Emily Kulkus — ��ϲ��

Photographer Gregory Heisler Settles into a New Career

Emily Kulkus — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 17:16:38 +0000

Photographer Gregory Heisler teaches students at Newhouse.

A few decades ago—when darkrooms and Kodachrome were staples of professional photography—a “hotshot” photographer spoke at the Rochester Institute of Technology about his extremely successful career.

In the audience sat an eager young college student who worked up enough courage to ask the first question: What advice would he give students seeking to build a similar career?

Do something else, the photographer told students; photography is dead.

That impressionable young student was professor and photographer . And lucky for countless admirers of his profound body of work—and now the Newhouse School—Heisler did not take those words to heart.

His love of photography was just too great, Heisler says, and he forged ahead, building a career that is widely admired and celebrated today.

“The guy’s a total photographic rock star,” says , chair of the at the . “When you see his name you usually see the word ‘legend’ in front of it.”

And since fall 2014, that legend and rock star has called Newhouse home as a Distinguished Professor of photography teaching both graduate and undergraduate photography students his beloved craft.

Professor in motion

Visit the Newhouse School and chances are good you’ll see Heisler teaching, but not necessarily in the classroom or even the studio. When you do see him—on the sidewalk, outside on the Newhouse patio or out on the Quad—you will observe three things: his unique personal style (dark hat with an upturned brim, round tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a bowtie); his constant, energetic motion as he glides from behind the camera to his students and their cameras, and back again; and his body language, which oozes energy and enthusiasm about taking pictures.

Bottom line: the guy loves teaching. And it shows.

“You can see it in the photos his students produce. There’s some chemistry there, some magic in what they produce after he’s done with them. It comes out of their fingers. It comes out of their photos,” says MPD department colleague .

And no wonder as Heisler has shot more than 70 covers for Time magazine and his work has appeared in countless other publications. His book includes photos he’s taken of this century’s luminaries, from athletes (Muhammad Ali) to musicians (Bruce Springsteen) to politicians (Hillary Rodham Clinton) and more.

So why would a photographer at the top of his game put the brakes on his own phenomenal career to come and teach at Newhouse?

“I wanted to be the dumbest guy in the room,” he says smiling from one end of his moustache to the other. “I thought, ‘That would be fun.’ ”

So at the end of the summer of 2014 Heisler and his fiancée moved to ��ϲ�� from Western Massachusetts, where he’d been working part time as a professor at the Hallmark Institute of Photography. During his first two weeks here, Heisler bought a historic house in DeWitt, got married and started at Newhouse.

“I was a photographer who teaches,” he says. “Now I’m a teacher who photographs.”

Heisler behind the camera (Photo by Hua Yu)

Talk with Heisler about what and how he teaches, however, and you won’t hear phrases like “good pictures” or “bad technique.” Instead he sounds more akin to a coach or even a yoga teacher.

“(Students) have to bring something to the party but it’s my job to get them very excited and super duper interested and curious and make them want to work twice as hard as they’ve ever worked before,” he says.

Sure, Heisler is working to ensure his students understand how to use their cameras—and how to create and control light—but more importantly, he wants them to be inspired by their photos. Their pictures should communicate a message, both from the photographer and from the subject. The work should tell a story, not just look good, he says.

Heisler says he wants his students to love photography. If they love it, everything else has the potential to fall into place, he says.

“You have to be passionate about it,” he says. “And you have to work at it. You can’t do ‘a little’ Olympic running. You have to do it every day. Serena [Williams] plays [tennis] all the time. She practices all the time. It takes that kind of effort.

“Are you going to keep a diary or are you a writer?”

Working with students

Second-year photography graduate student Alec Erlebacher was in one of Heisler’s first classes in the fall of 2014. He worked as Heisler’s teaching assistant for a class last summer and is a student in his class again this semester.

“He doesn’t want us to make great pictures, he wants us to survive in life, doing what we love,” Erlebacher says.

