Brandon Dill
Dressed in their best blue-and-white, Victoria Foth hugs her poodles Ginger, Flame, and Bridgette after winning the pet/owner look-alike competition during Pet Day at the Collierville YMCA. The annual event benefits the Collierville Animal Shelter.
Brandon Dill
The most endangered amphibian in the world didn’t feel like cooperating.
The Mississippi Gopher Frog — one of only 50 known survivors of that species — was part of the Memphis Zoo’s program to collect and preserve tissue and sperm samples from creatures whose survival was threatened. On assignment for this magazine, Brandon Dill was trying to photograph the little frog, who wouldn’t hop or even move, and the story required the creature to look, well, alive. But Dill tried different shots and angles, and finally got the image he needed for the March 2010 article called “Animal Attraction,” one of his early assignments for Memphis magazine. Quickly packing up his gear, he hopped in his car for his next job, an event at Latino Memphis — all part of a day’s work for one of this city’s busiest freelance photographers.
Dill doesn’t like to talk about his work — “it makes me feel like an egomaniac,” he says — but his digital portfolio speaks for itself, filled as it is with thousands of images that represent a wide range of experiences in this area: the “Death House” at an Arkansas state prison, the marijuana research lab at Ole Miss, Memphis City Council meetings, the Black Lives Matter protests on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and at Graceland, the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from Health Sciences Park, Grizzlies home basketball games, the city’s storm drain system, portraits of celebrities and regular folks, and more.
Brandon’s older daughter, Eliza, stands on Rockwood Bar, an island in the Mississippi River south of Chester, Illinois, where the Dill family and friends traveled to witness the solar eclipse at the only place where the path of totality crossed the river.
Work for The Commercial Appeal, Memphis magazine, the Memphis Flyer, and commercial clients drew Dill to Memphis, while national clients include The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Getty Images, and the Associated Press.
Born in 1980 in Springfield, Missouri, Dill says he “moved around quite a bit” when he was a kid. His family lived in Tulsa and Denver before finally settling in Hendersonville, Tennessee, where his father was a regional restaurant manager and his mother worked in a bank. In the fourth grade, Dill joined other elementary school students producing the school yearbook, and “that’s where I got my first camera — a little point-and-shoot thing called a Snappy Q, and I guess I’ve been taking pictures ever since.”
He studied photography for two years at Middle Tennessee State University but took a break from school in 2003 to take part in a study-abroad program in the Czech Republic. “This had a huge impact on me,” he says. “The teachers were Czechoslovakian New Wave art and documentary photographers, who worked during the Soviet occupation, and I was the assistant for Miro Svolik, who was at the forefront of the new creative explosion after communism fell there.”
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Dancers Lil Buck (left) and G-Nerd compete in a Memphis Jookin Battle.
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Brandon Dill
Bobby James cleans up his yard after heavy winds broke limbs from trees on his property near Gould, Arkansas. Dill had traveled to the area to photograph the “Death House,” where Arkansas prisoners on Death Row are executed, on assignment for a story in The Intercept.
Returning to MTSU for another year of classwork, Dill took a job with a school portrait company, where he took class pictures and also photographed sports around the Nashville area. When that company opened a baseball complex called Game Day Sports in Cordova, Dill and a colleague, Toby Sells (now the associate editor of the Memphis Flyer), were sent to photograph the games there, and “that’s how I started dipping my toe in Memphis.”
He was still living in Nashville when he met his wife, Amanda. “We both did a lot of irresponsible traveling and at the end of that we decided we didn’t want to move back to Nashville,” he says. “We had met a lot of really good people during visits to Memphis, and I started getting some lucky breaks and getting good work, so we moved here in 2008.”
Today, the Dill family — which now includes daughters Violet, age 5, and Eliza, age 7 — occupies a two-story home in Cooper-Young. Amanda works as a professional auctioneer, a job that takes her around the region selling commercial and residential properties.
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Sisters Caroline (left) and Anna Calvo interact with the “Barrier Free” art exhibit, an installation designed by their mother, artist Yancy Villa-Calvo, for Latino Memphis.
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Helen Putnam, 94, waves as she is introduced during the grand opening of the Crosstown Concourse. Putnam began working in the building in 1943 as the first female advertising artist in the retail department of Sears.
He looks back on his days as a school photographer as a learning experience. “All the classes I took at MTSU were still using film — darkroom and wet-process photography. But even though it was a really baseline, rudimentary-type job aesthetically, the school portrait company was ahead of the curve as far as technology goes, so we had brand-new cameras all the time.”
