Michael Ford was a Capitol Hill photographer, documentary filmmaker, author and ethnographer whose work is held by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.
Michael died on Sept. 4. He lived and worked on Capitol Hill since the late 1970s, and the headquarters of his company, Yellow Cat Productions at 11th & Pennsylvania SE, was a major creative hub until his retirement in 2023.
The Hill Center hosted a celebration of his life and work in December.
Michael started Yellow Cat Productions in Oxford, Mississippi in 1972 with the production of a 16 mm documentary about agrarian North Mississippi entitled Homeplace. It was a theme he would revisit numerous times over the more than 30 documentaries he created during his career.
He loved music, especially the blues, and over the years Yellow Cat hosted a litany of blues musicians when they played gigs in the District, including Taj Majal.
Another focus of his talents was ethnographic documentaries in Spain, South Carolina and West Africa, particularly Senegal and The Gambia. When not working on his own projects, Michael provided and led video crews for other producers with work seen on ABC, Discovery Channels, Showtime, A&E TV, PBS and numerous federal agencies. His work as cinematographer and executive producer for Return to Belaye: A Rite of age, set in a small village in Senegal, is listed in the Internet Movie Data Base.
Michael didn’t always look far from home when picking his topics. As a Navy veteran he made a video of a Capitol Hill institution, the Washington Navy Yard’s U.S. Navy Museum.
Originally trained as a still photographer, he continued to take pictures throughout his life. The Hill Center produced an exhibition of his photos in 2017. In 2019 the University of Georgia and the Library of Congress published his 200-page photo essay on life in rural Mississippi.
While living in Oxford, Mississippi, Michael apprenticed himself to a local blacksmith. He continued to smith throughout the rest of his life, turning from hammering hot iron to jewelry smithing in his later years.
Michael was also an expert sailor. Whenever his smart phone rang, it played the sound of a bosun’s whistle.
His collection of materials about rural life and culture in the hill country of North Mississippi was acquired by the American Folklife Center in 2014. Michael shot over 16,000 feet of 16 millimeter film, recorded many hours of interviews and music, and took over 1000 still photographs, capturing a way of life that has utterly disappeared.
