Jessica Birthisel | March 3, 2011
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| Photo by Jeremy Hogan |
| Alumni (from left) Bill Foley, Melissa Farlow and Michel du Cille talked about their careers Wednesday. All have won or shared in Pulitzer Prizes, and all are former students of the late Will Counts. |
Photojournalists Michel du Cille, Melissa Farlow and Bill Foley showed their work and recounted their careers at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater as part of the Will Counts Memorial Lecture on Photojournalism. The event was the first of the School of Journalism's spring Speaker Series, which this year will feature accomplished alumni in honor of the year-long celebration of 100 years of journalism at IU.
Counts, a professor at IU for 32 years who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his photos of desegregation in 1950s Little Rock, worked with all three featured photographers during their time at IU, as well as with panel moderator and journalism associate professor Jim Kelly. Counts’ widow, Vivian, was in the audience.
Following an introduction by journalism student Olivia Elsner Corya and Kelly, du Cille, BA’85, was the first to take the stage and share the photos that led to his three Pulitzer Prizes. He said it’s hard to describe how much IU, Bloomington and Counts’ mentoring meant to him.
“Still today I think about Will and the way he gave me ultimate respect and ultimate friendship and guidance,” said du Cille, the director of photography at The Washington Post.
He explained that his first Pulitzer was spurred on by internal motivation to seek a bigger story and poor sleeping habits. Insomnia kept him up much of the night, and in November of 1985, he heard a news report around 3 a.m. that the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption had left thousands dead in Colombia.
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| Photo by Jeremy Hogan |
| Photographers displayed their work and talked about the shots during the presentation. Here, Foley shows a 1980s-era shot of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. |
“I was ready to go whether he said yes or not,” said du Cille. “As we arrived in the mountains of Colombia, we found this incredible devastation.”
Du Cille and his colleague Carol Guzy were there to document the tragedy that left approximately 23,000 dead, and their photos resulted in a 1986 Pulitzer in spot news photography.
Later du Cille went on to pursue interpretive photo journalism.
“I wanted to do the big photo essay that had impact,” he said, deciding eventually, with the support of his publication, to spend seven months covering the crack addicts who had taken over a local housing development known as The Graveyard.
Du Cille says the project was an attempt to "try to show that crack and drug addiction was not just a quote unquote black problem in the inner city,” he explains. “I started off looking to really widen the perspective.”
The story earned him his second Pulitzer with the Herald, in feature photography for 1987. His third Pulitzer, for public service, came in 2008 along with his Washington Post colleagues Dana Priest and Anne Hall for a story about poor conditions at Walter Reed Hospital, where many wounded veterans live during recuperation and treatment. He shared one photo from the project, a veteran pulling back the wallpaper in his room to expose the mold growing beneath.
“It's such a simple photo,” said du Cille. “It's not photographically great. But really, it was a record of something that turned out to be fairly significant.”
Later, during investigations into the situation, the wife of one of the veterans profiled in the project came up to him and gave him a hug, thanking him and the Washington Post for the work they did.
"I've always wanted and felt that it's important that journalism [create] some change in society,” said du Cille.
After his story about the housing in Miami, the government came in and cleaned it up. “Our journalism changed something,” said du Cille.
He says that he feels grateful for the opportunities he’s had as a photojournalist.
“I'm very grateful for the luck, and it has been backed up with hard work,” said du Cille, “but there's somebody up there looking out for me.”
He introduced Farlow, with whom he interned at the (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal and, as he explained, whose house he once painted in order to earn some extra money.
“Believe me, Michael chose the right profession,” joked Farlow, BA’74, who grew up in Paoli, Ind., and knew all along she would come to IU.
She also reflected on her time with Counts.
“I'm so lucky to have been one of his students,” she said. “Will exposed us to iconic images, but the gift Will had was that he encouraged students to believe in themselves, to be individuals, and to follow their hearts.”
Bloomington in the 1970s was also part of her education, says Farlow, and the radical politics that marked the campus in that era prepared her for a variety of experiences as a photojournalist.
“Without that experience, I couldn't have covered Burning Man,” she said, showing a picture of a colorful attendee of the annual artistic and self-exploratory event in Nevada.
