When photojournalism professor Keith Graham asked his students what other types of photography they wanted to explore, three distinct themes emerged: the outdoors, travel and fashion. While January in Montana might not be the best time to teach class outside, the three-week winter term is perfect for delving into the world of fashion photography, first offered in January 2011.
Globally, the fashion industry is worth over a trillion dollars. Graham says fashion photography crosses commercial and editorial borders, so it helps stretch opportunities for photojournalists as editors and freelancers.
Photo by Kira Vercruyssen, from the collection “Red.”
Kira Vercruyssen, a UM senior from Honolulu, Hawaii, said that the class was a fun break from traditional journalism, since students had the chance to trade their role as a reporter for one of a creator. “It was really fun to make these ideas in your head come to life,” she said.
Students directed their own photo shoots, using friends and co-workers as models. However, for the first project Graham made students step in front of the lens and take their own self-portraits. Vercruyssen said it was good for them to understand what it felt like to be a model, and that it helped her when she had to direct her models and capture strong angles.
Once Graham revealed the theme for each photo shoot, students had no other restrictions “besides time and imagination.” Themes ranged from Coco Chanel’s classic “little black dress” to “red” to “replication,” where students had to find a professional fashion shot and capture the same image with their models. “It might look easy,” Graham said, “but can you try to re-create it?”
Both the “denim” and “futuristic” shoots led to more iconic shots, including Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 Born in the USA album cover and Grant Wood’s portrait of the American Gothic.
Photo by Kira Vercruyssen, from the collection “Hats.”
These shoots gave students the freedom to work both in the studio and around town. One of the highlights for Vercruyssen was getting permission to shoot inside the old Mercantile building in downtown Missoula. She also rented a collection of vintage hats from a local theater company for her final free-topic project.
Photo by Kira Vercruyssen, from the collection “Mercantile.”
Graham challenged the class to create narrative arcs within each campaign and consider what made their images visually and emotionally compelling for an audience. In addition to these spreads, they experimented with diptych photography, where two photographs are placed side by side to make an artistic statement.
With a standard week’s schedule compressed into a single day, all this kept the class busy.
“This kind of immersion is a very useful way to learn,” Graham said. “They produce stronger, better work as a result.”
Vercruyssen chose to attend the University of Montana for its strong journalism program, which is currently ranked 8th in the nation. For her, this class was “like a breath of fresh air” that re-charged her passion for photojournalism as she prepares to graduate this spring.
University of Montana School of Journalism photography student Evan Frost placed among the top 20 finalists in the national Hearst Journalism Awards Photo One Competition.
Frost’s portfolio placed 18th in the Photojournalism I: News and Feature Photography category. UM journalism professors Keith Graham and Jeremy Lurgio said they knew Frost’s work was worthy of placing among the best students in the nation.
Pictured: a winning photo from Frost’s portfolio. Pikunii Express team members try to gain control of one of their horses as a member of team whitecap takes off during the Indian Relays at the North American Indian Days in Browning, Montana on July 11, 2015. Photo by Evan Frost
“His submission of eight images showed vision, humor, action and impact,” Lurgio said.
Above all they were solid storytelling images.”
Lurgio said Frost was able to put his skills to the test through a summer internship at the Great Falls Tribune.
“That hard work in the professional world rewarded him with a group of solid images that earned him a top-20 finish,” he said. “This is a testament to the importance of the professional internship experiences our students pursue.”
Frost worked as the photo and video editor at the Montana Kaimin during fall semester of 2015, as well as the multimedia editor for the 2016 edition of the Montana Journalism Review. Montana Kaimin adviser and UM journalism Professor Nadia White worked with Frost during fall semester.
“Evan combines a keen eye with a sense of community,” she said. “He’s the kind of student that rolls up his sleeves and gets things done.”
Shane McMillan is a native of western Montana and graduated from the School of Journalism in 2010, at which point he moved to Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship. He interned as a photographer with the Associated Press, and worked as an English translator for German film projects. It was this second gig that helped push him into a career as a freelancer, landing him a spot on the production crew of “Can’t Be Silent,” a documentary film about a group of refugee musicians in Germany.
Since first moving to Berlin McMillan has been working as a freelance photojournalist and filmmaker, with work published in the New York Times, the Guardian and PRI’s The World, among other places.
I asked McMillan if he had advice for any journalism students who might hope to make it as freelancers abroad. “Just, like, make it,” he said laughing. “Just work hard and do good work and keep in touch with people who you’ve done good work for.” McMillan focuses his work on human rights because it’s what he calls the thing he’s most likely to get in a bar fight about. “Try to make things that people want to see or care about,” he counsels.
McMillan says he highly values the many facets of his education at the School of Journalism, he says, believing it was one of the reasons he landed a job in documentary film making. “I could write, I could do TV, I could do radio and I could take photos,” he said.
A WITNESS IN PARIS
Friday, November 13th, McMillan was editing work in an apartment he says practically touched the Bataclan concert hall in Paris as the terrorist attacks began. He was in town for a photography festival, part of his work as studio manager for celebrated fine art photographer Nan Goldin.
As it became clear that they were not hearing fireworks but instead sustained gunfire, Goldin and McMillan tried to figure out what was going on and debated leaving the building. “I really didn’t want to go outside that much,” McMillan said, but eventually he followed Goldin down the stairs.
They walked into a triage center. Police officers had been breaking into courtyards along their block to set up casualty centers for the injured, many of whom were severely hurt. McMillan said he found out the next day that three people died in their courtyard alone.
The two photographers began shooting photos once they got outside, but police forced them to stop. McMillan was sent out into the street, while Goldin was made to return inside.
On the street, McMillan said, his “natural instinct to shoot” as a journalist quickly faded. “People were very opposed to me taking photographs or even having my camera there,” he said.
He decided they were right. McMillan said he didn’t feel like his photography could accurately portray the scene, and didn’t end up taking very many pictures on Friday. “I didn’t feel like photographing that night because I really just wanted to talk to people,” he said.
Instead, he received a text from Anne Bailey at Public Radio International’s The World program. A former adjunct professor and fellow graduate of the School of Journalism, Bailey asked McMillan if he was in Paris. He then started reporting for PRI via phone and text message, describing what he was seeing, which he called a surreal experience.
Far from providing a scoop, this proximity tested McMillan’s training as a journalist. He didn’t want to ask the trademark questions a breaking news journalist would, like asking people to describe their experiences and how they were feeling inside and outside the concert hall. “In that moment it was just too much of a violation of their need to process what just happened,” he said.
Instead he helped people. He asked simple questions and talked with those he thought were ready to do so. If someone was ready to talk, he said, you could see it in their face.
“That may or may not be what they would tell you to do in journalism school but I strongly believe that you have to come to situations like this as a person first,” McMillan says.
While answering my questions via video, and remembering Friday night, McMillan was visibly upset. However he said he was strangely calm at the time. Bailey, from PRI, helped a lot by talking him through the reporting via text.
McMillan described a man he spoke with who was looking for his girlfriend. The couple had been separated during the concert, and the man was unsure if she was alive or not. There was blood on the man, and by now, McMillan would like to know if she was all right. At the time, he said, it was very hard to know whether he should share that kind of story or not.
“It was a lot of really intense decisions made in a very quick turnaround,” McMillan says. He did not give the man’s story to media at the time.
“It’s tough to be there when people’s lives are changing in such a fundamental way, and to feel both a responsibility to them and to telling the story,” McMillan said. There’s a tension that he said he feels even more conscious of now after some time to reflect. “I was in this very strange position of being both a journalist and a bystander at the same time.”
At first he was being called by a lot of big media outlets, with whom he has now stopped talking, having tired of giving eyewitness accounts. He answered my questions from a hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland.
In return for what he called “a more personal slice” of his mind, I was asked to treat his story with respect and also to deliver the following message:
“I ask you to credit the University for what I’ve learned. Because I did learn a lot at school and I’ve learned a lot in life following that and I learned a lot this weekend.”
Much of what he does, McMillan said, “is based upon an education from a collection of people who are really amazing journalists and really amazing teachers, who forged me as a professional.”
McMillan will be working with the School of Journalism as their local facilitator and trainer in Berlin for a study abroad trip this summer. Students will be reporting stories from the influx of refugees to Germany and Europe. The documentary McMillan worked on will be showing at 6:30 pm on November 18th in The Payne Family Native American Center.
Montana Journalism 