CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Award-winning photojournalist Sol Neelman, a freelancer based in Oregon, travels the world chronicling assignments such as the Olympics and "weird sports."  Earlier, Neelman worked for a humanitarian agency in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina and worked on staffs in Oregon for the News-Register (McMinnville) and The Oregonian, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. His work has been published by a variety of media outlets including National Geographic, ESPN and The New York Times. His advertising clients include Nike, Adidas, and Clif Bar. He has published three photo books on “Weird Sports” with publisher Kehrer Verlag. 

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

JW: Hi Sol! Thanks for taking the time to talk about your work. I’d like to start with the obvious question of how did you get your start in photography?

SN: I guess it started when I was in eighth grade. I had a friend who took a photo class, and I wanted to hang out with him, hang out in the dark rooms, play rock music, and maybe flirt with girls. And even though I was way too shy to do the flirting, it was kind of where the alternative cool kids were hanging out in those days.

The class was full, but I was able to work on the yearbook and that process really made sense to me. I never did work for newspapers in those days, but I did do yearbooks. I was thinking about it recently. You know I just published my third photo book and really what I'm doing with my photo books is the exact same thing I was doing with the yearbooks—collaborating with artists, designers, friends, writers, copy editors and photo editors, and putting together a body of work that I can look back and reflect on and hopefully size up a certain chapter of my life.

JW: That is so interesting! How did you get rolling a little bit deeper into it?

SN: Honestly, I didn't know how I got into the photojournalism part. I went to the University of Oregon and they had a really good journalism program at the time, but they did not have  photojournalism. So I studied TV journalism, but I was all sweaty and just horrible on camera. I was nervous and not a very quick thinker, but I did work for the school paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, for a couple of terms and kind of dug that, but I didn't know how to get into the industry at the time. I did an internship for free at this small suburban newspaper, where I would bus in because I didn't even have a car and photograph a few sports events in the evening. I might have been the oldest intern they ever had. And they told me that I should be working on a project while I was there, so long story short, I ended up photographing a refugee and her family from Sarajevo. This is in 1996. At some point she said, “You should come with me to Sarajevo and go see my family. You could make pictures.”  And I said, “All right, let's do it.” And so I quit my job and went. Originally, it was just going to be two weeks. But one day, I was there in Sarajevo writing a letter to my best friend, and the trip was about to wrap up. I was thinking about how much I loved it there and how amazing the people were—how I felt at home and welcomed and literally 10 minutes later I had a job offer! Somebody saw my cameras that I had put on the table as I was writing the letter, and he said, “I need a photographer. You want a job?” And I ended up working for the largest NGO in Sarajevo for the next six months! It's amazing. It's amazing there and I had the best time. I had really good fortune in Bosnia, professionally and personally.

SN: When I left, I felt like I needed to work at a newspaper. My goal was to work for newspapers for 10 years, and then go freelance. I eventually got a job at a small weekly in Mcminnville, Oregon and was there for three years—then ended up at The Oregonian and worked there for seven years. When I left, I had totally forgotten that my plan originally was to leave after 10 years, and I left 10 years to the day.

JW: So it sounds like serendipity really happened. When did you leave the Oregonian?

SN: My last day was May 31, 2007, and I've been referring to myself as a recovering photojournalist ever since. Most of my work now is commercial work, and I consider my Weird Sports project as photojournalism, but I haven't worked for an editorial outfit for some time. 

JW: What's so interesting about your commercial work for clients such as Adidas and Nike, among others, is that you’ve clearly taken your editorial style and approach—”your eye,” which is super unique and you've applied that to your commercial work. You've really found that sweet spot, and very few people have been able to do that.

SN: I really appreciate what you're saying. I'm not the best sports photographer but I do feel like there's a lot of missed opportunities with brands. I think a lot of people don't realize that they can have a continuous visual narrative,  style and story, and I think a lot of brands get overwhelmed. They say they want authenticity, but they don't know how to achieve it—when really the way to achieve it is by just paying attention. And so when you hire a photojournalist, you're hiring someone who's always keeping their eyes open all of the time and their head is on a swivel. Whereas commercial photographers are used to really controlling all of the settings and situations. I think they struggle with how to find authenticity. They're trying to “make it” instead of watching it, and then documenting it. I’m really proud of the work that I've done. Sometimes the work connects, and sometimes it doesn't. 

My "Weird Sports Project" has almost all been self funded by jobs that I get from higher paying clients. I use that money to buy airfare and then crash on friends’ couches. 

JW: How was the "Weird Sports Project" born?

SN: I'm a distant cousin of Jonas Bendiksen (National Geographic) and when I found this out (in 2005), from a Jewish woman in West Palm Beach, Florida, I reached out to him but I didn't get a hold of him because he was on assignment for Nat Geo in India. But I spoke with his wife, who's from Seattle, and she's a curator and a gallerist in Norway. She's like, “What do you love to do?” And I say, “Sports, travel, photography, weird shit.” What a simple question and what a simple answer. And that’s when I realized that I was trying to make photos to impress other people—whether it was for recognition, or self-esteem or clients, or whatever. And about that time I was working with Mike Davis at the Oregonian. Scott Strazzante actually told me, “You know you work with Mike Davis. You need to lean on him.”

JW: Oh, that explains a lot!

SN: Yeah, he really makes me look a lot smarter than I feel. His sequencing is ridiculous. It's very intentional, and he's really brilliant at that.

Around the same time, I went to my first Geekfest with Melissa Lyttle, and bonded with a bunch of super talented young photographers. It was kind of like our own version of The Outsiders. I felt really inspired by that. And when I was in Austin, I also discovered that Roller Derby was still a thing. When I got back home, I did some research and found that there was a league up in Seattle. So I made plans, started photographing it and had such a blast that it spun off to photograph the World Cow Chip Throwing Contest in Oklahoma, and then underwater hockey in England and the Highland Games and Scotland, and it just kind of spiraled after that…

It really changed everything.You know, awards are to me very subjective, but I won a few things in Pictures of the Year International, and so my confidence was up a little bit, and I ended up leaving Oregonian in 2007. All of a sudden, I had a lot of free time, so I started filling that time in with Weird Sports. 

I went to Germany, to the Frankfurt Book Fair and was completely overwhelmed. I had no idea how large it was, and I basically walked up and down the halls with a dummy book that Mike had put together for me. At the time, it was going to be on sports culture with Some weird Sports, and other stuff and I showed up at Kehrer Verlag where I met Alexa Becker and showed her my work. And she knew all about me. Apparently, she had been a juror for Critical Mass and remembered my work and my mission statement. And so she gave me a letter of intent on the spot. I didn't understand what that was, but I figured something was good, and I went on to publish three books with her. They are amazing and I love them.

I really didn't expect anything to happen. I really didn't. Nobody wanted to publish sports books. It was all nudes and celebrities, and and you know, famous dead photographers and things like that. 

I think when you look back at your career you realize—or at least I realized—that I haven't always been happy in the moment, because I didn’t fully appreciate that what's happening needs to be happening—that I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing. All the work I had done up to that moment led to me meeting Alexa. I didn’t even make it into the Critical Mass Top 50! But by making that connection with Alexa and then meeting her—that's how the books came to be.

JW: It sounds like the big takeaway that you are offering  is that you're looking back and understanding that it was all happening just as it needed to happen. And it kind of all started with you visualizing what you wanted to happen or setting an intention—maybe not formally, but mindfully.

SN: Yeah, because what I've always wanted to do with photography is to travel. I wanted it as an excuse to travel and to get access to other people's lives to explore my own, in a way. I traveled around the world when I was four with my mom after she graduated from University of Oregon. So, I always knew that I could travel and it was the biggest gift I have. All I have always wanted to do is to just keep moving. Keep going. And the weird sports kind of gave me that excuse to do that. And David Holloway was was giving a presentation about his projects at Geekfest and talked about crashing on people’s couches, and not spending a lot of money on hotels and how he makes it work financially and really gave me the blueprints for how I could do weird sports, because I don't have a lot of money but I have a lot of friends, and they all have a couch.

I mean photographing "Weird Sports"—this is low-hanging fruit— to me, it's always felt like cheating in a good way. Instead of me trying to make a picture of something that's not a picture, I am going to where the pictures are! Think about Big Wheel Racing in San Francisco—there's a picture there, if not several!

