From Potsdam to Pulitzer

Many people know Savoia’s work without even realizing it. In 2009, he covered Michael Jordan’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, where he captured a now iconic image of him. The viral photo, that became the “crying Jordan” meme, is now used to poke fun at losing sports teams by superimposing it over athletes or coaches after big losses. At one point, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Savoia about the trend, and he was not aware that the image had gone viral. Despite the social media craze surrounding the image, he said it’s far from the most popular or most important photograph he’s captured.

In 1992, he spent 13 months on the road with Bill Clinton during his presidential campaign, later winning a Pulitzer Prize, along with nine other AP photographers, for their collective coverage of the campaign. He received another Pulitzer for his coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Clinton’s subsequent impeachment hearing in 1999. “Bill Clinton probably doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he sees me coming,” Savoia joked.

One of his most widely circulated images was a photograph of Clinton and Boris Yeltsin sitting in wooden chairs overlooking the Hudson Valley in Hyde Park, New York during the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. The image provided a unique perspective of the two world leaders that Savoia transmitted around the world 10 minutes after he shot it. The next day he went to the newspaper stand at the U.N., where he saw his photograph on the front page of more than 100 papers from around the globe.

“They’ve got newspapers hanging on racks, and every newspaper has that picture on the front page. I realized at that point that I was communicating with the world. I’m not talking to 20,000 people anymore, when I’m on the story of the day, if I make the picture that coalesces everything, you’re talking to the world... When you’re working at the AP and assigned to the story of the day, the potential audience is as much as half the world’s population, which is billions of people,” he said.

After his extensive coverage of Clinton on the campaign trail, two of the President’s staff members spoke with him about any interest he might have in the White House photographer position, and then Clinton personally floated the idea to him. Savoia, although honored, told the President that he’s not a political photographer, he’s a news photographer.

“They put out their feelers and I responded because I knew where that was going, and I wanted to stop it at the very beginning. I liked being a journalist. I liked being able to cover a lot of different stories and do a lot of different things,” Savoia said.

His direct and affable personality helped him gain respect from his subjects—both Democrats and Republicans in the political sphere. He wore a peace sign earring and was very vocal about his political leanings, but he always aimed to be fair and honest in his coverage. 

“When I would go out every day, I would try to do the best job I could. I’ve never promised anybody that I would be objective. In fact, I’ve told subjects like Clinton and John McCain that if a journalist comes up to you and says they’ll be objective, you need to run, flee and scurry away from that person as quickly as possible. Because quite frankly—and I learned it at SUNY Potsdam—objectivity does not actually exist in the empirical world. All that is possible is a consensus of subjective opinions,” he reflected.

Savoia could be talking to a barber, a famous musician or the president and he would be completely at ease in every circumstance. While covering a press conference at Walkers Point in Maine, George H.W. Bush called him over to shake his hand and introduce him to his daughter-in-law Laura. “He loved the photographers, even though sometimes the photographers made him look bad, he loved us,” Savoia said. “He was chewing my ear off for about five minutes and finally I looked at him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m sorry, but in case you didn’t notice, there are two world leaders up there and I got to get back to work,’ and I hear Barbara go, ‘George let him go.’”

Despite having images appear in newspapers around the world and winning two Pulitzer Prizes, if you were to tell Savoia that he’s a great photographer, he would not agree. “I’m at best a mediocre craftsman, but I think I’m a pretty good journalist. I use photography as my pen and paper. I communicate visually and I can move past barriers of language, culture and ethnicity. I try to bring sociology to journalism,” he explained.

In 2000, he had the opportunity to break through cultural and language barriers when he photographed the Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic, something that he had dreamt about doing for 15 years. When Canada chose to give back the portions of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon to the Inuit people, he convinced the AP to send him to northern Canada. He hopped on a plane for Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut—1,750 miles from D.C. where he had been covering Clinton’s impeachment trial.

He spent the next three months immersed in the Inuit culture, sleeping in an igloo and even eating polar bear, a staple in their diet. After making some connections, he boarded a small ski plane that brought him to the remote Arctic ice flow. There, he spent several weeks documenting the lives of Lypa, Annie, their six children and one grandchild, who were living off the rugged landscape. He traveled by dogsled out to Lypa’s fishing grounds where he joined him on a seal hunting expedition.

Finding his Path

Savoia was born in 1953 with a congenital heart defect. By the time he was 13 years old, medical advancements had improved to the point where he could have a cardiac catheterization, which revealed that he had an atrial septal defect. Told that he would not live past his 16th birthday, he wasted no time and was admitted to the Texas Children’s Hospital for open heart surgery, a fairly new procedure in the 1960s.

