Introduction

Chauncey Hare

in: Chauncey Hare/Steven Kasher: Protest Photographs. SteidlKasher 2009: Göttingen.

I was employed as an engineer for twenty-nine years, but not by choice, because choice wasn’t
involved in becoming or remaining one. Long before starting my first year of college I had acquired
from my parents a fearful impression: work was a hardship to be endured, and there was no better,
safer way to make an income than to become an engineer. That I would become an engineer was
both expected and unspoken by my father, who was himself an engineer.
A month after I received my engineering degree from Columbia, my first wife Gertrude and I
married in Niagara Falls, New York, near where we both lived. Because engineering jobs were easy to
come by in 1956, I received six offers and accepted the one from the Standard Oil Company of
California (now Chevron). We moved from Niagara Falls to Berkeley after a three-month honeymoon
spent in Austria visiting Gertrude’s grandparents. Six years later we had our own home in North
Berkeley. I hired a carpenter to build a small darkroom in the basement and a cabinet-maker to
assemble a horizontal enlarger of my own design.
One afternoon Gertrude and I were driving down the hill in our new tan-colored, four-door
1962 Rambler American toward the Berkeley Coop to buy the week’s groceries. I said, in an
expansive and hopeful way that was unusual for me, “I have the feeling I am going to do something
important in my life, but I don’t know what it is.” This essay is about how that prediction came true.

In March 1968 I was walking in Point Richmond, California during a noon-hour break from my
engineering job at Chevron Research, adjacent to the Chevron refinery. I met for the first time Orville
W. England. A short, stocky man wearing a blue-and-white-striped railroad engineer’s cap, he stood
on the sidewalk in front of his house at 224 Santa Fe Avenue. He held out a black plastic camera and
asked, “Would you like to buy this?” Of course he couldn’t know—could he?—that I carried a Leica
camera beneath my jacket. I spent most of my free time away from Chevron taking and making
pictures on weekends. I developed film and made prints from negatives most evenings.
I intuited Orville’s offer to sell me his camera was a synchronistic event rather than a
coincidence. I regarded the offer to be an omen to guide me on my journey. I was reminded of fairy
tale gnomes who ask questions that may determine your fate. I thought that if I didn’t pay attention
to the query I might miss an opportunity—or worse. I immediately suggested we enter his home.
My noontime ritual of scouring the neighborhood for good pictures was relief from the tedium
of the engineering job. During these walks I sometimes stopped to talk to residents, many of whom
had once worked in the refinery. Some were candid about their dislike for Chevron; others were
more guarded in their assessments. Like Orville, some guessed I was on noontime break and created
an opportunity to chat.
While we sat in his kitchen at noontime that first day, Orville said he was a disabled former
stage rigger’s helper in the refinery. It was a job that required him to work full-time on refinery
equipment that was being shutdown for repair. He told a story that he had had an accident [11] while
dismantling high pressure piping at Chevron’s Ammonia Plant in the Chemical Division. Because
ammonia is a toxic gas, he said his lungs had been burned and he had trouble breathing. I learned
later that he was unaware of his real condition up to the time he died. The “accident” was a story—
called a “screen memory”—Orville had unconsciously created. The story explained the pain in his
lungs and his difficulty breathing. His condition was actually caused by inhaling asbestos “snow” that
was everywhere in the air during refinery shutdowns. Chevron never revealed to him that asbestoses
was the true nature of his illness.
With his permission, I returned the next day with my Burke and James 5 X 7 view camera and
made a photo of Orville in his kitchen (see photo on page 29). This personally transformative
photograph appears on the cover of Interior America; it was the first photo in the series mainly of
working class people and their homes. Later I made photographic studies of workers on their way to
work and while at work. These included photographs of Bay Area Rapid Transit riders, and workers at
Chevron, the Social Security Administration, and in Silicon Valley. These studies were funded by my
savings and in part by three Guggenheim and three National Endowment grants. The photo studies
of working people included in this book are only a fraction of the studies I made before I stopped
making photographs. As explained later in this essay, I quit photography shortly after I returned to
making a living as a working person.

From 1962 when I began making pictures in a committed way to 1966, I photographed landscapes
that were exhibited in local museums. Then in 1967 I spent six months in Mississippi on assignment
for Chevron. The civil rights movement was active in the South. In my spare moments—I worked the
swing shift leaving the days free—I photographed people in Pascagoula, Biloxi and smaller towns in
southern Mississippi. That change—from photographing landscapes to photographing people—
prepared me for the momentous meeting with Orville.
Although I was thirty-four at the time I met Orville and had lived mostly a mainstream life as an
engineer, the protest movements of the 1960s in Berkeley and in the South influenced my direction
forward. The road that I was on with my photography since meeting Orville, harmonized with
people’s desire for humanity and justice that I saw in the various protest movements.
