One DOZEN studies of ONE iPhone image of RICHARD MURPHY - inspired by RICHARD MURPHY / INDIA looms

Yesterday, I attended the monthly luncheon of the Alaska Professional Communicators in Anchorage, featuring Richard Murphy, who spoke on the theme of Personal Photojournalism. Richard is the 2012 Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and the former photo editor of the Anchorage Daily News. 

In 1989, Richard and his staff of Daily News photojournalists won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the social changes faced by Alaska Natives and later was nominated for another. In 2010 and 2011, Richard served as a nominating juror for the Pulitzer Prize.

In addition to photojournalism, Richard is also widely recognized as a fine, fine art photographer. In addition to his skill with 35 mm film and digital cameras, he often works with a large-format view camera.

Now, he has turned to his cell phone - I believe an iPhone, but I arrived a bit late and he kept referring to it only as his "cell phone." I talked to him afterward and I meant to ask, but I forgot. The cell phone has been liberating, Richard says. It gave him a chance to see everything in a new way - to be unobtrusive and, most importantly of all, to have fun.

He took every image that he showed us with his cell phone - from still lifes of flowers and weathered doors, to action shots at a wedding and a bit of street photography in Denver. I sometimes fall back on my iPhone - and, despite sometimes blurry pictures, have been pleased with the results.

I must say that Richard has taken his cell phone photography to a higher level. I was impressed. In almost all the slides he showed us, he had converted the image to black and white, or had toned it or manipulated the color in some way. 

I had a DSLR with me, but, given the circumstance, I felt it wrong to shoot with anything but my iPhone. For most of my career, I was a black and white photographer. When I went digital, it was my intent to convert all my images to black and white - but technology beat me and I almost always keep them color.

Oftentimes, even in the course of putting up this blog, I produce a picture I think would look much better in black and white than color. Sometimes, the colors just bother me. Even so, because I shot them in color, I tend to leave them color. When I process my photos, my goal is almost always to render them as close to what my eye saw as possible.

This will remain my goal, but Richard got me to thinking there is no good reason not to sometimes take a natural black and white photo and render it - black and white. Or just to sometimes play around and see what happens. This time, I decided just to play around with this one iPhone image and see what happened.

In his long photojournalism career, Richard said he had seen enough images of violence, of human depravity and inhumanity toward humans. He argued personal photojournalism is every bit as important - maybe more. In disasters, the first thing people look for when they return to their shattered, flooded, or burned homes is their personal photographs.

He urged photojournalists to cover their own lives, their own families, their neighborhoods - which is exactly what I am trying to do in this blog - my search for community home and family. I am going to keep it up, too. I need to find a way to finance and pay for it, but even if I don't, even if it wipes me out, I will keep at it.

Part of my family, my home, my community - my heart and spirit - is in India. I have what to me is an important story to tell from my last trip there. I will not post over the weekend. I need to reboot this blog a bit, put in a mechanism to at least begin to try to generate revenue. I need to begin to pull my images together, my thoughts together. This blog will reappear on Monday - in India.

That's Oscar talking to Richard - Oscar Avellaneda, who once pedalled his bicycle from Anchorage to the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula.

On April 11, Richard Murphy will present The Atwood Lecture: Professional Photojournalism to Personal Photojournalism, or how my cell phone set me free at building SSB, UAA Campus at 6:30 PM. There will be a reception at 5:30 PM.