Longtime Observer photographer, ‘one of the great action sports shooters,’ dead at 52
This, in a nutshell, was what it was like to work with David T. Foster III if you were a reporter at The Charlotte Observer and he was the photographer assigned to work with you for the day:
He’d show up in his gray Ford Fusion, strap around his waist a belt with what seemed like a hundred pounds of camera equipment loaded into its pockets and within minutes, large beads of sweat would form on his cleanly shaved scalp.
He was almost always initially reserved. But if the situation was intimate enough, Foster could be relied on at some point to lower his camera and jovially regale the people he was shooting with a colorful story or personal reminiscence. And when the work was done, he’d talk your ear off before, during and after unloading the endless amounts of gear back into his car.
Driving away, you were often left with the same two impressions: Boy, can “Frosty” talk, and man, is he a sweet guy. That’s how Foster will always be remembered by those who worked with him.
And now he’ll also be remembered as a man whose life was cut short too soon.
Foster — a cigar-chomping, UNC Tar Heel-loving bear of a man who was an award-winning staff photographer and videographer for the Observer for the better part of three decades — was found dead in his apartment off of Park Road in Charlotte on Monday afternoon. He was 52.
Charlotte police said there is no indication that foul play was involved in Foster’s death.
A very versatile photographer
His versatility as a shooter was extraordinary.
Foster could handle the sensitivity of photographing a couple in a hospital room, saying goodbye to their dying baby daughter just minutes after she was born, as skillfully as he could capture the energy of a Tina Turner concert.
But perhaps above all else, Foster was a legend when it came to covering sporting events, particularly Carolina Panthers games.
“If he was at a game, and there was a big moment of action... he would have it,” says Observer sports columnist Scott Fowler, who started at the paper in 1994, the year after Foster arrived. “He just was really good at that moment, and he was a big guy, and so you’d think, ‘Well, can he get from end zone to end zone quick enough?’ Yes, he could. When it was time, he could muster it up.
“And it’s true, he’d sweat a lot. (He was) working hard, and out there in the sun longer than he had to be, ’cause he would get there early to every game. But man, he would just have it. Over and over... In my estimation, he was one of the great action sports shooters in the country.”
Passion for photos and the Tar Heels
The youngest of three children, Foster was born to a father who was a shipping supervisor and car salesman and a mother who taught elementary school, raised in the tiny town of Henderson in Vance County just up U.S. 1 from Raleigh.
His eldest sister, Sylvia Hicks, says he didn’t play varsity sports at Northern Vance High School but rather played trumpet in marching band.
Hicks says their late father, David T. Foster Jr., dabbled in photography and helped young David learn his way around a darkroom, and it eventually bloomed into a passion.
Foster enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1986, going on to work as photography editor for a national award-winning edition of the university’s yearbook, Yackety Yack, and for its student-run newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. He left in 1990 with those career-shaping experiences, as well as a degree in political science and — to put it mildly — a rabid devotion to Tar Heel sports teams.
The only three years of his life that he spent living outside of North Carolina were spent working at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach from 1990 to 1993. From there, he came to the Observer, starting in the Gastonia bureau, then shifting to the Rock Hill bureau shortly thereafter.
Quickly, he wound up in the mix as a sometime sports photographer and unsurprisingly, when the opportunities arose, he’d angle to shoot Carolina basketball games.
If the assignment came his way, Foster showed his allegiance proudly.
“He’d be draped in Carolina blue and covering them,” recalls Michael Gordon, who covers courts for the Observer now but was in charge of the Rock Hill bureau back then. “I think the only Carolina clothing he didn’t wear back in those early days was the damn Rams head.”
The’ Pham, who supervised Foster after he was promoted to the main Charlotte office and is the Observer’s current visuals editor, says he never saw Foster get angry — except when he was teased about the Tar Heels.
And Pham warmly remembers the closing moments of a coaching session he had with Foster back in the ’90s, during which Pham had given him guidance on elevating the work he was doing.
Foster stood up and said something he often said to Pham upon being given direction: “I got you, bro.” Then he grabbed Pham in a hug.
“And you know how big David is,” Pham says. “And I’m 5-6, and I think back then I weighed about 135 or so. So basically, I felt like I’d been hugged by a big bear. I just said, ‘David, if you continue to hug me like this, I’ll be gone.’ He just laughed.”
Then he said it again: “I got you, bro.”
Capturing Cam’s fight
That was an interesting thing about Foster. In certain situations, he could be remarkably taciturn.
Fowler, the Observer sports columnist, recalls the day in August 2015 when Foster was the only one of a large group of journalists who captured the moment when then-Panthers quarterback Cam Newton got into a fight with teammate Josh Norman at training camp in Spartanburg, S.C.
“Everyone’s adrenaline’s spiking and then immediately it’s broken up and it’s over,” Fowler says. “I said, ‘Oh my God, did you get that? Did you get that?’ He gets this little smile on his face and just says, ‘I kinda think I got it.’ Then he looks (at the images on his camera), and goes, ‘Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty good.’
“Those pictures, they ran everywhere. They won all sorts of awards... And that was the compliment that he gave himself: ‘It’s pretty good.’ ”
Yet in lots of other situations, Foster could talk (especially — those who knew him well can attest — about cigars, Apple products, or popular music) for hours.
The last to leave
His brother-in-law Clinton Hicks of Matthews recalls Foster as “a good guy to be around (and) had good stories.” But whenever he and his wife hosted family holiday gatherings, “he’d always be the last one to leave. He’d stay here till 2 o’clock a.m.”
“If we didn’t shoo him away,” adds Sylvia Hicks, laughing.
That’s part of the reason why so many alarm bells went off when his family couldn’t reach him Monday, and when he didn’t respond to repeated messages from colleagues.
Whether it was just a little or a whole lot, Foster always had something to say.
So his closest work friend — Jeff Siner, the only Observer photographer who’d been at the paper longer than Foster — went to Foster’s apartment complex on Monday afternoon to check on him. Several hours later, after the police department and the fire department and emergency services had been through, Siner was still there.
“At one point, Medic told me that I could leave, and I told them, ‘No, I can’t leave.’ Couldn’t leave,” Siner says, pausing, as his voice breaks, “because I know he would have stayed there for me.”
After the Medic van drove off, Siner says, a man working for the apartment complex came by to change the lock on Foster’s door.
“I’m sorry for y’all’s loss,” the man told Siner. “He was a great guy. I always really enjoyed talking to him.”
It seems like nearly everyone who ever got drawn into talking to David T. Foster III would say the same thing.
Survivors
In addition to Clinton and Sylvia Hicks, Foster is survived by his 86-year-old mother, Mary D. Foster of Henderson; another sister, Regina Foster of Durham; and two nephews — Clinton C. Hicks II of San Antonio, Texas, and Allen F. Hicks of Charlotte.
Memorial service
The funeral services are planned for 11 a.m. Thursday, June 3 at Dickie’s Grove Baptist Church, 2996 Faulkner Town Road, Henderson. For the health and safety of others, masks will be required and social distancing guidelines should be observed.
His final project
Foster died prior to the publication of his last big project, The Skillet: How Black Cuisine Became America’s Supper, which draws connections between African cuisine and the everyday dishes of the diaspora. Charlotte chefs shared their expertise in making recipes from Nigeria, the American South, Brazil and Puerto Rico for a journey into how our plates came to look the way they do. Foster and Siner took the photos for The Skillet and shot all of the footage for the six videos.
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 3:55 PM.
