| Nov. 14, 2010
| Read about: Melissa Farlow, BA '74 Bill Foley, BA '07 Matt McClain, BAJ '98 Deirdre Read, BA '02 Jensen Walker, BAJ '01 Ashley Wilkerson, MA '07 |
In a world awash in images, at a time when new tools are making possible some of the most graphic and cutting edge visual storytelling ever seen, photojournalists are finding it increasingly difficult to come up with the resources to tell the world’s stories through pictures.
Newspapers and magazines, the traditional bastions of photojournalism, are closing or scaling back. At the same time, digital photography is everywhere and in the hands of everyone. Amateurs are publishing their pictures on the Web, sometimes supplying pictures at no cost to those same magazines and newspapers that have laid off their photo staffs.
But while the new day is one of insecurity and uncertainty, it’s also one of opportunity. Photojournalists are finding new ways to tell stories and to stay afloat in a rising tide of images and image makers.
At the School of Journalism, students learn still and video photography, design, audio, and how to package images, sound and words. Those skills will be invaluable for young photojournalists, but their success ultimately will hinge on their creativity, entrepreneurship and communication skills.
Newswire spoke by phone with six Indiana University alumni working in photojournalism about their careers and the strategies they’re employing to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. Their stories testify not just to the seismic shifts in photojournalism, but also to their enthusiasm for storytelling and the new ways they’re finding to tell those stories.
Matt McClain, BAJ’98
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| Matt McClain's self portrait. His new freelance career means thinking more like a business owner, he said. |
The paper, owned by the E.W. Scripps Company, had won four Pulitzer Prizes since the year 2000, including one for photography. But it was also suffering from the same forces as other newspapers across the country. Unable to find a buyer, the Scripps Co. announced on Feb. 26, 2009, that its final print edition would run the next day.
“After I got the call, I went back to the hotel and filed my pictures,” said McClain. “It took awhile for the news to sink in.”
Always the journalist, McClain returned to Denver to cover the closing of the paper he had called home for three years. He also had to turn in his photo equipment, which was when the full meaning of it all hit him full force.
“Equipment return was the hardest part,” he said. “I felt so naked and vulnerable. The camera is often an emotional shield, and I didn’t have that shield.”
McClain’s story is as sad as any in the industry, or it would’ve been if he hadn’t learned to adapt. Instead, he’s taken his years of experience, his numerous awards, his patience and determination, and his unflinching eye and built a successful career as a freelancer. He’s learned the business side of photojournalism, and he’s talked to others in the industry who already had made the leap to freelance.
“As a freelancer,” he said, “you have to do this weird balancing act where you take jobs that pay well so that you can do stuff that’s more meaningful and have the time to work on your own projects.”
You also have to start acting like a business owner, he explains, because “that’s exactly what you are.”
McClain’s editorial freelance work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Denver Post. “Finding Their Way,” a story that appeared in People magazine in November 2009, won second place for Daily Life Picture Story from World Press Photo.
Still, McClain says he misses the life of the daily newspaper photographer. “I like what a newspaper offers. I like working everyday with people, the collaboration, planning, researching stories. That’s been the hardest transition. But that’s where the industry is going.”
Melissa Farlow, BA’74
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| Farlow's self portrait. “Every assignment I’ve been given is like getting a graduate degree in that particular subject,” she said. “You really get immersed in it, and I enjoy that depth.” |
After leaving to teach and attend graduate school of the University of Missouri, she returned to newspapers and spent seven years at the Pittsburgh Press. When a labor strike occurred at that paper in 1992, Farlow left to do a story for National Geographic, and the paper closed soon after. Since then, she has contributed 13 more stories to National Geographic as a freelancer, among many other commissions.
For Farlow, magazine freelancing has allowed her to dive fully into her stories.
“Every assignment I’ve been given is like getting a graduate degree in that particular subject,” she said. “You really get immersed in it, and I enjoy that depth.”
Farlow’s photo stories have taken her across the country and around the world. She’s photographed loggers in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and traveled the National Road, the first federal highway in the U.S.
She’s also learned how to be a business owner. In fact, she and her photographer husband, Randy Olson, have plenty of stock photo requests to fill. So when Farlow isn’t shooting, she’s often answering e-mails and running what she calls “the family business.”
She echoes McClain in saying that young photographers need to quickly learn the business of photography while continuing to learn to tell stories.
“It’s so important to stay true to the core values,” she said.
Jensen Walker, BAJ’01
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| Jensen Walker's self portrait. “The advice is always to specialize, because in a completely saturated market, you need to be the bright shining apple that stands out as the best in the bunch." |
“Steve Raymer was an amazing support for me during that period,” Walker recalled. “He said, ‘Look, you have a job to do.’”
When he got home, however, jobs were scarce. He landed a temporary position as a photo editor with MSNBC during its coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics, but after that, freelancing wasn’t paying the bills. So Walker took a leap into a field that was completely new for him: commercial photography.
He took a job as first assistant to Stuart Cohen, a Dallas-based commercial photographer and film director who does work for major corporate clients like AT&T and McDonald’s. One of Walker’s first jobs with Cohen was a campaign for Nokia. Walker described the experience as a “three-year odyssey.”
