Bill Bachmann is a man of great stature in many ways. He is among the top advertising photographers in the world, and one of the top five stock photographers in the world. His photos have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, Travel & Leisure and Vogue. To date, he has shot some 900 magazine covers, and has more than 350,000 images with stock photo agencies worldwide. He has visited more than 150 countries on all seven continents, some countries many times. And while his work is known for its many superior qualities, he stands tall in every way as a person, as well.

For starters, at 6’4” Bachmann is an imposing figure, but his gentle nature and way with people enable him to put anyone at ease. Behind the camera, he can blend in with a group anywhere in the world, and has done so many times. His casual style veils a complex man who studied at Oxford, has an MFA and an MBA, and graduate work beyond that. His skills as an artist combined with his business savvy have enabled him to achieve the success he enjoys today. But having traveled so extensively and having experienced the world, he has come to learn that material things aren’t what’s important. By combining and capturing his love of travel and of people in his work, his photography conveys his deep sense of humanity and beauty.

At this stage of his career, Bachmann can step back and create art for art’s sake. This summer he is doing just that, as he releases two new books: Send Me Anywhere, a bright, colorful collection of his world travels; and Images of Woman, a collection of black-and-white nudes. In July, an exhibit of his black-and-white photos will be held at The Gallery at Avalon Island in Orlando.

Exposure                                  

Bill Bachmann is proud of his hometown. A great conversationalist who always has an interesting story to tell, he mentions that Pittsburgh, Pa., is also the home of five of the greatest quarterbacks: Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Joe Montana, Jim Kelley and Dan Marino. And perhaps it was Pittsburgh’s influence as a sports city that led Bachmann to play four sports in high school and two in college. Although he’s built like the defensive end he was, his best sports were baseball and basketball. He broke many batting records, and still holds numerous college rebounding records.

The youngest of three children, his growing up years in the Steel City were as positive and well-balanced as his photos would be. Perhaps the artist in him comes from his mother, Helen, who was a syndicated weekly columnist, much like Irma Bombeck, for 13 regional newspapers. (He has an early memory of going with her to her editor’s office: she carried an Underwood typewriter under one arm, and little Bill in the other.) And so he grew up reading about his family in the local paper—whatever had happened that week in the Bachmann household was fair game for her column.

He inherited her love of writing: he enjoys not only writing his books but creating captions for his photos, all of which he does with care and skill. But most of all, it was Helen who instilled in him the love of photography. She bought him his first camera, a Brownie, when he was four. She encouraged him and let him make mistakes as he took photos of his friends. In fact, he still has pictures of himself at age five with a camera around his neck.

Bachmann has always loved people, and attributes his gentle manner and his humanity to his father, Ernest, a postal supervisor, whose generosity included inviting the homeless to dinner. “He knew if he gave them money, they would just buy alcohol, so we sometimes enjoyed meals in downtown Pittsburgh restaurants with a homeless person joining us at our table,” he recalls. “At least that way we knew the person got nourished.”

His exposure to his parents’ perspectives influenced him deeply. He takes their influence with him as he travels the world. It is who he is, and it has served him well.

Developing                                  
From Brownie snapshots to world-class photography: Bachmann knew early that his career, his life, would be with camera in hand. But he wasn’t sure how. “I didn’t know how to make a living as a photographer,” he says. “But somehow I knew I wanted to shoot pictures.”

“My mother shot for newspapers, but that wasn’t a very high-paying position. I knew Olan Mills [photo studios]-type people, and I knew that I didn’t want to do that.” Even as his mother encouraged his interest in photography, she told him “you always need to have something to fall back on,” he recalls. “Several chapters in my books are about ‘When are you going to get a real job?” Which is why Bachmann got an MBA degree. “With a Masters in business, you can pretty much do anything.”

But back to his early efforts as a photographer: He made his first sale in high school, a photo of the Pittsburgh skyline that he sold to the City of Pittsburgh. He got $50 for it. “They framed it on plastic tables and sold them to tourists.”

