The Great + The Good

Richard Goldman 87, founder and president, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund

Why: Each year for the past 17 years, his foundation has awarded the annual Goldman Environmental Prize to five grassroots activists from around the world; the prize comes with a grant of $125,000, to be used however the recipient deems. “My late wife and I would often talk about giving back to the community, and we started doing it on our own. Eventually, we decided to create a foundation. A philanthropist, to me, is someone who tries to do something to help humanity with the wealth they have earned. Philanthropists may also be trailblazers. Look at someone like Bill Gates; he is almost single-handedly improving health on a global scale. The technology industry has made many people quite wealthy, and they are starting to now give some of their money away. They need to be encouraged to do so. I feel frustrated when I see other foundations and institutions, like universities, sitting on ever-increasing endowments, giving away only the bare minimum. We should solve the problems of today now, instead of accumulating these funds in large endowments that may or may not be needed in the future.”

Drew Altizer 38, society photographer

Why: No matter where you go, there Drew is. “The real power of [SF society] is its willingness to give money away. Sure, they all have power in their jobs and in their smaller circles, but their real power is in their willingness to part with money. What I do lays that foundation. People see friends or people they’ve heard of who are part of these organizations, and it gives the organizations credibility. I’m looking for people who will bring attention and attendance. But we also throw in ‘nobodies’ because they’re cute, nice or they’ve contributed to the event. It’s a complicated balance.” Web Exclusive: Read more of this Q+A below

	Donald and Doris Fisher 79 and 76, cofounders of Gap Inc. and philanthropists
Why: The couple recently gave $25 million to help launch a national network of KIPP charter schools for low-income children and will soon break ground in the Presidio on a 100,000-square-foot museum to showcase more than 1,000 works from their private collection of contemporary art. Building (and stocking) your own museum? That’s power.”

	Dave Eggers 37, writer and founder, 826 Valencia
Why: Eggers’ original Mission District writing lab for youth aged six to 18 has expanded to six additional cities (Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Seattle, L.A., Chicago and Boston), and keeps more than 1,400 volunteer tutors busy. Eggers won this year’s Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities for his work in literacy and publishing.

	Dede Wilsey 62, president, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Board of Trustees
Why: A fund-raising powerhouse, Wilsey solicited about $208 million from more than 7,000 donors for the rebuilding of the de Young; she is currently working on a $1.7 billion project to build three new hospitals (one for women, one for pediatrics and one for oncology) at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. Watch your wallets.

Alice Waters 63, founder and director, Chez Panisse Foundation

Why: If every school cafeteria in the United States starts serving organic food grown in its on-site garden, we’ll have Alice Waters to thank. In 1996, she founded her nonprofit foundation, which aims to develop a nationwide school curriculum that puts food at the forefront. The pilot program, Edible Schoolyard, is under way at a Berkeley middle school, and a second school, in New Orleans, has also joined the project.

	Bernard Osher 80, founder and treasurer, the Bernard Osher Foundation
Why: Osher’s foundation supports higher education and the arts, including just about all of SF’s major cultural organizations—look for his name on the California Academy of Sciences’ new Living Roof. The foundation’s lifelong-learning institutes for adults and endowed-scholarship programs exist at colleges and universities in the Bay Area and across the country.

Additional Q&A with Drew Altizer

How long do you see yourself doing this?
I plan on taking pictures forever. I have no other plans but to grow this here. I don’t have any other ideas. The real bottom line is I have been so fortunate to do this here. People have been fabulous, they really have. I have no plans to change. My plan is to grow this business and making it an innovative company, which will hopefully bring more attention to San Francisco.

Are you from San Francisco?
No, I’m from North Carolina—I’ve been here since 2002, and started doing this in 2003.

How many parties do you shoot on average in a year?
This year we shot on average a little more than one a day. Last year, it was one a day. We’ve shot 1,200 to 1,300 total, which is a lot in that time. Right now we’re shooting more than one a day, 365 days a year. We shot an average of 15 to 20 events this month.

What’s the best part about your job?
Honestly, the best part of my job is I get to take pictures for money. I really like taking pictures—it’s what I want to be doing. The best part is I like my job.

What’s the worst part of your job?
The hours. A typical day for me starts at 10 in the morning and finishes at three in the morning. All day, I’m running the business, booking things, submitting things, finding customers, and at night we’re shooting and editing and answering late-night emails. We’re on deadline all the time for clients, for publications—we’re always on deadlines every day. That’s why we have a lot of photographers and editors. Jami [Witek] and them make it all work.

Who’s on staff?
Jami is the only employee. Everyone else is a contractor—three photo editors, eight photographers.

What have you learned about the power of SF society from your job?
To my mind, the real power of that group of people is their willingness to give money away. They all have power in their jobs, in their smaller circles, but as a group, their power is in their willingness to part with money and build things. Honestly, people give them a hard time, too, but people like that are how the arts happen. Without them, the arts doesn’t exist on $15 visitor tickets. The opera doesn’t survive on ticket sales alone. Those are all necessary, but the things that make these arts organizations at all possible on the world-class scale that exists is the money this group of people gives. It’s also how kids get fed and diseases get worked on. To me that’s their real influence.

Do folks ever vie to get their picture taken? Do they ever hide from you?
Very few run. There are one or two. The one or two who run are generally not people I have to have a photo of anyway. Interestingly, the people vying for my photos are also people I don’t need to have a photo of. The photos I need are of the people who are in between.

How do you decide who to snap? The best looking? The richest? The biggest names?
All of the above helps. What I’m looking for is people who will bring attention to the organization or bring attendance to the organization. Or whose attendance will bring broader public attention to the organization. I guess I’m looking for people who the public at large are aware of or would find interesting. They don’t necessarily have to have a name already. I’ll photograph anyone. I don’t refuse to photograph people.

My thing is I can’t promise to get anyone into a magazine. I can’t promise an “in.” I can only promise “out.” We make a huge first cut. We cut 99.9 percent of those pictures, and we get it down to a handful. And we give [publications] a lot, more than most people in the old days—they’d give a few. But we give extras. We throw in nobodies who are nobodies to anybody and we’ll put them in because they’re cute, they’re nice or they contributed something to the event and we knew it. It’s a weirdly exclusive thing. But we’re not trying to make it completely exclusive. It’s an exclusive activity. There’s a fine balance between well-known people and new people. By definition we’re trying to include people and attract new people to include. It’s a very complicated balance.

Do you mind being called a party photographer?
People can call me whatever they want. I’d rather be called a society photographer, because “party photographer” implies we make our living shooting random parties. But really, people hire us because we take a nice photograph and we shoot with the press in mind. And Timmy’s birthday party is seeking the press. So I’ll shoot a birthday party for someone I know, but “party photographer” doesn’t sound like what we do. Sounds less specific than what we do. It’s really a weird job I know.