By Pauline Rogers

In a world where gaining "celebrity" status ironically can mean becoming isolated, one of the most famous celebrities of our time has something special going for him. Muhammad Ali has Howard L. Bingham - a real friend and confidant. An irony in itself, considering Bingham's chosen profession is one that could destroy that very celebrity - he's a professional photographer.

It is precisely because he is a friend before he is a photographer that Bingham is known as an anti-paparazzi - a photographer who is also a gentleman. He has been allowed to document the most intimate moments in Ali's life - as well as in the lives of the famous and even the infamous. His reputation for honesty is so well known that, while working for LIFE Magazine during the 1966 riots, a group of people living in his neighborhood let him photograph their huge weapons cache, secure that he wouldn't reveal the location of the arsenal.

Bingham never asks indiscreet questions or allows his camera to become annoyingly intrusive. He charms everyone - from James Earl Ray to James Earl Jones. "I can't just walk into a situation and begin taking pictures," he says. "I need time to assess the personalities and get comfortable. And, give them time to get comfortable with me.

"I don't bring the camera into play right away," he continues. "I've seen a lot of people go into a situation big-headed, with an 'I'm a photographer' kind of attitude. But, I'm the person before I'm the photographer. I don't take pictures just to be taking them. I have to see something happening, or anticipate that it's going to happen."

As George Fisher of Kodak says, "you see his pictures, you know he relates to his subject in a special way."

For Bingham, photography is all about being patient, earning the respect of his subjects, and knowing where to draw the line. It is this ability to be patient that helped him ride the tide of frustration that came with his 11-year journey to get a feature film made about his closest and most famous friend Muhammad Ali. When Michael Mann decided that this would be his project, things finally gelled. As Mann was researching the famous man, Bingham was there to supply photographic material compiled over a 30-odd year friendship. When cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki came on board, the hundreds of thousands of private and public photographs in Bingham's cabinets became an invaluable resource.

Bingham had no idea that the young loud-mouthed fighter by the name of Cassius Clay that he was to photograph for the Los Angeles Sentinel (a Black weekly paper) in 1962 was going to become his best friend and most infamous subject. A few hours after the press conference, Bingham was tooling down Broadway in Los Angeles and spotted the young fighter and his brother standing on the corner of 5th Street watching the world go by. Not one to pass by an acquaintance, Bingham offered to give the two a ride.

The rest is history.

Cassius Clay soon became "the greatest." He changed his name to Muhammad Ali and his tour guide became his confidante and chronicler. Four wives, nine children and 31 years later, the two are as close as the day they met. Bingham was there for Clay's first fight with Sonny Liston. He was there the day Ali was stripped of his title and banished from boxing for resisting the Vietnam era draft. He was there in Zaire for the fight with George Foreman, and finally he was there when Ali retired.

He has photographed Ali with the famous and the not-so-famous, never tiring of capturing Ali's private moments, his public life attending Islamic events or his benevolence while bringing laughter to terminally ill children.

Although documenting his best friend's life is and will always be his first love, the legendary fighter has not been Bingham's only subject. He flew to Detroit to cover the riots of 1967 . A year later in 1968, he covered the tumultuous Democratic National Convention and he has documented rural poverty in his book on Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Bingham also broke the color barrier for unit photographers in film and television in 1969, when close friend Bill Cosby, demanded that Bingham be on set to shoot his first (1969-1971) ground breaking comedy series. After 30 days of work over 18 months on a sanctioned Union series, Howard L. Bingham joined the International Photographer's Guild as a Unit Photographer.

Then, as now, Bingham's style is simple. He makes sure he is welcome, whether in his best friend's home, at a political convention, or in a dirt poor community. "I use mostly Nikon cameras (Nikon F100s and F5s)," he explains. "Occasionally, I use a Hassalblad and Mamiya equipment to shoot larger formats. With the Nikon cameras, I use the Nikon lenses - 28 to 85mm - and the SB28 flash. Film is always Kodak - especially the Ektachrome 200 which is great and can be developed in either black and white or color prints. Recently, I've also been using the Kodak digital professional camera. It's a medium that is the wave of the future in photography."

For Bingham, simple is and always has been better. "A photographer's best work, like that of a writer, is shaped by his life experience," he says in the afterward to his book Muhammad Ali: A Thirty-Year Journey. Bingham credits his favorite subject, Muhammad Ali for making his magical journey possible. That is why he has been so careful to document the man's incredible story in far more than a ride-along capacity but in as an integral part in this out-of-the-ordinary journey.

Bingham's photographs of Ali, Cosby, his mentor Gordon Parks, and so many others show the care a chronicler of life should take to do justice to each individual's life experience.