Shortly after meeting Orville, I sat at my kitchen table in my home in North Berkeley viewing
the photo I had made of him. It was unlike any photos I had made up to that time. I felt I was onto
something new and important. Using the vision that allowed me to make that first powerful portrait,
I immediately began photographing interiors of peoples’ homes in Oakland and in towns in the Sierra
foothills. I worked furiously during evenings and weekends from March to October of 1968. By then I
had enough good photos to apply for my first Guggenheim grant, which was awarded to me the
following April. I was allowed leave from Chevron for a year. I set out to photograph working people
in their homes all over California. [12]
Viewing that first picture of Orville connected with something deep inside me that I didn't
identify at first. By 1970, I had completed my first Guggenheim fellowship, and the first photos from
the “Interior America” series were exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. When the
interior photos were on display, I began to see that they were visibly related to early memories of my
grandparents in their two homes. The first was in Monessen up the hill from Pittsburgh Steel, where
my grandfather lost the use of a leg. The second was in the country where my grandfather retired
with my grandmother in what’s called “Lambs Lick Hollow” on the topographic map of Fayette
County, Pennsylvania. A picture taken in the 1940s outside their home on third street in Monessen
looking toward the steel mill is the frontispiece to Henry Miller’s book, Air Conditioned Nightmare.
When I made photographs of interiors, I included many small details that I discovered added a
special interest to the pictures. For example, the photograph of Orville in his kitchen shows a stove, a
water heater, exhaust piping from the stove and water heater, a can of Maxwell House Coffee, a
clock, and above Orville’s head, a winter scene. Recognizing the importance of including small details
in my photos came from recalling the importance of the specifics of scenes I experienced during
summer visits to my grandparents. One such memory was of my grandparents in their Monessen
home in 1940. My grandmother was cooking at a stove not unlike Orville’s. Laundry drying on a
clothesline was visible through the window. My grandfather, sitting at a large Mission style table
where all meals were served, was drinking from a saucer in which he had poured coffee from his cup.
My grandmother allowed me to drink from my saucer imitating my grand-father, but I was given hot
Postum rather than coffee to drink.
In 1952 when I was 18, my summer visits stopped when my grand-mother Chauncea died. Her
death leaves me with a further detailed and important memory. She was buried next to the Little
Redstone Church that the current topographic map says can be reached only by trail, no longer by
the road I had walked many times during the summers of the 1940s. During my last visit to the area
in 1972, both my grandmother’s and my grandfather’s gravestones were overgrown by grass and
weeds.
The summer visits to my grandparents gave me more than memories and detailed images that
influenced the photos in Interior America. These visits helped me to identify strongly with working
people and their families. I have on my book shelf above my counseling chair a photo made during a
summer visit in 1937. In the photo are four male members who represent four generations of the
Hare family. Three of these were hard working people. The first is my great grandfather who was a
blacksmith in what was near the end of a bartering community in Lambs Lick Hollow. The second and
third are my grandfather and father who were steel workers. My father later became the first in the
family to go to college. He became a mechanical engineer and began working for Dupont in 1929. I
am the fourth person in the photo, three-years-old, held in my father’s arms.
A lasting impression of the summer visits was the economic difference between the way my
grandparents lived and the way my family lived in our home on 87th street in Niagara Falls, New
York. My dad [13] seemed to have “made it” in an upwardly mobile way, but at the expense of
separating me and our family from my grandparents. I remember my dad saying to me mostly at
times when he was not quite sober, “Don’t do it the way I did it, Chauncey,” without further
explanation. I failed to ask him to clarify his statement because I knew he couldn’t or wouldn’t. My
dad and my dad’s Irish family weren’t “talkers” when it came to family subjects. One of many ways I
interpreted this warning was that my father did not want me to leave him the way he had left his
parents. He did not want to lose the connection with me that happened between him and his
parents when he finished college at Penn State and took the job with Dupont in Niagara Falls.
These memories and images from childhood visits to my grandparents in Pennsylvania may
seem to the reader scattered and unrelated. However, they formed the template through which I
viewed the workers’ homes I photographed, beginning with the photograph of Orville in his kitchen.
Recalling these memories while photographing brought an aesthetic consistency to all my photos,
not just the interiors. Because I believed in the high quality of these interior photographs, I applied
for, and was awarded, a second Guggenheim in 1971. This second year away from Chevron gave me
the opportunity to photograph my roots in the Ohio Valley—the place where I had accumulated the
early images that influenced the way I made pictures. Chevron allowed me a second leave, just as
they had allowed me the first, with assurance that I could safely return to my job without loss of
income.
 ★

When I made photographs in California, the Ohio Valley and places in between, I explored
neighborhoods and chose by intuition the homes in which I hoped to photograph. Often, I would
start by informing the police of the purpose of my visit to town so as not to take anyone by surprise. I
carried with me letters of introduction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Smithsonian, and
governors of the State where I was photographing.
