University of Montana School of Journalism

News and Events

Work by UM photojournalism students and alumni
to appear in 2002 Alumni Association calendar

This spring thousands of people from across the nation will tack a photo taken by University of Montana student Oona Palmer to their walls for 30 days.

Palmer’s photograph of a couple overlooking the Clark Fork River at sunset is featured in the month of June in the UM Alumni Association’s

Everyone Loves A River, by Oona Palmer

2002 School of Journalism calendar. The publication includes 12 photographs taken by journalism students and alumni. It will be distributed to the Alumni Association’s dues-paying members.

“I’m excited to be a part of the calendar,” Palmer said. “It’s a great opportunity for students to showcase their work, and it reaches a pretty large audience.”

Palmer, a second-year graduate student in the UM journalism program, took the photograph while interning at the Missoulian last summer. She was shooting a photo essay about the Clark Fork River when she saw the couple returning home from a wedding. Titled “Everyone Loves a River,” the photograph was chosen for the calendar by photojournalism professor Keith Graham and by Julie Schwartz, associate director of the Alumni Association, who coordinated the project.

For the past three years, Schwartz produced the Alumni Association’s calendar in conjunction with the Fine Arts Department She thought spotlighting the journalism school would make for an interesting change.

“They have a wealth of photos,” Schwartz said. “It’s a great way to highlight the journalism department and student excellence.”

She and Graham chose photos from a collection of Graham’s favorite student work. They tried to select images that bring to mind a particular time of the year or a season, without sacrificing journalistic standards.

“We’ve got a big audience, and some of them want to see pretty shots of campus,” Schwartz said. “That’s not what this is about.”

Each photo was taken by a student working on an assignment or an internship at the University. The October photograph, a close-up of a canoe paddle atop the sun-coated waters of

Lake McDonald, was taken by alumna Keegan Rumsey in 1998. January is “Mood Indigo,” a shadowy image of a drummer taken by alumnus Sam Dean, now a staff photographer at Virginia’s Roanoke Times.

“A lot of the pictures are scenic or pictorial, which is only part of what we do,” Graham said. “You’re not going to see the gritty photojournalism that we do also.”

The Alumni Association will print 8,500 copies of the calendar on campus in late November and mail them to its 7,000 dues-paying members. Additional copies will be distributed at the journalism school. The project is being funded with monetary support from University President George Dennison.

“ It’s great for students to have their work published in this form,” Graham said. “It’s a wonderful piece for the School of Journalism, to show what our students can do while they are here.”

Return to November 2001 News