The Rangefinder
Volume 73 - Issue 1
Before bed, Nikkia Anders sits on the porch with her daughter Nikkole, 4, while they take in the sounds of the night; airplanes, cicadas, frogs and insects. Nikkia has four-year-old triplets and one-year-old twins, and she will finally get a moment to herself after winding down the multiples in Jasper, Ind.
Photo by Marlena Sloss at MPW 72
Welcome to the Missouri Photo Workshop!
You are now part of a photojournalism legacy that stretches back 73 years to the time after World War II and the Farm Security Administration. In fact, the FSA greatly influenced the early workshops. Hundreds of photojournalists before you have been challenged to slow down, find a story and discover the narrative of the human condition in their moment. Now, it’s your turn to be part of the longest-running and first photojournalism workshop. The success lies in the power of the photographic narrative as a storytelling method. We’ll help you to discover this power. Naturally, your faculty are key to this process. The bond between the faculty and their teams is where some of the real magic happens. Even though you approach with excitement, apprehension or other emotions, we’re here for you, to show you the power in slowing down, thinking and overcoming preconceived notions of what type of story your faculty want you to do.
We’re excited to watch photo stories develop into pieces of journalism that didn't exist before this week.
Sincerely,
Brian Kratzer, Missouri Photo Workshop Director
Brian Kratzer, Jim Curley and David Rees at MPW.71 in Booneville, Mo., in 2019. Photo by Maddie Davis
Meet the faculty
Tay Kay Chin
TAY Kay Chin (aka Kay-Chin TAY to most of his American friends) is a Singaporean photographer who works mainly in the documentary and photojournalistic genres.
In 2003, he was named one of 12 Hasselblad Masters of the world, in recognition of his work Panoramic Singapore. The same year, he co-founded, together with Objectifs – Centre For Photography & Filmmaking, one of Southeast Asia’s first photography workshops, Shooting Home. From 2009 to 2015, he anchored the photojournalism modules at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information at Nanyang Technological University. In this capacity, he worked with many emerging photojournalists and documentary photographers on long-term visual storytelling projects.
In 2010, he co-founded PLATFORM, a photography collective to promote photojournalism and documentary work in Singapore through regular talks, panels and presentations at Sinema and the National Museum of Singapore. As a run-up to the 50th anniversary of Singapore attaining political independence, Kay Chin and the PLATFORM team launched the TwentyFifteen.sg initiative to publish 20 books, containing 15 images each, by 20 Singaporean photographers. From 2013, TwentyFifteen.sg published almost one book every month, culminating in an exhibition featuring all 20 books at Jendela (Visual Arts Space) at Esplanade–Theatres by the Bay in 2015.
In 2021, he co-founded Pictures of the Year Asia (POY Asia). Tay Kay Chin graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1992.
Melissa Farlow
Melissa Farlow has worked extensively for National Geographic magazine in the American West for stories on public lands, environmental issues and wild horses. Primarily known for her personal approach when photographing people, Farlow documented diverse cultures and landscapes while in South America, Quebec, Alaska, the Alps and the Okefenokee Swamp in over 20 National Geographic projects.
Awarded a Pulitzer Prize with the staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Farlow received a National Headliner Award as well as Pictures of the Year portfolio honors while at the Pittsburgh Press. Named Distinguished Alumni by the IU School of Journalism, she was inducted into Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2013.
In addition to projects for the Heinz Endowments, the Ford Foundation and Habitat for Humanity, her work is published in Smithsonian, GEO, LIFE, American Craft, American Bungalow, National Geographic Traveler and Sierra magazines. Farlow received a master's degree in journalism while teaching at the University of Missouri. She teaches workshops and is a frequent lecturer as well as a photography consultant with thephotosociety. She and her husband, Randy Olson, a longtime National Geographic contributing photographer, live in Pennsylvania and Oregon.
Becky Lebowitz Hanger
Becky Lebowitz Hanger is the operations manager and photographers' chief at The New York Times. Her work has been honored at Pictures of the Year International, and she was photo editor for Josh Haner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning project after the Boston Marathon bombing. She’s been involved in the online visual innovations for which the NYT is famous since joining the staff in 2004.
Becky earned her master's degree from the University of Missouri after conducting her masters project at the Hartford Courant, where she researched and watched how photo editors work. She later worked as a photo editor at The Palm Beach Post under the guidance of the late, great photo editor Mark Edelson.
This is Becky’s third MPW as faculty. However, she did crew MPW50 in Boonville in 1998. Her job that year was scanning negatives.
Kim Komenich
Kim Komenich heads the photojournalism sequence in the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University. In 2016 he published “Revolution Revisited: A Look Back at the 1986 Philippine People Power Revolution,” which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning images he took for the San Francisco Examiner.