“He puts in far more hours than people are even aware,” Erlebacher says, noting how Heisler’s classes often include additional one-on-one lab and critique time. And Heisler’s office, on the top floor of Newhouse 1, decorated in bright orange carpeting, classic cameras and historic photos of and by Heisler favorites, is a revolving door of students seeking his help and advice.

“He does a really good job of pushing you to do better stuff,” Erlebacher says. “On almost every assignment he says ‘This is your chance to make the best photograph you’ve ever made.’ “

Heisler says he has tried to expose students to what the real world will be like after graduation. He encourages students to focus on what they love, and that making a living will follow.

“It’s a little surprising how worried the students are about what’s next,” he says. For that reason, Heisler has opened his Rolodex for students. He has arranged for many field trips to New York City to meet with prominent photographers, and students say he’s a wealth of knowledge and networking.

And that photography advice Heisler received as an impressionable college student so many years ago still resonates. It’s why he tells students just the opposite: keep at it, keep working, photography is very much alive and well.

“That’s what’s cool about now,” he says. “There are many, many, many possibilities and you just want people leaving (Newhouse) thinking it’s possible and they can make it happen.”

Raising the bar

Heisler’s position on the Newhouse faculty is no accident. Strong, who runs the MPD department, was a student of Heisler’s at the first-ever Eddie Adams Workshop nearly 30 years ago. He describes Heisler as one of his photographic heroes and says he worked for several years to bring him to Newhouse.

Strong’s hope that one of his earliest teachers would inspire a new generation of photographers is proving true.

“When I tell people, photographers, that Gregory Heisler is one of my professors, they either want to go to this school immediately or their jaw just drops and they say how the hell is he teaching there,” Erlebacher says.

What makes Heisler’s presence at Newhouse so important, says Strong, is not even his resume.

“He cares immensely about each and every student and they respond to that,” Strong says. “Students love him. They say he listens, he’s patient, he cares deeply.”

To know Heisler is to know his amazing photography and now, his passion for teaching. But those who really know him also note his fun, goofy personality.

During one of his first visits to Heisler’s office, Erlebacher says he asked his professor about a tiny camera on one of the shelves. Erlebacher asked how the camera could even hold film and Heisler encouraged him to pick it up and examine it more closely.

“He squeezes it and water sprays me in the face,” Erlebacher says laughing. “I couldn’t believe it. He giggled like crazy.”

“He’s super funny. He’s fun, he’s funny, he brightens up the room,” Strong says.

So how long will Heisler—who remains one of the most important photographers working today—continue to brighten Newhouse?

“I’m hoping forever,” Heisler says. “If they’ll have me.”

Tom Mason ’01 Teams with Ken Burns for Short Film on Professor, Author George Saunders

Emily Kulkus — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 21:24:12 +0000

It all came down to just seven minutes.

Two hours of interviews, hours upon hours of pre- and post-production—including intricate theatrical staging, lighting and a professional puppeteer—and at least four months of editing.

Tom Mason

Then a green light from legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and from the film’s subject, acclaimed author and professor

Finally, “George Saunders: On Story” by filmmaker and graduate Tom Mason ’01, and his company , which he founded with fellow filmmaker Sarah Klein, was ready. After more than a year in the making, the captivating, seven-minute film was published this week on The Atlantic.com. The film is also available on PBS.com, since Burns is the series’ executive producer. ; Saunders is the second.

In the film, Saunders, whom Mason describes as a “storytelling Jedi,” talks about his writing process. But just how interesting could an author, even one as accomplished and lauded as Saunders, be in a seven-minute taped interview?

“There’s nothing more visually boring than writing,” Mason says. “Everything interesting about writing happens inside somebody’s head.”

“Watching him type was just not going to cut it.”

So Mason and Klein sized up two hours worth of interviews with Saunders—conducted last fall in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium at the Newhouse School—and had to figure out how to make it more than just a guy talking to the camera.