I was surprised how often I was allowed entry. On some not so rare but inexplicable occasions,
people even said they were expecting me. The net result of such easy entry seemed to say that for
most people I represented an authority figure they had too easily learned to fear and could not say
no to. Easy entry meant I had a responsibility to honor what I saw and photographed—especially
when I used a wide angle lens that took in more than what people thought I was photographing.
I drove and lived in a used, white 1964 Econoline van—my home away from home—equipped
with a table that collapsed into a bed, a catalytic heater that burned butane, and a horn to scare
away intruders who might try to enter the van at night. The van also served as my library or
meditation room. When it was late evening or raining, people would naturally be reluctant to allow
me to carry my equipment into their homes to photograph. Then I had plenty of time to sit at my
van’s table and meditate on what I had seen during the day or week. This helped me plan what my
approach should be when taking my next photographs. Just as importantly, I would review what this
rare experience of viewing America’s interior meant for my life.
Each morning in the van, I awoke in fear or terror as I had each [14] morning of my life. Not
knowing otherwise at the time, I never questioned the unrelenting panic feeling as I thought
everyone felt this way most mornings. When fully awake, I would focus on my project; when I
entered this creative place in my mind, the fear would diminish but not entirely dissipate. Knowing I
had a job with income when I returned to Chevron also helped ease fears. I have seen clearly through
recent life review that being obsessed with photography, thinking about it all the time, helped mask
my life-long fear. In the past, being obsessed with other projects like fishing, mountaineering, or
writing texts for books like this one, has done the same.
One positive note: I no longer experienced nausea when I embarked on my new life as a
documentary photographer. For four years previous to taking photographs full-time, I had felt
nausea at my Chevron job that doctors in the 1960s couldn’t diagnose. I was so nauseous I could not
watch television dramas in the evenings. The queasiness would stop only on weekends or vacations
when I could forget work and resume photography.
There would seem to be nothing more anxiety provoking than living alone in a truck hundreds
of miles from home making “cold calls,” knocking on doors asking to be allowed to photograph inside
someone’s house. And yet that is exactly what I was doing with seemingly less fear than driving to my
nominally secure job at Chevron each morning. The answer that came to me as I sat at the table in
my van was, it’s necessary to live a life with a sense of purpose that drives you from inside and
unfolds according to the path you are meant to follow in your journey through life. The purpose in
my life that photography gave me provided a remedy for my nausea that doctors could not offer me.
Although I was not yet fully conscious of both my fear pattern and self-defeating defenses against it,
working at Chevron was not my path and the security I believed was there was not. Chevron had
contributed to my ill health.
I also realized that my thirteen years at Chevron before I left on the first Guggenheim had kept
me from experiencing the world and learning about myself, including my fear and its sources. Except
for the visits to my grandparents, attending Columbia University after a year at the Virginia Military
Institute (VMI), and working at Chevron, I had lived an insulated life.
In the homes where I photographed, I saw that most people worked harder and made less
money than I made at Chevron. Some were abused by authoritarian bosses without recourse except
to change jobs. Their mistreatment by bosses or landlords brought out my anger and rage. I saw
injustices that I wasn’t equipped to deal with. Many if not most people I photographed lived joyless
lives without spirit, dis-connected from a sense of personal meaning that I had learned was necessary
for health in my own life.
I felt extraordinarily privileged to be funded to make this extended journey of discovery into
the homes of Americans. It was truly a miracle to receive so many grants that freed me to follow the
signals that came from inside, to make photographs, and identify new learnings as they happened. It
was a process in which my understanding of what I was called on to do evolved as I went forward. I
became aware of a growing obligation to honor the reality of each person and their home [15] as I
photographed. I found that carrying this sense of respect within me, and allowing it to grow, resulted
in better pictures, and pictures that complemented each other to heighten their meaning. It was as
though feeling honor and respect was what I could count on in order to continue to make archetypal
pictures. That’s the way I now see all my photos—archetypal images of America.
From the beginning, I knew that to receive photo grants I was expected to present my
photographs in a formal art way without accompanying text and to allow each of my photos to be
used as a work of art that stands alone. This meant that each photograph would stand without the
accompaniment of other related photographs that would help establish the meaning of the
photographs and my motivation in making them. This formal art process dehumanized the
photographs by turning them into purely aesthetic objects. It allowed and valued only that reality
attributed and defined by the viewer. Seeing the reality of the people in the photographs is
secondary if not non-existent. Making pictures to be displayed according to formal art criteria
became a dilemma as I came to identify with and respect the people and their homes that I
photographed.
