Thomas Miller | Sept. 19, 2011
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| Photo by Lauren Kastner |
| Washington Post photography director Michel du Cille talked about his work and its connections to the school during a talk Friday. He also is among the first group of Distinguished Alumni Award recipients. |
Du Cille started with a 1981 newscast from San Francisco’s KRON-TV about an electronic version of the San Francisco Examiner, which the announcer concluded with a statement that the “telepaper” wouldn’t compete with the 20 cent paper edition “any time soon.”
While the audience chuckled, du Cille said he dedicated this clip to his former professor, John Alhauser, who was researching electronic newspapers' effects on readers and the industry as early as the 1970s.
“I came here in 1977 and I think you were well on your way into your Ph.D. on this subject,” du Cille said to Alhauser, “and we all scratched our heads and didn’t quite understand it.”
Du Cille, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes and shared in a third, also talked about his other mentor, photojournalist Will Counts, who documented the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s and whose work was nominated for a Pulitzer. He taught at the school for 30 years.
Du Cille remembered coming to IU without a proper camera, yet Counts allowed him into an advanced photojournalism course. He said Counts taught him about capturing a moment and telling a story with photographs.
“He had a special knack for being right there for the moment,” du Cille said while showing Counts’ famous pictures of desegregation in Little Rock, Ark., in the late 1950s. As the now-iconic photograph of a young white woman yelling at an African American woman filled the screen, du Cille reminded the audience that Counts had reunited the two women and that an apology had been made.
“Through photojournalism, something neat happened,” du Cille said.
Du Cille shares two links with his mentor: He visited campus earlier this year as a panelists for the Will Counts Memorial Photojournalism Lecture, and both du Cille and Counts were among the inaugural group of 15 School of Journalism Distinguished Alumni Award recipients.
It is the latest in a list of honors for du Cille. He was awarded a Pulitzer for his work with Carol Guzy on the 1985 eruption of Columbia’s Nevado del Ruiz volcano. Although du Cille and Guzy worked together, they varied their coverage. “We tried not to shoot elbow to elbow,” he said.
Three years later, du Cille won again for his story about crack cocaine addicts in Miami. Du Cille spent seven months covering a public housing complex known by its residents as “The Graveyard.”
“I though the story wasn’t being told complete enough,” du Cille said. “I told the editors I thought we had done a disservice to the community because we only showed it as a black problem, but the truth was, it was a community problem.”
Du Cille would spend the next 17 years serving as a photo editor at the Washington Post. In 2005, he returned to the Post’s shooting staff and won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2008 with reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest.
“Dana Priest comes up to me and another editor and says ‘I’m working on this secret project,'” du Cille told the audience, “and I can’t really tell you a lot about it.”
The project, an expose on the treatment of veterans and conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital, sparked a public outcry. Du Cille said that during the testimony that followed the series, a woman came up to him and hugged him and thanked him for the story.
As the slideshow ended, du Cille took questions from the audience and talked about the need to show strong emotional pictures.
“There’s a constant wave of ‘no, we can’t show that’ or ‘our readers won’t like that,’” Du Cille said. “It’s dismaying to me because many times, there are really important photographs that should be shown that don’t get shown.”
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