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Transcendent
Vision
Photographs to Make the Everyday Sacred
Note: Story and Rita Reed photos were
published originally in the fall 2002 issue of Illumination,
a magazine that showcases research, scholarship and creative
achievement at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Rita Reed’s photographs, most taken
during the course of her 17-year career in daily journalism,
belie the ephemeral nature of newsprint. Like the work of Henri
Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith, two of her early idols,
her photographs use intimacy and compositional acuity to create
landscapes of human emotion that transcend typical deadline-driven
content.
Making such images, explains the associate
professor of photojournalism, is not simply the result of capturing
a likeness, or even learning to fashion dramatic descriptions
of news events on film. “It’s about granting to
them, the people that you photograph, the dignity of being your
equal. It’s a hallowing of the everyday, of making the
everyday sacred,” Reed says.
Not an easy task, particularly for her students
at MU. “My working method is something I discovered and
came to through years of experience,” she says. “I
can never go back to, say, over-thinking a picture. I prepare,
do my research, get myself in this sort of state in which I’m
opened to whatever comes, and then react. It’s kind of
a zone — it’s fabulous when you’re there,
when you hit it. But with students, I think you meet them where
they are. You have to meet them exactly where they are and help
strengthen them; to open doors or windows for them.”
Reed is well equipped to make that happen.
Before joining the MU
School of Journalism faculty in 2000, she worked as a news
photographer at the Cedar
Rapids Gazette and the Minneapolis
Star Tribune. During that time Reed received awards
of excellence from the MU/National Press Photographer’s
Association Pictures of the Year contest in 1986, 1987 and 1992;
was awarded a Nikon Sabbatical grant in 1993; was named Iowa
photographer of the year once and Minnesota photographer of
the year three times. She admits there are times when she misses
the rough and tumble of daily photojournalism, but is emphatic
when she says her move from newsroom to classroom has been a
welcome, often enlightening, change of direction.
“There is such a great difference
between the students here now and those who were here when I
was in school,” says Reed, who received her master’s
degree from the University in 1984. “Our students come
here expecting not just to get the basics of our craft, but
expecting to be taught how to operate on the more metaphorical
and symbolic levels.” Judging from the work on these pages,
they could hardly have found a better teacher.
View
Rita Reed Photo Retrospective
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Last Update:
November 15, 2007
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