Visual Learning Conference

Saturday, September 29, 2012
3:30-5:00 PM, Weitz Center Cinema

Torsten Kjellstrand '84, Mary Beth Meehan, Josh Meltzer '95

This panel focused on the following question: How does a liberal arts education prepare students for a career in the visual world and what could we do to more effectively help students prepare for such a career?

Our panel discussed the links between a liberal arts education and professional visual journalism. Each panelist has a BA from a liberal arts college, a degree that prepared us well for our careers in visual journalism. Some of the tools we learned in school, and which we use everyday, include narrative skills, social interpretation, technical thinking, cultural perspectives, ethical thinking, and, of course, aesthetic sensibilities. However, we all experienced the dizzying leap from the verbal world of most college curricula to the visual world of documentary photojournalist and filmmaker. Each of us showed a small example of our work and delivered a short talk about it and invited a discussion among panelists and the audience. We discussed possibilities for enriching visual thinking in a Liberal Arts curriculum and also introduced the idea that a liberal education helps us wrestle with the crucial, and too often neglected, work of developing an ethical framework for creating visual narratives in communities to which we belong, as well as in communities we enter as outsiders.

Here is who we are:

Torsten Kjellstrand, (Carleton Class of 1985) a native of Sweden, works as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in New York City and Portland, Oregon. Torsten's work comes mostly from small, rural communities, including Native American communities in The West, small towns in the Midwest, and his small farming village in rural Sweden. He is currently working on a project begun over 20 years ago telling stories of black farmers in the Mississippi Delta. Soon after getting his Master's Degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a portfolio of Torsten's work earned him the Newspaper Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association/ Pictures of the Year International (POYi)contest in 1996. At the time, he worked at The Herald, a small, sophisticated newspaper in Jasper, Indiana. Torsten has since won many national and international awards while working for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington and The Oregonian. He was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2003-4. Before his work as a photographer, Torsten cut his narrative teeth as an English major at Carleton College, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Mary Beth Meehan uses photography to create a connection with the people in her own communities, whose identities are often obscured by economics, politics, or race. Meehan's current project, City of Champions: A Portrait of Brockton, documents her post-industrial hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts. The project was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 2011. Work from City of Champions was exhibited in the Ring Cube Gallery, in Tokyo; featured in the Danforth Museum of Art, in Framingham, Mass.; and received financial support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Mary Beth has contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, and her honors include recognition by Pictures of the Year International and the National Conference for Community and Justice. Mary Beth directs the "Documenting Cultural Communities" photography program at the International Charter School, in Pawtucket, R.I., and teaches documentary photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Josh Meltzer (Carleton Class of 1995) is a Photojournalist-in-Residence at Western Kentucky University, where he teaches photojournalism and multimedia storytelling. After 9 years as a staff photographer and multimedia journalist at The Roanoke Times, Josh accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to work and teach in Mexico in 2008. A selection of his work from that Fulbright year won the Grand Prize Professional Award from Photophilanthropy in 2010. Josh also taught photography to a group of 11-16-year-olds through a program called Listen to My Pictures, which culminated with a show at a regional museum in Guadalajara in June 2009. His still and multimedia work has been recognized by the prestigious National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism competition. Josh is currently living in Miami, FL on leave to attend graduate school at the University of Miami in Multimedia Journalism.