“At the time that I had open heart surgery, the longest that people lived was five years, and now I’ve lived 58 years. So, I’ve had my share of physical issues. Those situations colored my worldview. They also made me less interested in notoriety, fame or wealth. I realized how important and transient the gift of life could be very early on in my life, and I wanted to make the most of it. I think that may be one of the reasons I was such a bad student in high school, I had a new lease on life, and I wanted to do what I wanted to do,” he said.

After his early health complications, his journey to become an influential visual storyteller was a meandering route that really began after he graduated from high school and started to seriously focus on his education. “I was a very lazy and uninspired high school student. I went to a catholic high school right outside of New York City and barely made the grade point average that you needed to receive a regent’s diploma in New York State in those days. I was not college material, let’s put it that way,” he said.

Still, Savoia realized that higher education was key to a better life, and although he didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career, he knew wanted to go to college. With grades that didn’t match his enthusiasm, he knew it was time to get serious. 

“I got out of high school realizing I didn’t want to be a truck driver for 45 years like my dad had to be. I wanted more joy in my life than that. It’s not that I didn’t want to work hard, I worked harder than most, but I did not want to be in a position in my life where I said, ‘I wish I had done this,’” he said.

He started looking at colleges, knowing that he might not be accepted based on his academic track record. And when his high school friend talked to him about his interest in visiting SUNY Potsdam for a campus tour, Savoia offered to drive him up through the Adirondacks in his 1964 pickup truck.

“It was during that trip that I fell in love with Potsdam. I thought ‘Wow, this place is great.’ But, there was no way I was going to get into Potsdam with my grade point average. I applied and of course, I didn’t get in,” Savoia said.

So, instead, he applied to a small school in a rural part of northeast Iowa that accepted him on a probationary status. After hearing the news, he was excited to tell his father that he was going to college. “He knew I wasn’t a good student, and he said, ‘Well that’s great, I always wanted my kids to go to college, and you’ll be the first, but I’m not paying for it,’” Savoia recalled. “It was the best move he ever made. It was my money on the line, and I realized, ‘You know what, if I’m paying for it, I don’t want to waste it.’ What surprised me by the end of the semester was that not only did I start to study, but I kind of liked academics.”

He made the Dean’s list in both semesters of his first year and reapplied to SUNY Potsdam. While impressed with his improvement, the admissions staff still wanted to see it continue for another year. So, Savoia decided to return to New York State and enroll at Elmira College, with the idea that it would be easier to transfer to SUNY Potsdam after his sophomore year. And then with two solid academic years under his belt, he applied to SUNY Potsdam and was finally accepted.

He enrolled in the College’s sociology program the moment he transferred to campus. During the second semester of his junior year, as he tried to enroll in a social theory seminar course, but it was full and he had to choose a different elective. He decided he was either going to take either a pottery or photography class. He chose the latter—and by happenstance, the beginning of his dynamic career in photojournalism started to take root.  

“The third week in class we went into the darkroom, and I saw my first print come up in the developer. It was amazing. It was like witnessing a birth. Technically I was hooked on the mystery of photography and how this latent image can emerge when you dip it in a fluid that looks like water,” he said. “The other side of that coin is that I bore easily and by the end of the semester, I was bored by the process of photography, but I became more and more interested in the language of photography. By the end of the semester, I realized that my interests in sociology can be explained quite well through photography.”

During his senior year, he decided to take an astronomy course after meeting the physics professor, Scott McRobbie, at a bar one night. McRobbie explained that his upper-level physics course wouldn’t be the best fit for someone without a science background, but Savoia was undeterred.

“I said, ‘You know what, I’ve got a really good GPA, I don’t care if I fail the class. He said, ‘Stephan, you really shouldn’t do that,’ but finally he relented. So, I took the class but he was right, quantum mechanics and physics were not my jam. I did terrible at it. Half the time they were speaking Greek,” he said.

Despite the physics, Savoia loved the class and loved using telescopes to explore the night skies around Potsdam. Understanding the optics of the long lens fascinated Savoia as he examined how a star moved toward or away from the Earth. And he drew parallels between the way the light filtered through the telescopic lens, and the lens on his camera. 

“While I didn’t understand the physics of it, I could understand the optics of it. If you’re going to be using the tool of photography, which is what I did as a journalist, photography has to be second nature. It has to be something that you totally understand. And I learned more about photography in that astronomy class than I ever learned in a photography class,” he said. 

During Savoia’s senior year, it became clear to Dr. Harry Kinsel, his advisor and social theory professor at the time, that photography had become the heart and soul of his education. During a solo exhibition of his photograph work on campus that year, Kinsel met his parents for the first time. “At that show, Professor Kinsel told my parents, ‘I fear I’ve lost Stephan to photography from sociology,’ and he had. But I didn’t know how I was going to make a living with photography,” Savoia recalled.