She says her career started in Louisville when she covered protests of desegregation, a story that led to bottle, rock and glass attacks and being chased by an angry mob.
“Journalism skills to react and report were automatic,” said Farlow. “I was young and I had no fear covering riots.”
She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for their coverage of the desegregation of the Louisville public schools. She spent 17 years working in daily news and now works as a freelancer for National Geographic magazine.
She shared her photos from a project on a female prison inmate, a nun’s cloister convent in Peru, flower pickers preparing for the Day of the Dead in Mexico, a pagan end-of-the-winter ritual in Austria and the Kentucky Derby.
"I practice the opposite of celebrity journalism," said Farlow, who says she tries to capture the stories of the people who often get overlooked. She subscribes to the photojournalists' adage, “go early and stay late,” and tries to think of unique angles to stories, such as overlooking the race during the Kentucky Derby and opting instead to spend most of the event shooting photos outside the women’s restroom.
“I'm drawn to moments that bring color and texture to an event,” said Farlow.
She’s also shared outdoor photography from Yosemite National Park and the “ugly little war going on in West Virginia” in the form of mountain top removal mining.
“It’s the most profound assault on the land imaginable,” said Farlow of the practice wherein entire mountaintops are blasted away.
Another photo of sprinting mustangs showcased a unique technique, where Farlow and her photographer-husband, Randy Olson, placed cameras in protective boxes, then activated them by remote from the safety of a hillside when wild horses ran through the area.
Getting the shot often means learning trying something new.
“In some ways I feel like I never really left school,” said Farlow. “For me, photojournalism had kind of been the graduate school of life.”
The third photographer, Foley, said he left IU in the late '70s because he wanted to get out in the world, and that’s just what he did. He was in Cairo in 1981 when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated and when Hosni Mubarak became president.
“There was this incredible sense of optimism that things were going to get better,” said Foley, ’77, BA’07. “But as we found out, things didn't change.”
He went on to photograph the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and he shared pictures of the survivors he spoke to there. He received his Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for spot news of victims and survivors of a massacre in Beirut.
“As photojournalists, we tell stories, and we tell stories of survivors because the dead people aren't talking,” said Foley.
He also showed photos of his of work in Beirut, his work on the Children’s Aid Society’s Carmel Hill project, which sought to capture one block of Harlem for five years, and a snowy shot of the Indianapolis blizzard of 1978.
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| Photo by Jeremy Hogan |
| The panelists greeted Vivian Counts, widow of Will Counts, after the talk. During their discussions, each talked about Will Counts' influence on their careers. |
Kelly and Corya then led the panelists through a series of questions regarding the increasing danger of photojournalism, trends toward multimedia and online modes of journalism, the impact of citizen journalism, and the role of freelancers in the future of photojournalism.
Members of the audience of 250 or so asked questions about Counts’ most memorable advice, the panelists’ favorite photo projects during their years in Bloomington, photo projects or assignments that didn’t go exactly as planned, keeping international photographers safe, and how to maintain emotional boundaries between subject and journalist.
Following the event, Corya, who first met Farlow when she participated at the Missouri Photo Workshop last fall, said she was impressed by the panelists’ passion for the documentary nature of photojournalism.
“The best part about this was that they weren’t just jazzed about photography, but they are journalists who care about doing photojournalism that truly seeks to make a difference,” said Corya, who seeks to subscribe to the same vision in her own work as a photojournalist.
Graduate student Ahmed Hamada said it was inspirational to see the hands-on and award winning fieldwork of School of Journalism alumni.
“It was very inspiring to see, especially at a time when every person has a digital camera,” said Hamada. “It was a reminder that the quality of your work does make a difference.”
He said he especially enjoyed Farlow’s photographs of the mustangs and Foley’s shots from the Harlem neighborhood.
The Centennial Speaker Series continues March 31 at 7:30 p.m. with the Roy W. Howard Lecture on Media Leadership. The lecture is at the Ernie Pyle Hall auditorium and is free and open to the public.
The panel will feature Gerould Kern, BA’71, senior vice president and editor of the Chicago Tribune; Paul Tash, BA’76, the CEO of the St. Petersburg Times and Poynter Institute for Media Studies; and Carolyn Washburn, BA’84, editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer.
For more about the school’s celebration of 100 years of journalism, visit the centennial website.
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