The Colorado Department of Agriculture encourages you to share your ag photos in its 2023 Colorado Best in Show Photography Contest. Submissions are due December 31. (Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash)

William Taufic ’77 grew up in Austin, Minnesota, a small meat-packing town best known for being the birthplace of SPAM.

Yet when he returned to his hometown in 2017 after spending decades developing a career as a professional photographer that took him around the world, he was struck by how much the community had changed. A substantial number of immigrants, refugees, and other newcomers have made Austin their home, hailing from countries such as South Sudan, Mexico, Benin, Myanmar, and numerous others. Together they have created a community rich with diversity, where more than 40 languages are spoken.

“What’s more, the town has welcomed the newcomers from all over the world with open arms, helping them to become part of the community and eventually new Americans,” Taufic writes on his photography site. “I am the son of an immigrant, who was the son of immigrants. Most of us here in our beloved United States of America, unless you have Native American roots, are immigrants. Unfortunately, in recent years we have become not so united.”

What he saw in the way that Austin has embraced its diversity inspired him to create a photography project titled “Our Austin, Our America” that features portraits of community members paired with personal narratives. The Minnesota State Capitol Art Gallery displayed his exhibit through this fall, and Taufic published a book highlighting the project that is available for purchase online at Sweet Reads, a locally owned bookstore in Austin, and at the Minnesota Historical Society.

“I am really hopeful that what I have done will help other communities understand that there is nothing to fear — the more you welcome people regardless of the color of their skin, the more likely that your community will be successful and diverse and have a richer culture,” he says.

“I am really hopeful that what I have done will help other communities understand that there is nothing to fear — the more you welcome people regardless of the color of their skin, the more likely that your community will be successful and diverse and have a richer culture.”

William Taufic ’77

The roots of Taufic’s appreciation for multiculturalism and diversity begin with his family, with his father’s parents migrating from Lebanon to Brazil. Taufic’s father would himself later immigrate to the United States. That link to global engagement continued to Taufic’s own time at St. Olaf during the 1970s.

During a biology lab during his sophomore year, while counting fruit flies for a genetics project, his professor, Arnold Petersen, approached him with a question: “I’m going to take some students to Liberia next summer to do an independent research project. Would you like to join us?” For Taufic, the answer was easy.

He spent the rest of his year planning a psychology memory experiment in Liberia with a group of other students from the University of Minnesota Student Project for Amity Among Nations (SPAN). He also collaborated with a psychology fellow from Rockefeller University in New York, Michael Cole, and  spent the summer of 1975 traveling across villages in northern Liberia collecting data for the research. Taufic documented his time there by taking photographs — lots and lots of photographs. Once he returned to campus, his work was displayed in a photography show, co-sponsored by St. Olaf Professor Emeritus of Art A. Malcolm “Mac” Gimse ’58, in the old student center. It was also printed by the Minneapolis Tribune for a story on the SPAN organization.

Little did Taufic know that this would lead to his first post-St. Olaf career opportunity.

“Three weeks before I graduated, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he says. Then he received a call from his uncle, who knew a photographer in New York who was hiring. Taufic sent him a letter and some photographs from Liberia. Three days later, he received a call from the photographer. A week after graduation, he was living at the YMCA on New York’s 34^th Street.

That initial job led to work assisting many known fashion, still-life, and corporate photographers, and then eventually to his own successful business as a corporate annual report photographer. It is a career that has led Taufic to travel across all 50 states in the U.S and more than 40 countries, doing work for Fortune 500 companies like United Technologies, Xerox, JP Morgan, UBS, Chubb, and many more. The world became his studio.

After that initial 2017 visit to Austin, Taufic spent the next three years living in Austin, where he worked closely with community leaders like former mayor Bonnie Rietz and retired Riverland Community College President Adenuga Atewologun. He presented his work to the city of Austin in August 2022 in a photography exhibit and a coffee table book.

“I am just so very grateful that I have been blessed with the ability and opportunity to do this work. It has made a difference in the world, in Minnesota, in Austin,” Taufic says. “People are wanting to come to Austin to see what is going on.”