Much of their post-interview production time was spent developing ways to creatively illustrate Saunders’ words. They shot the interview on green screen to later substitute any background and Saunders gave them plenty of material to work with.

In a first for Redglass, they hired puppeteer Deb Hertzberg, who spent “days with an X-acto knife” cutting out paper letters to illustrate a sentence that Saunders explains in the interview, as well as the silhouette of a man hunched over a clicking typewriter. The film features several tattooed and colorful paper puppets, a mysteriously lit black box and a series of silky, smoky backdrops as Saunders describes his creative process.

“The puppets were a way we could visualize what he was saying and be whimsical and dreamlike and not too literal, which is kind of in keeping with his tone,” Mason says. “He doesn’t take himself or his writing too seriously. We wanted the piece to feel the same way.”

And Saunders, whom Mason met in 1999 while shooting a portrait of the writer for The Daily Orange, was pleased with the end result. Saunders emailed Mason after getting a preview of the film about a month ago.

“(He wrote) ‘That was fantastic,’ and in all caps, ‘thank you,’ ” Mason says, “which was just about the best response you could hear.”

Saunders wrote in an email Wednesday: “I think Tom is a wonderful and innovative filmmaker. The film somehow exactly matched (and enhanced) the spirit of what I was trying to say—I felt, throughout, that I was in the hands of a real master.”

Redglass Pictures, which specializes in short films and installation work, was not paid for the project—the company has produced two “On Story” short films, essentially for fun. The series’ mission—interviewing storytellers about their process—is something both Mason and Klein are passionate about, he says. The exposure the film will receive, through The Atlantic, PBS, the company’s website and social media, elevates the company’s credibility, Mason says. Burns’ support and involvement add some serious weight in the industry as well; both are a trade-off to doing all that work for free.

Redglass worked with , a creative audio studio that produced an entirely new soundtrack with live instruments for the film. And the Redglass website features additional content from the Saunders interview—no surprise since the unscripted interview is more than 120 minutes long, Mason says.

“We make shorts, we don’t make TV shows, which is really liberating,” says Mason, who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two young sons. “We can just not worry about a number and just make (the film) what it wants to be. We’re pretty critical about when the energy drops in it and we cut it down and cut it down. We got to the point where it was finally tight and every word was

Perez Returns to Former Newsroom as One-Man-Band Reporter Each Year

Emily Kulkus — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 18:23:00 +0000

For two weeks every spring, Assistant Professor heads back to the newsroom. And while the veteran, bilingual newsman could probably join or lead any news team in the country, Perez does what few do: he heads straight into the field, covering stories one-man-band style, just like his students.

Simon Perez speaks into the camera while reporting in the San Francisco area.

Before joining the faculty at Newhouse in the fall of 2011, Perez spent more than 10 years working for , which is the No. 6 market in the country. This is his third year at KPIX, where he spends two weeks each May working as a reporter. The unions in California require that he get paid, but when you factor in the cost of his plane ticket, hotel room and meals, Perez says he comes out about even.

“What I get paid in experience, you can’t put a price tag on,” he says.

Perez’s former bosses are still at the station. They said he could return any time.

“It was my idea in the beginning, just because I missed it and I wanted to go back and do it, but the more I’ve done it the more I realize how valuable it is for teaching,” he says. “It benefits me to stay on top of things and it benefits the students because they know their professor is still at it.”

Perez goes to his old newsroom the Thursday before his first Monday shift to pick up his equipment. He spends the weekend “furiously” testing it out so he’s ready to report Monday morning. Then he’s assigned daily stories just like everyone else.

The field reporters at KPIX cover a large swath of the Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Because the area is large and traffic is thick, reporters are assigned their own trucks and equipment. They are responsible for setting up and operating their cameras and microphones and then produce and edit their news stories from the back of the truck. Only when doing live shots are they assigned a camera person.

The experience is very similar to what students have to do at Newhouse.

A shot from farther away shows all the equipment needed to perform a live shot.

