Retired Navy photographer aims to capture WWII vets’ images before they’re lost to history

SAN DIEGO — After retiring from a long career as a military photographer, Spring Valley resident Mickey Strand began looking for some personal photo projects he could do to expand his portraiture skills. One of the subjects he landed on was an easy choice: photographing local veterans who had served in World War II.

“Obviously, this was something close to my heart,” said the 54-year-old Strand, who spent 24 years in the U.S. Navy, retiring as the leading chief of Navy Combat Camera Group Pacific in 2009.

Since July 2017, Strand has photographed more than 100 World War II vets, taking their pictures as well as recording audio interviews of their war experiences that he turns into a brief written biography on the project’s website, www.veteransportrait.com. Strand said he is honored to hear these war stories and spend time photographing these heroic men and women. But the reality is that Strand is in a race against time.

Of the 106 WWII vets he has photographed over the past five years, more than 100 have passed away. Many of them were photographed in veterans homes and skilled nursing facilities across Southern California and were in the final months, if not weeks, of their lives. Taking these portraits has become both a mission and a labor of love.

“What I think about when I’m doing these sessions is that I might be the last guy they tell their story to,” Strand said. “My goal is to leave a legacy. Every artist struggles about the work they’re going to leave behind when they’re gone. I hope people can look at these portraits and say, ‘that was a body of work.’ After I die, that’s something I’d like to know.”

Strand’s most recent veteran photo session was on March 10 with Joe Albert Gonzalez, 95, of Clairemont, who served in the U.S. Army’s 381st Company, 96th Infantry Division. 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. Gonzalez helped carry the wounded man to safety through a hail of bullets.

For about 20 minutes, Strand sat with Gonzalez and asked him questions about his service for the audio recording. Gonzalez’s memories have faded with the years but Strand was patient and cheerful. 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 was born in San Diego and raised in Logan Heights. He was fighting as an amateur boxer with a mean left hook when the war began. He quickly signed up to serve with three of his brothers.

“I didn’t want to be on the outside. Everybody else was going,” he told Strand during the interview.

For the next 30 minutes, Strand took dozens of shots of Gonzalez, with his eyeglasses on, then off, smiling and laughing, then serious. Sitting back, then forward. With his jacket buttoned up and unbuttoned. Strand worked quickly, squeezing off more than 100 digital frames with a hand-held shutter trigger connected to a stationary camera, and sometimes moving up close for angled shots with a handheld camera.

Strand likes to use a flash because it accentuates the “laugh lines” in the veterans’ faces and he shoots in color but converts the images to black and white for portraits.

“Black and white offers the opportunity to really see the person and not get lost in the color of what their clothing or the color of the surroundings are doing. It helps focus on the moments they shared with me,” he said.