Photo by Bethany Winslow

Can photojournalist Donald Winslow help an industry struggling to reinvent itself survive the digital transition?

By Dane Anderson, staff writer

The grass grows green and deep in the humid Indiana summer, a fact Donald Winslow learned to appreciate when he was growing up. As a kid in Bloomington, he used to lie back on that lush carpet of grass for hours at a time, looking up at the sky and watching the planes fly overhead. He thought about the people on those planes, where they might be headed and why. He didn’t know those things, of course, but he did know one thing. He wanted to get the hell out of Indiana.

The only child of a university professor and a nurse, Winslow knew that he had places to go and things to see. But first, he had to do a lot of waiting, waiting until 5 p.m. every school day at the university for his father to wrap things up. Professor Winslow must have taken pity on his son’s impatience, or maybe he just remembered what it was like to be 10 years old and late for the world. Whatever the reason, he put the fourth-grade boy into the hands of a photography professor, who, in turn, put something magical into Winslow’s own small hands – a Nikon F 35mm camera.

That camera was Winslow’s ticket out of Bloomington. It earned him a window seat on a journey through time, a time when the world, and the way people viewed it, would change dramatically and forever. 

Thirty years later, Winslow is editor of News Photographer magazine, the monthly publication of the National Press Photographers Association and the sacred bible of photojournalists. He writes about the photojournalists and the pictures that are changing the world.

 “Photography was what I admired every day on the pages of the Herald-Telephone and the Louisville Courier-Journal,” Winslow said. “In my eyes, photography was a passport to that big, amazing, beautiful world filled with fascinating people and breaking news and major league sports. It was a chance to be around those sleek cars in Indianapolis, and the horses that ran in Louisville, and the beefy blue-collar NFL  football players like Dick Butkus, who ruled both the Miracle Mile of Michigan Avenue and the Sports pages of the Chicago Tribune.”

Winslow’s 1968 senior year in high school afforded the burgeoning photographer a twisted boost of insight and a springboard into the psyche of a country entering a new age. Playing baseball on the last day of school, he shattered his left leg and found himself flat on his back for three long months of summer. To keep the teenager from going insane with boredom, his parents plied him with stacks of magazines – Life, Look, Time and Newsweek. They were filled with powerful, painful photographs of a country that appeared to be coming apart at the seams, Winslow said.

Tethered to his bed, Winslow witnessed the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., and the June 5 assassination of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles through raw photographs that came to define the era. He saw the Vietnam counteroffensive explode into full swing through Associated Press photos that  catapulted the country out of innocence and face-to-face with Eddie Adams’ shot of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulling the trigger of a gun at the head of a terrified Vietcong guerrilla. It was death in suspended motion.

That photo, and others like it, forged a powerful new American generation. The summer of 1968 transformed Winslow from a boy to a man, from a photographer with a gift to a photojournalist with a mission. He studied photojournalism at Indiana University and landed his first job as chief photographer for the Wabash Plain Dealer in rural Indiana. In 1978, Wabash County was, as Winslow put it, a 421-square-mile cornfield barely interrupted by a small town. 

“Whatever blew up or burned,” Winslow said. “If somebody held up a potato that looked like Hitler, I took a picture of it.”

He might joke about it, but Winslow learned a lot at his first newspaper job. He learned about human beings and developed a deep respect for the stories they entrusted to him.

“Every week, I walked into people’s homes, into their lives, into their best moments and their worst disasters,” he said. “I shared their joys and heartbreaks. Through me and my cameras, their lives were splayed open on the newspaper’s front page and shared with our extended family, this larger community.” 

Let loose with his cameras and his intellect, Winslow developed the fundamentals that have guided him well throughout his decades as a photojournalist, writer and editor.  He came to understand the role he played in putting life on public display. 

“I learned that good journalism is about people, not so much about places or events, but about the relationship between the readers and the subjects of our stories,” he said. “It is about telling truth with a camera, and making the viewer feel something in response.” 

