JOANNE RATHE STROHMEYER // ‘SHE LOOKED FOR TRUTH’
When I hired Joanne Rathe (gulp) 40 years ago, there were fierce newspaper wars in Boston. Everything was super competitive. She was already a hotshot at the Boston Herald, and Springfield Union but more importantly she was the best pitcher on their formidable softball team. Negotiations were hush-hush. We gave her a code name of Madeline so word wouldn’t leak out.
Today, she retires a certain first ballot Hall of Famer. She is simply irreplaceable. The most beloved photojournalist in Boston today, first on the streets and then running the photo desk. But even more than that she’s a caring and kind person with a winning mixture of chutzpah, humor and sensitivity to excel at everything life serves up. Somehow, she never aged and never became jaded. Everything she touched became better. I guarantee you, if you are reading this, Joanne has done you an act of kindness and asked you for nothing in return.
A great shooter, she has been awarded the World Press Photo Children’s Award for her work in South Africa, the U.N. World Hunger Award for a photo essay on Rural Poverty in New England, and a slew of other prizes from the National Press Photographers Association and the BPPA. Joanne was fearless, going to places like Nicaragua and the tent camps of Pakistan. She looked for truth, not Marriott points.
Then came Act Two, as Assistant Chief Photographer, a thankless task involving being a news junkie, idea creator, motivator, shrink and babysitter. She trained star reporters to think photos and not head shots. To learn the inner soul of an amazing photojournalist is to observe how they do under stress.
Former Globe reporter Wil Haygood, author of “Colorization, One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” (recently banned by the Trump administration), travelled with Rathe on one of her two trips to South Africa. Haygood might be the only writer who can effectively translate pictures into words. He files the following report:
“Sometimes when I watch a movie set in South Africa, or read something about Nelson Mandela’s legacy, I pull out that Special Section, published in The Boston Globe on March 11, 1990: “SOUTH AFRICA: The Unfinished Revolution.” And when I retrieve the issue (damn right I’ve held onto it!) I think of Joanne Rathe. I wonder: How did she get that picture?! Or that one? Or that one? …Her photos showed me what I sometimes didn’t see with my own eyes.
I was with Joanne in South Africa during those mean – and also triumphant – days of Nelson Mandela, who was still locked up when we both arrived in South Africa, and released while we were there.
Sometimes Joanne and I worked in the same vicinity – tanks chasing us through this or that township, crouching in secret houses where Mandela’s cohorts resided as they were still on wanted posters. But most of the time, Joanne, fearless and intrepid, was off on her own, hauling those cameras over her shoulder, roaring down another dusty road.
Joanne put in 19-hour days in South Africa because she was made for one of the biggest stories on the planet. Take a day off? Not a chance. Here she is, smack in the middle of some of the mayhem that erupted after Mandela’s release, capturing a lone Black boy staring down two rifle-toting white South African policemen. There were those late days when Joanne would tell me she had found someone; we had to go back out; we had to navigate the back roads. Again. Right now. She didn’t want to lose the light. My goodness she stayed focused!
Her haunting and beautiful and documentary-like pictures take me back to South Africa time and time again. And for that I cherish – and love – having worked with the great Joanne Rathe. She may not know this: But she surely made me a better reporter. She stands as one of the great photographers of our time.”
That is high and mighty praise indeed, considering she is half of the Dream Team with hubby Damian Strohmeyer, the legendary Sports Illustrated photographer. He recorded the famous “helmet catch” by David Tyree of the N.Y. Giants against the Patriots in the Super Bowl. His 72 SI front covers are more than Tom Brady and Michael Jordan combined. But his greatest catch was Joanne.
For the scoop on that we go to Leigh Montville, the legendary Boston Globe and SI superstar: “The first buds of romance were spotted by the bloodshot eyes of Globe sportswriters at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta. Fresh from detailing the failures of the Jamaican bobsled team and British ski jumper Eddie the Eagle and the US hockey team, the intrepid scribes spotted a more intriguing story back at the press village.
Why was this photographer from Denver – it was Denver, right? – always around the grim prefab housing the Globe occupied for the length of the Games? Why was he talking with Our Joanne all the time? Why were they smiling, laughing, their conversations about more than f-stops and shutter speeds and lighting and the usual mumbo jumbo of their business? Why…there they were again.
Wait a minute.
Uh-huh.
Stop the presses.
Even the sportswriters could tell. Something was up,” writes Montville.
And now the dynamic duo moves to Atlanta to spoil the three grownup kids and soon to be three grandchildren and to take a well-deserved victory lap. It’s a big loss. We love them both. They are truly one of a kind. You won’t find a more deserving couple to be awarded the Boston Press Photographers Lifetime Achievement Award in all of the USA. Godspeed. — Stan Grossfeld, The Boston Globe