Photographers from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism visited Moberly to hone their storytelling skills while adding images to an archive that documents small town life.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, an enterprising newspaper writer described the city of Moberly as 'magically springing from the prairie' with the arrival of the Wabash Railroad Shop in 1873. Nearly a century and a half later the sound of freight trains still reverberate off the brick-walled downtown buildings and Moberly still touts itself as the "Magic City."
During the last week of September 2006, a band of 30 photographers, a dozen faculty and a score of student workers descended on Moberly hoping to create a little magic of their own at the 58th annual Missouri Photo Workshop. Drawn from the four corners of the U.S. and from Canada, France, Holland, Singapore, Romania and the United Kingdom, their mission was the same as their several thousand workshop predecessors. They came to sharpen their story-telling skills while collecting images that spoke to the essence of community and explored the lives of, and the issues facing, the people who inhabit small town America.
Reviewed 2013-02-18