Vanessa Brey figures she was about 16 the last time a photographer visited her family’s egg farm near Jeffersonville, New York, a rustic community nestled in the rolling foothills of the Catskills – far enough away from New York City to be considered “the boonies” but close enough that city folk get away there for the weekend.
Back then, there were still a lot of other egg farms in Sullivan County, and it was natural that photographers from the famed Eddie Adams Workshop would find their way to them. Vanessa, now 24, had seen students from the annual workshop coming to the farm ever since she was a little girl.
Her parents still have a framed image from that day in their home: a picture of Vanessa holding a feed bucket, tending to her cows. Another picture from one of those visits – a landscape image of the farm – is on the wall in Brey’s home.
As it celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, the workshop, which legendary photographer Eddie Adams and his wife, Alyssa, founded in 1988, is once again gearing up to unleash 100 very talented, highly motivated students and young professionals into the Jeffersonville community.
The Barnstorm, as the Eddie Adams Workshop is also called, has molded and inspired two generations of photojournalists. To say that you are an Eddie Adams Workshop alumnus is to say you are part of a relatively exclusive club, one that includes some of the biggest names in the industry. It’s a badge of honor abbreviated and tagged with Roman numerals; e.g., the first workshop, now looked upon almost mythically, is known as “EAW I,” with this year’s gathering forever to be known as “EAW XXX.”
In three decades, nearly 3,000 workshop attendees have ridden a bus 2½ hours out of New York City to the farm that Eddie and Alyssa bought and renovated. That also means that in that time, some 3,000 story assignments have been doled out.
It’s a safe bet to say that no other small community in the country with a population as tiny as Sullivan County’s has been the subject of so many photo essays by some of the best young shooters in America.
Several of those young photographers went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Many went on to successful careers in newspapers and magazines. The number of attendees who have gone on to lead photo departments is too long to print here.
Adams, who passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2004, made a lot of great frames over his career shooting for The Associated Press and later for Time and Parade magazines, among others. The photo that will always be mentioned first is the one he took on a Saigon street in 1968 when the South Vietnamese national police chief raised his gun and executed a Viet Cong prisoner captured just moments earlier. That shocking image some say helped change the course of a war won Adams a Pulitzer Prize and cemented his reputation as one of the best in the business.
The idea behind Barnstorm was to create a mentorship experience for young photographers that Adams had wished he had when he was coming up. As he and Alyssa, his future wife, discussed the idea, they talked about the workshops Adams had been invited to speak at and how expensive they were.
“What about all these young photographers who can’t afford this?” Alyssa said. That’s when she suggested that the workshop be free. They would pick attendees by merit based on their portfolios and then cover their costs.
The friends Adams made over a 45-year career helped when it came time to draw up a list of speakers and coaches for that first Barnstorm. Those famous coaches and speakers? They’d be asked to donate their services as well.
“He just knew all these people,” Alyssa Adams said. “He knew people who knew people.”
Tim Rasmussen, now the photo editor at ESPN, had been working part-time at a local newspaper in Logan, Utah, to pay his way through college when he arrived at the farm for the first workshop in 1988.
Rasmussen, then a self-described naive kid from Utah, didn’t know what to expect. Truth be told, no one – students or faculty – really knew.
“Eddie’s goal was just to put these great photographers and editors that he had worked with over the years together with these young minds – and let them figure this out,” Rasmussen said.
In fact, before he arrived on the farm, the young Rasmussen didn’t even know who most of the who’s who of speakers and faculty were that first year.
The only reason he was even there was that his photo editor at the Logan Herald Journal had seen something in him, going so far as to put Rasmussen’s application together and submitting it for him.
Luckily for Rasmussen, his editor knew exactly what an opportunity it would be to spend a couple of days sequestered with such renowned photographers. It could affect not only Rasmussen’s career but how he saw his place in the world of photojournalism.
“It really did change my life,” Rasmussen said. “It just showed you another place – another world of what you could become.”
He figures he could easily have gone back to Utah and produced solid photos for the rest of his career, but four days on the farm had made him aspire to greater heights. Within a few months of returning to Utah, he packed up his car and headed east to freelance and find work wherever he could. He also decided he would do everything he could to get back to the farm.
Gregory Heisler as a coach at the first Eddie Adams Workshop. Photo by Tim Rasmussen
The coaches the first year included Mary Ellen Mark, Douglas Kirkland, David Alan Harvey and Gregory Heisler. Read the list of luminaries who have paid a visit to the farm over the last three decades and you’ll find yourself saying, “Oh, wow” quite a bit: Eugene Richards, Gordon Parks, John White, Bill Eppridge and David Hume Kennerly, to name just a few.
