One month after Randy Batista posed smiling between President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden for a photograph in the Oval Office, the Gainesville resident said he’s still trying to wake back up to reality.

The “dream” started for the 75-year-old retired photographer this summer while driving on Williston Road. That’s when a 1-800 number from Washington, D.C., lit up his phone. Assuming it was a spam call, Batista picked up anyway.

“The woman says ‘Hi, I’m with the National Endowment for the Arts,’” Batista recalled in an interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t take soliciting over the phone.'”

When the woman identified herself as a staff member for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Batista said he moved into a surreal state of cognitive dissonance.

“She says, ‘No, no, listen. You’ve been nominated for the National Endowment Award for the Arts.’”

Sure enough, Batista also found an email waiting in his inbox informing him of the honor and the next steps required to receive it.

The NEA award is the highest honor an artist can receive from the U.S. government. It recognizes not only the quality of the artist’s work, but also endeavors to grow and support the availability of art in the U.S.

2022 NEA honoree Batista and his wife Linda Lanier joined other winners such as Idina Menzel, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Queen Latifah and Ken Burns at a joint awards ceremony in October. Officials decided to award the 2022 to 2024 recipients together this year after delays from COVID-19 and before Biden leaves office.

Unable to bring his medal home so that it could get engraved, Batista laughed that the award really could have been a dream. He still doesn’t even know who nominated him. But he credits every person who supported him or allowed their story to be told through his camera lens in order for him to have work that could be nominated.

“I love Gainesville,” he said. “I always felt that if you live in a community that blesses you by providing you with an income, the mission is to give back.”

Batista relates his artistic mind to a blender, always trying to do too many things. He wears long sleeves to cover up residual effects from a recent kidney transplant and doesn’t believe in hanging any of his own artwork in his house.

“There’s plenty of other art in the world that deserves to be in our home,” he said.

The photographer came to live in the U.S. in 1961 for the second time after being born in his mother’s hometown of Ybor City in Tampa. At age 5, he moved to Cuba, his father’s native country. But with Fidel Castro’s rise to power, Batista’s parents wanted their son to avoid indoctrination, so they sent the sixth grader to the U.S. to live with his grandparents and to finish school, even though he did not know English.

Batista never left.

“I just love this place,” he said. “So I said, you know what, I’m not going anywhere.”

After falling asleep during a 0202 pre-med exam as an undergrad at UF, Batista decided medicine wasn’t his forte and chose a sociology major instead. But a spontaneous trip with his roommate changed the trajectory of Batista’s career.

“We went up to Orange Lake, and he had bought a camera, and he gave me a roll of film,” Batista said. “And that was the magic moment when all of a sudden I realized that you had the ability to create and record messages. I went to the university and said, ‘I want to become a photographer.’”

Batista sought out internationally recognized faculty member Jerry Uelsmann for help switching majors and navigating the preliminary classes.

“He said, ‘I’ll make you a deal. If you do good in the first class, I’ll let you take the rest of them.’ I did extremely well in the first class,” he said.

Batista opened his own photography business, Media Image Photography, after graduating in 1974. Most of his work started as commercial projects, such as weddings and passport headshots.

Lanier said the central location of his studio paired with her husband’s love for people made the perfect backdrop for cultivating the “people’s photographer,” as the NEA referred to Batista in his award citation.

“Because he’s Randy, he knows everybody everywhere,” she said. “The broader picture is this photographer who made a living and did work like any other photographer would do, but who somehow managed to take that art form and turn it into something that the community could get behind.”

Batista organized a series of art shows to bring people and local artists together for the good of the community. He titled one of his first shows “I’ve Been Framed” and featured photos of everyday people who affected his business, such as his mailman.

Lanier, who is a radiologist, helped Batista put on a show called “Sole Sisters” to raise money for women needing mammograms. They invited high profile community members to design and be photographed in funky shoes, such as penny loafers made from a loaf of bread with pennies on them. The prints and the shoes were auctioned off to raise a total of $63,000 and would land Batista on Good Morning America.

“I never used the word ‘fund,’” Batista said. “It was a ‘fun-raiser.’ It wasn’t a fundraiser because it was always about having fun.”

Outside of the shows, Batista said channeling his passion of getting people involved with art and having fun doing it distinguished his photography from other artists.

Before a photo shoot, he invited anyone set to be in the portrait to come to his studio to talk about who they are. For over an hour he watched their body language, even how kids leaned up against their parents, just to capture their story.

“To me, a picture is a picture. But a portrait tells you something about the soul,” Batista said. “My job was to make sure that I let people realize that they need to be comfortable in their own skin.”

In 2022, the same year someone nominated Batista for the NEA award, he received a gift more overwhelmingly precious than any medal. In the middle of stage 5 kidney failure with only 5% of his kidney functioning, Batista needed to find a transplant donor, and fast.

When a friend and former client of his, UF alumni magazine’s former editor, Liesl O’Dell, heard of Batista’s need, she told him donating had already been on her mind after reading about it in articles she edited. Within three months, Batista had her living kidney in his body. He named it after O’Dell’s nickname.

“It was like being reborn, literally,” Batista said with tears in his eyes. “The award that allowed me to get my [NEA] award was to receive that kidney from her. I named her Lily, and Lily is just doing a stellar job. My numbers are perfect. I have a new life full of energy.”

Even though he’s been retired for around a decade, Batista said he’d like to find a way to work with UF Health’s transplant team and photograph transplant patients and their donors in hopes of increasing the amount of living donations.

He also looks after his former professor and mentor Jerry Uelsmann’s redbone coonhound Reba—after Uelsmann passed away two years ago—and houses Cuban immigrants awaiting their green cards. In all the challenges he’s faced, Batista said each one makes him even more grateful to be awarded the future he’s living and ready for any more challenges to come.

“Having every passage in my life, good, bad or indifferent, has led me to where I am today, which is a lovely place,” he said. “My dad having Parkinson’s, leaving Cuba with nothing but a shirt on my back and a pair of pants, starting a business—every one of those things made me a better person to get to who I am today. I look at those events as just another mark to go to the next place.”