I worked on a photo column with Bruce Ely at the Oregonian called, “Sidelines,” and it was just quiet moments at high school sporting events. We weren’t spending any time on who's winning or losing, or who's the star. I think it's really remarkable when you go to a sporting event and you disregard what's happening, you don't care who scores or makes a touchdown, or if there is even a touchdown because there are all these other pictures that are happening. Sports assignments are seldom covered like a documentary photo project, you know. It's very rare that you are able to simply gravitate to where the photos are.

There was a photo, early on, that took place on the sidelines at a 1A or maybe a 2A  high school quarter-final playoff game. It was not a high stakes game.

There's a little visitor bleacher section—it's tiny—and the visitors are all crammed in there, and it's just kind of on an island. It's just away from everything. I just spent my entire time with the game behind me pointing my wide angle lens right at them. They're like, “You know, the game's happening behind you.” And I'm like “No, it's happening in front of me right here.” I made one of my favorite pictures for that project. I don't think they even realized how surreal their situation looked. That attitude of Sidelines is what became weird sports. A lot of people look at my work and they're looking for the peak goofiness of photos. But what I'm trying to do is come back with photos that give a sense of what it's like, and it's not always going to be the action. It could be a fan. It could be the setting. It's a body of work that shows what this entire community feels like and a lot of times I come back with photos that are not what I intended at all. 

SN: And when I'm in the editing process with Mike and working on the book. I realized that in some ways it all made sense with what I came back with.

JW: Well, it sounds to me that the books are a kind of by-product of you living your best life, right? That the project provides a framework for you to live your life, in a way.

SN: Totally. It's always been that the project's an excuse to do what I want to do, and I think one of the things, between you and me, is that sometimes it's hard to just go to a friend and say, “Hey, I want to crash on your couch for a week?” I am creating mini-holidays where we're celebrating photography and connection and friendships and all that.

It's given me the structure, you know. I think most of us really relied on newspapers to provide that structure. Tell me what to do. I'm going to go do it. I'm going to be done with it. Let's do it again. I'm so thankful that Germans love weird shit. I found my audience.

JW: I mean it's hard enough to publish one book on one subject, but you’ve published three and they're all super beautiful, super interesting and unique. Do you ever feel in a way that you're kind of competing with yourself now? What is there left to do? Are there 20 more books in you or are you thinking about it like, “I'm just doing my thing.”

SN: I mean honestly all the books are different in that they came at different chapters in my life. I published my first book in 2011, my second in 2014, and then last year (2022) is when I published Book 3. The third book was slower. I was going to do the Kickstarter on March 13, 2020, and had to wait two years before I could publish the third book. I was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, photographing a beer drinking contest and in real time the world was shutting down and I was asking myself, “And why are those guys sharing glasses and no one's acting like this is really crappy right now?” 

Thankfully, I had enough work by then including a huge European trip photographing things like cheese rolling and shin-kicking in England, medieval fighting and rugby in Italy.

And so the books are all different. In the third book, I actually incorporated illustrations and actually have a drawing of Mike Davis on a tall bike in a jousting situation.

JW: I have a question—with your Weird Sports work, how do you keep it—you know like they say with long-term time relationships—how do you keep it saucy?

SN: That's a good question. I mean to be honest, I was kind of a little burnt out toward the end even a couple of months before the pandemic locked us down. It started to feel like work a little bit. I feel like there's a lot of chapters in our lives.

I've started applying for in house photo jobs because I wanted to do that type of continual storytelling and branding that we talked about.

Being a freelancer is hard because when it goes well, I'm getting paid good money to take pictures. I'm getting paid travel day rates. I'm getting paid money to hang in my hotel because there's nothing for me to do that day. And when things happen that seamlessly, it's like, “Oh, this will always be like this.” And then there are long periods of time, at least, in my career where I haven't worked, and the Weird Sports filled in the gap. I was busy, and I was seeing friends, and I felt like I'm still a photographer. I don't know if I'm done with Weird Sports. I don't really have a goal of doing another book. But if I can get refreshed, and maybe have more of a work life balance, who knows?

JW: You know you brought up sports culture a few times in our talk, I think it would be super interesting to see how you tackled a subject like that at some point.

SN: I mean that's what got me started with all this. Those are the type of photos that I have always been striving for—capturing those quiet moments.