NPPA AWARDS | APRIL 2021

NPPA honors Sandra Eisert, Eli Reed with Sprague Award

Outstanding visual journalists, educators and First Amendment advocates also recognized

By Michael P. King

Athens, GA — Since the first Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award was given by the National Press Photographers Association in 1949, the organization has continued to recognize individuals for their special contributions to the NPPA and the wider field of visual journalism.

These awards represent NPPA’s efforts to honor those who make our profession stronger, build our communities and expand the reach of NPPA in its mission to promote visual journalism and journalists. They recognize individuals who contribute to the profession in myriad ways. They honor people who elevate photojournalism, photojournalists who have made outstanding accomplishments, leaders who advance NPPA’s goals, people who fight for First Amendment freedoms, and educators who inspire.

The NPPA has awarded its highest honor, the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award, to Sandra Eisert and Eli Reed, for their commitment to the craft of visual journalism and to education that advances the profession. The Sprague awards, along with NPPA’s other top honors and the Northern Short Course Contest awards, will be presented during a virtual ceremony on Wednesday, April 21, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, kicking off NPPA’s Northern Short Course which will be held virtually, April 22-24.

Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award: Sandra Eisert

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Photo by Paul Kitagaki Jr.

Sandra Eisert has broken ground — often hard ground — her entire career. She was often the first woman, or even the first person, to hold the positions that she held. After graduating from Indiana University, she was hired as a picture editor at The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times, widely credited as the first woman to be named picture editor at a major American newspaper. Her work there would earn her NPPA’s Newspaper Picture Editor of the Year award.

She was asked to become the first picture editor at the White House. Working with David Hume Kennerly and others in Gerald Ford’s administration, they broke from opaque Nixonian public relations practices with a deliberate shift to honest visual documentation of the American presidency. Eisert would later return to the White House as an additional picture editor during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

At The Washington Post, Eisert expanded picture usage and grew special projects opportunities. At the Associated Press’ Washington bureau, she ran the Southern U.S. network and edited Capitol Hill and White House coverage, gaining experience on competitive and fast-moving stories that would serve her well in her next roles. As the design director and senior graphics editor at the San Jose Mercury News, her deadline editing and design work during the Loma Prieta earthquake was a key part of the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage. She also served as the art director of the paper’s Sunday magazine, West.

“I instinctively worked to change the newspaper picture editing model to what’s become understood as an ‘AME Graphics’ role — integrating design, art illustration, photography and even informational graphics to strengthen the visual impact of newspapers,” Eisert says of her time in print media.

In an era when pictures online were the size of postage-stamps, and dial-up internet was king, Eisert envisioned a lush visual landscape, and pictures as dominant elements on a web page. And she created that as one of the four founding senior editors at MSNBC.com, pioneering the use of large photos, interactive graphics, and even some video. Elements of those early designs still influence news websites today.

At the start of her career, Eisert was told “in some of the most unbelievable exchanges … that there was no way that a woman could be a photographer.” When she started in Louisville, there were no female allies or mentors in the newsroom. When she wanted to join NPPA, she was met with strong resistance. But she persisted, not only joining the association but volunteering, doing what she considers her life’s most important work.

As NPPA’s liaison to the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) for 20 years, Eisert fought for diversity and inclusion to be addressed, and for photography to be integrated into curricula. After her substantial work with only two initial partners, Standard 13 — relating to gender and racial diversity and inclusion for students and faculty — was established. It was “the last and initially weakest” of the criteria, Eisert adds. She persisted until the importance of diversity and inclusion was fully recognized. It is now Standard 3 — critical to accreditation.

“I think the potential that every person has is really important,” says Eisert, reflecting on her experiences and her penchant for helping others succeed. “I want to see every person reach their potential and enjoy being able to do all they can do. I think we’re all best served when everyone is able to give us their best.”

Eisert now serves on the boards of the National Press Photographers Foundation and LHSA - The International Leica Society. She has taught 20 Missouri Photo Workshops, is a past winner of NPPA’s Costa and Berman awards, and has designed, edited or created strategy for over 100 books. She is now a media consultant based in Seattle.

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Sandra Eisert, right, works in the The White House photo office in the West Wing with President Ford’s photographer David Hume Kennerly and Ford's daughter Susan. They were working on an album of pictures for the U.S.S.R. President Leonid Brezhnev to commemorate the historic S.A.L.T. talks in Vladivostok. Photo by Ricardo Thomas, The White House

Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award: Eli Reed

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Photo by Emree Weaver

Eli Reed believes a good picture is “one that you can’t get out of your mind.” He has been a clinical professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin since 2005, and is a Sony Artisan of Imagery. He went to art school for pictorial illustration and design, and while there, discovered the power of photography. At the time, he was living in the Delaney Homes housing project in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where his next door neighbor happened to be Eddie Otterbine, a photographer for the Plainfield Courier News who would often host two other area photojournalists — Harry Hamburg and Patrick Bernet — for coffee.