I felt that because I had received so many grants to make these pictures—a mystery that
baffles me to this day—it was a spiritual message that meant I had a special ethical responsibility to
make sure the photos did not become art objects separated from their true meaning. This included
not offering photographs for sale. Selling the interior photos seemed to me like allowing pictures of
my family to be hung on someone else’s wall.
The dilemma was driven home to me in 1977 when the Interior America photos were shown at
the New York Museum of Modern Art (NYMOMA) after I had printed the Ohio Valley photographs. I
was not invited or even allowed to communicate to viewers of the show my motivation for making
the photos and my high regard and concern for the people who allowed me to photograph their
homes. A review in the New York Times criticized the show for the discrepancy between my photos
and NYMOMA’s opulence. The reviewer later came to the San Francisco Bay Area and visited me in
my attic room at Orville’s. When he saw where I lived, and heard I had been denied an explanatory
wall text to accompany the NYMOMA exhibit, he apologized for his unfavorable review.
I was somewhat more successful in breaking through the art world’s rule of suppression when
Aperture published Interior America. With the help of Carole Kismaric who produced the book and
Marvin Israel who selected and sequenced the photos, I was allowed a first person text that told in a
literary way a brief history of my life and a story of how the pictures were made. I asked for only one
change in Marvin’s selection of pictures. I wanted to include in the book the photo titled West
Chester, Pennsylvania, 1971 (see photo on page 367 photo is on page 153 of Interior America) of the
exhausted young worker, bare-footed and sprawled out, asleep on a chair in front of his formal high
school portrait. [16]

When I returned to work five days a week at Chevron after two one- year leaves of absence for each
of the two Guggenheim fellowships, I knew intuitively but not entirely consciously, I had to turn
Chevron into a “project.” If I did not exert some of my own personal power at Chevron as I had done
while making photographs on the fellowships, the nausea I had felt before at Chevron would return.
Fortunately and for no reason I could see other than the prestige of the fellowships, I was
ranked in the upper quintile of engineers at Chevron Research and promoted. I now led a small group
of research technicians in search of better ways for Chevron to clean up refinery air and water
effluents.
The project I made out of this opportunity was to create a friendly, collaborative work group
within Chevron that was basically a top- down, interpersonally competitive work system. Our group
was successful in two ways. I gave up authoritarian control and encouraged collaboration to replace
competition. The group came up with novel but practical approaches for improving refinery water
quality.
Coincident with my return to work was the oil embargo of the early 1970s that brought public
criticism of Standard Oil of California (Chevron). Employees were called on to counter the criticism by
writing letters to local newspapers, speaking before neighborhood groups, or spreading a good word
about Standard Oil wherever or whenever an occasion arose.
Informal Save Standard Oil groups formed to take on these tasks. I volunteered to head the
group from California Research (Chevron Research). As crazed as it may seem, I saw this as an
opportunity for empowering employees and democratizing—or at least reducing the interpersonal
competition—in the company. Being a leader in this endeavor brought me to the attention of top
management—specifically the public relations department. I made suggestions for improvement of
corporate communications to employees; I was surprised when some of the suggestions were used.
I was fortunate in staving off nausea by taking initiative within Chevron, but I had not given up
on photography as a possible, eventual career goal. Becoming a teacher of photography was a vision
for the future I carried with me when I returned to work at Chevron.
I applied for a third Guggenheim—even though three Guggenheims are rarely awarded—to
photograph working people in their work environments and riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit
(BART). I had a wild hope that I could include in my study photography and audio-taping of Chevron
employees. Miraculously, I received the third fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as
permission to photograph at Chevron. Undoubtedly, Corporate officials allowed me to photograph
and tape fellow employees because of the prestige of three Guggenheims and my leadership in the
Save Standard Oil effort.
While preparing the Guggenheim application request for the third fellowship, and the request
to be allowed to photograph at Chevron, I reviewed my options. I had decided I would leave Chevron
immediately if one or the other of my requests were refused. If my two requests were honored, I
would leave after I had completed several months of audio-taping and photography at Chevron.
Whatever the outcome, my plan was to attempt to become a photography teacher beginning by [17]
earning a Master of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. I took the fellowship and the
permission to photograph Chevron people as a synchronistic omen to go forward with the new
project.
 As planned, I completed the photographic study of Chevron including making audio tapes of
Chevron employees. I transcribed the tapes and presented a copy of the transcriptions to the public
relations department.
Refinery operators that I had taped said that cutbacks in the number of operators at each
refinery unit made the refinery unsafe. Others both at Chevron Research and the Chevron Refinery
commented on the discrepancy between the competitive nature of the work and the appearance of
friendliness among fellow workers. The tapes revealed that truths were not spoken aloud in the
company. The public relations department was not happy with what the tapes laid bare and
withdrew permission for me to continue the study that I felt I had already completed. Later, a
member of the department came to Orville’s home and reviewed and approved the photographs I
had made.
