Record: Vietnamese Priest

For 49 years, the Missouri Photo Workshop has been a torch-bearer for the documentary photography traditions begun by the Farm Security Administration in the Depression. For much of its existence, the workshop was presided over by the late Cliff Edom, often called the "Father of Photojournalism" and his wife, Vi, who faithfully attends workshops to this day. The workshop has relied on a deceptively simple formula: in a different small Missouri town each year, workshop participants, experienced faculty and University of Missouri students and staff gather to pull off a one-week miracle. In a matter of days, tentative story ideas crystallize and become often emotional accounts of the lives of the town's residents; photographers achieve an intimacy with their subjects they never thought possible; and faculty and university student lab and scanning crew staffers stretch themselves to new limits to create a positive experience for the photographers.

These few days have changed the careers of many photojournalists, some who have gone on to greatness and others who have gone home to produce more compelling records of their own communities.

This year, the workshop took place Sept. 21 - 27 in Carthage, Missouri. Christopher Record, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer, shares his experience and the story he shot with Sight readers.

Record recounts his experience at the workshop

he concept seemed easy enough. Travel to a small town in Missouri to seek out and document a story under the guidance of top-flight faculty. I was pretty sure that 15 years in journalism, the past 11 as a photographer, had prepared me for the rigors of the Missouri Workshop. But what I encountered in Carthage, Missouri, was more than I had anticipated and will surely have an effect on how I take pictures throughout my career. The workshop brought 38 photographers from points across the U.S. and several other countries to this community of 10,747 in the southwest part of the state.

The first challenge was finding a story idea, then selling it to my three faculty members: Kim Komenich, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the San Francisco Examiner, Lois Raimondo, a freelancer who spent three years as the AP bureau's chief photographer in Hanoi, Vietnam; and Julie Elman, an assistant professor of photojournalism at Missouri and a former photo editor at The Virginian Pilot.

One goal of the workshop is to encourage photographers to do more thorough research and thinking before they shoot a documentary story. With a maximum of 10 rolls of film (Kodak P3200 rated at 1,000 ASA), research and patience are at a premium.

I found out about the Congregation of the Mother Coredemptrix, a Vietnamese seminary in Carthage that houses about 120 men, through The' Pham, a picture editor at my paper. After arriving in Carthage, I traveled to the campus and talked to officials there. I knew the seminary had visual potential, but I also learned that four other photographers were trying to do stories there. The faculty stressed doing stories that were of personal interest, and so I decided to press on with the idea. I decided to tell the story through one of the brothers, Justin Ky, a 29-year-old who left Vietnam with his family six years ago. I struggled to find a tie between the seminary and the people of Carthage, but I discovered that the seminary was a pretty cloistered society. So I saw this as an opportunity to show the local people what really went on inside this place. I wanted to show the brothers as real people, men who are deeply spiritual but who also like to laugh and have fun.

I gathered what I thought was a lot of information and took it back to my faculty team, who grilled me with tough questions and told me to go back to get more details. The faculty tried to nail down specifics about the seminary and why it was in Carthage. It turns out that it was pretty much happenstance that the seminary had ended up in this small Missouri town. I think the faculty members had some questions about whether I would be able to show more than just a bunch of men praying and walking around. One even commented that it sounded like it might be kind of boring. They wanted to make sure I had a very clear direction in what I wanted to show and how I was going to accomplish that goal.

I started thinking this was going to be tougher than I'd previously thought. After doing more interviews at the seminary and giving another story proposal, my faculty relented and said I could begin the project. As a photographer who shoots a great deal of sports in the age of the motor drive, my first lesson was: SLOW DOWN.

Shooting was to take place over three-and-a-half days with three rolls allowed on each of the first three days and the remaining roll left to shoot the final morning. I'm pretty sure at this point in my career that I know when it is time to really start working a situation. But sometimes I just start hitting the motor drive and figure I can sort it out in the editing process. At the workshop, I knew I couldn't waste film but I also started seeing that I didn't need to shoot a lot of the stuff I had been shooting. I started think more and shooting less. I tried to get into the spirit of the seminary, so to speak. While attending Mass I would put my cameras down and just take in the sights and sounds. The pace of life there certainly slowed me down and I knew I had more time to wait on certain situations.

I rose at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning and headed out to the seminary for morning Mass. The process started slowly as I tried to keep a low profile around the group. I could sense that a lot of the brothers weren't comfortable with me being there, especially in church and during Communion.