After graduating from San Jose State University in 1979, Komenich worked as a staff photographer for the Contra Costa Times. He went on to work as a photographer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner (1982-2000) and the San Francisco Chronicle (2000-2009). Komenich has photographed the ramifications of conflict in the Philippines, Vietnam, Guyana, El Salvador, the former Soviet Union and Iraq, where photos from his three trips to the Sunni Triangle in 2005 earned him the Military Reporters and Editors’ Association’s 2006 Photography Award.
He is a recipient of the national Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the 1983 World Press Photo News Picture Story Award and three National Headliner Awards. He is a 2005 recipient of the National Press Photographers Association’s Clifton C. Edom Education Award, and the 2010 recipient of the NPPA Humanitarian Award.
He was a 1993-94 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and a fall 2001 teaching fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at U.C. Berkeley. In 2006 he was named a Dart Ochberg Fellow, working with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, curating photo exhibitions and giving presentations to journalists about the human toll of covering traumatic events.
Sarah Leen
In 2013 Sarah Leen became the first female Director of Photography at National Geographic Partners. In late 2019 she founded the Visual Thinking Collective, a community for independent women editors dedicated to visual storytelling.
As a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Leen was the first woman to receive the College Photographer of the Year award. For 20 years she worked as a freelance photographer for the National Geographic magazine until 2004 when she joined the staff as a Senior Photo Editor.
Leen currently works with photographers and agencies consulting and editing projects and books, including America, Again with VII Photo, the 2020 FotoEvidence World Press Photo Book winner HABIBI by Antonio Faccilongo, Anders Wo by Petra Barth and Like a Bird by Johanna-Maria Fritz.
Leen mentors photographers and teaches visual storytelling at the Missouri Photo Workshops, Maine Media Workshops, Eddie Adams Workshop and Santa Fe Photo Workshop.
Torsten Kjellstrand
A native of Sweden, Torsten Kjellstrand started teaching at the University of Oregon after 25 years of work as a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He worked at The Herald in Jasper, Indiana, where he was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year by POYi. While working at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, then The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon, he was recognized for a broad range of work, from Lowell Thomas Awards for travel writing and photography to an Overseas Press Club Award for foreign news.
Throughout his journalism career, Kjellstrand has tried to tell stories that go beyond and challenge stereotyping in rural, Native American, and immigrant communities. He cut his narrative teeth as an English major at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. He spent a year as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2003-04, studying links between ethnicity, language, landscape and storytelling. He then worked as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in New York City before coming to Eugene in 2013.
Alyssa Schukar
Alyssa Schukar [she/her] is a Washington, D.C.-based photographer and writer. Her work is rooted in an interest in and love of people, and it's propelled by a desire to study and name the larger forces that affect people's lives. Alyssa works on assignment for national publications and is a contract storyteller at the nonprofit Feeding America.
She believes photojournalists advance and improve the industry by supporting each other. In 2019, Alyssa and two colleagues launched Prism Photo Workshop, which provides aid, education and advocacy for young photographers of diverse backgrounds. She is a returning faculty member at the Missouri Photo Workshop and has taught at several universities. She has also led photography workshops in New York City and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Alyssa is a native of the Great Plains and a proud graduate of the University of Nebraska.
Lois Raimondo
Lois Raimondo is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Reed College of Media, West Virginia University. She began her journalism work translating for CBS News in China during President Reagan’s presidential trip to Beijing. At the time, she was a graduate student living in a remote Chinese village collecting folktales for a master's degree in comparative literature. Raimondo lived and worked full-time in Asia for 10 years, including four years as chief photographer for the Associated Press in Hanoi, Vietnam. As one of the first American reporters into north Vietnam since the Vietnam War, she explored and reported on every aspect of the emerging new-economy society. Raimondo went on to specialize in conflict and human rights stories, smuggling in over the Himalayan mountains mid-winter to report on martial-lawed Tibet and Indian Kashmir.
Prior to teaching at WVU, Raimondo was a staff photographer at The Washington Post for ten years, covering everything from a local organic Virginia farm to the anti-American uprising in Iraq and the Ramadan Offensive in Afghanistan.
While still an intern, her investigative series on corruption in Mitchell Lama Housing for New York Newsday was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. In 2005, she was awarded the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to report on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. She spent the year working in the northwest frontier provinces of Balochistan and Waziristan. She won the Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 2002 for her frontline reporting on the war in Afghanistan.
Bill Marr
After starting a career in photography at a small yet very special newspaper—The Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri— Bill Marr started editing his colleagues’ work and designing photo pages. One thing led to another. He's worked on newspapers and magazines as a photographer, picture editor, designer and art director; freelanced from Philadelphia and Annapolis working on books, corporate magazines and annual reports; and was Creative Director for National Geographic magazine for 10 years. After leaving NatGeo in 2015, he was The Nature Conservancy’s director of photography.
