Kris Hardin, Michael Katakis donate work to Britain

The scene: a boring conference. A speaker is droning on about the Ganges River.

She: an anthropologist with striking red hair, a long black dress and pearls, just back from Sierra Leone.

He: a smitten documentary photographer in desperate need of a pickup line.

"Do you want to have dinner sometime?" he stammered.

"What would this dinner be regarding?" she asked, wary of strangers trying to sell artifacts to the Smithsonian Museum, where she curated the African exhibits.

"Eating," he said.

That meal was the first in a lifetime of dinners. Recently, 30 years, several continents and a wedding later, the British Library came to the Carmel home of anthropologist Kris Hardin, 57, and photographer Michael Katakis, 58, to collect more than 3,000 pages of field notes and 20,000 photos from their travels to West Africa, Paris, Greece, Morocco, China, England, Istanbul and beyond.

The couple's life work will be included in the British Library's American collection and turned into a book to be published in the fall.

The addition will update the library's Asia and Africa collections, most of which dates to the 19th century, said John Falconer, the British Library's curator of photographs.

"I was impressed with the humane quality of Katakis' photographs," Falconer said. "It's a straight, ungimmicky style that shows a dialogue between the subjects and the photographer. The added dimension is Kris' writings."

After meeting Hardin, Katakis started shooting differently, he said.

"I could no longer just be a voyeur," said Katakis, whose images now hang in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Geographical Society, the National Army Museum in London and in the special collections at Stanford University.

Shortly after they met, Katakis went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1984 to pay his respects to a fallen high school friend. Later at dinner with Hardin, he told her he was so moved he stayed for seven hours.

"I was talking to him about the way memorials provide spaces for people who have shared traumatic experiences," she said.

Hardin encouraged Katakis to go beyond the lens and talk to the people he photographed. Nearly three years and 10,000 images later, Hardin helped him see he had a body of work, which led to the book "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial," which included Hardin's essay "Ghosts in the Wall," a cultural reflection on the emotional response to the memorial. That first project together produced one of his most famous images, of the reclusive Vietnam Memorial architect, Maya Lin, in a private moment with her cat in her New York studio.

The couple's adventures led to more books, including "A Time and Place Before War," about the West African town of Kainkordu in Sierra Leone before civil war broke out in 1991.

Husband and wife are thrilled that the British Library has become the repository of their past and future work. They'd like to go back to Sierra Leone to see whether the friends they made survived the war.

In 2008, curators from the British Library came to Carmel for five days to collect oral histories from the couple. Hardin, a former associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has had the world's largest study on the Kono.

"As an anthropologist," Hardin said, "I knew I had an obligation and responsibility to the people I worked with to have the documentation in a public place where it can be available to them and other scholars."

The timing of the library project is bittersweet. In 2007, doctors discovered Hardin had a brain tumor and gave her a year to live. Now, after five surgeries in 2010 to remove scar tissue, her scan is clear.

"I remind myself every day that the doctors just don't know," Hardin said.

"Well," Katakis said, "my money is on you, baby."

E-mail Meredith May at mmay@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle