PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS
Photography – An Interview with Elliot Burg
Jennifer Emens-Butler : I am sitting here in the conference room of the VBA office in Montpelier , and I have Elliot Burg here . We are going to interview him for the Pursuits of Happiness column about his photography , but we should probably start at the beginning and talk a little bit about your career in Vermont , so maybe we can start at the very beginning , Elliot where you are from ?
Elliott Burg : Originally from Worcester , Massachusetts . I grew up and went to public school there and then attended Cornell University and got a degree in American government , which is like political science .
JEB : Political science . That ’ s what I did , nice . And then what do you do , right ? With a political science degree ?!
EB : I think that I always had the notion that I would practice law , but like most people coming through high school and even college , I wasn ’ t exactly sure what that meant . I was in college in the late 60 ’ s , graduated in the 70 ’ s , during a time of social and political ferment . By the time I was partway through college , I saw the idea of becoming a lawyer as more a political plan or values plan than anything else . In other words , I was less interested in the details of what lawyers did than in being a public interest lawyer .
JEB : Social change , not politics ?
EB : Social change , that ’ s right , exactly ; social justice . I was trying to put my shoulder to the wheel in the right direction .
JEB : Where did you go to law school ? EB : I went to Harvard Law School .
JEB : Excellent .
EB : I did the “ special six-year program .” I started in 1970 . In the spring of my second year , one of my classmates decided in her fourth semester that she would take a leave of absence , and she went to South Asia , Afghanistan , Pakistan and India . We were getting postcards from her ; I had never travelled to speak of , and my imagination caught fire .
JEB : This was in your fourth semester as well ?
EB : This was in my fourth semester , she left at the end of her third semester . The law school was very flexible about how people finished their education , and I decided that I wanted to see the world , so I asked for a leave of absence myself . After working for a law firm the summer after my second year , I left for Europe , and I spent the next two and a half years on the road--in Africa , where I hitchhiked for ten months all over the continent , and in the Middle East and West and South Asia . I made it as far east as Bangladesh before my money ran out . I got myself an interesting job in Appalachia for two or three months and then went back to law school and finished up in 1976 .
JEB : That ’ s incredible . That is incredible that you finished . I did the mini version and took the summer off after my first year , backpacking in Europe , and the furthest in Africa I got was Morocco . Even such a short trip made it hard to go back . I cannot imagine taking two and a half years off and then having that much motivation to continue .
EB : It was hard . I forgot a lot of what I had learned in the first two years of law school , and when it came time to study for the bar exam , I had to relearn my first and second year courses . It was a life changer for me to see that there is so much diversity in the world as you travel to out-of-theway places , and yet in so many fundamental ways , people are very similar .
JEB : So true . Now , were you into photography at the time , did you take a lot of pictures ?
EB : I bought myself a real camera about halfway through the trip and began taking photographs , and that was my first connection to photography . I found I enjoyed interacting with people , people I didn ’ t know , people who were different from myself , and I was pretty good at it . Rather than being
Ryan Beighley , 90
a sort of a shoot-from-the-hip street photographer — the school of street photography where you catch people on the fly — I was more interested in having some interaction with people to try to capture something about them and about their lives with my camera .
JEB : Knowing a little bit about them makes a difference .
EB : Yes . That is really how I have continued to operate in photography , although until recently my focus on photography has been sporadic .
JEB : You took a small hiatus of your entire legal career …. we should probably talk about that a little bit too .
EB : Right . I was hired to work at Vermont Legal Aid in 1976 .
JEB : That ’ s how you came up here ?
EB : Yes , that is how I came up here . One of the outgrowths of my travels was that I knew I wanted to work in a rural area , so Vermont was one of the places I applied . Justice Dooley at the time was the Director at VLA , and he hired a group of new lawyers . Mike Sirotkin was one of them . John Hasen , who was general counsel at the Vermont Environmental Board , was another one of the new lawyers , and we spread out all over the state .
JEB : That was during the height of the LSC funding ?
EB : We were actually hired as VISTA lawyers , and then the second year we were funded under the Legal Services Program . When I came to Vermont , I wasn ’ t doing
6 THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SUMMER 2016 www . vtbar . org