Marr now teaches photo editing through Santa Fe Workshops and Maine Media with his wife, Sarah Leen. They live in mid-coast Maine.
Randy Olson
Randy Olson is a photographer in the documentary tradition. Randy’s 30+ National Geographic projects have taken him to almost every continent. National Geographic Society published a book of his work in 2011 in their Masters of Photography series. Olson was the Magazine Photographer of the Year in the 2003 Pictures of the Year International (POYi) competition, and was also awarded POYi’s Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1991 — one of only two photographers to win in both media in the largest photojournalism contest operating continuously since World War II.
In 2011, Randy founded The Photo Society. The purpose of the organization is to find economic opportunities and provide exposure to members as the economics of print dwindles. While working as a newspaper photographer at The Pittsburgh Press, Olson received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 1995 to support a seven-year project documenting a family with AIDS, and a first-place Robert F. Kennedy Award for his story on problems with Section 8 housing in 1991. He was also awarded the Nikon Sabbatical grant and a grant from the National Archives to save the Pictures of the Year collection.
Dennis Dimick
Dennis Dimick has been a journalist for more than 40 years. He has worked as a newspaper photographer and reporter at newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, and from 1978-80 was a picture editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal. For 35 years he was a picture editor at the National Geographic Society, serving as the magazine’s environment editor for a decade.
Dennis has been on faculty at the Missouri Photo Workshop for 24 years, and in 2013 he received the NPPA’s Charles M. Sprague Award for service to photojournalism. A former board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, he has team-taught environmental and science journalism since 2018 at the University of Oregon with UO journalism professor and fellow MPW faculty member Torsten Kjellstrand.
David Rees at MPW.71 in Booneville, Mo., in 2019. Photo by Maddie Davis
How to Find a Story: What your faculty expects of you
By David Rees
Do the story you’re assigned (oops! – nope, NOT this workshop).
Be direct and succinct. (Do NOT pitch your story like this: "I was walking down the street, met a cat, found a nice person I thought I could talk to and he said it was really hot and he introduced me to someone who used to have a lot of influence in the neighborhood and then this guy rode by on his bike and, and I followed him and then I remembered I was interested in Boy Scout leadership and then…..)
Write down your ideas.
Select a topic/subject that is achievable in this within the time frame of MPW73... And find out what your subject is doing THIS WEEK – it’s hard to photograph the past or the future. Find out what’s happening NOW. This is a workshop to learn how to do a great story; likely the visual narrative you create this week won’t be the best thing you’ve ever done, but it will be the beginning of a new way of working, of researching, of building relationships.
Come up with multiple potential story ideas. Gather lots of detail. Ask questions of your potential story subjects, and do a lot of listening to them. Don’t know where to start? Build off your own interests or expertise. Or explore a part of the community you’re not familiar with. Often the stories for this workshop are character-based - talk to others about who *they* find interesting in the community and follow up with more questions and exploration.
Time spent finding a story that you feel is worthy of telling is time well spent. With a good story idea, the telling of it in photographs becomes much easier.
Try to synthesize the story idea into a combination of headline and one sentence explanation for each story idea.
Your faculty may ask you to do more research – almost certainly they will. They will have reviewed your MPW application materials and will look to find ways to challenge you.
Remember, the story must be approved by your faculty BEFORE you begin making pictures.
Be diligent – work hard. Put in the time. Check in persistently with your faculty – at least a couple of times a day, by email or whatever arrangement you work out with your team.
After you have your story idea approved, continue to reevaluate and refine your story summary – make it one paragraph that helps us to understand the person/topic and also wants us to know more. Inevitably the story will “change” as you learn more about who you are photographing.
Check in frequently by text or email with the faculty. Be considerate of others on the team.
Get some sleep; eat well.
Attend the online sessions. Attend team meetings. Consult frequently with your faculty.
Work hard – embrace the process. Make an honest effort by pushing yourself into new situations, to try to understand what it is you hope to say with your pictures BEFORE you start making pictures.
Embrace the process.
During this week you can expect:
Some frustration
Some great pictures (with your quota of 400 frames or less!)
Some real discussions about photography, visual narratives, how we connect with individuals and communities, and what our photography means.
More frustration
Inevitably, a step forward.
Finally, know this: A huge part of being able to control your own destiny as a photographer is having the ability to generate story ideas on your own – so that you can pitch them to editors, rather than expecting them to call you with an assignment. The ability to take initiative and to influence the agenda is critical to meaningful photography.