“I know what it’s like to carry around all the equipment. I know what it’s like to be really hot. I know what it’s like to be told ‘no’ all day. I know what it’s like when something fails and you’re on deadline and you have to scramble and make it anyway,” he says. “It doesn’t mean I cut (students) slack in the classroom but it means I have empathy for what I’ve asked them to do.”

Perez says students genuinely appreciate how he can recall examples from working in the field. Instead of relying on a textbook or hypothetical example, Perez—like many Newhouse professors with industry experience—can give a real, current example of how he handled a situation.

Perez loves what he does—in the field and in the classroom. But as much as he loves being a reporter, returning to his roots has become about one thing only: teaching. All day, each day while working in San Francisco, Perez says he thought about how the experience would translate to the classroom: What could benefit students? What could students learn from? What did he not want to forget to bring back to Newhouse?

In addition to his story notes, Perez also took teaching notes. And after each shift—including the double he was asked to work during sweeps—Perez sat down and wrote a blog post about that day’s experiences.

His blog, , is loaded with stories and photos of how he approached his assignments and valuable takeaways that apply to reporters from rookies to pros.

“Be a pushy parker,” he writes, accompanied by a photo of his TV truck parked on the sidewalk. In the photo you see his “tools” of the trade: chewing gum, Diet Coke, headphones and two laptops. Another post offers tips on how to shoot video on a cell phone: “Some video is better than no video.” In another, you see a shot of bumper-to-bumper, Bay Area traffic, about which Perez says, “Learn to love being in the car.”

“I really put myself in the mindset of the students, of what it is that they might not know,” he says.

is the chair of the broadcast and digital journalism program at the Newhouse School. He’s heard how much students appreciate Perez’s current experience.

“They know particularly with Simon that they’re getting somebody that’s fresh from the front lines,” Tuohey says.

Perez is one great example of the type of hands-on, professional experiences and expertise students have access to at Newhouse.

“It’s really sort of tangible proof of who we are and what we do here,” Tuohey says. “To continue to work and stay as fresh as possible is invaluable to his own teaching and to the whole department.”

In addition to providing memorable tales of forgetting to turn on the camera or sweet-talking his way into an interview, the annual newsroom experience always presents Perez with new learning opportunities, he says. At a party during his recent stint, one of his former bosses said “you wouldn’t believe this cover letter I got.” So he asked the news director for examples of good and bad letters he could bring back to show students.

And while his notebooks returned to ��ϲ�� heavier this spring, Perez did not. Between the stress of the job, irregular hours and lots of walking with heavy equipment, Perez says he lost seven pounds this year and nine in 2014.

“I kept a better stash of snacks in the car this time!”

Video Assignment Encourages Newhouse Students to Tell Their Own Tales

Emily Kulkus — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 12:19:18 +0000

Newhouse graduate students in Corey Takahashi’s “Web, Mobile and Interactive Magazine” class made videos about their lives.

You name it, Newhouse students have written about it: schools, government, trends, the weather, food, music and on and on.

Lately though, assistant magazine and communications professor has been assigning a story topic that for many students is entirely new: themselves. As part of his MAG 500, “Web, Mobile and Interactive Magazine” class, Takahashi assigns the students to produce a one- to three-minute autobiographical video.

The purpose of the assignment is twofold, he says: it forces the students to tell their own story and create a finished product that can be a great marketing tool in the highly competitive job market.

The results are often entertaining, enlightening and engaging, he says. (Watch several examples below.)

“While many students are skilled in telling the stories of others, they’ve rarely produced a story about themselves, with the benefit of constructive feedback from peers and a professor in class,” Takahashi says.

When produced well, a student’s bio video gives potential employers a unique look at the student as a job candidate, and it proves the student has video and storytelling skills. Takahashi requires the assignment of his graduate students and it is an optional makeup assignment for undergrads. He says students usually approach the video first thinking about what’s on their resume. He encourages them to think more about their “whole story” and what narrative can be told in a few minutes.

