Richard McPeak Photography

biography

For reasons unknown, a childhood hero of mine was the photographer from the local paper who came to football and basketball games. When I was ten, I made a camera kit out of a lunch box and a Kodak Brownie. He let me stand next to him sometimes at basketball games, and take pictures with him.

In the Army, I was stationed at an obscure base in Ohio. I had the run of the photo lab and improvised a job for myself as base photographer and public information specialist. I took some classes along the way.

After the Army, I literally replaced my hero as the local newspaper photographer when he retired. I also worked a short time for Nick Boris, who bought The Village Studio in Chagrin Falls, OH, and renamed it Studio Boris. Nick had learned lighting while working in the movies in the '40s and '50s. I think he was the best portrait photographer I ever knew -- and his work was the best I've ever seen, short of Yousuf Karsh of Toronto.

I worked for Jim Venditti in Bedford, OH, for a couple of years doing thousands of school pictures and senior portraits, plus countless weddings and first communions.

When I went to work for the Red Cross, it was as a photographer/writer in the Public Relations Department of the Greater Cleveland Chapter. When I was hired as the manager of the Lake County Chapter, I continued to moonlight as a free-lancer, and do photography for Red Cross and the local United Way.

In Red Cross, I photographed Vietnamese refugees, all kinds of disasters, dozens of dinners and banquets, and hundreds of volunteers and blood donors. In the early 1990s, I was the most published theatrical photographer in Greater Cleveland, for about two years (as a hobby!).

When I decided to take an early retirement from Red Cross, I needed to think about a new way to make a living. Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers, "follow your bliss." That is what I am doing. I am a photographer -- it is who I am and what I do. And it is really fun to be living it again!