CEDAR RAPIDS — One million times over the last 30 years, Bob Campagna has clicked the shutter on his camera. Only 60 of those clicks appear as photographs in his exhibit at the Carl and Mary Koehler History Center.
One million. Select 60. That should give you an idea how important these photographs are to Bob, 59, a vagabond, a philosopher, a dreamer, a teacher and a student as well.
“As a storyteller,” Bob says simply, “I used a camera.
“I like to do people behind the scenes. These are the things you’ll find here.” Indeed, the black and white images — either 11-by-15 inches or 15-by-15 inches — show people, places and objects in Linn County. They supply the foundation for “Linn County People and Places, A Retrospective and Invitation,” the exhibit that will feature photographs from other small Linn County towns during its run through Nov. 29.
“I look at this exhibit as my love song to Linn County,” Bob says.
Balding, soft-spoken and of average height, he was able to train his keen eye on unsuspecting subjects or pose them in portraits for posterity.
“These pictures here,” Bob says, “I remember all of the names and the circumstances of the photograph.” He gazes at one lasting impression, that of Don Janda sitting inside the front window of his Sykora Bakery in Czech Village. Don no longer owns the bakery, it was later closed and the flood of 2008 filled the building.
“What we’re trying to do is build around Bob’s energy,” says Dick Thomas, a former Cornell College history professor in Mount Vernon and volunteer at the history center. “To talk to people about history as well as photography. Every one of these photographs is a story.” Before Bob became an icon with a Hasselblad camera (he worked at the Mount Vernon newspaper for a few years before operating his photo studio from 1980 to 2007), he taught high school. In 1972, in Keokuk, he had students build an oil drum and wood raft and floated with them down the Mississippi River.
“That launched my freelance teaching career and my photography,” he says.
“The jobs I did, I always took a different route to get there. It was the artist coming out in me.” From photographing seniors while working on a housing project in the ’70s to his freelance teaching stints in the Midwest and Colorado, Bob and a camera became one. He’s collected more than 450 photographybooks and studied Ansel Adams, famous for his black and white photos of Western U.S. landscapes. He’s sorting through negatives left by four Mount Vernon photographers. Photography, Bob says, is a marriage of artistry and history. So he printed these 60 images on archival quality paper that should last 2,000 years, borrowed Adam’s “floating mount” technique and donated them to the history center for this exhibit.
“Doing this,” Bob says, “is my love of photography.”