We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Hessemer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

So through my photography career, it has been an honor having probably the best client in the whole world, being Nike as my main client for 15 years, and then being able to shoot destination weddings on the beaches of Hawaii. My office was mostly the beautiful beaches of Hawaii at sunset almost every day, but all that didn’t matter as much as the humanitarian photography that I was able to do and being able to learn how to photograph, or use any kind of art to help others has been the most rewarding. Using Photography as a tool to give back and to tell stories that could impact the world was the most rewarding thing for me. Through this, my students have learned how to use their photography to be able to change people’s thoughts and behaviors by their photographs, and by the stories, they get to tell. I was able to do that for about 13 years before I started teaching and the thing that drew me to the school that I’ve been teaching at is their willingness to try new things and things that have never been done before and building this team of photographers and having them learn how to tell stories with photographs was a real privilege. There’s another unique thing going on at our school. We have created an institute of art innovation, in which students can major in photography or film songwriting or dance, and having students for four years allows students to develop as an artists in their field and collaborate with other artists to create powerful stories to help others. Doing projects together and teaching them how to collaborate has been priceless. When we went on assignment to Africa and seeing them all work together on these projects and actually having to learn about what is being done to curb poverty in the world and then to be able to use their photography to tell those stories it is something that they can take with them. I also ask my students to come up with other ideas for projects. There is a project called Help Portrait that was started by a photographer named Jeremy Cowart, whom the Huffington Post, called the most influential photographer in the world. I honestly believe he is and he’s a pioneer in Photography doing things that nobody else is ever done. He started Help Portrait in 2008 He just went outside of his studio the first week in December and decided to take pictures of people who could never afford to have a professional photographer take photos of them. He just printed them up and gave them expecting nothing in return. Jeremy thought that was just a great idea and put it out there on the Internet. T’m thinking of doing it next year or two and maybe making it an annual thing so I chimed in it said I’ll do it. I was living in Maui at the time and so I found a small church with a food kitchen and I took pictures and gave them away. It was really rewarding so I did that for about three or four years in Maui before we ended up moving to California. When we moved here and I started teaching I decided I wanted my kids to be able to do this to show them a great way to give back with their photography and it was one of those precious things that we do every year. We build out two different photo studios side-by-side to shoot pictures of people that are on welfare and are coming to get Christmas presents at a church for their children and so the people come in and most of them are Hispanic and we have interpreters from our Spanish department helping. The parents have have interpreters and they’ll take them down into the Gym that is full of tables with presents and the kids will go to a craft place somewhere while the parents are shopping. These people will be able to pick out some Christmas presents for each of their children and there’s a crew there to wrap each present and put them in big garbage bags. They look like Santa Claus with great big green bags when they walk out but when they first get there we take pictures of their families and most of these families have never had pictures taken before because could never afford a professional photographer. We take each of their photos and we print them out for them and then when they’re all done and they have picked their kids up and they’re getting ready to leave we give them their free portraits. One of the stories that touched me the most was one family with a dad the mom and three kids. As soon as they came in to get their picture taken the dad was kind of standoffish and the mom wanted the picture taken and the dad said I’m not gonna do this. He just goes over and sits down on the sideline with his arms crossed and looked angry. I decided I was going to go over and talk to him while one of the students were shooting pictures of the mom and the kids and I went over and said don’t you want picture with your family and he said no I don’t want to be in any pictures of my family and he was really grumpy and I asked him if he would tell me his story. I don’t think anybody ever asked him