Photo by Autumn DeGrazia | MPW.76 | Kennett, Mo.

‘This is the future of the industry’: Canon supports MPW

By Bailey Stover & Olivia Maillet

Matt Campbell and Canon go hand in hand. The Senior Advisor, Key Agency & Pro Market Field Support at Canon said he used Canon equipment most of his career and believes in the company as well as the product. 

After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in photojournalism, Campbell worked with Agence France-Presse and the European Pressphoto Agency. In total, his career in the photojournalism industry spanned more than three decades. About a year ago, Campbell pivoted in his career and accepted a position with Canon. 

“I felt like here’s an opportunity to change what I’m doing but still really keep both feet firmly planted in the industry I’ve loved for so long,” Campbell said.

During MPW.76, Campbell is helping provide Missouri Photo Workshop photographers with top-of-the-line Canon gear, such as multiple Canon EOS R5 Mark II bodies and multiple Canon EOS R1 bodies. Campbell said the latter are not yet technically available to the public for purchase. He said he hopes Canon’s gear enables MPW photographers to make the best possible pictures during their time at the workshop.

“We know that, generally, participants in a workshop like this are gonna succeed,” Campbell said. “This is the future of the industry, and that's important for us to support, support the growth of great photojournalism and the continuation of photojournalism.”

Campbell said his background working with news agencies makes him especially qualified to speak with photographers as they search for the ideal equipment to use in their storytelling. He said he’s attended about the past six or seven MPWs and knows students, especially during the first few days of the workshop, will come by the Canon table looking to upgrade their gear for the week. 

“It’s not an inexpensive field to get into,” Campbell said. “It’s fantastic to see the reactions of students when you come in and just say, ‘Whatever you want. Just take anything you need.’”

Throughout the week, Canon representatives including Campbell and Senior Technical Specialists Kelly Anderson and Tony Kurdzuk will be available at MPW headquarters to check out Canon equipment to workshop photographers. 

“Try [it] out. Explore. Have fun. There’s no real limitations on it,” Campbell said. “We’re happiest when all of this stuff is out there, and we want everybody to feel free to try things out, ask us questions, whatever’s needed. We’re happy to help, and that’s why we’re here.”

CPOY scholarships support emerging photojournalists, awardees Anna Connors, Michael Blackshire

By Olivia Maillet

Cliff and Vi Edom founded the College Photographer of the Year competition in 1945, and practically every year since more than 600 students from nearly 50 countries globally have entered the contest. Countless university students dream of joining the contest’s long and prestigious winners list.

MPW.76 includes two photographers recognized as awardees in the 78th annual College Photographer of the Year competition: Anna Connors and Michael Blackshire. Blackshire received an Award of Excellence in the CPOY 78 Portfolio category, and his scholarship covers his MPW.76 tuition, room and board.

Anna Connors, who received an Award of Excellence for her CPOY 78 Domestic Picture Story, “Carolina Cowboy, was awarded a scholarship to the Missouri Photo Workshop in honor of Greg Dorsett and the Muskegon Chronicle. Dorsett was a photo editor for the Muskegon Chronicle from 1980-2021. A fierce proponent of visual storytelling, Dorsett believed in the power of photography – and he believed in the people he hired over the years, both staff and countless interns. This fellowship includes room and board, tuition and transportation for MPW.76.

This year, the technical recipients of these two scholarships were Minh Connors, as Runner-Up College Photographer of the Year, and Vincent Alban, the 78th College Photographer of the Year, as the Gold winner in the Domestic Picture Story category. Connors and Alban, however, photographed MPW.74 and MPW.75 respectively, so they passed their CPOY scholarships on to Connors and Blackshire. 

MPW.76 Director Brian Kratzer said he welcomes Blackshire and Connors and hopes they will commit themselves to the workshop and utilize their scholarships.

“Being at MPW.76 is very important for up-and-coming emerging journalists because this is a week to regroup and think about your stories,” Blackshire said.

Blackshire works in Los Angeles, Ca., at the L.A. Times, where he makes daily photos for the paper’s higher education stories. He said everything is very fast-paced in L.A., and he rarely has time to work on projects unless he does so in his own free time. He said he finds the workshop’s “slow journalism” approach refreshing.

