Photographer Tells Stories Through His Art
BY: OLIVER PULCHER
Staff Writer
On October 9th, STLCC Meramec welcomed alumni and internationally-acclaimed photographer, Lance Thurman, for an event showcasing his photographs from around the world titled “Seven Billion Stories.” The lecture series centered around Lance Thurman’s ability to, and emphasis on, capturing entire stories within photographs.
The event was sponsored by Kristin Peterson, alumni and retired photographer. Peterson created the event to supply networking opportunities to current students of Meramec’s Center for Visual Technology, as well as to encourage new and prospective students to explore and pursue a degree and career in the visual arts.
Thurman’s lecture series showcased his ability to create and describe stories connected to the photographs he produced. These stories ranged from local to international, personal to professional, and planned to spontaneous.
The photo sets used pictures from all sorts of events, including a picture of the Solar Eclipse from last year. Thurman said the event “was an amazing time to be a photographer” due to the increased ability within people to take random questions and share their pictures in accordance with the eclipse’s imaginative, provoking nature.
Another story was in the first introductory photo — a Buick with some little boy in the corner. Supposedly spotted by a photography professor from Meramec, the professor asked Thurman if he would mind the car being featured in a photo session later that day as the car was a rarity. Thurman agreed, so long as he could attend the photo session; the meeting inspired his interest in photography as a subject and he chose to pursue the visual arts as a career.
Other featured photos in the sets included photos of Thurman’s time in Cuba, one of which Thurman pointed out had over 20 people in it whom most wouldn’t notice at a glance, photos from his time in South Africa, which included screenshots of several emails from a fellow photographer offering him their information if he decided to come to South Africa, which Thurman said “was weird, because here I was thinking about going to South Africa and these people contacted me around the same time, about the same thing.” These sets also included photo examples of students currently in the visual arts program and their projects, which were based around them pulling stories from people they took pictures of, such as a picture of a man who enjoys flying his model planes in Forest Park whenever he can. The sets previewed examples of Thurman’s newest project, “The People of St. Louis,” which showcases normal citizens from the St. Louis-area.