or had been interested in his story before and he looked embarrassed. He said I just got out of prison and I just I don’t want want my picture taken! I said would you do me a favor would you let me take a picture of you and your family and I would like to do a wallet-size picture for you. I would print up a special one just for you that you can put in your wallet, because isn’t this why you’re going gonna stay out of trouble and because you wanna be with your family and he agreed. I took him over and then I showed him a picture on the back of the camera of the picture that we had taken of him in the family and he just started to cry and he asked if he could get one just with his wife and I said sure. Then he asked for one ofone of each of his kids and so we did a whole photo package for him with all these different combinations and to see the transformation in this man was priceless. To see the student’s reaction when they learned his story reminded me why I was teaching. We all cryed and when he picked up his images, he was just a whole different person the power of photography is just so real that people don’t understand sometimes but we’re hoping that’ll be a life-changing thing for him

Another project we did that was pretty amazing was that I always ask my students if they want to come up with their own project ideas. When they say they have an ideaso we’ll just stop and have a brainstorming session. They just have to be bold enough to share what their ideas are. We had this one really shy girl that was in our class that raised her hand one day and said I have an idea for a project and I said OK letʻs all eot together and in a circle hear what she has to say. Maren just shared that she had always wanted to do a coffee table book on burn survivors and I said what? Burn survivors? Tell us about that. She always wears long sleeves and we never knew why, but when she was two years old, she burned over 40% of her body and she had over 100 surgeries and skin graphs through the years she said you know what? When people see us with burns they just clam up and they won’t talk to us and we don’t have any friends. Because I’m going to a support group with people that severely burned those are my friends. The teenagers that she grew up together are her only friends. I want to change the perception of what people think about when they see people with burns that they would drop the walls of not knowing what to do or what to say and so we started talking about it. She said she dreamt of Publishing, a coffee table book on Burn Survivors. A high school photo class publishing a coffee table book was a big task. After much discussion we made a plan and we decided to do it and we did and when the word started getting out about it, Sony corporation donated their studio to let us shoot all the black-and-white portraits that we did and we got to use our cameras and their lighting equipment from what they had on their studios and it just became this really cool project and I was right before Covid happened and we got the book published anyway. It’s called Just Like You and can be found on Amazon or wherever books are found worldwide. Maren Jacobson is the author as this was her idea and it was so successful that all the walls did break down and all these kids became friends with each other and all there is no awkwardness about people looking differently than them any longer, and the students were so shocked by the end of the project that they said let’s do another one next year and I was gonna have some of these students back again and I said well who else do you want to do a book on? They came up with people in the down syndrome community and so we did a whole other coffee table book the next year just on people in the down syndrome community and that one is now published, and that turned into a music video that we went to Iceland to shoot. You see, Iceland is becoming a zero Down syndrome, country and requiring genetic testing for every single woman that gets pregnant and then they’re strongly suggesting to the point of 100% pretty much everyone with a positive test has an abortion. for people that have any children with Down syndrome that’s a whole other story but we took two girls that were 12 year-old girls with Down syndrome to meet another 12 year old girl from Iceland that also has Down syndrome. these three girls met and all spent this time together and became the best of friends. Everywhere we went people were curious, and they were friendly, and kind, and wanted to know about people with Down syndrome,. These girls became ambassadors for people with Down syndrome in Iceland and some more projects are being worked on. A music video was created in Iceland about this and is available on YouTube. If you want to see the video search Benjamin Edwards, YouTube channel if you just put Benjamin Edwards and Iceland it’ll come right up but yeah it was a great project that we did that just keeps expanding and so those are some of the projects that we have done with our class so far.

David, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

So I’ve been a professional photographer for over four decades now. I first got interested in photography because my father was an amateur photographer and had won a couple of competitions and had a Leica camera and I didn’t know what that was. I was in about the third grade when he first took me to his friend’s house where we went in his dark room, he had taken some pictures of our German Shepherd dog and he processed the film and exposed a piece of white paper, and we were in a red colored lit room and he took this paper and put it into some chemicals and I remember just standing there and on my tippy toes just looking into this tray with a piece of paper, all of a sudden an image of my dog appeared out of nowhere and I was hooked I just thought that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen and so I always had that in the back of my mind but it wasn’t until I was 16 when I got my very first camera. It was a Nikonos underwater camera, and I had a huge passion for biology at the time. We were on our way to Hawaii for a vacation. I wanted to and I was ready to go take underwater pictures and I was going to be the next Jacque Cousteau. When we got there, we were sitting on the beach, ready to jump in the water for the first time with my camera. The film was loaded and II was ready to get wet. I was sitting on the beach, waiting for my dad to get his snorkel, his fins, and his mask ready.and I looked up at the sky I said Dad can you take a picture of the sun and he said no the sun is too bright.You can’t do that. I had this light meter and I’m trying to figure out what I needed to set the camera settings for underwater exposures, and I said while the light meter says I can take a picture so I’m gonna try I just snapped a picture that was the first time I clicked a shutter and then I jumped in the water, and we saw all these beautiful fish and coral reefs, and it was just amazing. I couldn’t wait to get it all processed so as soon as we got out of the water, I talked my dad into driving to Lahaina, where there was a two-hour photo processing stand. We went and took the Film in and waited for it to be processed and I can never forget opening that envelope and looking at the pictures and being in shock they were terrible. The worst thing I’ve ever seen there were no vibrant colors in the photos. The fish were almost microscopic small you couldn’t even see them so what I wanted to do was throw the whole thing away I did see the picture of the sun and that image did turn out so I thought I’d just keep it so I just threw it in my suitcase and forgot about it and the next year in high school I took an photography class and at the end of the year teacher said let’s get your best damages together and let’s send them into this state of Oregon photo contest for high school students so I looked at all my work that I had done in class and iI wasn’t excited about it. It was OK but nothing outstanding and then I remembered that picture of the sun I took on Maui so I decided to show that to my teacher he thought it was my strongest photo and might have a chance of doing well. It was about a month later when there was an announcement over the intercom in our homeroom that said congratulations to David Hessemer for winning First Place at the state of Oregon photo contest for High School students. So the first time I ever clicked a shutter I had won the State of Oregon high school photo of the year so I was pretty excited about that. After high school I went to the University of Oregon where I ran track or University of Oregon and my coach started Nike when I was there and I was there when they were naming Nike, and Nike was very small at the time but they seemed to go places. They created this cool logo. The Nike Swoosh was created by a college student. I thought they’re gonna need photographs done as they grew and produced more shoes so I decided to go on to Photography school and spent 2 years at Brooks Institute of Photography where I got a second bachelor’s degree. I left Santa Barbara when I graduated from Brooks and moved to Portland to open the Photo Studio and figure out how to take pictures for Nike. It worked out and I did that for over 15 years until my wife and I both decided to head in another direction with our lives. She was a vice president of an agency in Portland when we met and she was my boss. I had to do photo assignments for her which was kind of interesting. After years in the advertising and marketing business, we got burned out of the corporate thing and since were married on Maui we decided we were going to buy the company that married us and start doing destination weddings on Maui and around Hawaii and so we did that and moved the family to Hawaii. We have six kids we moved the whole family over to Maui and spent another 15 years there doing destination weddings. We had a boat and went whale watching in the mornings before school. Many of my photography friends from all over the country would come to Maui every once in a while for a shoot and I got a reputation of being the photographer’s boat captain who always had a cut-up fresh pineapple on board. It became a thing in the photo world. After 1500 weddings, my wife said I think we’re done with weddings. She was the coordinator and I took the photos. We had done destination weddings on all the Hawaiian Islands and all over the world including one in a village in Kenya where they sacrificed a goat and used the hide for the wedding dress. That was a first. We brainstormed what was next for us and so we shifted again. We decided that humanitarian photography might be a good next step.and that’s always been my passion, shooting pictures for people who are