These days, Dill is rarely seen around town — or the Mid-South — without a Nikon D4 slung over his shoulders. At the same time, he admits missing certain aspects of the “old” kind of photography. “I do miss never touching an object, ever,” he says. “Here, you look at the back of the [camera] screen, and then I send you some electrons, and you look at it on another screen, but it never really exists anywhere.”
His first projects included a range of feature stories for the CA and project photography for Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects. As a freelancer for the local newspaper, Dill quickly realized that the regular “beats” were covered by the staff photographers, but that proved to be an advantage. “It was my privilege to gain access to so many other situations,” he says. “I shot an average of five or six assignments a week for almost 10 years as a freelancer for the CA. So within that is a feature on everything you can imagine.”
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Toastmaster the Clown, portrayed by Harry Bungard, waits to perform during the Al Chymia Shrine Circus inside the Shelby Farms Showplace Arena.
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Brandon Dill
left: Memphis City Council members take a break during a heated budget meeting at City Hall.
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Brandon Dill
Janis Fullilove reacts as early polls show her in the lead during the 2011 race for City Council Super District 8, Position 2.
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Brandon Dill
John “Bad Dog” McCormack, popular dj on Rock 103, continued to broadcast live from his hospital bed while he was being treated for leukemia. He died three months after this photo was taken.
At the same time, Dill began to feel what he calls “a photographic schizophrenia, where I would go directly from one crazy situation to another.” He recalls the day “where I was photographing family members at the scene of a juvenile homicide, only to be called away to shoot an immediate feature on a pet adoptathon.” He was “constantly jumping” with photo assignments that ranged from a story about a homeless center to the Munford High School marching band, from an Airport Authority board meeting to a dining review, and everything in between: education, music, healthcare, sports, politics, bluegrass festivals, jookin battles, environmental activism, and even “skateboarding bulldogs.”
He’s also the official Associated Press photographer for the Memphis Grizzlies, and says that “you can find me sitting on the ‘e’ of Memphis on the FedExForum court at every home game.”
There’s one area, however, he won’t touch: fashion.
“I don’t like that because I don’t like to tell people what to do,” he says. “I’m much better at finding pictures than I am at creating pictures.”
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Demonstrators occupy the I-40 Bridge during a Black Lives Matter rally on July 10, 2016.
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Protesters confront a line of policemen to explain why they are blocking the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. This was another shot taken by Dill that same evening.
Over time, Dill began to draw national assignments, doing nine shoots last year for The New York Times. These were often complicated stories that required an expert’s touch to convey them visually. “I don’t want to gloat,” he says now, in his self-effacing way, “but the one that got the most coverage last year involved a controversial herbicide made by Monsanto. States like Arkansas and Mississippi were considering banning it because it has a ‘drift problem,’ meaning it tends to float over other farmers’ fields.” If that other farmer hadn’t purchased genetically modified seeds — from Monsanto, of course — designed to handle this chemical, his whole crop could be destroyed. “Over in Arkansas two farmers were arguing over that and one of them got shot,” he says. “I didn’t cover the murder, but they sent me to photograph a similarly tense situation in Missouri.”
The NYT also sent Dill to Cleveland, Mississippi, where a Trump Hotel property had stalled. “It was part of a larger story about how the Trump business was doing during his presidency,” he says. “They try to pair you, I think, with your style, and since I guess I’m really good at photographing empty stuff, I guess they thought, ‘Here’s an empty field. Here’s an empty hotel. Go shoot it.’ They usually tell me who or what to shoot, but they actually give me pretty free rein with what I do with it.
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Brandon Dill Brandon Dill for The New York Ti
The Nathan Bedford Forrest statue is removed from Health Sciences Park. This photograph appeared in The New York Times.
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Baxter Leach and Ozell Ueal, from the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike, are honored at the National Civil Rights Museum.
“Most of my national stories are outside of Memphis, strangely enough,” says Dill. “I go to Mississippi all the time.” The LA Times hired him to photograph the only federally funded marijuana research lab in the country, located at Ole Miss. Shortly after, The Wall Street Journal called, wanting a story about the college football tailgating culture, so it was back to Oxford to photograph students partying in The Grove.
He certainly stays busy. “When anyone calls and asks if I can shoot this, I always say, ‘Oh yeah, absolutely.’ I always tell people I’m available even when I’m not, really.”
Some of those assignments involve considerable risk. Dill did a feature on Navy stunt pilots that required him to hang out the open door of an airplane. “That was definitely interesting,” he says. “They opened the whole side door and they lock you in just a little bit, so you can lean out the door and take pictures of the other planes.”
