“Art of Photojournalism”

LOS LUNAS — Ku Klux Klan rallies. Apartheid. Collin Powell. Rev. Jessie Jackson. Mikhail Gorbachev. The surrender of an Iraqi family during fighting in 2006. A kitten swimming for safety from the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina.

In journalism, it is said every story has a story. How the reporter found the story, convinced people to talk to them, challenges encountered and hopefully overcome.

For retired award-winning photojournalist Richard Kozak, the stories of his images range from harrowing to hopeful. Now retired and living in Rio Rancho with his wife, Elaine, Kozak is preparing for his one-man show at the Los Lunas Museum of Heritage and Arts.

As the Best of Show winner in the museum’s 12th annual Art Show in 2024 for his photo “Power of the Spirit,” Kozak’s show, “Art of Journalism,” begins on Saturday, Aug. 23, and runs through Saturday, Oct. 11. There will be two receptions during his show, which Kozak will attend, from 2-4 p.m., on Saturday, Sept. 6, and Saturday, Oct. 4.

The image that won Best of Show was taken at the 2022 Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque and, of course, has a story — a gripping, edge-of-your-seat tale that photographers will recognize.

The large image at first seems to be nothing more than a blurry mess of colors. Then the eye finds the calm in the storm of movement — Dennis Medicine Bird, a Cheyenne/Kiowa from Oklahoma, standing steadfast, holding the sacred eagle staff high.

“This was the first time I’d ever gone to this, so I was on the floor,” Kozak remembers. “When the grand entry happened, he was carrying the eagle staff and then everyone started circling him. I thought, ‘Boy, if I could get them as a blur and keep this guy steady, yeah, I’ll have a great image.’”

He quickly climbed the bleachers of Tingley Coliseum, looking for his vantage point. Without a tripod, Kozak laid his camera bag on the back of one of the seats and used it to steady the camera.

“I fired off about 12 shots, praying I’d catch him in that still moment,” he said.

A quick review of the digital images on the small screen of his camera told him he’d captured something special, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he put the pictures on a larger screen.

In his car in the parking, Kozak covered the windows with blankets and uploaded the images to his laptop.

“He’s out of focus. Slightly out of focus. Slightly out of focus. He’s in focus. He’s out of focus. He’s out of focus. He’s out of focus. He’s in focus.”

He had his image. Not only did it earn Kozak a one-man show at the Los Lunas Museum, but it also took third place in New Mexico Magazine’s 2023 photo contest.

The curiosity

Before the awards, before the travels across the globe, before the PTSD, Kozak was a curious 4-year-old messing around with his parents’ box camera. The result was an extreme closeup of his nose and being told he wasn’t allowed to play with the cameras anymore.

A decade later, while looking through the items in his father’s Army trunks, a still curious Kozak found a trove of photography equipment. He began exploring processing film and making contact sheets, and for his 14th birthday, was gifted his own 35mm camera.

Armed with that camera, Kozak ended up working for his high school yearbook.

“That was a good gig because I could get out of class. I could say, ‘Well, I’ve got to take a group shot of the football team,’” he remembers with a chuckle.

While skipping class was a fun part of being a teen, Kozak knew photography was the career path for him. He enrolled at Kent State University in Ohio, but quickly became disenchanted with the required classes like English, history and philosophy he had to take before even getting into a photographic class.

“I didn’t like that at all,” he said.

He then found the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif., which he described as the premier photographic school in the United States.

“It would have been on the same level as Harvard for photography. It was a 2 1/2 year course, no breaks,” Kozak said.

In 1980, he graduated with a bachelor of arts and the need for a job.

The beginning of a career

With relatives in the Cleveland area, Kozak headed for the city in the hopes of finding employment. He got word the sports photographer for the Cleveland Press was out for eight months after being injured at a baseball game. He showed up with his portfolio, but photo editor Larry Nighswander wasn’t hiring.

He pointed Kozak down the road to The Journal in Lorain, where he found a position.

After nearly four years in Lorain, Kozak made the move to The Washington Times — a publication most infamously known as being owned by Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon — where Nighwswander was director of photography by then.

The Times had a robust photo department of 13 people, eight of who were “real journalists,” Kozak noted. The majority of staff at Moon’s publication were his followers, who weren’t necessarily trained journalists.

Kozak described the paper as being “quite competitive” during his three years there, where he won several awards for his photography. He won the White House News Photographers Association “Pictures of the Year” awards in 1985, 1986, 1987, while at the Times, and in 1989 and 1990 while at Insight Magazine, a weekly news magazine published by the Times’ parent company, News World.

From 1987 to 1994, Kozak “pretty much covered everything — news, economics and all sorts of things. One day I’d be in Angola, then South Africa, Europe. I did a lot of domestic stories, too.”

