Photographer Bill Foley on his incredible journey

The photographer Bill Foley is a bit like the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.

He left a comfortable life in Indianapolis and went out into the wild world — the Middle East of the 1970s and 1980s. He had incredible adventures, frightening adventures. He acquitted himself with distinction.

Then he came home.

An exhibition of Foley's work, "Art Meets News," goes on display at the Indiana State Museum March 28-July 19.

As an Associated Press staffer in 1982, Foley brought to light the horror of the massacres at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in Beirut, winning a Pulitzer Prize. He was on the scene in Cairo in 1981 when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by his own soldiers in a chaotic melee. In 1983 he documented the aftermath of a suicide bomber's destruction of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon.

Only four years earlier Foley had been doing what young Hoosiers normally do: at Indiana University, strolling Dunn Meadow, snapping photographs for the college yearbook. He landed a summer internship for the Cincinnati Enquirer and photographed one of the greatest baseball teams of all time, the 1976 Reds.

He could have made a life of that.

But in 1978, Foley took his portfolio to London and interviewed with the Associated Press there. He was hired and sent to Cairo. For most of the next 12 years Foley was either there or Syria, or Lebanon, or Iran. During that turbulent time a range of people held guns to his head and tied him up. ("I'm going to guess eight times," Foley said.)

Always they let him go.

He returned to Indianapolis in 2005 to be near his recently widowed mother. He got a job teaching photography at Marian University, in the art department.

Foley, 60, lives in Broad Ripple with his dog and cat.

Last October Foley was nearly killed walking his dog, Sophie, in Broad Ripple. When another dog attacked Sophie, he grabbed it and was bitten on the hand. At first it didn't seem like much but the wound became infected. Foley's balance was thrown off and his mind went "loopy," he said.

When he failed to show up for class in the morning, his students and some Marian police officers came to his house. He was so out of it he couldn't tell them his own birthday. A doctor later told him that without treatment he'd have been dead by nightfall.

The Star's Will Higgins recently had lunch with Foley in a Vietnamese restaurant named Saigon in a converted former Bob Evans location on West 38th Street. The two communicated further by email.

WH: Your father was an expert marksman, teaching you to shoot guns at a young age. How did this help you in your career as a news photographer?

BF: My father was on the 5th Army pistol team for many years and had many trophies and medals acquired with his skills on the range. My father felt it was more than a little important that his kids learned about gun safety and understood that one always check a weapon to make sure it was unloaded, and then he taught us how to shoot at a number of shooting ranges.

My father taught me to shoot and I became pretty good with a .22 rifle with a peep site or .22 pistol. At Boy Scout camp one summer, I found out about the 'marksmanship' merit badge a few days before my time at camp ended. I went for it, and with the my shooting skills, as well as my gun safety knowledge as well as the mechanics and how to keep the guns clean, along with a written exam, I received my merit badge before I went home.

Fast forward a few years to 1981, and I was covering my first two wars: the Iran-Iraq war and the Syrian-Christian fighting in Lebanon.

The information about various weapons, accuracy, sounds, etc. that I learned from my father turned into an asset in a few situations.

At 2 a.m. one morning in Beirut, and I and a few others were leaving a dinner party. I was driving my 1979 Brazilian made yellow VW bug. At an intersection, I stopped as one does for cross traffic. Looking to our left everyone in the car saw a group of armed militiamen about 25 yards away. They saw us at the same time and started yelling for us to stop.

Not this time, they were too far away and as I punched it, I knew that unless they were Olympic marksmen that we would be out of their sight long before they could do any damage.

Thanks, Dad.

WH: What is meant by 'Art Meets News'? Do the best news photographs qualify as art?

BF: The idea that 'art meets news' has manifested itself over the past 40+ years as historians and curators have recognized the beauty and relevance in photographs that were made for editorial or other uses are seen as having another life as "art". One only needs to visit galleries and museums today that are showing work by Joseph Koudelka, a Magnum photographer whose work documenting the Soviet Invasion of Prague in 1968 was published in many magazines and newspapers as news photographs at the time, and now can be found in museums and galleries. Koudelka's work from 1968, as well as his other work from then and his current work, was shown last year at the Art Institute in Chicago.

In 2015, galleries and museums are showing work by many photojournalists, including David Burnett, Eddie Adams, Robert Capa, Susan Meiselas, Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans, Alfred Eisenstadt and the list goes on. This work, whether by Eisenstadt, Adams, Parks or Burnett, originally shot for magazines, is now being recognized as "Art".

WH: Has digital photography taken at least some of the 'art' out of photography by making dark room skills irrelevant?

BF: Many great photographers in the analog era were not always great in the darkroom. Henri Cartier Bresson, one of the most famous photographers/artists, always said he was not interested in the darkroom, only in the image, which is why there have always been people who made the technical side of photography their life's work, to balance those who had no interest in the darkroom side. Photography has evolved from the "wet plate"-collodion photography of the 1850's to the dry plate in the 1880's, to film as we know it in the the early 1900's to today's digital photography. At the end of the day, whether you are using a Speed-Graphic (4x5 film camera) or a 30-megapixel digital camera, photography remains about the light and how the photographer translates what he or she sees into a still image.

WH: Where does the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe fit in as far as photography being considered art?

BF: Mapplethorpe was an artist of many talents and is famously known for his more risque work. But, he also did beautiful still lifes of flowers as well as portraits and other subjects. One cannot simply focus on one facet of his work that (Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center) and a 'few' others had a problem with a few years ago.

FYI, I met him when I attended his show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in July of 1988. He was in a wheelchair at the time. He died of AIDS in March of 1989.

WH: Do you miss the excitement of a war zone?

BF: I don't know if exciting is how I viewed working in war zones. I looked at the work as a chance to tell interesting, important and not-so-important stories, travel, and — with any luck — make photographs that can be a catalyst for change. With work in war zones, often there is a welcome dose of adrenalin to get you around the next corner. That is not a bad thing.

WH: Who was the friendliest of the '76 Cincinnati Reds?

BF: If you consider the fastest one to smile as the 'friendliest,' it would be a tie between Joe Morgan and Tony Perez.

WH: Do you think Pete Rose belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

BF: We all make mistakes. Rose obviously has made a few. But when one looks at the history of pardons, sports and otherwise, and who has been pardoned for what crimes, all things being equal, I find it a little hypocritical of the sports bosses to continue to deny Pete Rose his place in the Hall of Fame.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.