July 22, 1922-August 20, 1987
Born in Hamilton in 1922, Richard Clive Saunders is one of the few Bermudian photographers to have earned a truly international reputation—and certainly the only one to have had a U.S. Act of Congress passed on his behalf.
Through his photojournalistic assignments for leading publications such as Fortune, Look, Ebony and Ladies’ Home Journal and the US Information Agency’s African magazine Topic, Saunders won widespread respect for his professionalism and integrity.
He photographed many leading public figures, such as Henry Kissinger, Leonard Bernstein, Malcolm X, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, James Baldwin and singer James Brown. His photographs appeared in Life, the New York Times and Paris-Match and his work is in the collections of The New York Public Library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Bermuda National Gallery.
Saunders was raised on North Shore, Pembroke with his older brother Cyril by his parents Richard and Daisy (Young). His fascination with cameras began as a young boy when he would follow a Mr. Simmons, a black portrait photographer, around Hamilton as he took pictures of tourists. Simmons gave him some old equipment to play with and the young Saunders—who was always known as “Dick”—was hooked. He developed his skills on a school newspaper in New Jersey where his family had moved when Saunders was about eight-years-old.
The family returned to Bermuda after the start of the Second World War. The aspiring Saunders was turned down for a photographer’s position with the Trade Development Board (the forerunner of the Tourism Department), which at the time did not employ blacks. But when David Knudsen, a keen photographer and owner of a photo business on Queen Street heard Saunders’ story he created a position for him in what later became The Camera Store on Reid Street. It marked the real beginning of Saunders’ photographic career and a lifelong friendship with Knudsen, his daughter Betty and son-in-law Crayton Greene, who later ran The Camera Store.
In the early 1940s, Saunders worked in the studios of Hilton Hill on Burnaby Street, learning how to process and develop film and took commercial pictures, mainly weddings and portraits. He also worked briefly as a police photographer.
Saunders wanted to document the social injustices he saw in Bermuda’s segregated society, but although his photos won several prizes in a Government-sponsored exhibition, he was unable to find anyone willing to publish his work. “It was then that I decided I wanted to use my camera to communicate and educate,” he would later tell Black Photographers Annual.
Frustrated, in 1945, he left Bermuda for New York where he married Emily Wilson, who was from Bermuda, on June 29, 1946. About a year later, Saunders photographed her at Whale Bay in a bikini for his first professional job—a commission from the Black Star Agency for the July 1947 cover of Ebony magazine.
Saunders took a photography course at Brooklyn College and also studied humanities and sociology at the New School for Social Research. Between studies he did freelance work with Emily acting as his assistant.
Through freelancing he met Gordon Parks, a Life magazine staff photographer, who would go on to become one of America’s most famous photographers, a civil rights activist and a director of several films, including Shaft.
Parks became a lifelong friend and later acted as his sponsor when Saunders became a U.S. citizen. He helped Saunders to get a job at Lenscraft, the leading photo lab in New York where he was able to study techniques of top photographers who had their work processed there.
Parks also introduced Saunders to his mentor Roy Stryker, a government official, economist and photographer who specialised in managing large documentary photojournalism projects for the Government and major corporations. In 1950, Stryker asked Saunders to join a team of photographers documenting Pittsburgh’s transition from an industrial mill town to a modern city. Saunders spent two years living in the poor, mainly black, Hill District taking more than 4,000 black and white photographs of the community.
His graphic and often gritty work in Pittsburgh established Saunders as a photographer of sensitivity, honesty and integrity, who brought drama and humanity to his pictures, and it earned him a prize in Life’s 1951 Young Photographers Contest.
“A photograph is nothing unless it is seen and conveys something of life to the viewer,” he once said in an interview with the Swiss magazine Camera. “What matters to me are people and their feelings; above all it is the unconquerable dignity of man, of whatever colour, creed or persuasion, that must come through in my photographs.”
Over the next 11 years he worked on assignments for many top publications of the day, including the New York Times, Ebony, Look, Fortune and Ladies’ Home Journal, but turned down the offer of a full-time job on the Times in 1962 because he wanted to focus on photo-essay work rather than daily news photography.
In the 1960, he travelled to Latin America for the Alliance for Progress, an economic development programme sponsored by the U.S. Government through the United States Information Agency (USIA). The assignment led to arguably the defining period of Saunders’ career. In 1967, he was offered a position as international editor at Topic, the USIA’s magazine covering Africa. Saunders was based in Tunisia and later in Washington, D.C.
For the next 19 years he travelled to 48 African countries on more than 60 assignments, developing a deep affinity for Africa—he once said it was “like going home”. On his retirement in 1986, Topic featured a Saunders image on the cover and an insert of 25 of his best pictures.
Saunders died at age 65 in a Washington, D.C. hospital where he was being treated for diabetes in August 1987, shortly before he was to have received the Bermuda Arts Council’s first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award. The award had actually been established through the efforts of Crayton Greene and Bermudian photographer Graeme Outerbridge, who felt that Saunders’ accomplishments and work should properly recognised in Bermuda before his death. In 1993, Outerbridge curated the first major retrospective of Saunders’ work in his own country at the Bermuda National Gallery.
After his death, his widow Emily, Topic staff member Rosalie Targonski and long-time friend and editor Kay Reese led a three-year campaign to make Saunders’ work with the USIA available to the public.
The legislation that established the USIA prohibited the agency from distributing any of its information in the United States. Americans were not even allowed to subscribe to Topic. Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel introduced legislation to have the prohibition waived and in 1991, Congress authorised the waiver and allowed the transfer of the collection to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
Emily subsequently donated much of Saunders’ non-USIA archive to the Center’s Richard Saunders Collection and the permanent collection of the Bermuda National Gallery.