After a meandering and well-rounded undergraduate education, Savoia walked across the commencement stage with his sociology degree in hand, and his many photographic skills not even noted on the piece of paper. “Potsdam was unique for me. I stumbled into the art department, and a photography professor that didn’t write me off, and I didn’t write him off. It was a small school, a beautiful area of the world geographically, and a really cool vibe,” he said.

Building to his Career

After he received his degree, Savoia returned home and wrote 250 letters to newspapers around the country looking for a job as a photojournalist, but with no job offers on the table, he decided to apply to graduate school for a career in visual storytelling. “I wanted to take an understanding of sociology and bring that to the medium of photography, of approaching subjects with what C. Wright Mills called, ‘a sociological imagination,” he said.

At first, he was looking at the University of Minnesota, but a conversation with former Topeka Capital-Journal photo editor Rich Clarkson sent him a different direction, and he applied to the University of Missouri. “They only took five graduate students at one time, and there was something like 100 applicants that year, and I’m sure I had the worst portfolio. I think I got accepted to Missouri for the same reason that Clarkson took an interest in me, not for my photographic ability at the time, but for what I was trying to do with photography,” Savoia recalled.

After receiving his master’s degree in photojournalism, he landed a job as a picture editor for the Missourian, before taking a job at a small newspaper in northwest Louisiana. After three years, he moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to work with Stan Alost at the State Times Morning Advocate.

In 1990, he accepted a job at the Associated Press. He was quickly assigned to the story of the day, the biggest news around the world on any given day, and he excelled in that role. With a focus on in-depth storytelling, his images changed the way the AP wire service covered events—with a greater emphasis on the photographic essay and displaying human emotion.

Overcoming Obstacles

From 1990 until 2018, Savoia traveled around the world in his coverage of major news stories and sports events for the AP. But as he approached retirement and was looking forward to the next chapter of his life, he received some terrible news from his doctors. In the spring of 2018, the day after his 65th birthday, he was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer—what has come to be known as ‘photographers’ cancer’ for those who worked with chemicals in the darkroom over the years. 

“We had our hands in film chemistry all day long. We were in darkrooms making prints. I wasn’t as responsible as far as using the tongs all the time. Being a disciple of W. Eugene Smith, I would use potassium ferrocyanide and bleached-backed prints and things like that, to get the look that I was after,” he explained. “I developed cancer, and it was bad. They had to remove one kidney, it metastasized to the lungs and they didn’t think I was going to last a week.”

After 10 weeks of daily chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy, and then 66 immunotherapy treatments over a five-year period, Savoia’s cancer is now static, with no further signs of spread. “I get scanned every 3 months, they do blood work, and they’ve all been stable since the middle of 2019. Long story short, I made this miraculous comeback,” he said. “I am 72 years old, living with the aftermath of stage four kidney cancer, I only have one kidney, one of my lungs only has 4 lobes instead of 5 lobes, but I still couldn’t be happier with my life.”

A Time of Reflection

Fast forward to the spring of 2025, and Savoia just returned from a trip to Europe after visiting his daughter, who works as a chef in France, and his new grandson. Now back home in Massachusetts, he is working on a career-spanning retrospective of his work—which with be featured at SUNY Potsdam’s Gibson Gallery later this year. 

After editing his 40-year career into 380 pictures, he met with a former colleague to get it down to 230 photographs. Now, he has whittled it down to 113 images that will be professionally printed and framed for a museum-quality exhibition at the College. After the show at SUNY Potsdam, tentatively scheduled to open in August of 2025, his work will travel to Ohio University and the University of Missouri.

“It’s going to be a unique show in many ways. I was practicing a whole different kind of photography at the wire service. That’s what this show is all about, it’s trying to show photojournalism is something more than just making documents of record. It’s not going to be just photographs hanging on the wall, there’s going to be a section on visual narrative storytelling with full-size, broadsheet picture stories, big enough for people to read the headline, the story, the captions and see the photographs, all intertwined together,” he said.

Before the exhibition, Savoia is planning a separate trip back to campus for SUNY Potsdam's annual Reunion Celebration. He will chat about his work as a photojournalist and share some photos from his career. The informal gathering is tentatively scheduled for Friday, July 11, at 3:30 p.m. in the Barrington Student Union’s Fireside Lounge. 

“I think if you go back and look at what I’ve done, I was trying to get to an understanding of the sociological and psychological issues behind it, when I make those pictures. That’s what I tried to do with my career,” he said.

Savoia has continued to give back to his alma mater over the years. In 2001 he visited SUNY Potsdam to engage with students in the Departments of Art and Sociology. In 2005 he gave the keynote address at Commencement, and in 2017 he was on campus during the LoKo Festival of Arts, where he held a workshop for photography students, in the same hallways where he was once a student. 

“SUNY Potsdam changed my whole approach to what I liked in music. It was a great fit for me,” he said. “One of the best choices I ever made was to go to SUNY Potsdam.”

Article by Jason Hunter