After finishing shooting that day and dropping film for processing it was time to head back to grab some food and get ready for the evening critique. The days were long at the workshop, with most of mine starting between 5 and 6 a.m. and not ending until well after midnight. The faculty members and co-director Bill Kuykendall all got involved in the critiques. This was one of the tougher aspects of the entire process. Shooters were required to stand at a microphone and answer questions about their story, its direction and how they planned to move ahead the next day. My first critique wasn't all that bad, but I knew I had a long way to go. I needed to gain the trust of my subject and the others at the seminary so I could get pictures that showed aspects of their lives people weren't accustomed to seeing.

The second critique was tougher. The faculty had lots of questions and I became defensive because I wasn't getting the pictures I wanted. I knew my pictures didn't show the kind of body language and emotion that demonstrated my subject wasn't aware of my presence. Bill Kuykendall asked if I had photographed his bedroom and on the seminary grounds. Those and other questions were things I had been thinking about myself. But I also knew that I was getting closer to making those kinds of pictures. The men at the seminary were very aware of my camera early in the week, but I eventually wore them down as I spent more time there.

Then, on the third day, I turned the corner as Ky loosened up and the others at the school seemed to accept me. One of the leaders came to me at breakfast that day and said, "You can go anywhere you need to go." I felt a sense of satisfaction from that. I spent the entire day at the school and tried to wait for telling moments that showed the aspects of the story I thought were missing. I felt really good about the pictures I had taken that day and dropped my film off for the evening critique.

Mine was the first critique of the night, and I smiled as I saw my images come up on the screen, especially a photo of Ky playing a guitar in his bedroom with its stark walls and single desk light. It was the kind of situation I had been looking for and it looked good on the screen. I was also happy to see the photos of Ky joking and working with the other brothers. The body language showed Ky at ease and being himself. I felt both relief and happiness at seeing photos that told a story.

The critique went well and I set off for a special evening Mass to shoot the 7 frames I had left on my 10th roll of film.

My final shot was in near darkness as I made a one-second exposure of Ky as he meditated outside the church following Mass. It turned out to be the closer of the story.

The Friday workshop schedule included a picnic followed by an editing session. Saturday morning we did final story edits, and the faculty did their edits which would be projected at that evening's final session.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the workshop was the photo exhibit. Once again the staff came though in producing hundreds of pictures that were placed on tables throughout Memorial Hall, our headquarters in Carthage. The subjects of the stories were invited to come see the work. Ky stopped by and seemed pleased to see the photos. I was happy to see Ky at the exhibit and I think he enjoyed being a part of the experience. It was fun to see people who had been subjects in the photo stories get recognized by others at the exhibit.

The faculty edits were shown at the final session, but the critiques were over. It was time to sit back and enjoy the work. It had been a long, demanding week, but I came away with a new perspective on how to approach my job. As an experienced photographer, you sometimes get in a mode where you go through the motions when taking pictures. After attending the workshop, I started thinking more about waiting for just the right moment and working harder at making my compositions as clean and appealing as possible. I heard the comment "you are in control of the frame" from faculty members, meaning you can change things by where you stand and by making an extra effort to get just the right angle. The workshop made me think more about these things. In photojournalism, I believe there is an element of "magic" that occurs when everything comes together to make a special picture. The workshop made me think that maybe that magic could happen more often if I worked a little harder at the things I could control.

Sometimes the easiest concepts are the hardest to grasp.

Record's story: Serving in the Shadows

Christopher Record

Christopher Record began his career as a sports reporter at The Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. After holding various reporting jobs, Record became a staff photographer at the paper in 1986.

Record was later director of photography at the Times-News in Burlington, N.C., before joining the staff of The Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C., in 1992.

A former president of the North Carolina Press Photographer's Association, Record's work has received recognition from the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, the Southern Short Course and the University of Missouri/National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year. He has been a North Carolina Clip Photographer of the Year and Runner-Up Photographer of the Year in 1994.

At the Observer, Record regularly covers Atlantic Coast Conference Basketball, the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA and the Carolina Panthers in the NFL. His 1995 sports portfolio placed second nationally in the University of Missouri/NPPA POY contest.

