Mary Beth Meehan
Photographer, Cinematographer
Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer, writer, and educator whose goal is to add intimacy and nuance to our understanding of urban American life.
Her work has been published and exhibited widely, and has been honored by Pictures of the Year International and The National Conference for Community and Justice. Her weekly photo-and-text column in The Providence Journal was one of the first to attract national acclaim, and was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize.
Her ongoing documentary projects have received financial support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is currently at work on a project centered around her changing hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts.
Mary Beth participated in the March 2010 MediaStorm Storytelling Workshop. She had the following to say about her experience:
I have not been this inspired about photography and photojournalism in almost ten years.
MediaStorm puts together an unbelievable combination of talented working professionals and experienced multimedia producers, and invites everyone to come together in a spirit of complete collaboration - and fun.
They share all of their cutting-edge awareness of how photography, audio, and video can work together, and you leave them feeling that you can take your work to a whole different level. I'm already thinking of things differently, trying to stretch beyond simply assembling still pictures to tell a story, and wondering how video and audio narrative might breathe some life into projects of my own.
Audio and video aren't just adaptive tools for surviving on the internet; they really can add layers of meaning and power to what we've been doing all these years as still photographers. The workshops are an act of generosity, really, as you get the sense that MediaStorm really wants to elevate all of our work, and take us along with them into the future of photojournalism.
Roxanne Pickering is a Brooklyn resident bound by family and economics to live near the Gowanus Canal, a polluted waterway recently declared an EPA superfund site.