For five years, he covered a heart-pounding event for Maxim magazine called “Maximum Warrior.” Sitting at a table at home, laptop open, Dill laughs as he looks over the photos he shot for this project: “There’s this strange paramilitary training facility over in Arkansas. It’s like a secret camp in the middle of a cornfield, and it’s a big deal. They do secret training for the State Department, for private security companies, and other groups.”
Brandon Dill
Carts are lined up behind one of the “big box” stores on Summer Avenue.
For Maxim, the project involved “these special ops guys paired up with Maxim’s ‘Hometown Hotties’ and they would compete against each other in a reality show, all involving live fire.” Meaning: real bullets and explosives. “It was just insane,” he laughs. “Of course, it was pretty dangerous and you had to sign a waiver, and in the back of their minds they figured, I’d signed a waiver, so, ‘Uh, Brandon, do you think you can get a little closer?’”
He certainly got close to the action. Later, meeting with the Memphis magazine staff, he pulls up a pants leg to show a nasty shrapnel scar — a “souvenir” from that assignment.
Looking over his shoulder as Dill clicks on a photograph of a jeep careening through a ball of fire, those Hotties seemingly in imminent danger, his daughter Eliza opens her eyes wide and asks, “Daddy, was that a real bomb?”
He reassures her, “Yes, but they set if off on purpose. It’s just part of a show.”
The reality show never developed, although scenes from “Maximum Warrior” can be found on YouTube.
Dill is much more pleased with his coverage of civil-rights issues and activities in Memphis.
“When the Black Lives Matter bridge protest happened two summers ago, I was lucky enough to get to shoot what I thought was a good collection of images,” he says. He managed to get right in the thick of the action, with hundreds of photos showing protesters face-to-face with police, as tensions mounted but never escalated to violence. One photo made the cover of the Flyer the following week, while others were used inside. Despite his connections with national media organizations, however, he was frustrated: “I tried really hard to get somebody to pick those up. I was on the phone with AP and The New York Times and Getty and whoever else, but I didn’t get much feedback.”
A melting ice cream cone run over by a car is an example of the scenes Dill finds for himself. A simple image, Dill says it “holds a lot of personal significance for me” since it was taken during a trip to Canada when he was on a “nine-month-long, soul-searching, midlife crisis.”
But he had better luck with the events of last year. “Fast forward to when the statues [of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis] came down,” he says. “It was almost impossible to get to Health Sciences Park, because the police had blocked everything off, but I managed to do so, sneaking down an alley next to the old Scottish Rite temple.” Dill’s photographs of the Forrest statue being lifted from its pedestal, and the dramatic reactions from the crowd watching the event, made the front page of The New York Times and inside editorial pages.
“Everything here relating to those two events is still ongoing, of course,” he says, “but I think those photographs are bookends for a certain period in my career.”
But he’s not always working on freelance projects for other people. Dill takes plenty of shots for his pleasure. “I learned photography in a fine arts program, and a lot of the photos that are my personal favorites have never been seen by anyone,” he says. “Many of them are just quiet, empty spaces.”
He flips through these images: a neat row of orange Garden Ridge carts against a stained concrete wall; a trio of oddly painted homes in Frayser; a mosaic of color that, at closer look, turns out to be piles of garbage from a landfill; eerily beautiful scenes from ancient brick-lined storm-drain tunnels (used to illustrate the cover story, “Underground Memphis,” in the March 2015 issue of this magazine).
Everyone today has an iPhone, or something similar, but carrying a “real” camera sometimes invites trouble. While visiting a local hospital, Dill was captivated by a patch of greenery in the parking garage. “I was in this weird, tortured landscape space,” he says, noting the rough concrete walls, “and I think, these are pretty.” Within seconds, it seems, of snapping the photograph, “Here comes some security person in a cart, and they accuse me of criminal trespass.” He finally convinced the guards that he meant no harm.
Brandon Dill
CLEVELAND
A road in Cleveland, Mississippi, ends at a stop sign. This photo was part of an assignment on the long battle over school-district desegregation in the region for The New York Times.
Looking over his collection of photographs, Dill again notes, “It’s very strange for me to just be gushing about myself,” but (almost reluctantly, it seems) he observes, “There’s plenty of whimsy and fun perspective on the breadth of the human experience here.”
It’s clear that he’s pleased with his work, and he’s especially proud of his family and their decision to move to Memphis.
“I have a special kind of relationship with this city because I’ve been in so many different situations and worked so closely with people from every walk of life,” he says. “Everywhere I go, it seems there’s a historic photo overlay where I can see the people I photographed the last time I was there. I feel a sense of place like I haven’t gotten anywhere else, and I’m really proud when I can contribute to the greater narrative here. That’s the one role I can play.”
For more on Brandon Dill, please visit brandondill.com or follow him on Instagram @bdillphoto.