Christopher may be contacted via email at: Fotorecord@aol.com

To see more Missouri Workshop stories from Carthage, visit the MPW site at the University of Missouri

[ Sight | Story ]



For 49 years, the Missouri Photo Workshop has been a torch-bearer for the documentary photography traditions begun by the Farm Security Administration in the Depression. For much of its existence, the workshop was presided over by the late Cliff Edom, often called the "Father of Photojournalism" and his wife, Vi, who faithfully attends workshops to this day. The workshop has relied on a deceptively simple formula: in a different small Missouri town each year, workshop participants, experienced faculty and University of Missouri students and staff gather to pull off a one-week miracle. In a matter of days, tentative story ideas crystallize and become often emotional accounts of the lives of the town's residents; photographers achieve an intimacy with their subjects they never thought possible; and faculty and university student lab and scanning crew staffers stretch themselves to new limits to create a positive experience for the photographers. These few days have changed the careers of many photojournalists, some who have gone on to greatness and others who have gone home to produce more compelling records of their own communities. This year, the workshop took place Sept. 21 - 27 in Carthage, Missouri. Christopher Record, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer, shares his experience and the story he shot with Sight readers.
Record recounts his experience at the workshop he concept seemed easy enough. Travel to a small town in Missouri to seek out and document a story under the guidance of top-flight faculty. I was pretty sure that 15 years in journalism, the past 11 as a photographer, had prepared me for the rigors of the Missouri Workshop. But what I encountered in Carthage, Missouri, was more than I had anticipated and will surely have an effect on how I take pictures throughout my career. The workshop brought 38 photographers from points across the U.S. and several other countries to this community of 10,747 in the southwest part of the state. The first challenge was finding a story idea, then selling it to my three faculty members: Kim Komenich, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the San Francisco Examiner, Lois Raimondo, a freelancer who spent three years as the AP bureau's chief photographer in Hanoi, Vietnam; and Julie Elman, an assistant professor of photojournalism at Missouri and a former photo editor at The Virginian Pilot. One goal of the workshop is to encourage photographers to do more thorough research and thinking before they shoot a documentary story. With a maximum of 10 rolls of film (Kodak P3200 rated at 1,000 ASA), research and patience are at a premium. I found out about the Congregation of the Mother Coredemptrix, a Vietnamese seminary in Carthage that houses about 120 men, through The' Pham, a picture editor at my paper. After arriving in Carthage, I traveled to the campus and talked to officials there. I knew the seminary had visual potential, but I also learned that four other photographers were trying to do stories there. The faculty stressed doing stories that were of personal interest, and so I decided to press on with the idea. I decided to tell the story through one of the brothers, Justin Ky, a 29-year-old who left Vietnam with his family six years ago. I struggled to find a tie between the seminary and the people of Carthage, but I discovered that the seminary was a pretty cloistered society. So I saw this as an opportunity to show the local people what really went on inside this place. I wanted to show the brothers as real people, men who are deeply spiritual but who also like to laugh and have fun. I gathered what I thought was a lot of information and took it back to my faculty team, who grilled me with tough questions and told me to go back to get more details. The faculty tried to nail down specifics about the seminary and why it was in Carthage. It turns out that it was pretty much happenstance that the seminary had ended up in this small Missouri town. I think the faculty members had some questions about whether I would be able to show more than just a bunch of men praying and walking around. One even commented that it sounded like it might be kind of boring. They wanted to make sure I had a very clear direction in what I wanted to show and how I was going to accomplish that goal. I started thinking this was going to be tougher than I'd previously thought. After doing more interviews at the seminary and giving another story proposal, my faculty relented and said I could begin the project. As a photographer who shoots a great deal of sports in the age of the motor drive, my first lesson was: SLOW DOWN. Shooting was to take place over three-and-a-half days with three rolls allowed on each of the first three days and the remaining roll left to shoot the final morning. I'm pretty sure at this point in my career that I know when it is time to really start working a situation. But sometimes I just start hitting the motor drive and figure I can sort it out in the editing process. At the workshop, I knew I couldn't waste film but I also started seeing that I didn't need to shoot a lot of the stuff I had been shooting. I started think more and shooting less. I tried to get into the spirit of the seminary, so to speak. While attending Mass I would put my cameras down and just take in the sights and sounds. The pace of life there certainly slowed me down and I knew I had more time to wait on certain situations. I rose at 5 a.m. Tuesday morning and headed out to the seminary for morning Mass. The process started slowly as I tried to keep a low profile around the group. I could sense that a lot of the brothers weren't comfortable with me being