Camera opens new world for St. Mary man

The Banner-Tribune
Ben Burgess has travelled … a lot.
Not aimlessly, to be sure, and not always as expected.
He is a member of the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana in Charenton.
“I lived across from the Yellow Bowl in a trailer,” he said, with family including Tony Burgess, and Judy Kirkland his mother and Chitimacha tribal member Ernie Burgess was his father.
The family moved often, and “then we always seemed to come home, my parents would have these little issues and we’d come back home to live with my grandparents in Baldwin.”
He went to Franklin Junior High School for seventh and eighth grades. Later in life, he said, “We have a very deep story. Barry Seal was involved in a bunch of stuff down in south Louisiana, Iran-Contra affair and all that stuff. Then we moved up to Florida, and then he moved to Virginia after some things happened with him and I went to high school there.”
Ben’s parents got divorced and his mother moved back to Louisiana, where he did his freshman year at then-USL.
“My math was never good,” he admitted. “I went to Virginia Tech, got into art and one point, got through a bit part of it then took a break and went back for international business political science.”
His mother turned ill, so he didn’t graduate at Virginia Tech, but “thank God, he kept me all in line with everything I went to school for, art, photography, and I’m a pilot.”
By 2006, after his mother died, he was suffering from alcoholism. “I was a mess. What started my upswing was getting back (to Louisiana)…I wasn’t there for her funeral, seeing being on, and I asked the Lord to take the drink away and He did it, right then and there.
“My mother passed in 2004, we visited thinking she would pass by Thanksgiving 2004. We visited for Thanksgiving and then had to leave by November 29, she was still alive. They said she made it through for one more of my birthdays December 1st. She passed December 2 at 2 a.m. I came back by 2006 to see her grave.
“And did what she always told me. Get on my hands and knees and ask Jesus to take the alcoholism from me, he did just that. All glory for all of my accomplishments to God.”
Ben had approached a recovery facility, and was treated with a medication. He ended up in a hospital, released Friday 13, 2006, “And within a month I was in corporate America. One of my friends mom’s friends’ had witnessed all this, and he saw that I had quit drinking and he said he had a position for me. So within a couple weeks of coming back home I was in corporate America, an international company that had two campuses in northern Virginia and other projects.
By 2016, it looked like the company might be broken up. Seeking new work, Ben said “my mom, before she passed, gave me of the first little digital cameras, around 2003 or so. I literally, somehow with all the moving, I still had it.”
He used that little camera for a time, and started into photography, and began upgrading, leading later to higher-level equipment. “They let me start taking photos,” Ben said. “About six years later, they said I should probably open my own business, and that’s what I did.”
He also began drone photography as well. He want to Washington, DC, and got involved with the political scene and toils of top-level opportunities for photojournalism. “Once all this pandemic stuff started I was essential,” he said.
There are three hospitals in the DC area, he said: Georgetown University, George Washington University and Howard University. There were tents on the outside for processing persons exposed to COVID and photographs were not allowed. “I have photos for days of homeless people sleeping in the checkpoints, and there were guard camps, and those were empty, too,” he said. “One day I was at GW and I went over there and was taking all these pictures of all this empty stuff and other stuff. I went up there and I said, ‘Can you believe this, this is all empty, and it has been for the longest time!’ Basically they acted like they agreed with me, but then I saw them finding angles that would tell a different story…angles that would portray not the emptiness!”
His emphasis on photography these days is corporate, head-shots and portraits. “My clients right now are small businesses that I can help out, also corporations and corporate real estate folks, I’ve got a big contract right now for ‘skiffs’ a company that creates basically metal boxes they can put their IT people into so nobody can access that information.”
His visit recently to where his journey began found him visiting amongst his fellow Chitimacha members. “Nothing beats that,” he concluded. “