March 13 - March 19, 2002

Joseph Kohl
1957-2002
By Michael Yockel

Minus the requisite period uniform, Joe Kohl looked as if he'd just walked out of one of Mathew Brady's iconic Civil War photographs--a small irony given that Joe was himself a professional photojournalist for more than 20 years. A man of ample girth, Kohl invariably sported old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses, a modified bowl hairstyle that strayed down his back when it wasn't pulled into a ponytail, glorious muttonchops, and a relentlessly cheerful demeanor frequently undergirded with a dose of mild bemusement.
Between a career-starting stint on the staff of the now-defunct News-American and his most recent job with the Baltimore Business Journal, Kohl freelanced for a startlingly diverse array of local and national publications--the Baltimore Alternative, the Baltimore Afro-American, The Village Voice, The Avenue, Catholic Review, Easy Rider, and Recycling Times, among others. From the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s, his primary showcase was City Paper, to which he brought what former CP staff writer Granville Greene characterizes as "a superb eye and a great sense of humor" in black-and-white images for countless feature stories, news articles, and music pieces. Kohl's death on March 5 at the age of 44--attributable to kidney failure after two episodes of cardiac arrest last summer, when he was undergoing treatment for leukemia, had caused serious brain damage--deeply affected his many friends and reverberated sharply through the local photographic community.
"I feel a special kind of sadness when a photographer dies," says Jennifer Bishop, who contributed images to this newspaper from the late '70s to the early '90s, "because I know the kind of vivid curiosity for witnessing life a person like Joe had. I mean, I ran into him everywhere, in the most unlikely places, because he was constantly on the roam with his camera, popping up everywhere like Where's Waldo. He wanted to see it all, and I guess he probably did see a lot of life in his abbreviated time."
The aspects of life that most fascinated Kohl, in his inseparable identities as person and photographer, existed far outside the mainstream. Both as a photojournalist (particularly in his CP days) and a fine-arts photographer, he was inexorably drawn to what some people consider the reprobate: transvestite prostitutes working Calvert Street, strippers on the Block, S&M dominatrices and their toadies, bikers and their molls.
"Joe was aware [of], and participated in, that side of life that most of us ignore or don't see or look down on," says Baltimore photographer Carl Clark, a close friend of Kohl's. "And he was right in there. He gave them dignity, and he gave them respect, so that when you looked at those pictures of people who you'd been disdaining, suddenly you're saying to yourself, 'These people are human.'
"He was an uncompromising, passionate photojournalist, like Weegee," Clark says, referring to the famed 1940s New York tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig. "At the same time, he was a documentary photographer in the vein of [Sebastiao] Salgado. And then all of a sudden, after these hard-hitting, blam-blam photos of the transvestite prostitutes, strippers, and dominatrices, you look at his personal work and you see these wonderful, soft-abstract nudes. Then one more switch-over, and there are portraits he made of his friends--remarkably sensitive and caring photographs. Then he goes to work for the Baltimore Business Journal and makes very businesslike but compelling portraits of suits."
In truth, Kohl photographed everything, never turning down a job no matter how unsexy its prospects. Despite his full-time post with the Business Journal, he freelanced until his hospitalization last summer, often shooting for the suburban-Washington chain of Gazette papers.
"He was incredibly reliable," Gazette photo editor Greg Dohler says, "and he never complained, no matter how mundane the assignment: community festivals with kids jumping on the Moon Bounce, elementary-school talent shows, crafting workshops, local beauty pageants. He made sure he got the nuts and bolts on the really terrible assignments--'Get me a cute kid, get me this, get me that'--but if there was something interesting there, he found it."
On or off duty, Kohl embraced photography. "I rarely, if ever, saw him without a camera," says Cindy France, who met Kohl when both worked at a Glen Burnie Pizza Hut in the early 1980s. "If you invited him to a party, he'd bring a camera and shoot what he saw there. It was like he was never not working."
In tireless pursuit of his obsession, Kohl seldom left his subjects unmoved, an attribute that imparted a distinctiveness to his images. "Joe was such a singular-looking character that he usually made a striking impression on whatever scene he was dispatched to photograph," recalls former City Paper staff writer and music editor David Dudley, who worked on numerous assignments with Kohl. "I can't tell you how many dubious subjects asked me, 'Is the big guy with you?' when Joe would show up and start taking pictures. But he was all business on the job.
"I think his somewhat intimidating bigness and strangeness brought out interesting facial expressions in people, which he would magnify further via that trademark unadorned portraiture style of his. . . . When he took a picture of somebody, he got right in their face and took a big damn picture. A huge face backed up against a wall, like a mug shot. It focused so tightly on the human subject at hand, not the photograph or the photographer's cleverness. It was sort of a fearless, stripped-bare aesthetic. . . . It seemed to lend great gravity to whatever the story was supposed to be about."
Kohl brought a similar dedication and purposefulness to his fine-art work, mostly nudes, and a similarly democratic, nonjudgmental spirit. "He didn't discriminate on the basis of body type," Cindy France says. "One photograph showed this very overweight woman, and it was just great--she looked completely comfortable with herself. Obviously, she had been treated with respect."
Over the years, France says, Kohl kept after her, half-kidding and half-serious, to pose nude for him. "I always said no," she says with a laugh. "But it got to be sort of a joke between us. When we would hang up the phone, he would say, 'Now are you sure you don't want to pose naked?' And I would say, 'Yes, I'm sure.' One of the last times he asked--by then I had turned 30--and I said no, he said, 'You should really be glad that I still ask.'"

Michael Yockel was editor of City Paper during much of Joe Kohl's tenure here.