“What I like about the medium of video is that when you’re writing in text it could always be decontextualized, (an employer) could read only part of the page. But with video, they watch it from beginning to end and they get it in the order that you want it delivered,” he says. “And it can travel across any platform on any device.”

Many students in their videos talk about where they grew up. Others include details about influences in their lives: books, music, art, internships. Takahashi tells students to think about “what would make an interesting conversation if you were having lunch with an editor.” That advice has led students to include their own ukulele music, footage of what growing up in a tough neighborhood looks like and emotional details of a sick parent.

And while the students tend to find the assignment challenging, they come away from the experience with new skills and a video to use in the job market. They learn as much about themselves as Takahashi does, he says.

“It forces students to think about who they are and how they convey themselves verbally,” he says. “They haven’t thought about what special qualities they are bringing to the marketplace. It’s forced introspection delivered in a performative and entertaining video.”

Newhouse Supports National News Engagement Day Oct. 7 with Interactive Events, GoPro Giveaway

Emily Kulkus — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 19:54:33 +0000

The is participating in the first National News Engagement Day, created by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Events to encourage news engagement are planned throughout the Newhouse School and across campus on Tuesday, Oct. 7. Participants will learn more about the news, have fun and win prizes, including a GoPro camera. Follow on Twitter at #NewsEngagementDay.

Everyone is encouraged to become a newshound on National News Engagement Day.

Planned activities include roving reporters—student journalists from the Newhouse School—who will discuss news engagement with people across campus; demos of Oculus Rift, 3D scanning, DJI Phantom drone and Google Glass with Dan Pacheco, chair of journalism innovation at the Newhouse School; and a screening of the film “The Fifth Estate.”

According to a statement from AEJMC: “AEJMC is leading the effort to make engaging with news a national priority again by sponsoring the first National News Engagement Day. On Tuesday, Oct. 7, everyone is encouraged to read, watch, like, tweet, post, text, email, listen to or comment on news. National News Engagement Day will not only contribute to an informed society, it will encourage people of all ages to explore news and raise awareness about the importance of being informed.”

A complete listing of events is available online at .

Newhouse Professor Leads Team Developing Website to Track Ebola in Liberia

Emily Kulkus — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 20:52:55 +0000

This map of Liberia shows the number of Ebola cases by area.

professor scrolls through a series of brightly colored online heat maps of Liberia while talking on the phone with a colleague in another state. He stands at his desk, moving back and forth between computer screens in baggy pants and sandals. He’s talking into the microphone connected to his iPhone, and his face is a mix of concern and concentration.

Harper, associate professor and director of the , is working as the U.S. director of a project aimed at better tracking and mapping cases of Ebola in Liberia. The project, which Harper has been working on with at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HIll and others for about six weeks and remains a work in progress, went live Monday at: .

Ken Harper

For most people, Liberia and its spreading Ebola outbreak are a world away. For Harper, Liberia is where his friends live, including Thomas Karyha, a former student in Harper’s media development project, Karyha is now working for the United Nations and the Ministry of Information in Liberia, which has been struggling to contain the deadly, highly contagious disease. As more and more people contract Ebola—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the death toll in West Africa at 1,848—Karyha called Harper to see if he could help.

A number of factors are contributing to the spread of Ebola, Harper says. Many in Liberia do not trust the government, he says, which continues to struggle following decades of civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead. That leads to a largely illiterate population not taking adequate precautions, not reporting new cases and not seeking proper treatment. So while the World Health Organization says it is tracking nearly 3,500 confirmed cases of Ebola, many fear the actual number could be much, much higher, Harper says.

That’s where the web developers come in.

Harper and professor , the Peter A. Horvitz chair in Journalism Innovation at the Newhouse School, put the call out to alumni, former students and colleagues about Karyha’s plea for help.

“What can we do to help the Liberian government better keep track of cases?” they asked. “What existing technology in Liberia can we tap into in order to more accurately share and expose this crisis to the world?” they wondered.

