Only Tom Seaver started more Opening Days than Randy Johnson, but 17 years after his final Opening Day nod, Johnson doesn’t have too many memories of the first game of the season.
“I don’t really remember too many baseball highlights, to be honest,” Johnson said. “I’ve been retired since 2010, what’s that, 13 years now? Baseball had my whole life from when I was 7 years old to 46.”
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Saturday is a new Opening Day for Johnson, as his photography exhibit Randy Johnson: Storytelling with Photographs will begin at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Johnson, who has a plaque in the town’s more famous museum, studied photojournalism in college at Southern California and since his retirement has continued to explore his interest in photography. The exhibit runs through Sept. 17 and features 30 large prints from his four visits to separate regions of Africa.
Baseball, of course, has helped open some doors for the former baseball star. This past weekend, he shot drag racing at the NHRA event in Phoenix. He has photographed concerts and traveled around the world, with trips to Africa and Japan on the schedule for this year.
“Baseball’s not my life anymore,” Johnson said. “I have friends, I have children and I have other interests than baseball. I’m also 60 years old now. For people that baseball is still everything to them, more power to them. That’s great. But I have some other things I wanted to get good at and give the attention to just like I did baseball.”
The Athletic was provided with four photos from Johnson’s exhibit and asked him about each. Here’s a sampling of the exhibit and what was behind each photograph.
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, 2019
Johnson: I thought it was interesting because we were tracking it. We were in a Jeep and we knew there was a leopard and it was at the top of a small little hill and there was lots of rocks and lots of trees and bush. Obviously you can’t walk up there, you’re at the mercy of getting a visual and trying to see what direction he’s walking.
We did that and eventually he popped out behind that bush and he just looked at us like, “you’re tracking me, I’m tracking you as well.”
I just captured that. He took the time to look at us. It was a quick second that he did and I was able to capture that moment of some eye contact with the leopard. It was kind of cool.
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I wasn’t that far away. I had a longer lens … I’d say it’s probably around 15 yards or so. I wasn’t far. We were on a little dirt trail on the Jeep and he was just off of that on the hill behind that bush. The little car path that goes around the top of that hill so you can kind of drive around the perimeter of it and that’s essentially what we were doing trying to wait for him to pop out at any moment and he did right then.
Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 2019
Johnson: That’s Amboseli National Park — that is an elephant refuge in Kenya. That’s a dried dust bowl of an area, but where those zebras are, there are small little marshes. There are dirt roads in between these marshes. The elephants come down from out of the hills, big groups of them, families of them. And you can see them off in the distance walking toward you because of the dust and then they get closer and that’s when you can take your pictures, obviously. They walk in this big dust bowl of an area. Then they get into these marshes and it’s kind of like springs, the water comes up from the mound and there’s lots of vegetation, grass, I guess, in these marshes. The elephants get their water in those marshes.
The elephants can sometimes cross right in front of you, they’re that close. To take photographs, it’s incredible to be that close.
More importantly, there’s a few different other kinds of animals that are there, but I went to go visit that area to see the elephants that had these huge tusks. As we were going toward that area, we drove by a really shallow marsh there and all these zebras were lined up and I just thought the way they were lined up with the storm clouds in the sky, it just led to a really dynamic picture. It was obviously a color picture, but I turned it black and white because I thought it was more interesting in black and white than color.
Sossusvlei, Namibia, 2019
Johnson: That’s a tree, that’s goes to show you how big that sand dune is in Africa. That is in Sossusvlei — don’t ask me to spell it. It’s a national park and it has some of the biggest red sand dunes in the world. And that’s a good-sized tree at the base of the sand dune.
The sand dune surrounds this old lake bed that is dried out now. There are petrified trees in the lake bed that are like 600, 700 years old. It’s a very trendy place for photographers to get pictures of this lake bed. It’s like Death Valley, where you see the dried-up lake bed and it’s like these little sections of clay broken up and then you see the red sand dunes in the background and then these petrified trees. It makes for a really interesting picture, I have one of those in the exhibit, as well.
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There’s three or four different types of pictures in the exhibit, obviously animals, people and silverback gorillas in Rwanda and then I went trekking up into the mountains and this sand dune was one of the highlights of one of my trips.
Maasai village, Maasai Mara, Kenya, 2016
Johnson: I was in a village of Maasai warriors. When they are younger, they are put out into the bush and they have to tend to the goats and cows, which are basically the money that the family has. They used them for bartering. They provide them with food and milk and they can also be used for trade. To protect their livestock from other animals, they are Maasai warriors and they are not afraid of confrontations that they could encounter with other wild animals to protect their livestock.
I thought that was a really interesting picture. It was kind of off in the distance. I was closer to the village. The young boy was kind of like a shepherd, he was rounding up the goats and bringing them back to the village after they’ve been eating and drinking. They can’t let them just roam around, they’d get attacked, probably.
(All photos courtesy of Randy Johnson Exhibition)