Bachmann attended college at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where he majored in computer science and minored in photography. Rochester is the home of Kodak film, and after college he shot ads for Kodak. Still thirsty for knowledge, he headed to England, where he took classes at Oxford and the University of London. The University of London sent him to Eastern Europe for filming all over the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovokia and East Berlin. “I was behind the Iron Curtain for four hard months with lots of scary incidents. I will never forget some of those memories.”  

Back in London, he worked as a stringer for UPI. (A stringer, he explains, “is a person who ‘whenever something happens and photos are needed’ they send out to do the pictures. A freelancer who has regular assignments.”) He also did a good deal of fashion in London, and moved to southern France to do the same thing.

He returned to the U.S. with many magazine credits to jump- start his career here. He worked in New York, sharing studios with several people in Greenwich Village and going to NYU grad school. He then went out to California for grad work at  UC-Berkeley, came back to NYU to finish his MBA, ready to dive full-time into his passion—photography. And his reputation grew.

Balance
Tired of cold weather, Bachmann relocated to Miami, where he could incorporate the Caribbean into his fashion and lifestyle work. He had a busy fashion and travel assignment business in Miami, but he grew tired of the demanding pace of owning a big studio in a hectic city. And while the jobs were bigger, so much of the income was going into overhead and payroll. So he decided to move to somewhere in Florida with a slower pace, where he could build a studio on his own property, scale down to fewer employees, and slow the assignment pace. He looked into Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando and Naples, and settled in Seminole County’s Markham Woods area.

“I fell in love with this area. It reminded me of North Carolina,” he says. “It was close to a big city, but I felt like I was in the country, and I still feel like that here. I can’t imagine a better place to live than here. It’s peaceful. I enjoy the outdoors and the weather. It really is a lifestyle I like.”

Bachmann’s Lake Mary home and studio encompass more than 8,000 sq. ft, including a guest house. It was in this home that Bachmann helped raise his two stepsons, Brandon and Jordan Wilder, who give him a strong sense of pride. (Jordan is at the University of Florida and Brandon works in Orlando, but both still travel with Bill when they can.)

Another source of pride is his studio. “This studio is the type that New York used to have, but no one can afford this facility in New York City today,” he says. “We have a 34’ cyclorama [curved wall] that can accommodate anything I do in print or television production, and our 27’ light box is the largest in the South to light cars and boats. I want to shoot for more local clients, and we sure have the production facility here to do that.”

Accompanying him in the studio is Jeffrey Zipay, who has assisted him for many years, and his studio manager for the past three. Zipay runs the business while Bachmann travels, and shoots some of the commercial jobs in his absence. The other assistant is Alan Knapp, who has been with Bachmann for 11 years and is his number-one assistant when shooting commercial advertising worldwide.

World traveler. World-class photographer. Well-educated. Successful. And yet he says he’s “a very normal person with a very exciting career, but it doesn’t make me any different.”

 

Panorama
In the ’90s Bachmann landed his biggest assignment ever—A World Monument Tour sponsored by Kodak to document 28 of the world’s most famous man-made monuments. The job took him two and a half years. This 72-country shoot took him 214,000 miles (that’s more than eight times around the world) to photograph the major monuments and people on Earth.

Accompanying him on that tour was Luke Potter of Luke Potter Dodge. “Luke is a very wealthy retired man who wanted to assist me. He loves photography more than anything in the world, and he has been a father to me . . . my assistant, my father and my friend. I admire his gift of being able to communicate with people. I wouldn’t have done that trip without him.”

And what a trip it was—although not all smooth sailing and pretty pictures. Bachmann overcame any number of obstacles in those two years, from a ruptured appendix in Singapore (his doctor spoke only three words of English: “I cut you!”), earthquakes in Egypt, a plane crash in Amsterdam, food-poisoning in India, the plane going off the runway into the water in Hong Kong, bombings close-by in England and Spain, and more.

Of course, he returned with outstanding images. And Kodak used him in their magazine ads with the headline, “Bill Bachmann uses Kodak film.”