“Eddie was the first news photographer that I ever met and knew personally,” recalls Reed. “I thought that was so cool. Three working photographers are meeting next door!”

“Photojournalism was so amazing to me. I wanted to do work that meant something, and the only plan was to get someplace to show them that I could do the work.”

With a small darkroom setup in a coat closet at home, Reed began freelancing in 1970 and broke into newspapers thanks to a chance meeting with a Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record reporter who invited him to tour the newsroom. He was told to keep in touch and was soon offered a job. He remembers getting mail, a newspaper clipping of a rodeo picture he had made, along with a note from the late Eddie Adams: “Hell of a picture, kid.” Reed would go on to The Detroit News and the San Francisco Examiner before turning his attention to crises in Central America.

“Each newspaper pushed me up another level,” Reed says.

His work from Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries caught the eye of those at Magnum, and Philip Jones Griffiths would soon invite him to join. Shortly after his Nieman Fellowship at Harvard (where among other things he studied the history of war), Reed was voted into Magnum as a nominee in the summer of 1983. He became an associate member in 1985 and a full member in 1988. He was the first Black photographer to join the agency.

Reed would go on to cover conflicts in places such as Lebanon, Haiti, Panama, and Zaire. He would document refugees of the Rwandan civil war and second Sudanese civil war. But his work domestically is equally compelling. Decades of documenting the Black experience in America was published in Black in America (1997), with a foreword by Gordon Parks. Although Reed’s unique photographic perspective on Black life was valued by Magnum, it was sometimes dismissed by the editors at publications he approached with that work. He recalls being told that he was “too close to the subject,” and rhetorically wondering if they’d say that to a white photographer. A retrospective of Reed’s career was published in Eli Reed: A Long Walk Home (2015).

“You can’t take anything that’s not offered to you,” Reed said in a 2020 short film about his career for Sony. “In some ways it’s probably best to say you collect pictures. You collect moments. People sometimes look for the big broad moments, big brush strokes. But the brush strokes are not always large. A lot of times they’re small, detailed. It means you get closer. You learn how to be quiet, and listen to people, and pay attention to people ... you’re all ears, all eyes, trying to understand what it means to be a human being.”

As an educator, Reed has mentored a new generation of visual journalists who, like him, are “collecting moments” around the world.

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NPPA’s top honors and annual recognitions also announced

Joseph Costa Award

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Chris Post is awarded the Joseph Costa Award. The Costa Award is named after NPPA’s founder and given for outstanding initiative, leadership, and service in advancing the goals of NPPA in Costa’s tradition. Post, a photojournalist at WFMZ-TV in Allentown, Pa., is recognized for outstanding dedication to advancing safety and security interests in 2020 — a particularly challenging year with a pandemic, protests, and targeted violence against journalists. Post shared information and techniques — on social media, in webinars, and via consulting — to keep his colleagues near and far safer from harm.

Post, who leads NPPA’s Safety and Security Committee, has extensive prior experience in public safety: emergency medical services (EMS) certified since 1995, a disaster communications specialist with FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue’s Pennsylvania 1 task force, and is a Hostile Environment and First Aid Training (HEFAT) trainer.

“I’m glad that I’m able to contribute back,” says Post. “I survived in public safety because I had the best training. If I can help visual journalists have longer careers and survive, it’s all worth it.”

Jim Gordon Editor of the Year Award

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Kyndell Harkness is awarded the Jim Gordon Editor of the Year Award, given to an editor that supports and promotes strong photojournalism, best use of photography, and whose individual dedication and efforts have moved photojournalism's standards forward while advancing the best interests of all photographers. This award celebrates the leadership, ethics and advocacy dimensions of editing.

Harkness joined the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis in 2000 as a photographer, and became a photo editor in 2015. Harkness has been an instructor at AAJA’s JCamp for 16 years and served two years as photo editing chair for NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism contest. The Star-Tribune photo staff was not even three months into pandemic coverage and “work from home” before George Floyd was killed by police, sparking massive, widespread protests.

“In the nights of chaos in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Harkness was a guiding light for our newsroom and our photo staff,” said one nominator of Harkness.

“My presence in our meetings made people think about our coverage differently,” Harkness says. “It was probably the first time I brought my full self to those meetings. As a journalist of color with more than 20 years in the business, I have become accustomed to making myself smaller. This time was different, and those journalists at the meetings were receptive.”

Harkness was promoted to Assistant Managing Editor of Diversity and Community in October 2020, and earlier in March earned honors in the Best of Photojournalism contest as Newspaper Editor of the Year: Individual (Above 100,000 Circulation).

Clifton Edom Award

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John Sharify is awarded the Clifton Edom Award. The Edom Award recognizes an individual in the tradition of University of Missouri photojournalism professor Cliff Edom to inspire and motivate members of the photojournalism community to reach new heights. When Sharify was told that he’d been given this honor, he said: “That’s so great! I just got off the phone with [a reporter] after giving her feedback for an hour and a half.” Typical John Sha

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