A proponent of long-term journalism herself, Connors has been working on a story for a year and a half about the relationship between a mother and a daughter. The mother has been her daughter’s primary caregiver for 47 years. Connors said she is ready for the challenge of getting to know the subject of her MPW.76 photo story in less than a week. 

“I like to work slowly,” Connors said. “I like time to build trust. I like to tell intimate, character-driven stories, and that’s totally possible in a week, but it requires working in a completely different way.”

MPW faculty expect photographers to find and photograph stories using their unique approaches to photojournalism. Throughout the week, MPW.76 photographers have ample opportunities to learn from one another and compare source-gathering and storytelling techniques, preparing each and every participant to confidently go wherever their path in life leads next. 

Idris Talib Solomon’s photography journey started in 1999 while he was a graphic design student at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y. Solomon described his photography education as one that is largely self-taught and full of curiosity.

He discovered his interest in photography while attending BU and joined the school paper, taking photos of whatever he thought was “cool and interesting.” His ability to follow his emerging passion, however, was cut short when a large amount of his photography equipment was stolen.

It wasn’t until 2008 that Solomon decided to pick up a camera again. Starting in 2014, Solomon started to actively pursue photography professionally. During this time, he took a Continuing Education class at the International Center of Photography in New York City under the direction of French photographer Frank Fournier.

“[Fournier] told me that instead of going out and taking a bunch of random photos and making them look nice, I should focus on a story that means something to me and return back to that story over the course of several days, several weeks, months, sometimes even years and that [I will] start to develop an eye for storytelling,” Solomon said.

In 2016, Solomon attended the Eddie Adams Workshop where he met photojournalists and editors. Because of the workshop, he then had assignments from publications such as The New York Times and Reuters. 

Two years later, Solomon traveled to Mountain Grove, Mo., to attend MPW.70 as an early career photographer. During the workshop, he produced a photo story of Chase White. White was a deacon, loved to hunt and delivered mail to the residents of Mountain Grove who lived where postal trucks did not venture.

From his MPW.70 experience, Solomon decided he did not want to be known as a photojournalist but rather as a documentarian.

“For me, photojournalism — the way that I experienced it — I would get a call for a random project or story that I don’t really care about, and I would spend a few hours there, and then I would leave and not return to that story at all,” Solomon said. “But with documentary, I get to go back to the same place and meet the same people, and I get to see them differently.”

During Solomon’s time as a photojournalist in New York City, he realized that the demands of the industry did not allow him to also take care of his family. After reevaluating his priorities, he decided to take a step back from documentary journalism and focus more on the commercial side instead.

“The camera was always just a tool to express something creatively,” Solomon said. “I used it in conjunction with graphic design, art direction and video. I am a photographer, but I’m not only a photographer. I’m able to use the camera in a lot of different ways, so that allowed me to work on different projects where it’s not just based on a camera. But, I can write or bring in a design and text. So, it kinda gave me a lot more options on how I can pursue creative work.”

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Solomon started his podcast, “The Black Shutter.” The Black Shutter started after Solomon connected with other Black and Brown photographers at The New York Times’s 2018 portfolio review and shared their experiences of injustice toward creators of color in the industry.

“I created [The Black Shutter] as a way to say, ‘You know what? It’s time that we celebrate ourselves and not wait for anybody else to celebrate us,’” Solomon said. “And, I know that there’s a lot of really dope Black and Brown photographers out there. Why not put their stories out there in a way that can inspire someone who’s looking to hear those stories?”

Solomon said that, in his experience, being a non-white photographer in a white-dominated field can be challenging, frustrating and disheartening. For example, around January each year, Solomon said he gets emails and calls from editors from a variety of publications asking him to pitch stories relating to Black History Month.

“I remember this one email,” Solomon said. “An editor said, ‘Hey, you know, I love your work.’ So, I started looking up this editor, and they weren’t following me. They’ve never made a comment on any of my work. So, I’m thinking, ‘How much do you really love my work if you’re not following me and have never interacted?’”

Solomon said his Black and Latino friends in the industry have received similar requests. Particularly following George Floyd’s the murder, editors asked his colleagues to frequently cover the ongoing protests that came out of that event. 