The answer? An automatically updating, data-driven website that includes: cases and deaths, including confirmed, probable and suspected cases and a heat map of the area with numbers by region. The site also includes the number of healthcare workers who have contracted or died from Ebola. Harper calls the site a “data visualization dashboard.” The goal is to provide data that is current, accurate and available to all, Harper says. The site is the first official site of its kind to track the latest outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.

Harper from across the United States, including Brian Dawson, a Newhouse graduate now working at IDEO in San Francisco, and King, former head of innovation technology for The Washington Post, now teaching at UNC. King and the team have gathered data for the site from Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative and the Centers for Disease Control.

Team members have donated their time to the project, Harper says. He estimates that everyone’s been working 30 to 40 hours a week for the last six weeks. The project would easily cost at least $30,000 through a private company, he says.

“It’s cliché to say it takes a village, but in this case we needed trusted people who could do it in a hurry,” Harper says.

Harper and King have been developing the project with students in their classes, Harper says, noting that it’s an ideal project to show students an example of something that has to be created, from scratch, very quickly. It will be an evolving work in progress, which is known in the industry as a “minimally viable product,” he says.

“You do not wait for perfection, you get it out. People are dying. Get it out,” Harper says. “You don’t want it so buggy that it’s not useful but you’re building the train as you’re going down the tracks.”

Newhouse Alumnus Wins Pulitzer Prize for Washington Post Series

Emily Kulkus — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:58:53 +0000

Eli Saslow

Eli Saslow, a 2004 graduate of the, for his yearlong for The Washington Post.

Saslow won in the explanatory reporting category: “Awarded to Eli Saslow of The Washington Post for his unsettling and nuanced reporting on the prevalence of food stamps in post-recession America, forcing readers to grapple with issues of poverty and dependency.” The award comes with a $10,000 prize.

Saslow previously won the prestigious George Polk Award for National Reporting and an ASNE award for the six-part series. about his work and the awards.

Saslow, who was a newspaper major at Newhouse and worked extensively at while a student, said the series took about a year to report and then was published over about 12 months in 2013.

Saslow was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing in 2013 and garnered wide praise for a wrenching story about a family who lost their young son in the Newtown shootings.

Saslow and his wife, Rachel, a freelance writer and a Newhouse and Daily Orange alumna, live in Maryland outside Washington, D.C., with their two daughters, Sienna and Chloe.

The Story Behind Iconic Image from Aftermath of Pan Am Flight 103

Emily Kulkus — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 20:35:02 +0000

Catherine Crossland hugs a friend at an SU basketball game on Dec. 21, 1988, hours after learning about the explosion of Pan Am 103 and the deaths of SU students aboard.

When Catherine Crossland returned to campus in January 1989 for the second half of her sophomore year at ��ϲ��, a friend gave her a newspaper he bought while studying abroad the previous semester.

The paper was from South Africa. It had Crossland’s photo on the front page.

It was the first time Crossland, whose married name is Hauschild, realized how far and wide her photograph had been seen.

The black-and-white image of a crying Hauschild hugging a friend at an SU basketball game is one of the most iconic images to come from the Pan Am Flight 103 disaster. The photo was taken in the Carrier Dome on Dec. 21, 1988, just hours after the terrorist attack that killed 270 people, including 35 SU students.

The image was likely used in hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the globe. For 25 years, Hauschild has been the face of a grieving campus, perhaps a grieving world.

Hauschild was an SU cheerleader at the time, on the sidelines as the . Pan Am Flight 103 had exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland, at about 7 p.m. or about 2 p.m. ��ϲ�� time. Tipoff was at 8 p.m. There was no Internet; there was no Twitter. News about the victims was trickling in and word was spreading that there were SU students on board.

Hauschild spent the afternoon glued to the television, reading a ticker of victims’ names. She had friends who were coming home from studying abroad in Europe and, like many others on campus, she was very upset. But the opposing team was already in town and SU went on with the game—a decision then-Chancellor Melvin A. Eggers later said he regretted.

The Dome observed a moment of silence and the crowd wept. Among them was Hauschild, a 19-year-old Newhouse sophomore from Ohio, trying to be a cheerleader.

Photographer , a former student in SU’s who was stringing for United Press International that night, took her photo. Hauschild is tightly hugging a fellow cheerleader. Her chin is pressed into the woman’s shoulder. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is pursed. And large tears are streaming down her face.

Grunfeld says he was standing just a few feet away from Hauschild when he took her picture. His assignment that night was to shoot the game and capture the emotion of the Dome after the Pan Am 103 news, he says. He was taking photos of the crowd in the stands but then saw Hauschild right in front of him.

“I see these tears streaming down her face,” he says. “I got two frames off in this very quiet moment. It didn’t last very long. I knew we had to get that out on the wire immediately.”

Catherine Crossland, now Hauschild, today.

Grunfeld says he remembers that Newhouse professor who was also taking pictures that night, took his film up to the Dome’s darkroom for him since Grunfeld needed to stay near the court.

“In those days you didn’t really know what you had until you developed the film,” says Grunfeld, a former Post-Standard photographer who has worked at the New Orleans Times-Picayune since 1993.

Mason says he knew immediately “that was the picture.” He also knew Hauschild. She was one of his students. Mason transmitted the image on the UPI wire less than an hour after it was taken, Grunfeld says.

“All of a sudden everyone’s trying to get hold of me,” says Grunfeld, who was 27 at the time. “New York is calling, wondering if I shot it in color. It was the infancy of color and everyone wanted to run it on the front page. The answer was no, I didn’t have color.

“I also didn’t understand the impact of the image. I knew I had a picture but I was a young kid and I didn’t appreciate the impact of what it represented.”

Hauschild says she didn’t understand it either—not until the letters started coming.

For months after the bombing, Hauschild and her family received dozens of cards and letters, totaling at least 100, from people around the world expressing their condolences. They arrived at her parents’ house and at her dorm on campus.

“Then it opened my eyes that I had been the face for this,” she says.

Hauschild says she has bags of letters and newspapers, many with her face on them, from many different countries. She wants to donate her collection to and hopes to visit campus for soon. Hauschild owns her own business and lives with her family in Athens, Ohio. She and Grunfeld never met outside that moment on Dec. 21, 1988, but recently connected on Facebook.

Grunfeld says the photo is one that he will always remember.

“She represented how everyone else felt, and not just the grieving student body but the whole ��ϲ�� community,” he says. “I always hope that I have the courage to put the camera up to my eye and shoot the picture without disrupting the moment of someone’s grief. And then to have the courage of getting into someone’s life so abruptly. I needed to know what her name was.”

In that moment, Grunfeld says, he was a journalist first. But he too, was grieving. Fast forward 17 years and Grunfeld found himself again covering tragedy at home with Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune won several Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the storm.

“The correlation between Pan Am and Katrina was that I was covering a disaster in my own community,” he says. “It’s much easier to parachute into a disaster when it’s not your own. But that’s what you go to school for, train for, hope for—that I can do my job during a very difficult time.”

Hauschild, a mother of four, still finds it difficult to talk about the victims of Pan Am Flight 103. She knew several personally and says the 25th anniversary has brought back many memories.

“Thirty-five kids did not get to do what I did,” she says. “They did not get to have kids like I did. And that just breaks my heart.”

The Pan Am Flight 103 bombing was an unprecedented act of terror on an international scale.

“It was the first act of terrorism,” she says. “It redirected the course of history, really for the rest of our lives.”

Grunfeld says he’s humbled to have documented such an important moment for Hauschild, and the world.

“Whenever I have moments that are personal that seem to affect people universally, it reminds me how important my job actually is, to show what life is, and I enjoy that,” he says. “I still appreciate the power and pursuit of trying to make meaningful and powerful images that resonate universally.”

Emily Kulkus — ���ϲ�����