Newton kansan newton kansas veterns photos12/22/2023 His collection - still in progress - mixes portraits of the small-town journalists and print shop laborers with dusty still-life images of newspaper artifacts. A photography professor at Louisiana State University and a Kansas native, Ariaz brings a mixture of reverence and urgency to the project. So, when I saw Jeremiah Ariaz’s photographs of rural Kansas newspapers, those contradictions and emotions rose easily.Īriaz has traveled Kansas to visit and then photograph the offices of small-town newspapers: The Russell County News, Downs News & Times, The Winfield Daily Courier. Standing in the opening of the revolving door, I saw that room as regal yet forsaken, dumpy yet nostalgic, historic yet disposable. Our darkroom became a storage room … a landfill. ![]() Then, we pushed our film cameras aside in favor of digital cameras. First, darkrooms became obsolete because we could scan our processed 35mm film into the computer. ![]() But that was years before.īy the time I worked there, digital photography had firmly grasped the newspaper industry. Until you flicked the switch to also turn on the fluorescent tubes overhead, you couldn’t see the dust covering everything.Ībandoned and ghostly, the room creaked, and I imagined the decades of photographers who stood over their prints, tapping their toes impatiently for images to emerge so they could meet that night’s deadline. The red safe lights buzzed and faintly illuminated the enlargers. While no one had used the darkroom recently, decades of vapors from photographic developers and fixers hung in the air. When you walked into the darkroom of the small-town newspaper where I worked two decades ago, you could still smell the chemicals. Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas. Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state.
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