underprivileged and need their stories told. I have Had the privilege of being on many photo assignments around the world. My goal was to travel to different countries and find nonprofits that I believed in the work they were doing and tell their stories. I was able to do just that for about another 10 years before I started a nonprofit called Free World, which was about human trafficking prevention. If you can stop poverty in the world then slavery will stop. Few know that there is a movement to stop poverty in the world and it is making huge progress. I was focusing on that at the time when I was asked to do a TED talk about telling that story about transitioning between Photography and the nonprofit world I was asked if I was interested in teaching a photography class for high school students at a prestigious private high school in southern California. At first, I had no desire to teach Photography to high school students I said no, but I got to rethink it and thought it might be cool if we could build up teams of photographers of high school students to be able to travel the world and tell the stories for these nonprofits that are doing great work. I went back and pitched that to the school and they said they were all in and whatever I wanted to do I was free to try. They asked if I could build the best High School Photography program in the world, so that’s what I’ve been working on for the last eight years. I still work on photography assignments outside of school, but mostly just teach the students how to travel the world and do projects for nonprofits, and use their photography for good. As a class we’ve traveled to Kenya, We’ve been to the Amazon River, and last year we had the privilege to go go Iceland on assignment. This next year we plan to go back to Africa again. Our class also does a domestic trip to go visit professional photographers in different parts of the United States and next year we hope to go to Nashville for a second trip.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

People can’t believe my life sometimes tells some of the crazy things that have happened to me on Photo assignments. The first photo I ever sold was a photo that I took while in photography school. Who bought the photo? National Geographic. I happened to be doing photography for MarineLand and there was an orca that had the first baby born in captivity. I had done a photo assignment for a school project and they liked my work. They asked me if I would be the only photographer there when the baby Orca was born? They trusted me but this was a lot of pressure for a college student. There were only three of us there when the baby whale was born and this was going to be a national story. I had the only pictures and they let me just sell it to him directly. It was pretty amazing but a couple of other things that have happened to me. I’ve been chased by the KGB on assignment. I had go get gas in Al Qaida training station, I got to shoot Wonder Woman and 20 dolphins and believe it or not I was also the subject of a romance novel and that’s kind of embarrassing.
But probably the story that shows the most resilience is when I went to Africa with a group of medical doctors who were going to be serving people that never gotten medical attention before they were going to some of the remote places in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, and right on the border. There was a tribe called the Borana tribe, and I made a deal with the Director of this nonprofit that I wanted to go and find a completely remote place. A village that had never heard of radios TVs pretty much no media knowledge. They did not have electricity and they didn’t know anything about social media I was looking for a remote tribe and they’re not easy to find around the world. I did find one in Nicaragua that I could go to that was a day-and-a-half day trip by canoe up the Rio Coco River I was about ready to go do that one when this Director said yeah we’re going to these remote places in Africa and if you want to go with us to take pictures of those medical groups that would be great and I said well on one condition and that’s that when you get to the most remote place, I can go and take some cameras. They were donated by Fuji at the time and found a village that was completely remote and had little exposure to the outside world and see if I could teach their young adults to take pictures to tell the story of their culture these are people who had never seen a computer or camera they didn’t know anything about that and so he agreed. He told me if we get there an if it’s still not remote out you can take an interpreter and go with you and go take the SUV and go out for another day or two and try to find the village and so we got to the most remote place. It still wasn’t remote enough so we took off I had two interpreters because this was a Borana tribe, and the main language of Swahili and we had an interpreter for Borana who spoke Swahili but didn’t speak English very well and we had an English interpreter that spoke Swahili, but not Borana so I had to go through two interpreters so we went English to Swahili to Borana to Swahili to English to speak to anybody in his village so we went for about a day and it was getting late and we finally found a village that I said OK I think this is it so we had to get permission to take pictures but they didn’t even know what pictures were. It was crazy but we went into the village and children always come whenever there’s an SUV or something like that they want to come and explore I was the only white person that many of them had seen. w. It was a unique thing for them to see outsiders from their village come and so they kind of surrounded our truck and I started pulling my camera out of