It is Winslow’s steadfast adherence to delivering real truth and emotion that sets him apart and sends others in the news industry to him for understanding. In a Jan. 24 Washington Post article by Andrew Alexander on the graphic nature of photos from  Haiti, Winslow offered words of wisdom that echoed back across his years of experience, reflecting the same basic tenets he first pulled together. 

“Words make people think,” Winslow noted. “But pictures make people feel.” 

Winslow’s 30-year career arc has taken him from small daily newspapers to the Oval Office to a global community of readers and garnered him the daily demands of Web reporting and producing magazines. He’s served stints at The Republic in Columbus, Ind.; the Pittsburgh Press; and the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post.

Reuters recruited Winslow in 1990 to cover the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, professional sports and the Barcelona Olympics. But it was in 2003 that Winslow garnered his dream job, when Jim Gordon, editor of News Photographer magazine, retired after 25 years, and the 48-year-old boy with a camera became editor for the next generation. 

Winslow takes the helm of the iconic magazine at a time of great change and even  greater challenge. He puts out his magazine on a laptop through WiFi connections all over town. Hard at work in the local coffee shop near his Lost Creek home on a recent rainy morning, Winslow took a few minutes to lean back on a cushioned couch, reflect over the defining moments in photojournalism history and peer ahead into the volatile unknown.

One of the first technology advances to change the course of photography in the U.S. was the release of the Brownie Hawkeye camera in 1950. Winslow’s parents had one. So did everyone else in the country. Suddenly, everybody was taking and developing photos. 

In the early 1990s, digital cameras became affordable and leveled the playing field between amateur photographers and those working for National Geographic. In the late 1990s, computers became ubiquitous, and everyone became an expert. 

“The magic of photography that used to separate the professional photographer is gone,” Winslow said. “Photography has been taken from the hands of a few revered professionals and put into the hands of the masses. Images from all around the world are now coming from the people you see sitting around you in the coffee shop on their laptops. It’s going to give us a broader, less filtered and more real understanding of the world. ‘Look, here is what this person living in Haiti understands at this minute in time.’ “ 

Winslow said there is a new ruling source of information at play today, the visual world. 

“A shift in human understanding has taken place,” he said. “What the new generation understands and misunderstands about the world no longer comes from parents, textbooks, churches, or mainstream media. Most education now is visual. The line between entertainment, education and information is blurred. The real power of photographs may no longer be in what they show, but in what they may stimulate people to do.”  

Photojournalism suffers from the same factors that have torpedoed newspapers and print magazines, Winslow said.  

“Demand for photos is at an all-time high, while the ability to make a living as a photographer is at an all-time low,” he pointed out. 

Winslow said the world is on the cusp of a new era of visual storytelling. Two years from now, photojournalism will be completely different. The world is in major transition, and there is no such thing as the long term anymore, he said. 

“New realities are on the horizon,” he said. “We can manage them well, or we can manage them poorly, but we will not be able to ignore them.”  

Winslow said we need to learn how to capture the potential of probable mainstream devices of the near future, such as Apple’s tablet, iPhones, Kindles and eReaders. 

“This is a crucial time for photojournalism,” he said. “Its survival may well depend on  how well the transition from print to digital devices is managed.” 

More than 30 years into his love affair with images, Winslow considers ways to step back from the pressure of daily deadlines to think about the future. Much like the young boy who watched planes fly overhead, he wants to know where  photojournalism is going and what it will be like when it gets there.  

Does the unknown nature of the once-and-future industry make him a little nervous? He shrugged his shoulders and peered over his glasses as he answered. 

“I don’t like change any more than anyone else, but I have no choice,” he said. “It’s adapt or die. And I’m not old enough to sink to the bottom yet.”

 
Photos by Donald Winslow. Left, Members of an Amish family briefly cross paths with a sports car on a Pennsylvania highway. Right, Havana is filled with aging American automobiles from the early 1950s, which families keep running for decades.