Perspective
Bachmann has learned that the world may be very large and varied, but people are very much the same. “I’ve encountered problems with language and problems with communication, but basically, people understand each other,” he says. “I have never been rejected in all of my travels—because I’m smiling. If you’re pushy, they’re not going to like you. But if you’re smiling, or drinking with them, or buying something from their shop, or giving them a Polaroid . . .” He believes that people throughout the world have much more in common than they have differences, and that’s what leaders should focus on. “We basically all want the same thing . . . a better life for [our] children, happiness, love, enough to eat, and a good place to live. They want that in a tribe in Africa or a city here in America.”  

While traveling through India on the Kodak tour, Bachmann and Potter went to a place near the Ganges River where 250,000 people were living in a horrific slum area. “We walked in and it looked like one of those old videos where they switch from color to black and white—except this wasn’t black and white, it was brownish-grey and white. The only color there was my yellow shirt and [Potter’s]  purple shirt. I didn’t shoot any pictures there.” He met Mother Theresa in Calcutta and was impressed with her spirit. “I wouldn’t take pictures of the people in her hospital because the patients there were so ill, so fragile.” India is beautiful, he says, but “[it] just knocks you out with problems. There are a billion people in a place one-third the size of the United States . . . just people on top of people. It affects you. It affected me.”

He always looks forward to discovering new places and the people, even in places he’s been to. He knows he’ll meet people who are rich, poor and in between, but it doesn’t matter. “[Having] the camera eliminates a lot of class [distinction]. It’s hard to describe, but I don’t think they notice what you’re wearing, or how much money you have. I meld into the background and become an observer,” he says. “I’m more shy when I’m alone than I am when I’m with a group,” he adds. Sometimes “I wish I weren’t so tall when trying to blend into a crowd.”  

“I appreciate what we have in this country, but I don’t live for it. I live for my trips and meeting new people and new experiences. I hope I can do it for as long as possible. I’m sure I    will need more assistants to carry my bags as I get older, but I’ll still want to climb that mountain to see something that I haven’t seen.”

In stock
Clearly, Bill Bachmann is a successful photographer on every front. “You need a certain amount of money in your life. We all strive for that,” he reflects, but “after that, I don’t think money is a motivating factor. I don’t think that it has been for me for a long time.” With his pick of jobs, he says he’ll “almost always” take the one that’s more interesting over the one that’s more lucrative.

And then there’s stock photography—agencies that charge royalties for the use and re-use of the photographs in their     collections. Bachmann now has more than 350,000 photos listed with stock-image representatives worldwide, and receives royalty checks from these stock reps whether he’s working or not. “I’ve felt freed by my stock photography. I’ll take a job in Siberia because I know I’ll make money on the back end from stock sales.” Japan, France, United States, Germany and England are all big markets for his work. “When I visit these countries, I have dinner with my rep. I’ve made a lot of money for them, and they for me.”

But while some of his travel shots are timeless, he can’t count on them selling: for example, after 9/11, a shot in Egypt that once did very well stopped selling, because people stopped traveling to Muslim countries in the Mid-East. But his photos of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon then did well. He thinks about those things and plans ahead when he chooses locales—he’s been shooting in China now because the world will be interested when the Olympics are there in 2008. He did the same thing in Australia in 2000 and Greece in 2004.

When he has time, Bill lectures for both Kodak and Fuji, and uses both companies’ film. When he’s shooting for a catalog, he uses Kodak because the colors are truer. When he shoots travel photos, he uses Fuji Velvia because the colors are warmer and more saturated, a look his photos are known for. Of course, he now shoots some of his work digitally.  

Flash
Bachmann has photographed his share of stars and celebs, of course. Who’s the biggest celebrity he ever shot? “Shaquille O’Neal,” he answers coyly. “Muhammad Ali was the most animated. I liked Charleton Heston, too. He was so wonderful. He wanted to carry bags. I kept telling him, ‘Moses, no! Let us do it.’” Arnold Palmer was another favorite (and hails from Latrobe, Pa., where Bachmann’s mother was born). “A real people person,” he says. And when The Backstreet Boys were at a photo shoot in his Lake Mary studio, he taught them a song from the 70’s, Cover of the Rolling Stone. A fun time was had by all.