The tapes confirmed for me that I did not want to remain at Chevron where people worked
together but without being real with each other. It was a long held and unconscious rule (norm) of
the work culture to hold back feelings. This rule meant that people were not entirely honest in their
day-to-day interactions with each other. I was angered by what I found, but the anger helped cover
the deep fear and anxiety I felt about leaving a structured job with a substantial income, when I
finally left Chevron after twenty-one years of protected employment.
With this great anxiety only partially covered by anger, I embarked on my plan to become a
photography teacher; I began my M.F.A. studies at the Art Institute as the first step in that direction.
At the same time, I continued to photograph BART riders, and people at work in the Social Security
Administration in order to complete the third Guggenheim.
Nine years after my first meeting with Orville, my life had come full circle. My response to his
fateful “do you want to buy a camera" question had indeed become a major life-changing event for
me and my family. I left my engineering job at Chevron in 1977, after twenty-one years. My wife
Gertrude and I, married in 1956, agreed to divorce in 1975. She remarried soon after. She had
wanted a child and I had not, so she agreed to raise our ten-year-old son Victor. She kept our house.
She knew I was going off on a journey where I would not have a reliable income like the one I had
earned at Chevron.
I moved into an apartment in Point Richmond near Orville, and then into an attic room in
Orville’s house where I lived for the next seven years. I took care of Orville and his wife Helen as a
home health aide until Orville died in 1984.

As a child growing up in the thirties and forties I failed to bond with my mother who was mentally ill
and had extreme fears that were passed on to me and my brother, eight years younger. We both
were denied the love and support we needed to feel a basic sense of well-being and safety, that we
deserved to be alive. I am not sure of the [18] source of my mother’s illness; however, I suspect it was
child abuse. My grandmother, before she died when I was seven, was often quite violent toward my
mother. The violence caused me to have night terrors that I still remember. There likely was a genetic
component to my mother’s anxiety that was passed on to me and my brother.
I know little about my mother's family; she never talked about it. Her father worked in the
Shredded Wheat factory in Niagara Falls, New York, until he died at 46. The very few times we made
family visits to her cousins are shadowy and disconnected in my memory. Her past and her childhood
remain a mystery to me, inaccessible as she was. This explains why my father, and our summer visits
to his family, were where I found my early sources of meaning.
 What caring support my brother and I did get came mainly from my father who had become a
rising star in the Dupont Company. From 1943 to 1945 he took the family to Hanford, Washington,
where he was assigned temporarily to work on the government’s uranium enrichment project as
chief engineer. When he returned to Dupont in the late 1940s, he was groomed soon to become
manager of the Electrochemicals plant at Niagara Falls.
As the oldest sibling, my father idealized me and, without caring input from my mother, gave
me the only message he could. The word was, I had to be self-sufficient, and handle on my own
whatever came my way in life. My father sent me to military boarding school from age 12 to 17,
when I entered the first year of college at VMI.
Being sent away amounted to abandonment during my teen years. Totally alone, I learned to
numb out, keep a low profile, and use brain power and strategic thinking, as protective behaviors in
what I experienced to be a heartless world. I used sudden anger to cover my fear when numbing
could not contain it. I did not and could not form friendships with schoolmates because I felt I was
not competent to fulfill obligations that having friends would create. Inside, I felt I could barely take
care of myself.
The defenses worked for me. I was among the top ten in my class at VMI and had fewer
demerits than anyone in the school of more than a thousand students. I continued to use these
defenses at Columbia, where I had transferred when I completed the first year at VMI. My upbringing
made me a good corporate employee at Chevron, where structure and income were assured, and
intimate contact was incompatible with omnipresent competition.
I thought my extreme fear and my defenses were normal; that every-one felt this way. I had no
idea others were free of this burden, nor could I imagine what that would be like, when I didn’t even
know it existed. So I had no idea how much my fear crippled me from having normal relationships.
I could not sustain intimacy, certainly not with Gertrude or my son Victor. When I left them to
pursue photography, I abandoned them as I had been abandoned as a child. I was blind to how these
same rigid defenses against anxiety, especially being unable to make friends, would become a
handicap when I left Chevron and attempted to side a living on my own. Like many people, I was
unable to change defenses that I was unaware of.
In 1979, two years after I left Chevron, I received my M.PA. from [19] the San Francisco Art
Institute. I was ten or more years older than most students. Many saw me as “having made it,”
because Interior America had been published accompanied by a one person show at NYMOMA. I
formed tentative friendships with students. However, I was disappointed that most were at the
Institute to define themselves the only way the Institute could — by helping them to become artists
who sold works of art in downtown galleries. I found I had a serious values conflict with people in the
Photography Department at the Institute and the photo art world generally.
