Sometimes an interview takes you to very unexpected places. When I talked to prolific travel photographer Rob Howard, we ended up talking about his experiences during 9/11. We all remember where we were that day. I was in high school, and I remember every second vividly even though I was in Wisconsin and nowhere near the attacks. I can still picture the eerily silent locker filled halls. We walked from classroom to classroom numbly, the only activity of the day was watching the news in each room. I remember the exact sound of the gasps when we watched the towers collapse on TV. It’s not the kind of thing you forget.
Rob Howard lived right by the World Trade Center, and watching the tragedy unfold around him deeply affected him. At the time, he told me, answering a question about why he and his wife moved from NYC to a quiet farm upstate, he lived a very busy life in the city. But witnessing the second plane hit right outside his apartment window and having to flee made him want to live somewhere quieter, with less chaos. And in many ways, that was the start to a whole lot of life changes.
Howard is an incredibly successful travel photographer. He spent the better part of two decades on the road, chasing adrenaline and adventure in well over 100 countries. But sometime after 9/11 his priorities shifted. Not only did he and his wife move to that farm upstate, but the rush of constant extremes he was used to seeking in travel lost its meaning. He still loved photography, but 20 years of constant adventure left him feeling empty inside. So he began to look around him (rather than thousands of miles away) for his art. And what he found surprised him. Through his lens, he captured the beauty in the smaller things, and in the people around him. And he loved it.
Howard found that taking pictures of friends and family, dandelions in fields, and life’s little moments was just as satisfying as scaling a mountain to reach a remote village on the other side of the world. The rush that he loved — the joy, the excitement that he had spent so much time chasing, he actually didn’t need to go far to find them. Those feelings were right at home all along. That may sound cheesy, as if Howard had clicked his heels three times and said “there’s no place like home,” but his voice took on a tone of pride and happiness when talking about his new, quieter life. Constant travel was great for a while, but unsustainable forever. Over time our wants and desires change, and Howard has completely embraced that what brings him happiness now isn’t the same as it was at 22.
I’ve interviewed numerous travel photographers and various adventurers who are at the beginning of their travel careers. For them, the chase, the danger, and the glory are still at the forefront of their journey. Howard is on the other side of that. When traveling 24/7 stopped spark the thrill that it used to, he explains, he found new joy in his surroundings. He’s no less passionate about his work; he’s just finding that spark, that light in different ways. And his work is beautiful. It’s about simple emotional connection now. He finds the story and adventure in someone’s eyes rather than by being kidnapped in the jungle. And even though he was a former adrenaline junkie, his work now makes him just as happy.
Howard was kind enough to share a sampling of his very large body of work with us, and we talked about the surprising and amazing places your career can take you to when you’re open to trusting your instincts, listening to your gut, and following what actually makes you happy.
Where are you living these days?
Well, in winter, I live in Malibu. In a trailer park. Do you know Malibu Seafood Restaurant?
Yeah, definitely.
There’s an RV park right above there. I keep an airstream there. I spend the winters there, and in the summer we’re on the farm (in upstate New York). Which is pretty cool.
Do you have animals? What are you farming?
We farm nothing. We farm grass. We have two cats. And there are bears, and deer, and raccoons, and foxes, and all that kind of stuff running around. Coyotes. It’s just a nice refuge from the crazy world of airplanes, travel, and all that kind of jazz.
When did you make the move to go live on a farm?
God, we lived at Wall Street and Broadway during 9/11. We were right there and it was kind of crazy. I even photographed the second plane just as it was hitting the towers.
Oh my gosh.
It was pretty intense, and that photograph got used all around the world. It was just one of those weird things. And then we just thought, to heck with it, this is crazy. So we bought this farm. We’ve been up there ever since.
Being a photographer in the city during 9/11 must have been so intense. How do you jump into that mode of, “something horrible happened, I should be taking pictures”? What was going through your mind?
It was weird. I got off a plane late that night before from Venezuela. My wife, Lisa, and I walked over to the World Trade Center when I got off the train. We wanted to go to the book store under the Towers and buy a book about Venezuela. I wanted to show her some stuff. It closed a minute before we got there. We were just about to head back the next morning.
I haven’t thought about this for a long time, so I’m a little … We were just heading out the next morning to the book store again, and our doorman said, “Hey Rob, there’s a small plane that’s hit the North Tower. Go check it out.” So we went out. There was all this stuff flying from the sky. Papers, and then we could see that there was smoke coming from the Tower.
I thought, ‘Geez, I’m gonna run up and get a camera.’ So I just ran upstairs. Lisa got a phone call and I was just poking my head out of my living room window. The second plane came over our building and hit. I just happened to get a few of the shots.
Later on that day, Chris Dougherty, who was a photo editor at New York Magazine at the time, knew I lived down there. He gave me a holler, said, “Hey, did you get any pictures?”
