How do you go from making a living in photo journalism to crafting Star Wars figures for Lucasfilm?
If you’re Stephen Hayford, you let the perfect storm of a changing journalism landscape, a Star Wars obsession that began at age 6, and a near-death experience have its way with you. Toss in a strong desire to spend more time with family and it all starts to feel poetic. The Force lending a hand, perhaps?
This 44-year-old former photo journalist now makes his living as an artist creating, according to his Life in Plastics website, “elaborately detailed dioramas which he populates with customized action figures which are less than four inches tall. He then photographs these unique scenes with great attention to subtle gestures and compositional storytelling.”
The thing about Hayford is that he pays attention. So, yes, his work – both the photography and the dioramas – require great attention to detail. But it’s also bigger than that. He pays heed to life occurrences, pauses to hear their messages.
For example, shortly after he recovered from a stroke in his 20s, he recalls being in a long line at Wendy’s and not joining in the grumbling about the wait.
“People were getting irritated,” Hayford tells me in our recent interview. “The woman in front of me said, ‘Can you believe these people?’ I said, ‘Honestly, I just survived a stroke, so I’m happy to be standing here.’ It was the first time I had verbalized it.”
That feeling of gratitude only escalated when about seven years later he had heart surgery to fix a congenital defect. By this point he and his wife, Pam, had two kids. The surgery was a culmination of a lot of research and self-advocating and an incident in his car that could have killed him. A Florida resident, he flew to South Dakota the next day for surgery, greeted by professionals who couldn’t believe he was alive.
“My kids were four and one at the time,” Hayford says. “I wanted to do something that would allow me to be at home with them.”
His photo journalism work for newspapers like The Palm Beach Post, Sun-Sentinel, Miami Herald, Rocky Mountain News, and The News-Press (in Southwest Florida) had him photographing all measure of things – community baseball, car accidents, devastating storms, world leaders. After majoring in photo journalism with a focus on psychology and sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he grew into a photographer who could “better understand and connect with his subjects,” according to his website.
But he saw what was happening at newspapers all over the country and his own.
“They started changing the rules,” Hayford says. “The ethics of print didn’t apply to online. It became so stressful.”
In November of 2008, the paper sent Hayford to Kenya on assignment. As is his way, he paid attention.
“I saw all these people there that had nothing,” he says. “They were happy. I realized it was a frame of reference.”
So he called his wife and started brainstorming. If they cut cable and dining out, could they live on one income? He came home and asked human resources for a buyout. They were already in the process of laying off a few dozen people, so his query saved someone else’s job in the photo department. Still, his last day was also the last day of co-workers who had been laid off and he was in a completely different emotional place.
“I was skipping through the parking lot,” he says.
Meanwhile, he had been doing his diorama work on the side and Pam was encouraging him to take it up a notch. It was helped along by the fact that he had been a “bear” to live with near the end of his newspaper job. All that time in childhood making elaborate scenes from cups and plates and pillows had been paying off.
“I was creating stories,” he says. “I fully credit my storytelling [ability] to my fascination with Star Wars.”
In the early 1990s he had begun collecting Star Wars toys (again) and with the Internet just beginning he saw that people were taking action figures and customizing them. When he started making scenes with them, it was “natural” that as a photographer he’d also photograph what he’d created.
“I sent [my work] to a Star Wars fan site,” Hayford says. “People had a strong reaction to them.”
He built a following, took requests for private projects, created Star Wars-themed greeting cards, and did gallery exhibits showing his work. While still employed at the newspaper but recovering from heart surgery, Hayford received an email from someone who worked at Lucasfilm. While he tried to put Hayford in front of licensees like Hallmark, eventually he had a realization.
“We need you to do this for us,” Hayford recalls him saying.
That, along with a trip to the Star Wars convention in Los Angeles in 2007 where he hooked up with a representative from Hasbro, paved the way for his foray into full-time diorama work. He had fully expected to have to fight to be heard at the convention, but instead the Hasbro rep was already familiar with his work. Another sign?
“When I took that buyout, I had nothing,” Hayford says.
That was in 2008. Since 2009 he’s had a contract with Lucasfilm. He’s shown his work and enjoys being taken around and introduced as the artist. At a Star Wars convention in Orlando a man from France told him he wasn’t going to attend the event until he saw Hayford was a featured artist on the agenda. Hayford is blown away by the feedback he gets on his work, including on Facebook.
“It is so appreciated,” he says. “I never got this much respect in journalism.”
So, I wondered, what does this gracious and grateful man live riveted to?
“My children,” he says. “I’m seriously biased when it comes to them.”
He tells me how his 13-year-old son, Logan, created a club at school for community involvement in things like the local soup kitchen and helping the elderly. And that his 10-year-old daughter, Riley, created “fluff ball” animals and sold them to raise money for an animal shelter.
He loves their insightfulness.
He knows a bit about that.
by Nancy Colasurdo
