The Missouri Photo Workshop: 75+ Years of Documentary Storytelling
Founded in 1949 out of the FSA documentary tradition, the Missouri Photo Workshop is the world's oldest and most influential photojournalism workshop. One week. One town. Stories told with a camera.
Every year, roughly forty photographers travel to a small town in Missouri. For one intensive week, they embed in the community — attending church services, sitting in diners, visiting farms, riding along with volunteer fire departments. Their assignment: find the stories that matter and tell them with photographs.
There is no script. No client brief. No shot list. Photographers research their subjects, earn trust through presence, and build 10–15 image picture stories that reveal something true about the people and places they document. Each evening, they edit with faculty drawn from the top ranks of photojournalism — Pulitzer Prize winners, National Geographic photographers, World Press Photo recipients.
The result, repeated across more than 75 years, is one of the greatest archives of rural American life ever assembled — and a methodology for documentary storytelling that has trained nearly 3,000 photographers in the principles of truth, dignity, and narrative excellence.
From the FSA to small-town Missouri
In 1935, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to document the reality of the Great Depression — not to propagandize, but to make invisible suffering visible. Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Russell Lee produced images that changed policy, redirected resources, and shaped how America understood poverty.
When Clifton C. Edom founded the Missouri Photo Workshop in 1949, he explicitly looked to that legacy. FSA director Roy Stryker and photographer Russell Lee co-founded the Workshop with Edom, serving as faculty in its early years. This wasn't metaphorical inspiration — it was direct institutional continuity from the photographers who documented the New Deal to today's visual journalists.
Edom himself organized and headed the first accredited photojournalism department in the United States at the University of Missouri. He founded the Pictures of the Year contest (1943), started Kappa Alpha Mu (the national photography honorary fraternity), and is widely credited with coining the term "photojournalism."
His credo, unchanged for 75 years, remains the Workshop's ethical foundation:
"Show truth with a camera. Ideally truth is a matter of personal integrity. In no circumstances will a posed or faked photograph be tolerated."
The picture story
The Workshop's unit of work is the picture story — not a single image, but a sequenced narrative of 10–15 photographs that together tell a complete story. This format became the backbone of mid-20th century photojournalism in Life, Look, and other magazines. It requires research, patience, access, and editorial judgment.
Research
Arrive in town. Talk to everyone. Find the story beneath the surface — the teacher staying late, the family rebuilding after a flood, the barber who has cut hair for 40 years. Pitch your story to faculty before you shoot a frame.
Observe
Spend time. Be present without directing. Wait for real moments. Shoot a maximum of 400 images with no deletions allowed — every frame must be intentional.
Edit
Select ruthlessly. Sequence for narrative arc. The 10–15 images must work together — establishing context, building tension, arriving at emotional truth. Present at a public exhibition at the end of the week.
This methodology — intensive research, immersive observation, ruthless editing — produces work that transcends the news cycle. The best MPW stories are still studied decades later, not because they were timely but because they were true.
75+ years of documentary storytelling
1935 — The Farm Security Administration deploys photographers — Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee — to document Depression-era America. Their images change policy, redirect resources, and define documentary photography as civic infrastructure.
1943 — Clifton C. Edom joins the University of Missouri and establishes the first accredited photojournalism sequence in the United States. He founds the Pictures of the Year contest and coins the term "photojournalism."
1949 — Edom founds the Missouri Photo Workshop with FSA director Roy Stryker and photographer Russell Lee. Forty photographers descend on a small Missouri town for one week of intensive documentary storytelling.
1950s–70s — MPW becomes the training ground for American photojournalism. Faculty and alumni rosters read like a who's who — National Geographic, LIFE, the Associated Press, The New York Times.
1990s — The Workshop expands internationally. Photographers from dozens of countries apply. The methodology — immersive community documentation over one week — remains unchanged.
2021 — MPW #73, the "Hometown Edition," adapts for COVID: 27 photographers in 11 countries document their own communities instead of traveling to Missouri.
2023 — MPW #75 returns to Sedalia after 43 years. The State Historical Society of Missouri exhibits "Small Towns, Big Stories" — 121 photographs from 51 towns spanning 75 years of the archive.
2025 — MPW #77 documents Union, Missouri. Nearly 3,000 photographers have participated since 1949. The archive resides at the Missouri School of Journalism.
A who's who of photojournalism
MPW's faculty roster spans 75 years of the profession's best. In the early years, FSA director Roy Stryker and photographer Russell Lee guided students directly. In subsequent decades, faculty has included Randy Olson (Pulitzer Prize winner, 30+ years at National Geographic), Sarah Leen (first female Director of Photography at National Geographic), MaryAnne Golon (Washington Post Director of Photography), Melissa Farlow (National Geographic), and Bill Marr (National Geographic Creative Director), among many others.
The Workshop describes its teaching staff as "some of the most energetic, productive, and articulate documentarians currently working." The intensive peer critique and editorial review process means photographers learn from each other as much as from instructors.
Small towns, big stories
The MPW archive, housed at the Missouri School of Journalism, comprises one of the greatest collections of photographs of rural America. Thousands of images spanning seven decades document geographic diversity from the Ozark Plateau to the Mississippi riverbanks, social change from population shifts to economic decline, and human stories of family, tradition, hardship, and stubborn love for small towns.
In 2023, the State Historical Society of Missouri exhibited "Small Towns, Big Stories" — 121 photographs from 51 towns, showcasing 75 years of documentary work. The exhibition underscored what the archive reveals in aggregate: a portrait of community resilience across decades of American change.
Why this matters now
The FSA proved that documentary photography is not decoration — it is infrastructure. When Americans saw Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, they didn't just feel sympathy. They funded programs. They changed policy. The image made invisible suffering politically actionable.
The Missouri Photo Workshop preserved and refined this approach for over 75 years, training photographers to find stories in communities, build narrative arcs from real life, and produce work that serves the people it documents — not just the people who publish it. Edom's insistence on truth and personal integrity remains as relevant as ever in an era of synthetic media and algorithmic content.
That tradition — show up, earn trust, tell the truth, produce work that makes invisible impact visible — is the foundation that RiseWorks builds on.