One he remembers distinctly and will be featured in his show is the coverage he did for Insight in 1989, exploring how Yellowstone National Park was recovering from devastating fires the year before. He was able to tell the story of the rebirth of the park through photos of a buffalo cow and her calf.

As the news industry continued to shrink, Kozak felt the effects. In the mid 1990s, the newsroom at Insight underwent two rounds of deep cuts, with Kozak eventually the last man standing in the photography department.

Already an experienced international photojournalist, he struck out on his own in 1994, providing images and photographic expertise to publications such as U.S. News & World Report, Smithsonian Magazine and Science Magazine.

After a decade as a freelancer, Kozak became a full-time war correspondent for Army Times Publishing, covering the various branches of the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Beirut, embedding with units on the front lines.

“They needed a person bad because they were staffing Iraq and Afghanistan 24/7.”

On the front lines

In January 2005, Kozak made his first trip to Iraq. Later that year, he was wounded while on Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border with the U.S. Marines and Special Forces.

As the Marines were beginning the sweep of a town, a gunnery sergeant invited Kozak closer to the front of the action.

“People in a mosque opened fire on the gunny and me. I could see the projectile coming at me in slow motion. It hits me here,” he says, sweeping his index finger across his left cheek.

The back edge of his left ear still bears a distinctive notch.

The Marines are returning fire and Al-Qaeda’s giving no quarter as a medic bandages up Kozak’s face like something out of a cartoon dentistry patient. Word is given they’ve called in an air strike, due to arrive in 10 seconds. Everyone is ordered to cover their ears and the countdown begins. Nothing happens and the gunfire continues.

“All of a sudden, you hear a couple of Hellfire missiles go. They just scream as they go,” he said, mimicking the high-pitched shrieking. “You can hear birds instead of guns now.”

Once the morphine wore off, Kozak was back on a transport headed back to the unit he’d been embedded with, ready for the next assignment.

There are more stories about being “outside the wire” in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Kozak said, but the most significant may be the one that happened where he should have been safe.

During his last trip to Iraq in 2008, Kozak and reporter Kelly Kennedy were working on a series of stories about medical treatment of U.S. troops in the field, as well as that of injured, captured prisoners.

There was a forward operating base outside of Baghdad taking heavy causalities, stretching medical staff for that unit thin. The FOB was positioned below a bridge, which gave snipers the advantage.

While Kennedy was doing interviews, Kozak would take a break and go out on patrol with the soldiers. One morning, after returning from an early patrol, he decided to hang back from a second trip out, needing to catch up with his reporter.

Within minutes of the departure of the Bradley’s, the armored vehicles transporting troops and their interpreters, chaos erupted.

“All hell breaks loose. There are soldiers running. They’ve got their weapons. People are putting on their flak jackets. No one would tell me what was going on.”

Finally, he learned one of the Bradleys had hit a buried IED — an improvised explosive device — about the size of a Volkswagen. The gun turret had been ripped off in the violent explosion and the Bradley was on its side, burning. The other two Bradleys were engaged in a gun fight, desperately trying to reach the other vehicle to get people out.

It was only later that Kovak discovered he was supposed to be on the disabled Bradley. When the fighting was done, six soldiers and an interpreter were brought back in one body bag.

He made what images he could of the wounded coming back, the body bag, before they were relocated and he transmitted the photos back to the Washington, D.C., office of the Army Times.

Leaving the job

“I was a wreck.”

He was offered a week off to recuperate, but convinced his employer he needed a six-month medical leave.

“Then the newspaper was in touch and said, ‘We’re gong to put you on disability.’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’ They said they were going to put me on disability for the PTSD,’” he recalls.

Soon after, he lost his job.

The first doctor treating him was what Kozak described as “just a pill pusher. One would take me up, one would take me down. He wasn’t doing anything.”

Startled by loud noises, paranoid to the point of running string around his house with small bells attached to warn of intruders, Kozak knew he wasn’t doing well.

A move to central Pennsylvania connected Kozak with a therapist using light and sound therapy, a method that greatly helped his PTSD, Kozak said.

In 2016, he and Elaine moved to Rio Rancho, where he traded war coverage for images of dahlias, sandhill cranes, hummingbirds and other New Mexico subjects.

His show, “Art of Photo Journalism,” at the museum has been arranged into four distinct collections — historic photos, New Mexico images, portraits and a small collection of black and white images from the very beginning of his career.

“All these pictures have back stories,” he says gesturing to the incredible array of slices of life.

The museum, 251 Main St. SE, Los Lunas, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. There is no charge to visit the museum or view Kozak’s show.