Heisler, a former Time magazine photographer who now teaches at Syracuse University, met Eddie when they worked on Rick Smolan’s “A Day in the Life of America” project in 1986. Even though he was a team leader and an accomplished pro, he was a little starstruck by his colleagues at EAW I.
“I was still a pretty newbie photographer,” Heisler said. “It was a huge honor for me to be included.”
Heisler has been back to the workshop on and off over the years and says the annual event is a way for him to pay it forward, to “share my truths, my experiences and to make an extra effort to bring it down to earth.”
For attendees, Barnstorm is very affirming and even humbling as they find themselves surrounded by 99 other attendees just as talented.
The attendees are split into 10 teams, with a team leader, editor and producer. Each photographer is given an assignment and competes for awards handed out at the end of the weekend. Heisler worries the supercompetitive nature of the workshop can push some of the students out of the profession.
“I think for some people, honestly, the workshop ends up being the final blow,” Heisler said. “There are those photographers who come as real hotshots and, honestly, just bomb out – and you end up bombing out publicly in this group, and that’s kind of tough.”
Almost all who have attended the workshop mention how excited they are when they find out they’ve been accepted. They also talk about how grueling it is, with days starting early and critiques and discussions in the barn going on late into the night.
Andrea Cornejo, a graduating senior at the University of Florida, has heard the stories and says she has been mentally preparing herself for the four days on the farm and vows to sleep at least 12 hours the night before she leaves. She was in class when she got the email that she had been accepted into this year’s Barnstorm.
“I literally just stared at my phone for five or 10 minutes,” she said.
Cornejo had set her sights on the workshop more than a year ago when she decided not to enter as a junior because she didn’t think she was ready. Instead, she spent the time working on a project that won her a Multimedia Story of the Year award at the annual Hearst Journalism Awards.
Half of the attendees will be students like Cornejo, and the other half will be people with three years or less professional experience.
Some, such as Andrea DiCenzo, already have quite a few life experiences under their belts. DiCenzo moved to Erbil, Iraq, in 2015 to cover humanitarian stories as a freelancer and had previously covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza in 2014. For her, besides being a great career opportunity, the weekend will be a break from working in a conflict zone.
“I’m excited to hear the talks and discussions about photo essays and projects,” she wrote in an email. “It’s carving out space to only talk about those sort of things, which is wonderful and not something you get the chance to do every day.”
To this day, there’s nothing in the industry that comes close to replicating the experience. But back at EAW I, there was no thought about what kind of legacy they were creating. They were more concerned about filling ditches and rewiring the barn before people arrived.
“There was no talking about how many years we would go on,” said Alyssa, a photo editor herself. “We were just trying to get through the first one.”
Alyssa has carried on the legacy in the years after Eddie’s death but says none of it would have ever happened without sponsors such as Kodak and Nikon, who stepped up that first year. Kodak is long gone, but Nikon is still a major presence at the workshops, giving a top-of-the-line gear kit away as a grand prize to one of the attendees.
Jim Colton, a former photography editor at Sports Illustrated, was involved since the beginning with his father and brother. His father, William “Sandy” Colton, was director of photography for AP, and his brother, Jay, was a star photographer and photo editor at Time. Both have since passed away, but Jim keeps their memory alive by having returned to Jeffersonville every year since EAW III.
Colton is moderating this year’s workshop and marvels at the longevity of the project that Eddie and Alyssa created. Yet Colton is also a realist and says the industry has changed so much over the last 30 years that it’s hard to know how much longer the workshops can go on.
The values the workshop instills, such as ethics, integrity and passion, are needed more than ever, he said. He plans to keep coming back as long as they will have him.
“I have a very personal bond to that workshop,” Colton said. “There are ghosts on that farm but good ghosts.”
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After the first workshop, Rasmussen tried to get back to the farm for EAW II, practically begging and offering to sleep on the floor. Though he got turned down that year, Eddie and Alyssa relented the next year, bringing him back as a producer for EAW III.
He’s been a fixture at Barnstorm in the years since. To this day, he keeps a picture of Eddie on his wall to help serve as his conscience. When Rasmussen is hard on photographers as a coach or an editor, Eddie’s there making sure he’s doing it for the right reasons.
This year, like all years, the charter bus will stop at the bottom of the hill, and the attendees will start walking up the to the barn while Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” is played over the sound system:
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away
The young photographers will be bright-eyed, excited and much fresher than when they walk down the hill a few days later.
Years later, they’ll still appreciate that moment, Rasmussen says.
“While you’re walking up the hill, you’re now immediately and forever a part of that family.”
