Once photographer Jim Sugar had a National Geographic cover story in his portfolio he was able to choose his own assignments, so he chose to drive a Volkswagen bus west from Washington, D.C., and then the length of the Pacific Coast, a project that took a full year of salaried time.
Plus, the National Geographic book division paid for the van and supplied all the cameras and color film he needed, which turned out to be thousands of rolls because Sugar always shot everything.
That project became “America’s Sunset Coast,” which was published in book form in 1978 and won him the Photographer of the Year Award issued by the National Press Photographers Association. An unmentioned side project had been to search for a place to relocate, and Sugar ended up parking the VW bus at a woodsy canyon home in Mill Valley, where he set up a studio and stayed for 41 years with his wife, Jan.
On New Year’s Day 2024, Sugar attended a party at Muir Beach and gathered everyone together for a group portrait with the sun setting behind them. It was his last official photograph. A lingering heart condition took a wrong turn and he chose to let it run its course, said his wife. He died at home on July 24. He was 78.
“His final words were ‘I’m OK. I’ve done everything I wanted to do,’” Jan Sugar said. “Jim was adventurous and relentless in getting the photograph he wanted.”
The “adventurous” label is evident in the magazine articles and monographs he accumulated during 22 years on the staff at National Geographic, shooting in exotic locations that ranged from the Congo to the South Sea Island to American freight trains that he hopped with his cameras to ride along with the hoboes.
The relentlessness is evident in the private pilot’s license he attained so that he could get places quicker. Sugar and famed Rolling Stone staff photographer Baron Wolman went halfsies on a Cessna 172, and one would shoot aerials while the other piloted the aircraft. Then they would switch roles — though not in midair.
“Jim was tenacious,” said fellow National Geographic photographer Steve Uzzell, adding a third adjective. “He had a fertile imagination, and once he had an image in his mind, he went after it. We got permission to do stuff that you just wouldn’t believe. That was his genius.”
It helped that Sugar had a friendly smile and a likable personality that could get a wary subject to overlook the two or three cameras around his neck.
Once while waiting on the English coast to photograph the human-powered Gossamer Albatross as it crossed the channel in 1979, a neighbor came by and Sugar chatted him up. Soon enough he was invited by the man to come wait in the warmth of his farm house. The neighbor turned out to be Paul McCartney. Sugar got a signed Polaroid to prove it.
But his best story about the British Isles came 10 years earlier when he spent three months meeting people in the Irish countryside. He became so close to the remote villagers in Inisheer on the Aran Islands that he was able to shoot a funeral procession, which turned into a two-page spread within a cover story titled “The Friendly Irish,” published in 1969.
That cover story was so popular in the country that 40 years later Sugar went back at the invitation of an Irish documentary film crew to revisit the friends he had made in the course of shooting 300 rolls of film. This became “An Ireland of Another Era,” a Christmas special that aired in Ireland.
From the San Francisco Chronicle… to read the entire story go here. Photo above by Kim Komenich.