“For some of them, it was a great career situation because they were getting a lot of work,” Solomon said. “For them, it was lucrative, but that also comes with the realization that some of the attention that they got and the money that they made was off the fact that somebody was murdered. They were able to make a living based on someone dying. And, once the protests slowed down and ended, nobody was really reaching out to them in the same way. That’s problematic.”

From being a MPW.70 photojournalist early in his career to becoming a successful multimedia artist, Solomon brings a storybook of experiences to his role as a MPW.76 faculty member. Solomon said he still applies the photojournalistic principles he learned during MPW.70 in some of his work and mentorship despite not wanting to be defined exclusively as a documentarian. Still, he does not allow that to hinder his ability to guide his photographers.

“What we’re teaching all of the photographers here at the workshop is to ask questions, to be curious, to dig deeper into the idea,” Solomon said. “And, if you’re able to do that when you’re approaching these stories, then what’s stopping you from doing that in other areas of creativity?”

 Who is Mark Petty, and why is he ‘The Keeper of MPW.76 Stories’?

Mark Petty embraced being an outsider from a young age. He grew up in Tulsa, Okla., and attended Jackson Elementary. His teachers taught their students that the school’s namesake, President Andrew Jackson, was a hero. Petty knew better. 

Petty said that although his ancestry is half Italian, he identifies more with his Native American heritage. His family has Cherokee roots, and, as part of Jackson's 1830 “Indian Removal Act” in 1830, his ancestors were forced to leave from their home in Georgia and traverse the deadly Trail of Tears until they reached the then-called “Indian Territory,” which is now the state of Oklahoma. 

Petty said blending into the background and getting to know the outskirts of society has benefited him in his photojournalistic career. He has made pictures of the inside of jail cells, the aftermath of hurricanes and what he said are his two most hard-hitting stories: the lives of leprosy hospital patients and a human interest piece about being homeless on the streets of New Orleans.

“I know that is the genesis of why I did what I did,” Petty said of how his heritage shaped his journalistic calling. “My wife and I photographed a leprosy hospital. We were drawn to do it, and I can’t even explain why.”

One day, when Petty was working in Pensacola, Fl., at the Pensacola News Journal, he had an assignment to meet a reporter in Carville, La. The pair spent two nights in the administrative building of the National Leprosarium where he was covering how leprosy patients received treatment in the 1970s. In 1933, 40 years before Petty’s story, the state of Louisiana decided to build the leprosy hospital, which consisted of 68 beds in two wards separated by sex. 

Petty said the hospital put on a “dog and pony show.” The hospital restricted where he was able to go, and, ultimately, only three out of the 300 hospital patients agreed to be photographed. This limited access intrigued Petty and his wife, Marty. The couple had both graduated from the University of Missouri with bachelor’s degrees in photojournalism and magazine journalism, respectively.

Soon after his story was published in the Pensacola News Journal, Petty and Marty quit their jobs, secured the necessary access and moved into the National Leprosarium for a year and a half. Petty became the hospital’s part-time medical photographer, and Marty became a part-time writer for the patient’s international magazine, which needed an able-bodied consultant. 

After Petty completed his year-long photo story on the hospital, he talked with Angus McDougall, former head of the Missouri School of Journalism Photojournalism Sequence, who then called up Howard Chapnick, the photo editor and influential leader of the Black Star photo agency. Chapnick tried pitching his story to Life Magazine and Look! Magazine, but both publications passed on Petty’s piece. 

The connections Petty formed throughout his career helped him workshop the story globally. Stern Magazine, based in Germany, purchased the story rights. Because of this legal agreement, Petty was unable to sell his story to any other European media outlets.

Petty said Stern Magazine “captured it and killed it.”

Eventually, The New Orleans States-Item, a newspaper in Louisiana, ran the photo story after Petty became a photographer with the publication. The paper had been trying to run a story on the subject for 40 years but didn’t have the manpower. The New Orleans States-Item ran a 24-page special section for Petty’s leprosy hospital photos.

Petty said he has always found a way to build rapport among groups other people overlook. During his stint with The New Orleans States-Item, Petty followed Thunderbird, who was an unhoused man. He recalled Thunderbird was missing part of his leg. The man had stuck a metal pole, an inch thick in circumference, where his leg should have been. Thunderbird spent his days walking around the city with a grocery cart. 