there, especially in church and during Communion. After finishing shooting that day and dropping film for processing it was time to head back to grab some food and get ready for the evening critique. The days were long at the workshop, with most of mine starting between 5 and 6 a.m. and not ending until well after midnight. The faculty members and co-director Bill Kuykendall all got involved in the critiques. This was one of the tougher aspects of the entire process. Shooters were required to stand at a microphone and answer questions about their story, its direction and how they planned to move ahead the next day. My first critique wasn't all that bad, but I knew I had a long way to go. I needed to gain the trust of my subject and the others at the seminary so I could get pictures that showed aspects of their lives people weren't accustomed to seeing. The second critique was tougher. The faculty had lots of questions and I became defensive because I wasn't getting the pictures I wanted. I knew my pictures didn't show the kind of body language and emotion that demonstrated my subject wasn't aware of my presence. Bill Kuykendall asked if I had photographed his bedroom and on the seminary grounds. Those and other questions were things I had been thinking about myself. But I also knew that I was getting closer to making those kinds of pictures. The men at the seminary were very aware of my camera early in the week, but I eventually wore them down as I spent more time there. Then, on the third day, I turned the corner as Ky loosened up and the others at the school seemed to accept me. One of the leaders came to me at breakfast that day and said, "You can go anywhere you need to go." I felt a sense of satisfaction from that. I spent the entire day at the school and tried to wait for telling moments that showed the aspects of the story I thought were missing. I felt really good about the pictures I had taken that day and dropped my film off for the evening critique. Mine was the first critique of the night, and I smiled as I saw my images come up on the screen, especially a photo of Ky playing a guitar in his bedroom with its stark walls and single desk light. It was the kind of situation I had been looking for and it looked good on the screen. I was also happy to see the photos of Ky joking and working with the other brothers. The body language showed Ky at ease and being himself. I felt both relief and happiness at seeing photos that told a story. The critique went well and I set off for a special evening Mass to shoot the 7 frames I had left on my 10th roll of film. My final shot was in near darkness as I made a one-second exposure of Ky as he meditated outside the church following Mass. It turned out to be the closer of the story. The Friday workshop schedule included a picnic followed by an editing session. Saturday morning we did final story edits, and the faculty did their edits which would be projected at that evening's final session. One of the most rewarding aspects of the workshop was the photo exhibit. Once again the staff came though in producing hundreds of pictures that were placed on tables throughout Memorial Hall, our headquarters in Carthage. The subjects of the stories were invited to come see the work. Ky stopped by and seemed pleased to see the photos. I was happy to see Ky at the exhibit and I think he enjoyed being a part of the experience. It was fun to see people who had been subjects in the photo stories get recognized by others at the exhibit. The faculty edits were shown at the final session, but the critiques were over. It was time to sit back and enjoy the work. It had been a long, demanding week, but I came away with a new perspective on how to approach my job. As an experienced photographer, you sometimes get in a mode where you go through the motions when taking pictures. After attending the workshop, I started thinking more about waiting for just the right moment and working harder at making my compositions as clean and appealing as possible. I heard the comment "you are in control of the frame" from faculty members, meaning you can change things by where you stand and by making an extra effort to get just the right angle. The workshop made me think more about these things. In photojournalism, I believe there is an element of "magic" that occurs when everything comes together to make a special picture. The workshop made me think that maybe that magic could happen more often if I worked a little harder at the things I could control. Sometimes the easiest concepts are the hardest to grasp.	Record's story: Serving in the Shadows Christopher Record Christopher Record began his career as a sports reporter at The Daily Item in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. After holding various reporting jobs, Record became a staff photographer at the paper in 1986. Record was later director of photography at the Times-News in Burlington, N.C., before joining the staff of The Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C., in 1992. A former president of the North Carolina Press Photographer's Association, Record's work has received recognition from the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, the Southern Short Course and the University of Missouri/National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year. He has been a North Carolina Clip Photographer of the Year and Runner-Up Photographer of the Year in 1994. At the Observer, Record regularly covers Atlantic Coast Conference Basketball, the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA and the Carolina Panthers in the NFL. His 1995 sports portfolio placed second nationally in the University of Missouri/NPPA POY contest. Christopher may be contacted via email at: Fotorecord@aol.com To see more Missouri Workshop stories from Carthage, visit the MPW site at the University of Missouri