“I walked away knowing how to pitch a job, how to bid a job, how to book make-up stylists,” he said. “I learned the ins and outs of setting up a commercial job that simply aren’t taught in school.”
Walker now has a long list of commercial clients, including Nike and Apple, but he’s also hung on as an editorial photojournalist, doing stories for Time, The Boston Globe and Der Spiegel. He’s also a contributor to Getty Images.
The mix of commercial and editorial experience has opened doors for him, but, he says, it also presents a challenge.
“The advice is always to specialize, because in a completely saturated market, you need to be the bright shining apple that stands out as the best in the bunch,” he said. “But the journalism background gets you hooked on shooting everything. I don’t want to shoot just one thing, and that’s hard to market. It’s hard for reps to market, and that’s something I’ve really struggled with.”
Ashley Wilkerson, MA’07
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| Wilkerson's self portrait. The decision to do photography, if not photojournalism, was hard, she said. |
Her first job, it turned out, would be another internship, this one at The Newport Daily News in Newport, R.I. Wilkerson was there for a year, and then moved to Jackson, Wyo., where she interned with the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
“It felt like all you could do was internships because there just weren’t any jobs,” she recalled.
So Wilkerson started doing something she hadn’t really considered before, but that more and more photojournalists are turning to for income: wedding photography. This summer she shot eight weddings.
“I realized that I still wanted to do photography, but that it might not be photojournalism,” she said. “That was a hard decision, and I really miss it, but I can still enjoy what I do because with photography there’s always something new to learn, some new challenge.”
Wilkerson’s background in photojournalism, it turns out, has been valuable in setting her apart from many other wedding photographers.
“One of the things that photojournalism helped me with was going out and meeting new people,” she explained. “You have to learn how to establish relationships quickly and show them respect and earn their trust. You have to do that at newspapers, and you have to do that with weddings, too.”
Wilkerson’s wedding photographs show the attention to detail and the awareness of the bigger picture crucial to storytelling.
“I was always drawn to the documentary and storytelling elements of photojournalism,” she explained. “I bring that to my wedding photography. I’m still telling stories, just different ones.”
Bill Foley, ’77, BA’07
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| Bill Foley said "doing it right" means communicating with pictures. |
Foley left IU before finishing his degree and traveled on a $99 one-way ticket to Europe, where he landed a job with the Associated Press. He returned to Bloomington to finish his degree in telecommunications and political science in 2007
The former Indiana Daily Student staff member sees the move to digital, in particular, as a double-edged sword, opening up the field of photography to many more people but contributing as well to a weakening of the fundamentals — understanding light and storytelling.
“With digital, a trained hamster can go make pictures,” he said. “But there’s a difference between doing it and doing it right. If you want to do it right, you have to learn how to communicate with pictures.”
“In the analog world, between shooting and processing, I could think about my captions,” he added. “I could tell you what the story was.”
That’s not the case with digital photography, he said.
Some of those stories included the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the assassination of (Egyptian president) Anwar Sadat, stories he covered for the Associated Press, where he was a staff photographer from 1978–1984. His coverage of the Sabra and Chatila massacre in Beirut earned him the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.
He worked for six years as a contract photographer for Time, and he has photographed and worked on book projects for numerous nonprofit and humanitarian organizations.
Since 2000, Foley has been an educator as well as a photojournalist. He taught photography at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for five years and is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Marian University in Indianapolis.
He sees promise in his students, but recognizes they’re entering a world far different from the one he got his start in.
“There’s just such an amazing number of people doing this now,” he said. “The competition now is just exponentially larger.”
His advice?
“Don’t be afraid of business classes,” he urges his students. “It’s one thing to take pictures, but how are you going to get your product out there to the market and have people buy it?”
He also encourages young photographers to study languages, history and political science. “You have to understand the way the world works if your pictures are really going to tell a story.”
Deirdre Finzer Read, BA’02
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| Read's self portrait. "For up-and-coming photographers, you have to find your voice, your own style, and you have to work hard to make yourself stand out.” |
As an editor, Read had a unique vantage point to watch an industry in flux. She was in daily contact with photographers and could see who was rising, who was falling and why. Earlier this year, the changes she was witnessing caught up with her. She was laid off from her job at Time — while on maternity leave — along with most of her department, due to across-the-board cuts at the magazine.
Read’s now at National Geographic, and she's optimistic about her own prospects and those of photojournalism in general.
“There will always be a place for still photography,” she said. “Anyone can read it. No matter what language you speak, anyone can read it.”
She knows the road ahead may be tough.
“Everyone is trying to get the gig,” she admits. “You see people at the top of the game, and they’re struggling too.”
Still, she encourages people to pursue their dreams.
“If you’re passionate about it, doors will open for you,” she said. “For up-and-coming photographers, you have to find your voice, your own style, and you have to work hard to make yourself stand out.”
She’s a believer in the importance of professional organizations like the National Press Photographers Association and the support net they provide for photojournalists.
“Our business is about relationships,” she said. “You have to network, you have to get out there and meet people. Go to workshops and conferences and make those connections.”
Finally, she says, remember the fundamentals.
“We’re all out there trying to tell people’s stories,” she reminds photojournalists. “If we keep doing that, we’ll be successful.”
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