Gregory Heisler is OK being the dumbest guy in the room.

That’s what he said, at least, in his interview to become a distinguished professor of photography in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

“The level of the faculty is outstanding,” Heisler said. “I want to come here to learn; I want to come here to grow; I want to be among people who are wildly smart.”

Most people, however, would consider Heisler one of the wildly smart. His resume, as a professional photographer for over 40 years, includes more than 70 covers of Time magazine, and his photo essays have graced the pages and covers of Life, Sports Illustrated and Esquire. This fall, he joined the Newhouse faculty in the multimedia, photography and design department.

Heisler, who grew up in Chicago, got his start in photography by taking senior portraits for a yearbook company. In one year, he shot roughly 60,000 senior pictures.

“As a shy person, that totally brought me out of my shell where I could talk to anybody and nobody made me uncomfortable, and it was very easy and it was a great experience,” Heisler said.

He moved to New York City after one of his photography idols, Arnold Newman, offered him a job as an apprentice. He later started freelancing and worked for smaller magazines until he got a call from Life.

“It was to take pictures of a parking lot,” Heisler said. “Literally, a parking lot. And that’s the kind of assignment they would give to the new person.”

It paid off, though. Soon after, a staff member at Time contacted Heisler to do his first cover, a portrait of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an Olympic track and field star.

“I’m a terrible sports photographer, so I actually made it into a picture that I could take and tried to make her kind of larger than life, and I think they kind of responded to that,” Heisler said.

Throughout the next 20 years, he photographed President George H. W. Bush, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Springsteen and many others.

With every photo, Heisler said he hopes the viewer will learn something about the subject.

“In a still photograph, you’re taking the continuum of experience and crystallizing it onto one image to say this will stand for that whole experience,” he said. “This one picture says everything.”

In his career, Heisler chose to take risks. At one point he was hired to photograph an advertisement for men’s clothing. He said the models weren’t the type of men to actually wear the clothes, so he hired professional dancers to model them instead.

“You take your biggest chances on your most important opportunities, on your most important jobs,” Heisler said. “What happens many times, people in general, photographers specifically, they play it safe when they’re up against a big event or a big opportunity. They want to do the sure thing that they know is going to work. I think it’s the risk that pushes me to do my best work.”

Heisler said he doesn’t have one favorite assignment or project. There are some that stand out because they’re turning points in his career, or the subject was interesting, he said, but he also sees his faults.

Heisler considers all of his photos failures. When he looks at them, all he can see is what’s wrong with them.

“You don’t remember the things that you got, the things that you captured — you remember the missed opportunities,” he said.

This mentality carries over into his illustration photography class, said Amanda Piela, a junior photojournalism and anthropology double major. Heisler shares his triumphs and failures as examples when teaching.

“He knows that he’s not a perfect individual, and he shows us that and lets us realize that that’s not the most important thing in life,” said Piela, who is also a contributing photographer for The Daily Orange.

MPD department chair Bruce Strong said he thinks Heisler’s humility is one of the reasons he is a successful teacher. Students give him respect because of his accomplishments.

“When he speaks to students about things to do or not to do, they are all confident that he is speaking from experience,” Strong said. “He knows it because he’s done it, and he continues to do it.”

Strong was influenced by Heisler’s work when he was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Heisler did a photo essay on Muhammad Ali for Sports Illustrated, and Strong said that essay taught him how to create a mood with photos and show the viewer the essence of the subject.

The two officially met at the Eddie Adams Workshop in 1988, an intensive four-day program for young photographers. Many years later, they were both back at the workshop as instructors, and Strong asked Heisler if he would ever be interested in teaching at Newhouse. When a position opened, Strong first thought of Heisler.

Strong said that while some professors struggle to explain difficult concepts to students, Heisler is not one of them.

“Because we know how to do something, we assume others understand it,” Strong said. “I think Greg has the ability to put himself back at the beginning, remember what it was like not to know how to do specific things and then to articulate how best to do that for a beginner.”

One of Heisler’s main goals as a teacher is to help students gain a new perspective on their own work. He sees himself as a communicator, and teaching is just one more way to do that.

“Everybody says you teach to give back, which is true,” Heisler said. “But I do it for more selfish reasons. I think it’s really fun and it’s gratifying to be a teacher. As satisfying as it is to make pictures, and it is, it sort of is more gratifying really to be able to enable someone else to see things in a new way or to be able to have the tools to express themselves in a new way.”

Published on October 2, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Emma: ekbaty@syr.edu