Podcast: To Serve and to Soar - John H. White and Endia Beal

10/28/2016

The B&H Photography Podcast was very fortunate to be invited to the 29th Eddie Adams Workshop this year. The annual workshop, officially sponsored by Nikon with support from B&H, is a unique and inspiring event, bringing together 100 young photographers with some of the world’s most recognized photojournalists and editors, including thirteen Pulitzer Prize winners, for four intense days of photographic presentation and collaboration. The team leaders and speakers are a who’s-who of the photojournalism community, and we took our opportunity to sit down with as many of them as we could for conversations that ranged from personal inspiration and technical innovation to the photographer-editor relationship and how to set a camera trap for mountain lions. In the weeks to come, we will present several of our “conversations from the barn,” thus named because we created an impromptu studio in the fabled barn on the Eddie Adams farm.

Our first conversation joins Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John H. White and photographer, artist, and educator Endia Beal. Mr. White could be considered the spiritual heart of the workshop and anyone who hears him speak will understand why. His work for Chicago’s daily newspapers dates back to the late 1960s, and he was on staff at the Chicago Sun-Times when he earned his Pulitzer. His work is well rounded, as any newspaper photographer’s should be, and covers events big and small, but it his depiction of Chicago’s African-American community that has garnered the most attention. We speak with him about his upbringing in North Carolina, his relationship with his subjects, including his friend Muhammad Ali, and the most important camera he has ever used. Endia Beal is an accomplished artist currently serving as Associate Professor of Art and the Director of the Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University. Her early artistic work emerged from personal tragedy and called into question cultural and skin-color-based stereotypes in her hometown community. Her more recent work continues to pose questions, exploring the identity of minority women within the corporate space. Join us as we chat with these two remarkable people about their lives and work.

Photograph above © John H. White

Guests: Endia Beal and John H. White