VERO BEACH — When the Indian River Photo Club next gets together, its members are braced for mayhem. Provoked by their leader, architect George Bollis, the photographers will divide into rival gangs by their weapons of choice- the Nasty Ni-Kons; the Hassel-Bads; the Loose Canons.
Fortunately, the speaker that night is allowed to pack heat – and not just a hot new camera: Sergeant Kyle King is supervisor of forensic operations at the sheriff’s office.
A forensic photographer with a certification as senior crime scene analyst, he is one of only 49 such analysts in the world. He will be speaking Oct. 27 about some deadly serious issues, including the legal aspects of forensic photography, avoiding bias and working through human tragedy.
Bollis will no doubt take the subject matter seriously, though he will be in full buffoon mode, replete with doorag, brass knuckles and leather vest.
He just can’t resist being ridiculous.
Since taking office in January, Bollis has unabashedly made a fool of himself monthly for his memberships’ benefit, posing for a cover photograph in the club newsletter to illustrate the upcoming speaker at their meetings.
He has posed looking morose in a white half-mask as Phantom of the Opera for a lecturer on black-and-white photography; as an idiotic hippie for a talk on creativity; as a badly dressed tourist for a talk on travel photography; and for a talk on lighting, he wore a lampshade on his head.
The soft-spoken Bollis, whose straight face makes his sudden amusement all the more affecting, has designed high-end island homes for most of his career.
A member of the Vero Beach Art Club, he is an avid watercolorist. He joined the Indian River Photography Club in the 1980s.
“It was a different type of club back in the film days,” he says. “There were maybe 12 people, meeting in a building on 14th Avenue.”
Since the advent of digital photography, the club’s membership has swelled to over 250.
The monthly photo contest draws more than 100 entries.
Members drive from Melbourne and Port St. Lucie to go to the meetings at the downtown Community Center and hear a roster of volunteer guest speakers.
The speakers steer the amateur photographers through the arts’ many evolutions.
“I bought my first digital camera around 1995 to replace my Polaroid,” Bollis says. “It had 1.5 megapixels. I only got it because I did a lot of renovation, and I needed something relatively instant to come back to the office and start designing.”
He got passionate about digital photography around 2005 when he went to a butterfly exhibit in Gainesville, and saw a display by Florida nature photographer John Moran.
Subsequently, he heard Moran speak at the library in Fort Pierce. Moran recommended the Nikon D200 digital camera.
Instantly, Bollis was hooked.
Today, a weekend may find him trudging through marshes with a 10-pound lens and two cameras criss-crossing his chest, or perched in the stands watching women’s roller derby at the Skate Factory on 43rd Avenue.
While Bollis, 64, admits to knowing no shame for his newsletter self-portraiture, at the same time, he likes to think of his diverse interests as key to his personality.
“If I could dress up as Leonardo da Vinci, I’d be a Renaissance man,” he says.
Or, more likely, a spoof of one. His levity is almost a mission.
“Our time on earth ought to be enjoyable, not so serious all the time. Our health is a serious thing, and how we care about each other. But the rest of it?” Bollis shakes his head and laughs.
“None of this is life-threatening,” he says.
Bollis admits to having been more withdrawn in his youth.
Photography was a passion he shared with his father, an electrician in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania.
“He would develop black-and-white images in our basement when I was very small,” he recalls.
Bollis started out in engineering at Penn State, determined to become the first person in his family to graduate from college.
“I remember being very focused. It was incumbent to get through college. I knew I didn’t want to be a factory worker and I knew I didn’t want to go to Vietnam and I didn’t want to be poor.”
He did, however, want to be in love.
To that end, he followed his high school crush, Mary Ester, now his wife, to Vero Beach one Christmas in 1966.
They had known each other for years by then – Mary Ester’s mother used to spend summers in Bollis’ rural home town, selling goat’s milk fudge to tourists, among other products from the family’s goat herd.
But in winter, they lived in Vero Beach, not far from where Bollis has his office .
Bollis was infatuated not only with Mary Ester but with Vero, its balmy climate and the air scented with orange blossoms long since lost to development.
Then-19, he announced to his parents he wasn’t coming home, rented a room in a rooming house on 14th Avenue and transferred to what was then Indian River Community College, taking a bus to the Fort Pierce campus.
He eventually graduated in 1972 with a degree in architecture from the University of Florida.
As his senior project, he wrote about Vero’s Riverside Park, the 50- acre tract of riverfront land owned by the city, used in the 1960s to dump the stumps of Australian pines that grew to cathedral proportions on nearby Memorial Island.
Bollis interviewed the public works director at the time, discussing concepts for the tract including an amphitheater and community cultural center.
He presented his project before the Vero Beach City Council, and was promptly named to the board of the Center for the Arts, at 24, a babe in the woods as compared to the civic big-wigs like Alma Lee Loy and Jean and George Armstrong.
Bollis first worked as an apprentice architect for the school board, and helped redesign elementary schools to conform to the mandate of desegregation.
“I was shocked when I came here from Pennsylvania to see separate bathrooms and drinking fountains,” he said.
Today, Bollis still takes the practice of architecture very seriously.
“I believe a high-end luxury home ought to be a fun experience to build. But I do have great respect for clients’ desires – and budgets. That’s when I turn off the humor.”