“He told me my work was stagnant and not human enough,” Strand said. Unfortunately, Strand’s mentor told him that “life” was the one thing missing from his early attempts at portrait photography about six years ago. The experience led him to appreciate the importance of celebrating life and capturing its essence in photographs. After an appendectomy, he developed a deadly sepsis infection and spent six months fighting to recover. Two years after retiring from the Navy, Strand had a brush with death. Later he taught photography at the Defense Information School in Maryland. He took pictures for his high school newspaper and yearbook and then joined the Navy, where he served as a photographer on the USS Ranger and USS Long Beach ships and at Miramar Air Station. Strand fell in love with photography as a boy, developing images with his dad in the basement darkroom of their home in Racine, Wis.
Everybody else was going,” he told Strand during the interview. He quickly signed up to serve with three of his brothers. He was fighting as an amateur boxer with a mean left hook when the war began. Gonzalez was born in San Diego and raised in Logan Heights. He has learned to ask the same questions three or four different ways and eventually the veterans’ minds become more limber and the stories trickle out. Gonzalez’s memories have faded with the years but Strand was patient and cheerful.
Gonzalez helped carry the wounded man to safety through a hail of bullets.įor about 20 minutes, Strand sat with Gonzalez and asked him questions about his service for the audio recording. He earned a Bronze Star for his bravery in the Battle of Okinawa, when he jumped out of a foxhole to rescue one end of a fallen stretcher bearing a wounded soldier, after one of the medics carrying the pallet was shot to death. Army’s 381st Company, 96th Infantry Division. Strand’s most recent veteran photo session was on March 10 with Joe Albert Gonzalez, 95, of Clairemont, who served in the U.S.
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