Atlanta photojournalist Boyd Lewis died last week at age 77.
His wife Deborah Lewis confirmed the news on Facebook, writing that he “suffered from a variety of illnesses and diseases that weakened him day by day.”
“To me,” she wrote, “he was my friend, my soulmate and my husband of almost 32 years.”
Deborah Lewis first crossed paths with Boyd in 1984 while working at WABE and seeking photos and resources regarding Margaret Mitchell, the writer of “Gone With the Wind.” Boyd was the last legal resident of her apartment, she said, and “his photography helped them re-create the inside of the house while my networking helped assure that the house would be a museum to Margaret Mitchell.”
Lewis, a Vietnam War veteran, took a single photography class at the University of Memphis before embarking on career as a photographer. He was fired from a Mississippi newspaper for quoting witnesses who disputed a white police officer’s account of a murder of a Black man. In 1969, he joined the Black weekly newspaper The Atlanta Voice, dubbed at the time as “the white boy with the Black press.”
He later worked at The Atlanta Inquirer, then Creative Loafing. For a time, he also wrote a column for the underground newspaper the Great Speckled Bird.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
He covered Klan meetings, marched with civil rights advocate James Meredith, documented the rise of Atlanta mayors Maynard Jackson Jr. and Andrew Young. He also peeked into the pocket-size cultures of Summerville, Cabbagetown, the Strip and the many other tributaries that fed the Atlanta melting pot.
“Boyd was everywhere,” said Young in a tribute video The Atlanta Press Club made when it inducted Lewis into its Hall of Fame in 2020. “I don’t know when he slept. ... He usually captured an image that went all the way through our minds to our hearts and made us responsive to the need for change, for the cry for justice. He was not just a journalist but an advocate for social change.”
Lewis had many other jobs over the years as a classical music disc jockey, a reporter for WABE-FM, where he hosted a radio program about the South’s history called “Southwind,” and a headline copy writer at CNN.
In 1997, he moved to Los Angeles to become an English teacher. For a time, he taught mostly Hispanic students at an inner-city middle school under the flight path of the Burbank airport. They nicknamed him “El Pirate,” in honor of his eye patch.
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
“You’d get the fulfillment and feedback every day you walked into the classroom,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2016.
Over the years, he bought his own film in 100-foot rolls, and printed his photos in his own darkroom, retaining ownership of his pictures. After worrying about having the photographs lost or stolen, he decided to donate more than 25,000 images to the Atlanta History Center.
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
Among the photos he gave them: a marcelled Maynard Jackson at his elaborate inaugural, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra performing behind him; Krishna Consciousness devotees, clad in dhotis and high-top Converse sneakers, joyfully banging their two-headed drums in Piedmont Park; and a gay pride cohort, awash in feathers and parasols, waving from the windows, roof, bed and hood of a blue pickup truck.
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
Credit: (c)2007 Boyd Lewis
“There were better photographers than I, more evocative audio artists and God knows, more story-telling writers,” Lewis told the AJC. “But I can’t think of anyone else who did it all.”
In a Press Club video honoring Lewis, filmmaker Jennifer Hall Lee noted that “the depth of his work is amazing. His character just shines through. It was present. You feel like you’re right there with people.”
