Student wins Hearst for hospice photo story
Second UM student this year to win first place in Hearst competition

By Hannah Heimbuch
J-School Web Reporter

UM photojournalism student Mike Greener didn’t have a lot of time to gain David Barton's trust before photographing him. He didn’t have a lot of time with Barton period. Because at 73, Barton was dying from lung cancer in a Chicago hospital, and was soon to be transferred back home to spend his last weeks in hospice care.

photo by Garret Smith

Mike Greener is a photojournalism student who recently won first place in the Hearst competition for a photo series.

Greener recently won first place of 44 entries in the Hearst Journalism Awards’ 2004-2005 photo story competition for his picture series about the end of Barton's life. Greener received a $2,000 scholarship and the UM J-School also receives a matching grant of $2,000. The top four finalists from each of this year’s three photo competitions will compete in the semi-finals in June.

“My initial reason for starting out on this road of hospice was how I personally had to deal with my own losses,” Greener said. “I’ve had a lot of death in my past, and my way of understanding it and coping with it is to explore it.”

 The idea came from several years of projects and study that centered on hospice care, said Greener. His mother works within hospice care as a chaplain in Chicago, and he’s been interested in the subject for some time.

Greener said one of the great challenges to this project was gaining enough trust and ease with Barton and his family to do the project. After all, he was asking to photograph and be there for one of the most vulnerable times in a person’s life.

“You’re sitting front row to watching this man, his body, slowly shut down,” Greener said. “There was no way I could have done this story without my previous knowledge to what hospice is about.”

Communication was vital, Greener said. He needed to enter the situation and gain instant trust if it was going to work. He said he was sensitive to times when Barton or his family thought it wasn’t a good day for shooting. He wanted to establish himself as a shadow in the home.

Every day, Greener showed Barton the pictures from the previous day of shooting, wanting to explain to him exactly what he was trying to do. “I thought maybe I could show this man’s journey from pain, an incredible amount of pain, to comfort, to family, to home,” he said

By the time the end came, Greener said, he and Barton were friends: “It was just a really incredible experience and I was very fortunate."

photo by Garret Smith

Mike Greener listens as Dean Brown congratulates Hearst winners at the 2006 Dean Stone night.

Greener said a lot of his work about hospice care has also been trying to look at death in a different way. “It’s a topic that is just very hush-hush in our society. A lot of people deal with death differently, don’t even want to go there.”

But this story has also started a sort of “chain reaction,” Greener said. After his hometown paper in Crystal Lake, Ill., wrote a story about him, he started getting a few e-mails. Someone had seen his story, and created one themselves about their own loss.

Everything submitted to the Hearst Journalism Awards must be published work. Greener’s work can be found at the Web site for the magazine Grief Digest.

Greener is a senior in photojournalism and will graduate in May. He is spending part of his summer studying at the Poynter Institute, and also recently signed a contract with the New York Times as a freelancer.

Greener is the second UM journalism student to win first place in a Hearst competition this year. Broadcast student Stan Pillman won for his radio broadcast submissions earlier this spring.

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