The art of the everyday

Multiple images of Parisian couples, Latin American dancers, families in Fort Wayne in the early '70s and refugees from Albania, Rwanda and Iraq filled the screen behind internationally renowned photojournalist Peter Turnley Wednesday in the School of Fine Arts. His photographs in Fort Wayne, taken when he was 17, reflect his growing awareness of the world and the art of capturing it on film. \nTurnley grew up in Fort Wayne and attended the University of Michigan, the Sorbonne of Paris, and the Institut D'Etudes Politiques. Despite his travels and world experience, Turnley stressed the significance of his background and upbringing. During his childhood in the late '60s and early '70s in Fort Wayne, topics like Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and basically "challenging what was" were all issues that Turnley's family frequently talked about, he said. He experienced first-hand the integration of his high school and witnessed the difference between his life and the life of many of his black friends. \nA knee injury during Turnley's junior year in high school was the catalyst for his parents to buy him his first photography book. It greatly inspired him to acknowledge the beauty of everyday moments in life, he said. He soon bought a camera, went into the inner-city sections of Fort Wayne and began to photograph the lives of the people living there. \n"The camera became a tool to enter new doors and share a response to this new world, how I feel and what I observe," said Turnley. \nTurnley and his twin brother David began photographing the lives of the working-class people who lived on McClellan St. in Ft. Wayne. They got to know everyone on the street, baby-sat for their children and even compiled family photo albums for them. This work, "America in Black and White," was eventually published in a 25-page story in The New York Times. \nAfter graduating from college, Turnley saved up enough money to move to Paris. He described his experience as a chance to reinvent himself, and he was struck by the bigger world he had never seen before, he said. He entered into the Institut D'Etudes Politiques to study international relations, and began photographing daily life in Paris. \nHe then covered the 40th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy and received an annual contract with Newsweek to cover world news. From 1984 to 2002, Turnley photographed and witnessed human history in the making.\nIn 1986, Turnley was shooting during the height of the Cold War in the Soviet Union. One of his portfolios, "The Family of Man," is based off the philosophy that human beings should all concern themselves with our similarities rather than all our differences. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was perceived as the enemy to Americans, and Turnley wanted to focus his pictures on what was good about Soviets. \nDuring the Gulf War, he came to have a sense of growing concern with the press and what the public was seeing compared to what was actually going on. He saw that he'd never be able to fully cover what was going on in Iraq under the military-controlled press pool.\n"I left the Gulf and came back with the military uniform I was given," Turnley said. "I drove through Kuwait and saw what was called 'the highway of death,' a long expanse of overturned cars and dead bodies. There were dead Iraqis everywhere, American soldiers and bulldozers burying the dead bodies."\nHe became concerned with how little of his coverage of the actual war in Iraq was published, and he described news coverage of the war like watching a video game with the bombs hitting the targets. He also expressed his concern about most Americans never seeing the human result of war -- or what was honestly going on.\nIn the recent Iraq War, journalists who reported in Kuwait had to be accredited as either embedded or unilateral (not embedded). Turnley and some of his colleagues were classified as unilateral, and when they tried to get through a checkpoint, soldiers told them it was illegal to enter the war scene as a unilateral journalist.\n"Few writers in the national media report in an independent way," Turnley said. "Embedded journalists in Iraq wore military uniforms and the Iraqi people saw them as assimilated with an opposing force. They couldn't linger in hospitals and morgues; the public was not exposed to how the war affected the Iraqi people."\nRecently, the U.S. government made it illegal to photograph the coffins of U.S. soldiers at risk of offending their families. Turnley expressed that the majority of families he encountered want people to be aware and don't find it disrespectful. He thinks it's disrespectful that the public doesn't get to see this. \nLooking back, Turnley misses the innocence and purity of vision in his earlier work, "America in Black and White", and tries to incorporate more of that vision into his current work. He is recently working on a photo essay for Harper's magazine "Dance -- a Language of Life in Latin America." Aside from photographing war, peace, and refugees, Turnley is interested in photographing relationships and sensuality. \n"When I look back on my career, I'm proudest when I take a look at where I was when I was 17," Turnley said. "We all think we must go to exotic places to witness important things, but I saw those things in Fort Wayne, Ind. We need to use our sight and vision to observe the world, and that observation has made my world richer."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Rachel Kenis at rkenis@indiana.edu.