“My heart just bled for this guy,” Petty said. “He was very difficult to talk to because I’m pretty sure he was mentally ill. There wasn’t a big outcry about the plight of the homeless in 1977; it sadly was not talked about.”

Any time Petty could, he searched New Orleans for Thunderbird. The last time Petty made photos of Thunderbird, he was so intent on getting the images he felt were essential to his coverage that he stayed out until around 3 a.m. to ensure the man fell asleep safely, despite the area being surrounded by smashed payphones 

That night was dangerous, so dangerous that his wife was still awake when he returned home in the dead of night. Petty said he had been “stupidly not thinking of the effect his absence had on her,” but this was his wake-up call. He realized he now had people who loved him, and who he loved in return, looking out for him.

By the end of his reporting with Thunderbird, Petty had produced three photo stories connecting to his subject. 

As “The Keeper of MPW.76 Stories,” Petty writes down each photographer’s pitch to preserve and pass on. When speaking about his expectations for MPW.76 photographers, Petty said he hopes they will keep in touch with each other outside of the workshop. The friendships photographers make during MPW, Petty said, are the connections that will keep on giving, even after each attendee’s photo story is finished. 

Throughout his career, Petty has found a way to tell the stories of people persevering, and he has enough experience to know when a story is worth pursuing. So, when MPW Director Brian Kratzer named Petty “The Keeper of MPW.76 Stories,” Kratzer knew he was giving the task to the right person. 

Which MPW icon are you?

QUESTION 1: To which photo do you feel most drawn?

Question 2: What do you think is a “normal” number of photos to make on an assignment? 

1. Less than 100 frames

2. Between 400-500 frames

3. Between 100-200 frames

4. Between 200-300 frames

5. Between 300-400 frames

Question 3: What’s your go-to snack when you’re in the field?

1. Beef jerky 

2. Trailmix 

3. Fruit snacks

4. Grapes

5. Protein bar

Question 4: Pick your assignment! 

1. Covering the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA

2. Documenting the future of space travel

3. Reporting on environmental conservation efforts

4. Creating a photo book

5. Covering a presidential candidate

Question 5: Which previous MPW town would you want to visit?

1. Jefferson City

2. Columbia

3. Mountain Grove

4. Maryville

5. Osage Beach

Question 6: If you weren't a photographer, what would you be?

1. A politician 

2. A scientist

3. A counselor

4. An artist 

5. An educator

ANSWERS

1. You’re Howard Chapnick!

   1. You’re an influential leader and aren’t afraid to go after what you want. Howard was a double-edged sword while leading the Black Star photo agency: he developed a new department that worked on photo essays and books for Black Star while simultaneously maintaining a world-wide network of photographers. Your to-do list is long but doesn’t intimidate you. If you don’t get everything crossed off today, you know you’ve always got tomorrow. 

2. You’re Cliff & Vi Edom! 

   1. You’re innovative and a trailblazer. Cliff Edom is credited with coining the term “photojournalism,” and Vi had a long career with the Missouri Press Association. The Edoms also created the Missouri Photo Workshop, traveling with students to small towns across the state to teach them the importance of slow journalism. You can delegate tasks in your sleep, and telling people the value of visual storytelling is your go-to conversation starter.

3. You’re Jodi Cobb! 

   1. You’re most at peace in nature and know your own worth. Jodi was the only woman to become a staff photographer in National Geographic history, and the publication featured her work in more than 30 stories. Just like Jodi, you enjoy traveling and exploring places that bring you out of your comfort zone.

4. You’re Sandra Eisert! 

   1. You’re cool under pressure and bring empathy to your storytelling. Sandra was the first White House picture editor and, as a newspaper picture editor, contributed to coverage of numerous breaking news events. You’re able to see the big picture of complex stories while also maintaining your eye for intriguing details.

5. You’re Yoichi Okamoto!

   1. You aren’t afraid to ask for more access and know how to navigate complex power dynamics, just like Yoichi did while photographing U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson as the first official presidential photographer. You look for intimate, candid moments and have a special talent for seeing the unexpected in the mundane. You care about history and understand the important contribution photojournalism makes to the historical record.