I didn’t even know. I was in a daze. I had no clue. We had to flee. And then the Towers both collapsed. I knew I shot that. We were up on a roof when the South Tower collapsed, and it came right at us. It was pretty intense. And then we left, and there was a dead body outside of the back door of our building. Parts of one of the planes. There was some fuselage, there were … just parts. We saw people jumping. Then we ended up fleeing across to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. Have you ever lived in New York?
No. I’ve been there to visit friends a lot. But I’ve never lived in the city.
You gotta try it sometime. It’s a heck of a city. But anyway, we went over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. The whole time I had a camera, so I was shooting the whole way. The next day, I got the film — this is back in the days of film — of course. I didn’t know what the heck I had. My lab called me and said, “Oh my God, Rob. You did get pictures of the plane.” I didn’t know. We sent it all out to Chris. He published it the next day in a special issue of New York Magazine. The first two pages. And then it just went all around the world from there.
We were just in a crazy state. Our car was trashed. Our home, we couldn’t get to it for six weeks. The next week, I had to shoot a job in Vegas. I remember being in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, overlooking … My room overlooked the airport. My whole room was glass. The whole side was this big, big window. Planes were flying by my room. I remember just freaking out. I had to close the blackout curtains. Just so I couldn’t see the planes. It was really, really scary.
Of course.
We were so traumatized that we ended up moving to a farm in the middle of nowhere. Now we’re rednecks. Living in the middle of nowhere. And we love, love, love, L.A. And Malibu. I shoot a lot in L.A. during the winter. We just live in a trailer. Which is kind of great, too. So we’re trailer trash and rednecks.
Best of both worlds! Can you talk a little bit about your travel career?
I had a long travel career where I was on contract with Conde Nast Traveler (among other publications). I was on the road about 300 days a year for 20 years. Finally Lisa said, “Stop it.” She’d have to come with me on the road as my assistant often. Just so we could stay married. And that was really, really awesome. It was great. But about six or seven years ago, I put the brakes on.
What’s it like to transition from that life of being a nomad to settling down a little? And doing more commercial based work?
It’s been a revelation. It’s been wonderful. It’s just…the next stage. My whole work as a travel/adventure guy was all about moments. And it was all about trying to tell stories about places and people and things. It was all just story telling. I kind of lost myself to magazines. I’d become very good at shooting to their editorial voice. To who my clients were. I just kind of retreated from that.
And I stopped taking assignments. I hung out on the farm in my little area. Delaware County. In the Catskills. And started shooting my own little stories the way that I shot travel. I’d always shot in far flung places. And it was really refreshing to me to just slow down and shoot around me. It was funny because I never used to carry a camera around my home. I saw the beauty but I didn’t see the stories as being photographical until I took this time off and just started exploring my home and my friends and people who were close to me. Telling their story photographically. It was just like a revelation for me.
I started realizing that I didn’t need to get my buzz from the exotic. Or the crazy adventures and death-defying situations. I’d been thrown in jail and kidnapped and shot at. It was just so nice to creep around my own little world with my camera and realize that I was getting a buzz off day to day life. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what was going to happen. In fact, I thought my career was kind of done.
But I started putting those pictures up on my site and in my portfolios. And all of a sudden I was shooting big campaigns for major American brands. And Canadian brands. And it’s just become a thing. Now I can live wherever the hell I want to. I can travel whenever I want to on my own dime and do whatever I want. It’s just been a dramatic lifestyle change. I can create my own destiny, which has been really liberating. And kind of wonderful.
I love the idea of you being able to recapture the joy of something that you’d had and lost with travel photography.
I’ve never lost the joy of shooting, but I did lose the joy of travel. I was traveling too much. To the point where I wasn’t digesting what I was living, what I was experiencing. I was just shooting it. There were so many adventures. It just became boring. How ridiculous is that?
What excites you about photography now?
It’s a very exciting time in the world of imagery. People are complaining about magazines going away and social media taking over. All those interesting shifts that we’re all experiencing together. I feel the world of image-making has never been more exciting.
Oh my God, it’s just so fun. Shooting with the iPhone, Instagram. It was really cool to read the pieces that you’ve done on those other guys who were just getting so much joy out of (travel and adventure), too. I hear those stories from my assistants. And from my past assistants, who are all like sons to me. I feel like we’ve got a whole family of young guys and girls out there getting so much joy shooting. Getting their butts kicked. Crying the blues. And then having extraordinary adventures. It’s so fun to watch.
There’s so much fear under this president, so much uncertainty. But there’s this very exciting up swelling of resistance, and mobilization that I think is very exciting right now. It’s a terrible time and yet it’s a very, very thrilling time in the world of social commentary, storytelling, and image-making. It’s a wild time.
