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| Photo by Frank Folwell/USA Today |
| Robert Hanashiro looks for a location to shoot Olympic boxer Andre Ward for USA Today's "10 To Watch" while on a scouting trip near the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. Click photo for a gallery of Hanashiro's images from the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games. |
The photographic community is incredibly diverse, made up of photographers who shoot from the sky to the sea and everywhere in between. Each month we look at a different segment of the industry, interviewing top professional photographers about life, their careers, and what sets their piece of the photographic industry apart from the rest.
This month we focus on Robert "Bert" Hanashiro, 53, a staff photographer with USA Today since 1989. Known worldwide for his online sports photography community, SportsShooter.com, Hanashiro will join thousands of other journalists in Beijing this August for what will be his sixth Summer Olympics. In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic games, Hanashiro talked with American Photo about the Olympic experience, which can often include 15- to 18-hour workdays and covering four events in a day.
American Photo: What led to your career as a newspaper photographer? How did you end up at "The Nation's Newspaper"?
Robert Hanashiro: To borrow a line from fictional TV anchorman Ted Baxter, "It all started in a 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno, California..."
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and my father Seico Hanashiro ran a small newspaper just outside of Fresno. So some of my earliest memories of my dad involved newspapers and his love for sports. I guess I've always had it in me to be a "newspaper man." I wanted to be a sports writer and went to college with that in mind. But somehow I took a left turn at California State University, Fresno in the '70s and followed one of my best friends Barry Wong into photojournalism. Maybe being a horrible speller had something to do with it -- there was no spell check back then.
As far as becoming a staff photographer at USA Today, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. In 1987 while I was the chief photographer at the Visalia Times-Delta (near Fresno, California), I temporarily worked on the news picture desk at USA Today as part of its loaner program -- other Gannett newspapers "loaned" staffers to USA Today as a part career-building, part staff augmentation thing. I guess I made a good impression on Paul Whyte, USA Today's director of photography at the time and Richard Curtis, the managing editor of the photography and graphics department.
They took me to the Seoul Summer Olympics in '88 and I was offered several positions after that, but they were all on picture desks. In late 1989 they created a new staff photographer position in Los Angeles and I was fortunate enough to be offered the job. So I went from a 20,000 circulation newspaper to a 2 million circulation newspaper! And the rest, as they say, is history.
AP: What type of assignments have you photographed for USA Today? Have you always photographed sports? Do you approach a sporting event or athlete portrait session differently than other assignments?
RH: I cover whatever assignments come up. People think I only shoot sports, but really a majority of my work involves the other sections of the newspaper, particularly the Life section. I cover all of the major entertainment awards shows -- and NO I do not do the paparazzi-thing -- I generally shoot the actual show inside the theater. So basically I've covered every Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and Grammy Awards show since 1990. I can't say the same with the World Series or the NBA Finals.
I do a lot of portrait work and I take a lot of pride in that, especially lighting. Most people don't know that I've covered a couple of international "conflicts" in my career, in Kosovo and Haiti. But most of my work involves the daily assignments in the other three sections of the newspaper as well as a growing number of video stories. But obviously my favorite assignments involve sports and working with athletes.
AP: With only five staff photographers at USA Today, do you find yourself traveling a lot? Are you ever required to cover multiple assignments in several distant cities in the same weekend?
RH: We travel when the need requires it and once in a while we have to move from city to city for assignments. I think the most I was on the road in one year was 169 days, but I haven't been close to that in a while. I think now it's probably around 75 or 80. Olympic years are higher because we'll be gone for the three weeks of the games plus assignments covering Olympic qualifying trials and athlete profiles we ordinarily wouldn't be doing in a "normal" year.
I will say that travel these days takes a lot more patience and fortitude than it did just five or six years ago. Travel by air is tiresome and frustrating most of the time. I've really come to hate air travel, while just a few years ago I used to love to travel.
AP: You're well known in the industry not only for your work as a photographer, but also as the founder of SportsShooter.com. Why did you decide to create an online community for sports photographers? Did you have any help with developing the site? How has the response been from the community over the years?
RH: Sports Shooter started out about 11 years ago as simple emails I sent out to a few friends and colleagues like Bob Deutsch, Brad Mangin, Peter Read Miller, Ron Taniwaki, Jack Gruber, Wally Skalij, Robert Seale and Rod Mar. From there it somehow morphed -- for a lack of a better word -- into a regular newsletter.
The first official Sports Shooter Newsletter went out because I wanted to rant about a new credential policy the NFL had instituted. Those early Sports Shooter emails got passed around, were posted on newspaper photo staff bulletin boards and all of a sudden I started getting messages from photographers wanting to "subscribe." I said to Brad at one time, "Subscribe to what?" But now we're at issue # 111with 7,500 subscribers and hopefully more to come.
The SportsShooter.com website came along six years ago when Brad, Grover Sanschagrin and Jason Burfield decided to develop my concept of a community for sports photographers and photojournalist into a website. They showed me a prototype and we began serious discussion on different features and services. The entire site is custom designed and programmed by Jason and Grover and it keeps getting better and better. If it were not for the genius of Grover and Jason and the dedication of Brad, there would be no SportsShooter.com.
The response to the website was been wonderful. The diversity of photographers that are members is a tribute to that. Where else can you find a photography community like SportsShooter.com that has David Burnett, Vincent Laforet, Peter Read Miller, and Donald Miralle mixing with photographers from small newspapers, newbies and students?
To me the best thing that Sports Shooter has done is given me the opportunity to give a little something back to a profession that has been pretty good to me. It's exciting that we've also been able to take this Sports Shooter concept and develop it into various educational programs like the Sports Shooter Academy and the Sports Shooter Boot Camp. The workshops are where we do a lot of great things with students.
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