Auburn High School senior Richard Gaffney looked up in surprise when he heard the click of a camera. “Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s just Bob,” he thought. Gaffney, 17, the only male cheerleader at his school, was the subject of a photo by Bob Miller, one of 100 Syracuse University photography students who worked Friday, Saturday and today to...
Photography coach Janna Dotschkal (left) and Auburn Citizen photographer and coach Sam Tenney work to cover the Auburn High School’s homecoming football game during Syracuse University student workshop organized by S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Every year, Newhouse students gather in October to capture life in one city or village; this year they focused on Auburn.
Auburn High School senior Richard Gaffney looked up in surprise when he heard the click of a camera.
“Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s just Bob,” he thought.
Gaffney, 17, the only male cheerleader at his school, was the subject of a photo by Bob Miller, one of 100 Syracuse University photography students who worked Friday, Saturday and today to capture life in Auburn. They produced 45 photography and multimedia projects over the weekend.
The 11th annual workshop hosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications brought students and professionals together for an intensive three-day experience in storytelling. Each year, the workshop dives into a different upstate New York community to tell the residents’ stories in pictures, video, and audio.
Bert Fox, the director of photography at The Charlotte-Observer in North Carolina and former National Geographic magazine picture editor, said he tells his photography students to “see the moment” when working on their stories.
“Young photographers are like water bugs,” Fox said. “They skim the surface but they haven’t gone deep enough into the moment to tell a truly great story in that photograph.”
To find that moment, Fox encouraged his students have an understanding of Auburn residents.
“It’s about moments and finding emotion within the scene. It’s all about the human condition,” he said.
The students’ stories focused on Auburn residents from all walks of life from a sidewalk minister to a woman giving birth at home to a 79 year-old man housing doves in his attic.
Faculty and students work at the Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES Center headquarters during Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Communications’ annual photo workshop Saturday. Professional photographers and photo editors worked with 100 SU students to capture life in Auburn.
“We really feel like Auburn has allowed us into personal parts of their lives,” said Bruce Strong, an SU photography professor and the workshop’s director.
Three students from Auburn High School worked alongside the SU students.
Ian Molloy, 17, a senior at Auburn High School interested in studying journalism at Syracuse University, said the workshop was a life-changing experience.
“It’s definitely a challenge to even try to match up to these really great college photographers,” Molloy said.
Molloy took photographs at O’Hearn’s Histories, a community-oriented monthly publication, and was coached by Wasim Ahmad, a photography professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island and Adena Stevens, a freelance photographer in New Jersey.
“I think that everything I learned is definitely going to improve my chances of being a successful, happy photographer,” Molloy said.
Like Gaffney, it took Molloy a little time to get used to the idea of his ordinary community being the subject of “art.”
“The picture I see from Auburn are things I see everyday, and not things I see as art. It’s fantastic to see people who view the city as beautiful, and as a work of art,” he said.