Traveling Light

TRAVELING

PHOTOJOURNALISM PROFESSOR DR. TOMMY XIE BALANCES THE ART AND SCIENCE OF HIS FIELD, WHILE TRAINING STUDENTS FOR LIFE IN TODAY’S MEDIA.

by Tess (Brown) Long ’07, MFA’11

About ten years ago, on the outskirts of Carbondale, Illinois where the city fades to cornfields, Lei “Tommy” Xie was at work behind his camera, telling the story of an undocumented immigrant chef at a Chinese restaurant.

Dr. Xie (pronounced Shay) followed his subject — known as Zheng — through a grueling morning schedule at a Chinese buffet, watching him prepare dishes in the predawn hours and then retreat to his economy flat late in the afternoon where he quietly ate soup while corresponding with his family back home in China.

Left: An image of Zheng, an undocumented immigrant chef at a Chinese restaurant, eating soup at home. This photo was a part of Dr. Xie’s prize-winning photo essay called “Living Foreign.”

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“I WANT TO SHOW MY STUDENTS HOW DIFFERENT AND WONDERFUL A LIFE EXPERIENCE THEY CAN HAVE IF THEY PUSH THEMSELVES OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONE.”

Snapping photos day after day for his graduate thesis at Southern Illinois University, Dr. Xie discovered the chef had an unusual nightly routine of heading to an obscure college watering hole where he was a championship billiards player.

“He was popular at the bar and I initially thought that people just wanted to play pool with him,” Dr. Xie said. “Later, I found out some really wanted to talk to him. They brought an English-Chinese dictionary and tried to teach him some basic English words.

His friends there cared about him.”

Throughout his thesis project, which

resulted in a prize-winning photo essay called “Living Foreign,” Dr. Xie remembered the words of his mentor, photojournalist Phillip Greer of the Chicago Tribune: getting a single shot is easy, anyone can get a cool shot, but to tell a complete story through a sequence of images is the ultimate challenge.

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r. Xie is now an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences; for the past decade he has passed along to Fairfield students some of the same principles that were passed on to him: passion

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for the field of photojournalism; defense of the “public’s right to know”; empathy for one’s subjects; and a belief that photojournalism can make a difference in our world.

A native of Shanghai, China, Dr. Xie came up as a “news boy” through a “very different media ecosystem” than the one in which he now teaches. He recalls editorial meetings in China where news stories on politically sensitive topics were weeded out.

“I realized that I didn’t have the kind of creative freedom that I wanted, to tell the stories that I felt were important,” Dr. Xie said.

“So, I took my journalism passion to the U.S.”

Above: A girl looks through a wall made of pipes and bamboo while class is in session at Dabao Elementary, Dabao Village, Guangxi, China.

At right from top: Chinese tourists in a choreographic pose with a horse and yak near Qinghai Lake, China. This image was one of the 20 finalists for the Nikonians Photography Award in 2017. A woman of Dabao Village, China, finishes field work at the entrance of the village. Because of the village’s geographically insulated location, farming allows for the villagers to be fully self-sufficient.

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JOURNALISM AT FAIRFIELD

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t the University, Dr. Xie teaches courses in news writing, photojournalism, digital journalism, and most recently, big data storytelling — journalism that is strongly rooted in what is typically numerical data and subsequent analysis.

“Journalism has changed so much in the last decade,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Richard Greenwald, PhD. “It’s morphed into a platform agnostic field.

Our program has been created for a digital world and we have designed a curriculum for those realities.”

Last spring, Dean Greenwald facilitated a connection to NBC Universal through a colleague and arranged for Dr. Xie’s students to visit the news headquarters in New York City for a rigorous day behind the scenes.

“Students were able to see producers in

“WE ALREADY HAVE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, BUT THE RESONANCE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCES IS DESPERATELY LACKING. BY TELLING POWERFUL AND RELATABLE STORIES OF THOSE AFFECTED

BY THE ISSUE, PHOTOGRAPHY CAN HELP BRIDGE THE GAP.”

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r. Xie’s photographs often exhibit a cross-cultural, global viewpoint — accessible for their quirky details and their startling juxtaposition of worlds: In one, a ruddy-cheeked young girl tosses a fish back into the waters of Qinghai Lake, in the Tibetan region; in another, a man kneels on his prayer rug adjacent to both a blossoming cherry tree and a highway guardrail in Brooklyn, New York.

As both a journalist and an academic, what interests Dr. Xie is the instance where his experience at the moment of snapping the photo opens a window on something larger — a bigger, more nuanced story that requires

research and further study and analysis.

“In my ideal world,” he explained, “photography and scholarship are reciprocal.”

So for instance, Dr. Xie learned that the boy tossing fish back into Qinghai lake was actually trying to preserve the lake’s delicate ecosystem.

Climate change and pollution have damaged the fish population. Highly dependent on the fish, lake birds are leaving and the ecosystem is in collapse. In a few generations, this lake could be gone. Dr. Xie remembered the children calling out to him from the shore: “We have to throw them back into the lake so they don’t get trapped in lake grass and die young.”

“As a photographer, I can capture images

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of a few Tibetan kids catching fish against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset. But as a storyteller, I should also tell the whole story where desperation and hope intertwined, so that when you look back at the images, you feel that ‘beautiful’ is nearly useless to describe what the children were doing,” Dr. Xie said. “We already have scientific evidence for climate change, but the resonance of human experiences is desperately lacking. By telling powerful and relatable stories of those affected by the issue, photography can help bridge the gap.”

In his courses, Dr. Xie hopes to inspire a sense of wonder in his students and instill a confidence in them to venture into the unknown.

“I want to show my students how different and wonderful a life experience they can have if they push themselves out of their comfort F zone,” Dr. Xie said. l Above: A Tibetan girl throws a young fish back into Qinghai Lake, China, in an effort to save the area’s delicate ecosystem.

At right: A man kneels on his prayer rug adjacent to both a blossoming cherry tree and a highway guardrail in Brooklyn, New York.

action during pitch meetings. Editors gave feedback on student portfolios, and the students had a meet and greet with news anchor Lester Holt,” Dr. Xie said. “Several students earned key contacts that resulted in internships from that day.”

Assistant professor of English and digital journalism Matt Tullis, MFA, who is also director of Fairfield’s Digital Journalism program, said an outcome they have approached with diligence to achieve in the program is to ensure students have broad experience with a backbone of best practices.

“Reporters and editors are on the front line of the important things that are happening throughout the world on a daily basis, so they can let the rest of us know what is going on in our world. Within our program, we like to also work storytelling into that,

because the best way to let people know what is happening in the world is to couch it in good, solid, reported and factual stories,” Tullis said.

Nicole Funaro, a 2017 graduate who is now an online Lei “Tommy” Xie producer for Hearst Connecticut Media Group, took Dr. Xie’s photojournalism course and feels that she’s currently putting into practice all that he taught: “With every decision I am faced with, I try my best to remember what I learned at Fairfield: that to tell a story is a privilege and to decide what news our readers consume and how they F consume it is no small responsibility.” l

FAIRFIELD RANKS 9TH NATIONALLY IN SALARIES FOR COMMUNICATIONS & JOURNALISM MAJORS, SAYS PAYSCALE Recently, Fairfield University has been ranked 9th in the nation out of 637 institutions offering communications and journalism degrees by PayScale’s 2018-19 College Salary Report.

PayScale’s annual report, based on the salaries of 3.2 million college graduates, provides estimates of early and mid-career pay for 2,646 associate’s and bachelor’s degreegranting institutions throughout the U.S. For communications and journalism majors, PayScale looked at 637 institutions offering fouryear degrees.

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