RITphoto Contributes in a Big Way to 2018 Winter Special Olympics
RITphoto, led by Josh Meltzer, volunteered to help at the 2018 Winter Special Olympics. Josh shares how this came to be.
In the fall of 2017, while looking for local organizations with whom my photojournalism students could find stories for their first multimedia video course, I reached out to the Genesee Regional office of the New York State Special Olympics. Just two years earlier, one of my former graduate studies professors from the University of Miami, Rich Beckman, invited me to be a part of a small team of volunteer photographers who would produce video stories at the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Los Angeles. That opportunity came again with the Winter World Games in Graz, Austria in 2017. It was an experience that I wanted to replicate for my own students at RIT on a local level. Beckman first began working with local Special Olympics when he taught at the University of North Carolina decades ago and I was interested in starting a partnership at RIT.
I was interested in finding opportunities for my students to profile athletes, to produce video stories about the Special Olympics and make connections with people with intellectual disabilities. In addition to those opportunities, the New York Special Olympics directors told us that Rochester would be the host city for the 2018 and 2019 New York State Winter Games.
Immediately, I began to imagine our whole photojournalism program covering the Games and pitched the project to my colleagues, Jenn Poggi, William Snyder and Visiting Professor Karen Cetinkaya. We decided to offer an independent study to two students who would lead the entire planning process of our coverage of the Games. 4th-year student Emily Hunt and 2nd-year student Bridget Fetsko took on the challenge, planning workflow, arranging access, getting press passes, holding information meetings, planning take-overs of several social media accounts during the Games and pairing student and faculty photo editors with student photographers. In addition, we recruited four high school students, all incoming RIT photography majors, to participate in our coverage.
February 10 -11 2018, more than 60 students and seven faculty from the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences covered the New York State Special Olympics Winter Games in and around Rochester. The two-day event, held at four different venues, featured over 700 athletes from across New York State competing in six sports – floor hockey, figure skating, snow shoeing, snowboarding, alpine skiing and cross-country skiing. Students worked late into the night both days producing content for the project website, http://www.specialolympics-ny.photos, and various social media accounts through Special Olympics New York and RIT.
I was pleased that though the project was born in the photojournalism program, it included some very significant contributions from outside of that major. Over a dozen students and two faculty members, Clay McBride and David Turner, from the advertising sequence worked with their students to produce on-location portraits of athletes at three of the venues. During closing ceremonies at the Riverside Convention Center, McBride and Turner and his team of students made portraits and gave out instant prints to each athlete. At the closing ceremonies dance party, we hung large prints from the day’s coverage and a projected a slideshow of our best images. Athletes were free to take prints of themselves home.
The coverage was truly a collaborative team effort, both from within the School and College. With the help of the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences information technology department and School administration, we set up a local shared server from which photo editors, web editors and social media editors could access content from events throughout the day. The School’s camera gear cage staff allowed participating students to check out extra camera bodies and long lenses for the entire weekend, to facilitate their coverage, and loaned out a printer and supplies to display prints at the closing ceremonies.
It was a powerful testament to watch the students interact with athletes with disabilities, to shine a light on their achievements and celebrate the diversity within the Special Olympics community. Furthermore, producing this project reaffirmed my belief that one of the strengths in the School is its diverse set of skills and expertise and when we bring the best of everything we teach and have to offer together from time to time, we can produce so much more as a collaborative team, working from our individual strengths, interests and passions.
Finally, I believe that one of the most important accomplishments that we can do as visual storytellers or photographers is to educate others with our images. We do this best by being conscientious observers and listeners to those we photograph, and when we do this well, we help to eradicate stereotypes while telling compelling stories. The Special Olympics gives visual storytellers that opportunity and I’m proud to share the work of these students.
Josh Meltzer joined the faculty at RIT in 2015 after teaching in the photojournalism program at Western Kentucky University from 2009-2015 as a Photojournalist-in-Residence and Assistant Professor where he taught photojournalism and multimedia storytelling.
A native of Athens, Georgia, Josh is a 1995 graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota and received his Masters in Multimedia Communications from the University of Miami in 2013.
In 2008, after 9 years as a staff photographer and multimedia journalist at The Roanoke Times in Roanoke, Virginia, Josh accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph and teach in Mexico where he began working on a project about the migration of indigenous families within Mexico. A selection of his work from his Fulbright year won the Grand Prize Professional Award from Photophilanthropy in 2010. He completed this project in 2014 as part of his Master’s Thesis.
He has been a co-coordinator and instructor with the Truth With A Camera workshops in Mexico, Ecuador and Bosnia and has served annually on the staff of The Mountain Workshops since 2009.
His still and multimedia work has been recognized by NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism competition, where he was the 2006 Photojournalist of the Year for markets less than 115,000 circulation, Pictures of the Year International, which recognized a long-term project on those who care for the elderly with the Documentary of the Year award, KNPA, VNPA, Atlanta Photojournalism Competition, Northern and Southern Short Courses and the Society of Newspaper Design. He is also a recipient of the National Press Photographers Association’s Humanitarian Award in 2012 and is a 2014 recipient of the Carnegie Hero Award.