Photo Workshop Has International Flair

In a just a couple of weeks 45 photographers from all corners of the U.S. and eight foreign countries will be converging on Trenton for the 65th annual Missouri Photo Workshop. This year’s workshop runs from September 22-28. As it did when the workshop visited Trenton in 1995, MPW will focus on the fundamentals of researching, shooting, and editing photo stories while emphasizing ethical practices. The faculty will include some of the leading photojournalists, editors, and educators in the field. They will encourage and demand participants to follow founder Cliff Edom’s edict to “show truth with a camera” throughout the week.
Is this enough of an attraction to bring people across the country and half way around the globe? Here’s what a few of those 45 participants have to say about why they’re traveling to Trenton.
Ralph Hodgson will travel from London, United Kingdom where he has worked as a freelance photographer for more than 20 years. He acknowledges Edom’s edict in his application statement. “I do a lot of work for charities—both here and in the developing world—in which showing truth with my camera is of utmost importance.”
Hodgson’s former teacher at Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design Mick Williamson has tracked his pupil’s work for two decades and says Hodgson has “diligently applied himself to developing his craft with a strong commitment to taking photographs for charitable institutions and aid organizations.”
Some of Hodgson’s clients include the National Health Service and documenting reconstruction efforts in Sierra Leone for Tearfund.
Hodgson is looking for a challenge. “At this point in my career,” he says, “I feel I need to spend some time reconsidering my photographic skills, focusing on the essential.” And he has friends who have done the workshop tell him it was ‘by far the best training they have ever done.’
He’s confident that the MPW experience will be of “benefit to my work, the organizations I work for and the students I teach.”
While she doesn’t have to cross the Atlantic, Marta Iwanek does have to cross the northern border from Missauga, Ontario. With recent degrees from Loyalist College and Ryerson University, Iwanek is just finding her way as a freelance photojournalist.
“I am a photographer who is interested in documentary work, storytelling,” Iwanek says. “I have fallen in love with this way of journalism because I love how intimate…how powerful it is.”
Among her documentary projects is one chronicling the lives of elderly caregivers caring for aging loved ones. That project took some research to find the right subjects and she likes the fact that MPW “focuses on finding stories in a smaller town, because it emphasizes the point that good stories are everywhere.”
Roger Nomer doesn’t have nearly as far to go—just a four-hour drive up Highways 71 and US I-35 from south Missouri, where he has worked for more than eight years as a staff photographer for the Joplin Globe. But in some ways he’s coming from a place as foreign to him as some of the far away countries from which his fellow participants will be traveling. He was one of the first members of the media on the scene after the tornado struck Joplin in May of 2011.
“The devastation and shock I witnessed would have been overwhelming if not for the feeling of dedication I possessed to tell the story to our city and to the nation,” he says. That tornado brought destruction that changed the face of the community, and he’s spent much of the last two years documenting the reconstruction of buildings, lives and families. “I photographed what life was like for families in the FEMA temporary housing sites and followed a Habitat for Humanity house as it was built, from foundation to the owners putting a key in the front door.”
Nomer says this kind of documentary photography is not something the Globe has done much in the past, but the staff is now beginning to see the value of this kind of storytelling. Globe Editor Carol Stark agrees, “Our newspaper would like to see more of this type of work and we think Roger and the Joplin globe would benefit from being involved in the workshop.”
Sarah Priestap is also a newspaper photographer looking to improve her storytelling. A 2011 graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, she has worked the past two years as a staffer at The Valley News in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. “While I’m confident photographing daily assignments and short term stories,” she says, “I struggle with shaping and thinking through deeper and lengthier narratives.” She thinks MPW can help. “I believe the workshop will help me use the tools that I have been given at my newspaper—time and space—to craft more coherent stories.”
In a fitting twist of fate, she first heard about the workshop from her editor at the Valley News. Geoff Hansen was one of the 48 photographers who documented Trenton in 1995 at the 47th Missouri Photo Workshop. “I’ve been a cheerleader for the workshop since my time in Trenton,” Hansen says. “The knowledge I gained is still put into use every day in my job as photo editor at the Valley News. We do a photo page every week and I encourage photographers to write a story summary that I bring into our weekly budget meeting. How I photo edit those stories, and for other sections of the newspaper, comes from what I learned at the 1995 MPW.”
These four photographers typify the goals of the more than 40 others who will be traveling to Trenton later this month. All are passionate about photography and all want to learn to be better visual storytellers.
Since many of these participants will be traveling great distances at great expense, workshop organizers are hoping a few Trenton residents might be willing to consider housing one of the participants during the week, and/or to loan a bicycle for the week. It would be much appreciated, especially for some of the international participants who would also welcome the opportunity to see the American way of life first-hand. Anyone wishing to help in either of these two areas can call or email co-director Jim Curley at 573-73-5134 or [email protected]; David Rees at 573-289-3783 or [email protected]; or Wendell Lenhart at the Republican-Times.
The workshop will conclude with an exhibit of photographs made during the week as well as some of those made during the workshops first visit to Trenton in 1995. The exhibit is open to the public and will be held Saturday, Sept. 28 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Trenton High School Commons.