“Celebrities have the same insecurities we all have. The problem is their PR people. Their advance people will say the star only has five minutes, he’s in a hurry “and the celebrity ends up talking to me for an hour.” How to shoot a celeb? Never act like a fan. And the CEO “with five minutes who hates photographers”? Ask “Where are you from?” says Bachmann: “He’ll go, ‘Toledo,’ and I’ll say, ‘Do you know Paco’s there by the water?’ Then he’ll talk for an hour [and] I’ll hear him saying on the way out, ‘He’s the best photographer!’ or ‘Great pictures!’—and he hasn’t even seen the pictures yet. I haven’t met anyone who has mentioned a place that I don’t know something about. Then I let them talk about themselves, because that’s what people like to do anyway.”

And he’s stayed friends with hundreds of people he met while taking their photos. “It’s more than just a piece of film” he says. “When you take a picture of someone, you have captured a moment that’s never going to happen again. Tomorrow will be a different moment.”

Reload
Even with a successful career going strong, Bachmann’s new work, a book of black-and-white photos entitled Images of Woman, has rejuvenated him. “I love painting and I love art? I just don’t seem to have a talent for it. It’s not like I draw stick figures, but black-and-white photography goes back to my roots,” he says with excitement.

“In this digital world, no on ever asks for black-and-white any more. But with these B&W nudes . . . I’m looking for      textures, I’m looking for lighting, I’m looking for things that you don’t notice in color, because color always wins. It blows away texture. You have to be a better photographer in black and white,” he says. He has been working on this book for   several years. “I am so proud of it. The writing’s pretty good, but it’s taking me back to the pure art. I won’t make money from this book, but it is something I’m really proud of. It’s something I would have shared with my mother.”

In discussing his book Send Me Anywhere, Bachmann says flat out, “It’s probably the boldest color book I have ever seen. I’ve never seen a book like it, “it’s page after page of full-page bright color bleeds . . . You don’t even get a word of copy until page 29.” The book consists of isolated images, one per country, that he says “will touch people. [They’re] the best pictures I’ve ever shot, from all over the world . . . It’s a smorgasbord of color that is almost overpowering.”

F-stops
Bachmann’s advice: “Shoot what you love.” What he loves are people and places. Once a year, he takes a group of 25 people who love travel and/or photography on a trip to an exciting place he knows well. This September, the destination is China.

“Everyone should stand on the Great Wall once in their lifetime,” he says. “Usually photos of The Great Wall have people on it, but I know a place on it that nobody else knows.” The attraction of this part of China is its natural beauty and steep mountains, and the region’s great art. Plus the food is wonderful, Bachmann knows people there, and he can’t wait to go back.  He takes groups to locales he knows and loves best, and they have a great time wherever they go. “In 2006 I plan on taking the group to Cuba. I may also do Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.”

And he loves to look at other people’s work, including the photos his travel groups take. “Everyone brings their own perspective to photography,” he says. “After the trip we have a reunion and show our slides. Sometimes you wonder, What is that? Where was that? We’re all in the same spot, but people see things differently.”

Among  the well-known  professional  photographers Bachmann knows and admires are Peter Turner and Eric Meola, both masters of color. He likes Annie Liebowitz, as well: “I admire many of her ideas. And there’s a Japanese photographer named Hiro who blows me away. He does jewelry ads and puts a spider on jewelry, and it’s striking. He makes me say, ‘I wish I had done that.’ I hope some people look at my pictures and say that, too.”

Legacy
But for Bill Bachmann, it’s about much more than just getting the great shot, the money shot. “I just hope that my photography touches people, with the show I’m doing and the books I’m doing. You don’t make money from books, but you hope to leave a legacy. We’re on this world for a short time—our goal is to make it better. When you leave books behind, it does make a difference.” For Bill Bachmann, that difference is the positive impact he makes on the human spirit with his art.                 S

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