I’m just taking some pictures as we went to the chiefʻs hut. They didn’t know what I was doing We found the chief and I said you need to ask him. My interpreters said OK so they took us to the Chief’s hut and when the chief came out two children ran over by the side I took a picture of the chief and his two kids and we went into the hut and it was all dirt floors. It was a thatched hut, and when we sat on the floor, I tried to explain to him through the interpreters what we were trying to do. While we were doing that, I pulled my computer out, put in my SD card and pulled up the picture of him and his kids and so when I’m explaining what a photograph is and that it actually shows an image like a drawing or something that looks real and so I turned the computer around to show him and he just started to freak out and I thought oh no I’ve crossed a cultural line here. I hope I don’t get killed right now. This is not good. He was freaked out and he was kind of yelling and didn’t know what was going on and all of a sudden some of the women around me started giggling, and I thought that’s a good sign. I’m not sure what’s wrong here, but through the interpreters, they finally said to me that he doesn’t recognize who is with his children but it was him. He had never seen himself before you s, they didn’t have mirrors and they didn’t have clean water. He had never seen the reflection of himself, and this man didn’t know what he looked like, but he knew what his children looked like so he was fascinated by Photography and said yes we can do it. We did that project and then when we were driving back and we were about an hour into the drive the driver said I’ve got some bad news We don’t have enough gas to get home. I asked what do? He said that up ahead I do know a place where we can get gas but it’s Al Qaeda training station and they don’t like Westerners and you might not come out alive and I thought that might not go well. I asked if there were other options? You can get out right here and wait for us and will be back in about an hour to get you I looked out and two cheetahs were sitting not 20 yards from our SUV and I said do you want me to get out here and wait with these cheetahs and possible snakes or whatever else are out here for an hour on my own and hope you come back to get me? I chose to go with them. The driver said well will wrap you up in a turban and just cover your face except for your eyes and you don’t say a word and you don’t look at anybody you look away the whole time we’re there you’re gonna be deaf, and you’re gonna be mute.When we drove in it was just like what you see in the movies where there was this dirt road going down to this compound and there’s people target shooting with machine guns. It honestly thought I was gonna be dead and not come out alive but we got there and these guys talked to him and they had people to the SUVt. They talked for a while and I just stayed quiet. Some children ran up to the truck and there were these people’s wives and their families there. It was a terrorist training community and they gave us gas. They bought the line that I was deaf and mute. We drove out. We did get back obviously because I’m telling the story That’s the most rewarding thing in the world for me but now being able to be a teacher and see my students doing the same thing is just as rewording. I’ve been a teacher eight years so I’ve had several groups that graduated from college over the last four to seven years and some are professional photographers now. To see my students using their photography and being able to hang in there are see these students using their photography skills for good has been a pleasure to watch.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Some people say that my middle name is Pivot I’ve pivoted my life so many times and it’s like I’ve got these second and third photography ives. My website is Act3Photo because the first act was having a commercial studio in Portland with Nike as my main client but I had a lot of other ones too. I worked for the Westin hotels for Intel, Apple, Canon, Boeing, and a lot of different corporate clients, and then when we left that world and moved to Maui. We started doing destination weddings and that’s a whole different animal it was so rewarding but that too eventually called for a pivot. Next, I decided to pivot again and moved from Hawaii to California and started doing humanitarian work that’s been the most rewarding of all of it, but that was probably the biggest pivot of all when I decided to use my photography for helping to change the world and there’s been nothing more rewarding than that and I know some of my other photographer friends have done humanitarian assignments and that’s probably their passion if they had their choice but it’s a hard thing to make much of a living doing because you don’t wanna charge nonprofits for your normal day rate or anything. so usually when you have another source of income through your photography then you can just say you’ll do it for cost if they just pay your airfare and ground expenses while you’re there then you’ll do all the photography for them and give it to them. That’s kind of what I’ve usually done on those types of things and then I did start a nonprofit it ended up paying for the trips that we worked on. That way the organizations we did work for did not have to pay anything for their stories being told, and that was the most rewarding of all, but being able to use your craft to help others in need is by far the most rewarding thing and it was worth all pivots to get to that point.

Contact Info:

• Website: Act3photo.com
• Instagram: davidhessemer
• Facebook: David Hessemer
• Linkedin: David Hessemer

Image Credits
All images are mine and you can use.