by Jeffrey Stanley

“Live your plan and it will come true. Life is composed of magic, and you are the magician.”

Robert Johnson ’74 never imagined when he was growing up in working class Brooklyn that he would be a jet-setting fashion and travel photographer based in Milan. “It was a blue-collar neighborhood where Dad went to work in the morning and mom stayed at home,” he recently recalled about his Bay Ridge upbringing. “Pretty much every family on the block had the same dynamic.” Conceding that he was not an ideal student in elementary and middle school, he said his parents feared he might fall through the cracks for good in a public high school so they began seeking an alternative. “A financial crisis was crippling New York and the effects on public services was enormous.”

He entered BFS as a ninth grader in 1970 and admits he had a hard time adjusting to the culture at first. “My parents were ultra Republican, pro-Nixon, and all of my classmates and most of the teachers were opposed to the [Vietnam] war.” He compares the situation then to the situation now with Iraq, and hopes that current BFS students are speaking out as he and his classmates did back in the day. “There are many institutions today that are teaching children dogma, to trust without verification. Friends School of the 1970s was teaching us quite the opposite. We were encouraged to question authority and not to blindly follow.”

Back then the school used teaching methods that still seem radical by today’s standards. Students were directly involved in creating the curriculum and shaping even the look of the classrooms. Robert described one such classroom as being like a Greek forum made up of carpeted platforms instead of desks. “Indeed it was a forum where free thought and expression were encouraged.”

The arts played a crucial role in the educational program, so much so that once the entire faculty and student body decided to stop work and wrap the entire Schermerhorn Meeting House in white sheets as an anti-war protest. “I seem to remember we were going to draw a symbolic stamp and address the building to the White House. We actually did wrap most of the building.”

Although a spirit of peace and cooperation prevailed at the school, Johnson admits he remained a less than stellar student. “I spent many hours in both Mr. Asch’s and Ms. Magzanian’s offices because of my inappropriate actions and as a result I got to know them both extremely well.” He credits head of school Stuart Smith for saving his life. “He never gave up on me. In retrospect, I believe if he had asked me to leave I would have fallen down badly but he chose to watch over me and help me find myself.”

Among several other teachers, Robert noted that Paul Pechter taught him to value his own artistic instincts over others’ opinions. “If I permit someone else to influence the outcome of my art I am no longer doing art because it pleases me but to please that other person.” Although he didn’t know it then, Mr. Pechter’s advice would resurface when Robert’s artistic side truly blossomed a few years later.

Robert graduated from BFS in 1974. While a student a SUNY New Paltz, he was taking criminology courses that led to a two-semester internship at the nearby Fishkill Correctional Facility. The experience left a haunting impression. “To this day I reflect on what I experienced in relation to crime, punishment and the human condition.”

He had come out of BFS knowing that violence was a poor substitute for peaceful conflict resolution, but the prison system operated on a different principle. “Fishkill was my first real insight that dialogue and reason have no real place in a highly politicized arena such as a state prison and that execution of policy with extreme prejudice is the order of the day.”

In New Paltz he also met his future wife Katherine Sarkissian, a film major and up and coming photographer whose passion for the image inspired Robert to try his own hand at photography. “Unbeknownst to us at the time, we were about to hook up for an adventure.”

One St. Patrick’s Day in Manhattan while snapping photos of the parade up Fifth Avenue, they were approached by a Brooklyn newspaper reporter who asked if they would send him some of their photos. They happily obliged, wound up selling several shots to the paper, and their husband-and-wife photography business was born. “For the next four years we were freelancers for the New York Daily News. We had a Ford van loaded with scanners and we chased news at nights while delivering furniture and flowers in our van during the days.”

Their seat-of-the-pants lifestyle made for a thrilling marriage chasing down big-city crime, but in an echo of his prior experience at Fishkill, seeing the worst side of humanity on a daily basis soon left them cold. “Seeing so much death, blood and violence night after night took its toll on us. We saw firsthand how the media bends and twists stories to sell papers.” After getting shot at during a particularly harrowing crime scene visit, they decided it was time to get out of the photojournalism racket.

They moved to sunny California and attended classes at the acclaimed Brooks Institute of Photography. After graduating with BFAs, they found some success making television commercials but in the end the lure of still photography won out over the moving image. They soon headed back to Gotham where they found work assisting photographers Annie Leibovitz, Neil Slavin and others. “It was an incredible rounding off of our formal education.”

After building their portfolio in New York, the couple went to Europe, initially for a short stay to enhance their body of work by assisting European photographers. “Fourteen years later we’re still here.” Today they are acclaimed fashion and travel photographers in their own right working for major clients. They live in Milan for half the year and in New York for the other half (his mother is in her nineties and still lives in Brooklyn), with plenty of international travel in between. “Our early photojournalist adventures helped shape our style,” he says, not only in a nomadic sense but as a duo with a knack for making their models feel comfortable in front of the camera. “People tend to open up and relax with us and this leads to some great photographs.”

His advice to the current generation of BFS students hearkens back to his BFS of the ‘70s. “It’s quite obvious that today’s leaders don’t have all the answers and it’s up to you to speak up now to create a better world, not only for yourselves but for your children when you get there. Embrace the Quaker principle of nonviolence. War is the vilest of all human endeavors.”

He also expressed a concern that today’s youth are seemingly obsessed with wealth and creature comforts. “Money is not what life is about. Katherine and I have photographed many people who are cash wealthy beyond comprehension but at the expense of spending time with family and at the cost of their personal joy. Money without joy is a lonely, empty place to exist.”

Robert Johnson and Katherine Sarkissian’s work can be seen at their website
www.johnsonsarkissian.com.