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.