LIFESTYLES
A Life in Photography Jerry Poppenhouse Has Seen it All Through His Lens by Lori Roll It all started with a Roy Rogers box camera and a racoon. “I set the camera up with a flash blub and a string attached to some food, so when the raccoon pulled on the string, he took his own photo,” said Jerry Poppenhouse. From that moment, he was hooked on photography. Poppenhouse grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Owensville, Missouri, a small town with only one stop light, where people were on a first name basis. There were no televisions or computers, and the telephone was a party line which let anyone who picked up the phone be involved in the conversation. From that humble beginning, Poppenhouse enlisted in the Navy for four years and afterward received a basketball college scholarship in Missouri, which led to an art scholarship at the Kansas City Art Institute. After graduating with his BFA, Poppenhouse was hired in 1967 by Phillips Petroleum Company as a graphic designer and photographer at their Bartlesville headquarters, where he spent his career.
The small-town boy quickly found himself traveling the globe, working on annual reports, environmental brochures, safety booklets, short films, slide presentations, and assignments he likened to National Geographic. His work often took him to remote parts of the world he had only heard about in high school history class. “Our subject matter was very
diversified; everything from offshore oil rigs, gas stations, refineries, plastics, fertilizer, clothing, fashion, food, sports, arts, wildlife, underwater, aerials, landscape, portraits, and architecture,” he said. While many experiences were exciting and memorable, one close call sticks in his mind — when a series of explosions rocked the Houston Chemical Complex Oct. 23, 1989. Poppenhouse had arrived at the Complex that morning, but was asked to return the following day since they had forgotten his appointment. He drove to another assignment in nearby Sweeny, where he heard about the explosion which would have killed him along with the 23 people who died that day. He rushed back to the complex with firefighters and an FBI investigator to document the event. “Even to this day I have trouble talking about it. I have covered three such disasters during my career, but this one was the worst,” he said. Photography assignments provided Poppenhouse with adventures in the rain forests of West Africa, the tropical jungles of South America, the edge of the
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b Monthly | MARCH 2020