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and Harvard lecturer B.D. Colen is coming to Burlington to talk about photography.

Laureate College will welcome Colen to its campus on Saturday, Nov. 18, from 10 until noon. The session is part of Laureate’s Master Class series, which is an outreach program of the private co-ed, day and boarding school for Grade 9-12 students. The series aims to support the arts and build a creative hub in the community.

Colen will discuss documentary and street photography and his day-in-the-life photography (literally shooting photos of a family from sunup to sundown). He’ll then take questions.

Everyone is welcome to listen to the photo/journalist, who covered events that shaped the world, at the campus, 1921 Snake Rd., the 50-acre property of the former Notre Dame Convent.

Colen, 77, now calls London Ont. home. He shared some stories with BurlingtonToday about his impressive career that’s spanned more than six decades behind the lens.

He was working at Newsday in the 1980s when he shared a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting along with his colleague Kathleen Kerr. 

Colen started his journalism career when he was 17 years old, covering the historic March on Washington for a small weekly in Connecticut. He went on to work at The Washington Post,among several esteemed newspapers in the U.S.

For years, he commuted on the Boston subway to teach students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and that’s where he began his collection of photographs called Alone, Together.

His commute became even longer when he moved to London.

“It was the longest commute; it wore me down,” he admitted. But it also gave him the opportunity to continue his series on individuals who appear alone in crowds of people.

“I photographed whatever caught my eye from the window of the train, to my getting a flu shot at MIT,” said Colen, who’s written several books on medical subjects, one of his specialties as a reporter.  “It started as something to distract me.”

He’s known for his black and white photography that speaks volumes, especially on such subjects such as death, NGOs, civil rights and famine.

Over the years, he’s shot with every brand of camera – Fuji, Leika, Pentax, to name a few. But, he says, a passion for photography is not about the equipment.

“You get hooked very quickly and in that sense the camera doesn’t matter much,” he said. “It’s about being in the right place at the right time and knowing what to do with it, and it either comes together or it doesn’t.

“I used to tell students either you have an eye or you don’t. I can help you focus it, refine it, why you’re doing it, teach technical aspects, techniques, but I can’t give you the eye.”

He says people have asked him,”‘Why photographs?’ Because I can’t not. I have to do it. I don’t know why.”

As for shooting endless photos of a single subject, he said it happens easily. 

“I always say, we’re all our own worst editors. Every photo is one of our babies, and nobody is an ugly baby. It’s learning to put some up for adoption.”

He enjoys reporting and talking to people equally as much.

“I’d tell my feature writing students that being a journalist is stepping on a ladder and looking over the fence into the neighbours’ yard and saying what’s going on. You see and learn things that other people don’t. Writing has come automatically to me. I think it’s having an eye. Anybody can learn to write basic English, but to get beyond that it’s either there or it’s not.”

He said although writing medical stories can be sad, he found it really interesting. In fact, he never took a single biology, physics or chemistry class throughout high school, and he ended up as a medical reporter.

“You ask questions. You learn where to go to get the basics you don’t have,” he said.

Although he says he’s retired, it’s a rare day when he doesn’t lift a camera. Most common, he laughs, his subjects these days are his three dachshunds: Webster, Edna and Cookie.

He said he spends more time now going through digital photos and trying to sort through those than actually shooting. Up until 2001, he only shot on film and he jokes “I was never particularly good at keeping those in order.”

Colen, who’s now married to a fellow dog lover, also has three children. Everyone is artistic: his daughter Karen is director of New York City’s Howard Greenberg Gallery for 20th century photography. His eldest son Ben is a renowned skateboard photographer in California and his youngest son, Nick, 41 is a graphic artist in Boston working on a comic book.

Three members of his family had works selected for this year’s 100KelloggLane London, an art competition which sees 100 works chosen out of thousands of submissions.

Learn more about Colen and find his photography at http://www.bdcolenphoto.com.

Colen’s Nov. 18 talk at Laureate is open to the community and admission is free, but guests are asked to register in advance.