Fred Dailey at MPW.70 in Mountain Grove, Missouri, in 2018. Photo by Jenna Kieser
Remembering Fred “Duane” Dailey
by Emmalee Reed
Friends remember Fred “Duane” Dailey’s calm presence, his simple kind of warmth, a quiet sense of humor and a contagious laugh that shook his whole body.
The former MPW co-director was a born journalist and keen observer of life. He loved to write, to communicate and to photograph.
Dailey died Tuesday, March 10, 2020, at Boone Hospital Center in Columbia, Missouri.
In 2019, he wrote an article with Missouri Photo Workshop co-director David Rees, giving a “history lesson” about his life. Much of the following biographical information is drawn from that article.
Dailey was born Nov. 23, 1935, in South Lineville, Missouri, a small town hugging the Iowa border. He grew up on his family’s 640-acre farm, with beef cattle, vegetable gardens, hogs and hard work. There, Dailey developed a dedication to the agricultural story, something he would carry with him his entire life.
He attended the University of Missouri, where he studied agricultural journalism. After graduation, Dailey joined the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant and worked in artillery training for two years.
Dailey returned to MU and put his dream of agricultural reporting to work as the 4-H editor for MU Extension. He used photos and words to talk about people using innovative farming technology, turning science jargon into stories comprehensible by the average farmer.
At the height of his Extension work, Dailey hired many students to work in his darkroom and process the photographs he made.
“It was a whirlwind experience,” Dave Marner, one of Dailey’s darkroom assistants, recalled. “I saw some of the most technically brilliant photography at the time I was learning about photojournalism.”
“It’s almost like the aesthetic he had is more seen and understood now than it was then,” said Sarah Leen, another darkroom assistant and former director of photography for National Geographic Partners. “It was subdued, a little more ‘fine-arty.’ He was ahead of his time in a way. Now I see it.”
Outside of his Extension position, Dailey spent his time photographing Missouri mules. In the early 1980s, he traveled all over the state to document the stories of mules and their owners. He photographed more than 100 people and mules, creating a visual history of the animal.
“He was different from news people in a lot of places, always chasing the big stories,” said Rita Reed, professor emeritus of photojournalism in the Missouri School of Journalism. “Duane liked to tell the stories of just day-to-day lives of people who worked and lived their lives and did things that needed to be done in the world. He liked to tell those stories, and he was committed to teaching others how to tell those stories.”
Dailey was an active writer and photographer on agricultural issues. He wrote a weekly newspaper column, “Hometown Boy,” for small newspapers across Missouri and was a regular contributor to Missouri Ruralist Magazine. His last column was published only six days before his death, Marner said.
“He was a fixture,” Marner said. “Every newspaper in the state of Missouri has run Duane Dailey stories for 55 years. You’re never gonna see that again.”
Dailey participated in his first Missouri Photo Workshop in 1961.
“He credits that with changing his life,” current workshop co-director Jim Curley said, “the way he photographed, the way he thought about photojournalism and photo stories.”
Inspired by the workshop, Dailey and photojournalist Bill Kuykendall created the Agricultural Editor’s Photo School. At the photo school, agricultural journalists — mostly editors and writers — learned how to shoot documentary-style photographs and incorporate them into their publications, Kuykendall said.
Kuykendall said Dailey deserves a tremendous amount of credit for cultivating documentary-style reporting in the agricultural press, an approach he said redefined standards and processes in that field.ac
“That would not have happened, I believe, without Duane’s influence,” Kuykendall said.ac
In 1986, the pair returned to MPW to take over for founders Cliff and Vi Edom as co-directors.
“When he ran the workshop, he did it with good humor and a kindness to the faculty and students that worked there,” Reed, who worked as workshop faculty, said.
Those who knew Dailey described him as the spirit of the workshop, always offering a smile and knowledge learned through experience.
“He brought a steady goodness to the workshop,” current workshop co-director David Rees said.
Dailey was central to the workshop’s mission of teaching photographers the value of rural stories. He cared deeply about rural stories and was always willing to take the time to help students learn how to tell them.
“He had the powerful ability to observe,” said Brian Kratzer, current workshop co-director, “observe agricultural life, rural life and help many students along the way see and feel the powers of observation themselves.”
Dailey became an emeritus co-director after his tenure. Over his lifetime, he would spend 37 weeks at the workshop, the most of any person other than the Edoms, Curley said.
“I’ll always see him across the breakfast table, putting raisins in his oatmeal,” Kuykendall said. “Those were golden moments, when the world was at peace and all that lay ahead was a whole spectrum of possibilities. We’d start the day never knowing what was coming, but it was always good exploring it with Duane.”
Thank you to our sponsors.
Brian Kratzer, Co-Director
Jim Curley, Co-Director Emeritus
David Rees, Co-Director Emeritus
Hany Hawasly, Operations Director
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