In Their Own Words

by

Arts

On the third Saturday in October, a rented truck will pull up to the Cox Building in downtown Maysville, where Western Kentucky University students will unload dozens of computers and connect them with thousands of feet of ethernet and fiber networking cable. Tables, chairs and a big screen will be set up, and the historic convention center will be transformed into a temporary workspace—part classroom, part newsroom.

The 50th annual Mountain Workshops will be ready to roll in Mason County.

The workshops started in 1976 as a WKU class project to photograph the last one-room schoolhouses in Kentucky’s mountains. In the half-century since, it has become a nationally renowned seminar that trains visual storytellers by having them capture life in a community for a week. To date, the workshops have documented 40 Kentucky counties and five in Tennessee through pictures, words and—since 2007—short films.

“It started out as something we did for our students, but I don’t think we anticipated just how much impact we would have on the industry and the communities we covered,” said James Kenney, who heads WKU’s visual journalism and photography program and has been the workshop’s director since 2000. “In the process, we have built a half-century history of life in Kentucky.”

•  •  •

On Oct. 21, about 70 student and professional photographers from across the country will gather in the transformed Cox Building. They will spend the next four days and nights learning skills from an all-volunteer staff of 40 professionals that include Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers, Emmy Award-winning filmmakers and Hall of Fame journalists.

“I’m in awe of it every year,” Kenney said. “I can’t believe what people in the industry give to the workshops because they believe in [them] so much.”

Recruiting world-class instructors has never been hard, said Tim Broekema, a WKU professor who oversees the video workshop. “I cold-call filmmakers who are Oscar-nominated and have absolutely nothing to do with Western, and they immediately say, ‘I’ve been wanting to come to Mountain forever!’ ” he said.

The workshops begin at noon on Tuesday, when participants rush to pull a folded slip of paper from a hat during the chaotic opening ceremony. Each slip contains the name and phone number of a local person who has agreed to be a story subject: teachers, merchants, barbers, pastors, farmers, restaurant servers, veterinarians—seemingly ordinary people. But workshop lesson No. 1 is that seemingly ordinary people have fascinating stories if you take the time and effort to discover them.

The participants immediately call their subjects and head out to meet them. Over the next few days, they will become the subjects’ shadows, following them to work, play, meals and family moments big and small.

By the time the workshop ends in the wee hours of the following Sunday morning, video participants, with help from their coaches, will have made short films about their subjects. Photographers, working with both photo and writing coaches, will have told their subjects’ stories in 10 images and a written essay. All of this will be posted online at mountainworkshops.org. 

Professional filmmakers who are workshop alumni will have created a stunning documentary about Mason County using digital video they shot, as well as clips and images from participants. And a team of photo-editing students and coaches will have sorted through thousands of images to begin assembling a 124-page book.

While some participants are WKU students, the Mountain Workshops’ fame has attracted students and working professionals from across the United States and as far away as Australia and Denmark. The event has helped make WKU’s photojournalism program one of the nation’s most respected.

WKU’s photojournalism majors are encouraged to begin attending the workshop as freshmen “labbies,” a title that recalls the pre-digital days, when their main job was processing and printing participants’ black-and-white film. Now, the labbies do most of the grunt work—from running errands to setting up all those computers and cables under the direction of a former newspaper photographer who runs an IT company.

“They get back [to campus], and they’re just on fire,” Kenney said of the labbies, who usually return the next year as participants. “They’ve seen what it’s all about.”

•  •  •

Award-winning photojournalists have found their callings at the Mountain Workshops. One is Jonathan Newton, who retired last year after a 24-year career as a staff photographer at the Washington Post and previous stints at newspapers in Tampa, Atlanta and Nashville.

In the spring of 1983, Newton was an unfocused WKU freshman from Louisville. Mike Morse and Jack Corn, two of the photojournalism program’s founding fathers, pulled him aside and told him he should consider another major. “They said I just wasn’t cutting it,” Newton said. “In hindsight, they were exactly right.”

After thinking it over all summer, Newton decided to give photojournalism another shot. He came back to Western, attended the workshop in Celina, Tennessee, and drew a great story subject: Bud Garrett, a blues singer who hand-crafted flint marbles—then a popular men’s sport in that town of 1,500 people. Newton also received encouragement from his photo coach, Tom Hardin, then photo director at The Courier-Journal in Louisville.

“It all came together for me at the workshop—I learned how to shoot,” Newton said. “Tom Hardin gave me a ‘lightbulb award’ because he said he saw a light went on in my brain.”

Newton returned for many years after that as a volunteer. At the 1999 workshops in Muhlenberg County, he met coach Joe Elbert, then photo director at the Washington Post. A year later, Elbert hired him.

Leslye Davis found her calling at the workshop a generation later. A Greensburg native, she is now a New York-based filmmaker and writer. As a videographer for The New York Times, she co-produced Father Soldier Son, an award-winning Netflix documentary, in 2020.

“I feel like the Mountain Workshops was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me,” Davis said. While working with video coach Liz O. Baylen, now a senior audio editor at The New York Times, Davis was inspired to become a documentary filmmaker. “I saw the power of audio and video and letting people tell their own stories,” she said.

Davis has volunteered several years as a video coach. She would be in Maysville this year were she not studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a prestigious Knight Fellowship.

•  •  •

Communities are changed by the workshops, too. That’s because the process of being story subjects, seeing themselves in photos and videos, or just seeing photojournalists all over town reminds people that their little towns are special.

“We didn’t know what to expect, but it was wonderful,” said Roddy Harrison, the mayor of Williamsburg, site of the 2024 workshops. “It brought the town to life, and it made everybody feel good … It gave them a voice. Any city that gets the opportunity would be crazy not to do this.”

Even with an all-volunteer staff, it costs a lot of money to put on the workshops. Budget cuts have eliminated most university funding. Many participants now pay their own way rather than being sponsored by an employer. As newspapers and magazines shut down or reduce staff, more photographers are becoming freelancers.

Host communities and corporate sponsors provide valuable financial and in-kind support, but organizers have started fundraising for an endowment to keep the workshop going for another half-century. 

“The Mountain has always held on to a strong ethical approach,” Broekema said. “In an industry that is constantly under attack for its ethics, that’s still our guiding mandate … to teach young journalists the ethical process of gathering content and telling stories.”