My values are at odds with how most photographers view their work. As I photographed the
interiors of working people’s homes, I felt an evolving sense of mission to represent the truth of their
lives as best I could. I became increasingly identified with the people I photographed. The photos
became social as well as artistic statements and their artistic mastery served to make the social
statement powerful and clear. For me, each was a record of a promise I had taken on: I would not
misuse the trust people had extended to me by allowing me to photograph them. To sell their
photographs in a gallery marketplace would be to devalue them. It would have felt like selling the
people. For this reason, I do not now see myself as a “photographer,” but as a working person who
has made photographs for a short period of his life.
Failure to form firm and lasting friendships with staff people was a mistake that caused me to
lose a possible teaching position at the Institute. Instead of forming friendships, I saw staff as
competitors, just as I had viewed other engineers at Chevron. I felt disappointed in my time at the
Institute and frightened about whether I could get a teaching job. These feelings fueled my defensive
anger, without my realizing it at the time.
During my last year at the Institute, 1979, I picketed NYMOMA’s circulating exhibit Mirrors and
Windows, to protest the sponsorship of the show by the manufacturer of Phillip Morris cigarettes.
The picketing was witnessed by staff from every photography department in the Bay Area. By
picketing the show, I sabotaged myself; I was unable to secure a teaching position at any
photography department in the Area. I’m sure that my anger was not the only reason for not being
offered a teaching position. I was a middle-aged male, and at the time, young women were given
teaching opportunities they had not been given before.
I was given a chance to teach one successful summer class, Photography and Spirituality, for
the Art Institute. The class was repeated at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley. I also gave a favorable
five day Artists’ journey workshop in Rochester, New York, for ten photographers who were
interested in my work. These successful classes and workshop demonstrated my likely ability as a
photo teacher.
However, failure to make it as a photo teacher meant I had to fall back on my experience as a
chemical engineer with a specialty in environmental cleanup. I took a job with the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) in San Francisco and was able to make it a part-time job. This left me time to
finish my photography of Silicon Valley workplaces. I was also able to self-publish the book This Was
Corporate America with funding from the National Endowment [20] administered by the Institute for
Contemporary Art in Boston. The photos from the book were shown in Boston and at the University
of California Art Museum in Berkeley. I conducted a one day Artist Journey workshop that was well-
received in conjunction with the show in Berkeley.
Shortly after joining the EPA, I met my second wife and partner Judy Wyatt when I answered
her ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper. Judy is a talented psychotherapist, poet,
dancer, writer and activist. She has a life-long interest in how individuals and the organizations they
are associated with interact. Our values were a perfect match; we both identified strongly with
working people and questioned art world values. Judy helped me clarify my thoughts for the text to
This Was Corporate America and wrote the afterword for the book.
In my job with the EPA I, along with two coworkers, brought collaboration to the Air Division of
the agency. This was a larger repeat of the collaboration I had brought to a small group of
researchers at Chevron before I left. After meeting Judy and introducing successful collaboration in
the Air Division, my new interest in the psychology of organizations and individuals increased while
my interest in photography waned. My involvement in organizations had grown to the point that I
joined the Pepperdine external degree program in organization development in 1983, to learn what I
did not yet know about organization dynamics.
My masters thesis for the Pepperdine program was a study of the morale of employees at the
San Francisco office of the EPA. With Judy’s help, using questionnaires and statistical methods of
evaluation, I learned that more than half of the employees experienced low morale. By coincidence,
management of EPA in Washington became concerned about employee morale at the same time I
made my study. They called upon William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of EPA, to correct the
problem if any. Ruckelshaus hired professional organization specialists to evaluate each of the
regional EPA offices in the country.
Timing of the professional consultants’ study of the San Francisco Office exactly paralleled my
own. However the results did not. The professional consultants upon completion of their study
reported the morale in the local office to be very good. This result contradicted my own. In order to
make my thesis complete, I spoke to one of the consultants and reported that my study showed low
morale in the office. The consultant said to me, “The morale is low here, but what good will it do to
say so? Nothing will come of it; no improvements will be made at the EPA.”
I reported this controversial conversation in my masters thesis. I received my Masters in
Organization Development in 1986. I was taken aback when I received an inquiry from the
Pepperdine library ten years after I received my degree. I was asked if it was alright to take my thesis
out of the locked cabinet where, to all appearances, it had been hidden without my knowledge. [21]

Suddenly one morning in March of 1987, I was called into an Air Division Branch Chiefs office and told
to remove all my belongings from my cubicle and not to report back to work the following day. I had
been fired.
The charge was that I had undermined the authority of the agency. I had done this first by my
masters thesis that brought employee low morale to people’s attention. Secondly, I undermined the
authoritarian hierarchy by my activities to bring collaborative rather than top-down management to
the Air Division. My Pepperdine organizational development studies had been paid for by the
National Endowment. However, EPA management in San Francisco did not want me to apply what I
learned at Pepperdine (by way of government funding) to improve employee morale by bringing
collaboration to a government office.
