanted to do, but that was the first time he showed me the way.”

She and her former teacher remain friends, and he says of her: “You think of the ingredients that go into a photographer — a lot of love for humanity, compassion and passion, the skills it takes to use a box that has a light hole in it to capture what you see and feel. So there are all these ingredients and she has all of those ingredients. She has a zeal and a passion and a fire and a splendor that wakes her each day to do what she does.”

Focht became a stringer for local papers and the Associated Press, and even went to the Sun-Times to ask for a job. She was given the advice all seasoned journalists come to understand: You don’t start at the Chicago Sun-Times. So she set her sights smaller and landed a job on the staff of a newspaper in Gary, Indiana. It would be the perfect training ground. “It’s a tough town. You think Memphis is a tough town? Gary is a tough town.”

It was 1984 and there were not a lot of women in the profession, especially not women as compact in stature as Focht. “They didn’t really know what to do with me because you’re in this area where there’s a really high crime rate,” she says, adding, “but it became a phenomenal training ground for me because it was an amazing news town and by the time I left I was going on drug raids with the police and got a reputation for shooting incredible breaking spot news.”

She was named Indiana Photographer of the Year and that’s when everything changed. Suddenly everyone from Alaska to Miami wanted to hire her. It was in a workshop in the bootheel of Missouri that she met Tom DeFeo, then director of photography for The Commercial Appeal. When an opening came up on staff, he asked her to interview. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t even know where Memphis is.’” But she was a fan of blues and jazz music, and was teaching herself blues harmonica at the time; a trip to the Delta seemed fitting.

The Commercial Appeal has always had a reputation for premier photojournalism and a position on staff would be an impressive resume builder. The city, too, was impressive. “The weather was warm and beautiful,” she recalls, a plus for anyone who had just flown in from the Midwest. “The love affair [with Memphis] began. I remember coming out of the interview and hearing harmonica and blues music coming from Beale Street, and that was it, my soul had found its home.”

It was in this new home that Focht found success as a photojournalist, her dream since childhood. But it would also be where she embraced the artistic side of her skills. It’s a side she’s nurtured even more since leaving the newspaper last year. It’s the side that sees rural fields of sunflowers and red barns far removed from Gary and Chicago, misty European street scenes, and one cozy photo of a mother and baby giraffe that has gone viral (and, unfortunately, un-credited).

What is it about the Bluff City that produces photojournalistic and artistic storytelling such as Focht’s? “Memphis just has that soul, it’s visually very soulful. There’s something you feel in your core. It’s the kindness, the interaction that people have with each other, it’s the grit,” she says, indicating a photo of a man pushing a disabled boy in a wheelchair as they escape a nearby house fire. The man, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, appears unconcerned while firefighters work on the blaze.

“As a news photographer,” she continues, “you don’t really want to be in Santa Barbara. I mean, Santa Barbara is a great place to be if you want to have lunch with your girlfriends, if you want to be on vacation, but it’d be boring as crap as a photographer, right? [In Memphis] you’ve got these characters and that backdrop, that grit and soul that I want to capture in my pictures. The people and the poverty and the problems and the crime kind of cross over with the faith and the kindness . . . all those things put together, it’s like a Memphis stew. You put those together and you come up with this,” pointing to a photo of a white Santa Claus cradling the face of an African-American girl.

Focht moves easily between the world of photojournalism and art. “She’s connected to the heartbeat of humanity,” says John White. She’s made her bones on police ride-alongs and in capturing the emotion of infant mortality, and she’s found her heart there, too, and developed it along with images of bluesmen, animal life, rural and urban landscapes, and real people experiencing the joys and sadness and surprise of everyday life. She’s a Memphis transplant, yet has made the city her own, embracing the “grit and kind” and eating heartily from that stew. Through it all, she’s had one viewer in mind the whole time — the public.

“It never really was between me and the editors,” she says. “My relationship has always been with the readers. It’s always been between me and the readers. That’s always where I looked for my response and that’s where I got my motivation — the relationship I had with the readers and how they would respond to the pictures I took.”

For more on Karen Pulfer Focht, please visit karenpulferfocht.com.