The exhibit at the University of California Art Museum and the book This Was Corporate
America that accompanied the 1985 show, certainly contributed to the firing. In the book I had
revealed some of my negative experiences working at the EPA. The results of my Pepperdine thesis
study were published in the Organization Development Journal, and the successful change from top-
down control to collaboration in the Air Division was published in Western Cities magazine. Having
this information published while I was still employed at EPA was another probable reason for sudden
termination.
I was thrown into shock, depression, and my latent anxiety was aroused. I have unhealed post-
traumatic stress symptoms from that day which become more active as I grow older. Twenty years
later, it is I had learned at Pepperdine, and by my experience with the professional consultants at the
EPA, that I had a basic values conflict with members of the organization development profession.
Based on my organization studies and hard experience at EPA, most organizations are authoritarian.
Organization consultants are hired to find new ways to make sure power remains with top
management, not to discover novel ways to share power with employees. The values conflict I have
with the organization development profession is that I want power in the organization to be shared
with employees.
Though it was too short a period for me to recover from the shock of the sudden firing, fear of
no pay check drove me to begin my next step on my journey. With Judy’s help I felt I had no choice
but to become a licensed family therapist. As a therapist I would have the opportunity to help
working people and their families — these are the people who are shown in the photographs in this
book and with whom I am most comfortable.
With my background in organization studies and employment in both private and
governmental organizations, I would be able to provide unique assistance to those who had work
problems. I began to envision myself as an employee advocate and used this theme as my thesis
project for a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology. This degree was required for me to acquire a
license to conduct family therapy practice in California. In less than a year’s time I completed the
thesis and other requirements to receive my M.A. degree. I became a therapist intern the same year I
was fired; five years later I received my license. [22]
During ray psychology studies, and counseling people while interning, I learned for the first
time that my life-long fear and anxiety were not shared by most other people. However, I felt I had
under control the anxiety that had increased since I left the EPA. I did not realize even then, the
survival strategies I had developed without conscious awareness to keep my fear in check. I ran three
miles daily and I masked the fear by directing it into my drive to complete the work necessary to
become a therapist.
After I received my license I began counseling people with work problems. It became clear that
the average worker was unaware that workplaces are authoritarian systems not managed to benefit
workers, but to benefit top management. Essentially everyone had the expectation of fairness and
justice at work. “It’s a democratic country” they would say. It was this false expectation for fair play,
and the person’s ineffectual struggle to attain it, that caused most difficulties for Judy’s and my
clients.
It was extremely hard for our clients to revise their expectation for justice that they believed
they should receive. Judy and I helped them understand that a person could only minimize the
number of injustices, not eliminate them. This could be done by assessing the unconscious rules
(norms) of the organization and the emotional limits of coworkers’ personalities. Clients who learned
not to break these organization rules, or press the limits of coworkers, became more successful at
avoiding pain and getting their needs met.
During one of our infrequent vacation visits to Yosemite, Judy coined the term “work abuse” to
encompass the many kinds of mistreatment our clients experienced at work. In 1988, at the
invitation of the California Legislature’s Task Force on Self-Esteem, Judy wrote a paper using the term
“work abuse” to describe the wide range of work-place injustices working people endure.
Scapegoating, blaming one or more individuals instead of looking at the work system, is the most
damaging, if not the most frequent, kind of abuse that a person can suffer at work.
At the EPA I had been scapegoated; I was blamed by management for bringing to light
problems that were embedded in the work system. It was necessary for them to fire me, because I
had embarrassed them by pointing out what they could not or would not fix. Correcting top-down
control by sharing power with all employees, not just the Air Division, was beyond the ability of the
management of the San Francisco office. Management’s unwillingness to share power was consistent
with the reason they gave for firing me: undermining the authority of the agency.
Truthful written material that described the problem of worker mistreatment in authoritarian
work systems was nonexistent. Judy and I took on the seven year project of writing a 160,000 word,
400 page book about it. Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It, was the first book of its kind
to explain the interaction between the two fields of psychology, individual and organizational, as
applied to the workplace.
The first half of the book describes the many kinds of abuse and how and why abuse happens
at work. The second half of the book helps readers formulate strategies to minimize mistreatment
and injustices. [23]
The book was not a best-seller because most working people remain in denial about the true
nature of work. However, the book is most useful to our intended target audience: people who have
been emotionally injured and see that fairness is not possible at work. We estimate several thousand
working people have been helped by this book so far.
I have counseled individual working people in person; I have also advised people in the United
States and around the world on the Internet. Judy and I gave several successful seminars for working
people that presented the material in our book. Seminars for therapists were less successful, because
many were working in authoritarian clinics and were not ready to break denial and face their own or
their clients’ injustices at work. Given the circumstances, Judy and I believe we have been as effective
as was possible in our endeavors to help emotionally injured workers.
At age sixty-five, twelve years after I started my therapy training, I discovered the true depth of
my anxiety that had been held in check by the body numbing mechanism acquired in early childhood.
I no longer had projects I could use effectively to mask my anxiety by absorbing it in my creative
drive; the protective numbness of my body to ward off fear gave way. I suffered major anxiety
disorder. I began medication that was mistakenly prescribed for long-term use without warning that
it could be addictive for some undisclosed fraction of those who use it.
The medication worked for three years; then, in my case, I learned it was addictive and had a
hidden effect called “low dose tolerance.” This meant that although I was on a low dose, my body's
demand for the drug was increasing without my knowledge. My attempt to get off the medication
failed because I had nothing that could cover my panic level anxiety once I was free of it. I had to
return to use of the drug at a much higher dose than when I began using it. The higher dose has a
side effect of slowly weakening my body. My anxiety disorder has become a terminal illness I face
daily.
This illness has given me a new perspective on what I learned about my fear in an intellectual
way during my training as a therapist. Previous to the training, I thought everyone shared my level of
fear. With my defenses mostly gone, I now understand — in even greater depth — the omnipresent
anxiety that has tormented me since I was born. Most importantly, I see with clarity how my
defenses caused me to avoid making and keeping deep and intimate friendships that would have
enriched my life and made it much easier.
The defense of denial means that people cut off painful feelings at such a deep level
unconsciously they are not aware they exist. The denial that kept me from seeing the depth of my
fear, also kept me from feeling the loneliness I now feel with most of my defenses gone. I fully
recognize that a person learns about him or herself in stages. In the journey of life, not seeing and
correcting one’s emotional patterns soon enough may be viewed as a mistake. Self-forgiveness
means not making the further mistake of blaming oneself for defenses that were incurred in
childhood, but not discovered until late in life. We must forgive ourselves, because we live in a world
culture that blames us rather than helps us see, understand, and correct our behaviors. [24]

By the early 1950s, my father had become a plant manager at the Dupont Electrochemical works at
Niagara Falls. In the mid to late 1950s he was assigned to Dupont Headquarters in Wilmington,
Delaware. He was put on pension in 1959 at age 55 for reasons that are still unclear to me. My guess
is that as a man who grew up in Appalachia, he could not escape the emotional hold his working class
background had on him, and he failed to rub elbows with Dupont elites in an acceptable way. I only
know that my dad, when he was plant manager, disobeyed orders from on high when he ended a
strike. He did this after an employee who attempted to bring food to strikebreakers was drowned
when his boat capsized on the Niagara River.
My father might have been considered a mischief-maker in other ways as well. In 1952, a small
piece in the New York Times announced that my father was the first plant manager to remove
timedocks from a plant in the Electrochemicals Department of the Dupont Company.
 My father and mother had moved from Niagara Falls to West Chester, Pennsylvania, near the
Dupont headquarters in Wilmington where he worked before retirement. After he retired, he tried
consulting, teaching, became a justice of the peace in his township, and joined a fundamentalist
Christian group in West Chester. Sadly, at 55, he could not from that point on create a satisfying life
for himself. He was depressed for the remaining 19 years of his life, having neither the esteem nor
challenges that the position and structure his job with Dupont had provided him.
I said earlier in this essay that my father had often warned me, “Don’t do it the way I did it,”
which could have been interpreted many ways. I failed in one way; by moving to California I
separated from him and my mother the way he had separated from his parents when he moved to
Niagara Falls from Fayette County, Pennsylvania. However, I succeeded in another way he may have
meant it. I did not succumb to the corporate ethos of trying to make it to the top.
My father’s need to be seen as a competitive heavy-hitter at Dupont caused his depression
when he was “let go” instead of being promoted to vice-president. (See my father’s photo on page
143.) However, like my father, having worked 21 years at Chevron and 8 years at the EPA, I grew
dependent on organization structure for a steady income, and a place that provided identity even
when I disagreed with how the organization was managed. Also like my father, I was not able to
create a fully successful business on my own after I was fired.
My father was divided about his role in management. This was demonstrated by his support of
the employees when he ended the 1950s strike against orders. The “Don’t do it the way I did it”
statement may also have meant he wanted me to live out that part of him that identified with his
working class origin. I believe he would be proud of my photographs which he would agree are a
celebration of our roots in Appalachia. He would also agree with my motivation in making the
photographs, to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people and their
families by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers. [25]

I want to than my wife and partner Judy Wyatt for correcting errors in this essay and or her
consistently loving support during our twenty-five years of living and working together. I will always
love you, Judy.
[26]