MPF announces 2024 Photojournalism Hall of Fame inductees
The Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame in Columbia will induct four award-winning photojournalists on Oct. 17.
This will be the 20th group of inductees since the founding of the Hall of Fame in 2005. Inductees are the late William Paul Straeter, Jr.; Talis Bergmanis of Kansas City; David Eulitt of Kansas City; and John Trotter of New York.
Photographs made by the inductees will be on display during the 4 p.m. ceremony and reception in the Sam B. Cook Hall at the Center for Missouri Studies, the State Historical Society of Missouri’s location in downtown Columbia. Those photographs will join the Hall of Fame’s collection of work by inductees.
The Photojournalism Hall of Fame was founded at the urging of Bill Miller Sr., publisher of the Washington Missourian newspaper, to recognize outstanding contributors to visual communication with ties to Missouri.
Information about the Photojournalism Hall of Fame and previous inductees can be seen at photojournalismhalloffame.org. RSVP for the induction ceremony online at bit.ly/mophotoj or by email at mharper@mopress.com.
William Paul Straeter, Jr. started work as a bookkeeper in the 30s and shortly before World War II he began to believe he could make more money as a full-time freelance photographer, and “posting records bored the hell out of me,” he said.
During the war, Straeter took photos and taught photography for the Navy Seabees in the South Pacific and then he was a photographer for the Associated Press Kansas City bureau. After 30 years, he retired “to start leading a normal life.”
The plan was lots of golfing, fishing, watching sports, and especially sleeping through the night since he had been on call for 30 years as AP’s only photographer for the region. Straeter often received a call in the middle of the night to shoot a fire or cover a plane crash, and he often covered regions all the way into Oklahoma and Kansas. For bigger stories, he traveled even further, including when he covered the school integration conflict in Little Rock, Arkansas and a 1947 explosion in Texas. He also covered Big Eight sports (Big Six when he started) and the 1960 Winter Olympics.
When Straeter joined AP in 1945, he called photography his life, his vocation and hobby, his love, almost his religion. Straeter frequently said every time he was sent out it was his favorite time because he got to help make sure that anyone getting up early before work or coming home after a long day could reach for a newspaper and see what’s happening.
In December 1981, Straeter died after a long illness.
Talis Bergmanis took the only photo class offered at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1965. When he graduated two years later, he leveraged his bachelor’s in journalism and a modest photo portfolio into a job as a writer/photographer at the Sunday magazine of the Rochester, N.Y. Democrat & Chronicle.
Over the years he realized that his talents and passions lined up better with photography than writing, and he became a full-time photographer.
Bergmanis left the paper to teach high school photography and to freelance, but he missed the pace of daily photojournalism and returned after several years. He was hired as Assistant Photo Editor at The Kansas City Star in 1980. He quickly learned what Mark Twain meant when he wrote, “I’m not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.”
Bergmanis disentangled himself from the desk job and for the rest of his 20 years at the Star was, gratefully, a plain old staff photographer. He retired in 2001.
David Eulitt was 11 years old when he unknowingly discovered his future career by making his first Polaroid photograph and watching it develop in his hand. Since pursuing photography as his career, he has spent 34 years telling stories through visual imagery, in both still photography and video.
Eulitt attended the University of Missouri-Columbia and began his career in California. After four years in California, he moved back to the Midwest to work as a staff photographer at the Topeka Capital-Journal for ten years.
For 15 years in Kansas City, Eulitt photographed a host of national and international sporting events for the Star and parent company McClatchy, including four Summer Olympic Games, two Super Bowls, four Final fours and two World Series, while covering the Kansas City Chiefs beat for 11 years.
He has volunteered shooting still images and videos for Cross-Lines Community Outreach, a Kansas City, Kansas nonprofit that feeds and houses the homeless and hungry, specifically for their fundraising efforts.
Eulitt currently freelances for Getty Images in Kansas City, primarily photographing the Kansas City Chiefs home games and as a staff multimedia producer and still photographer for Midwest Health, Inc. since 2018, where his journalism background is the foundation for his unscripted storytelling video work. Eulitt has won several awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award, multiple Mid-America Emmy awards, the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, five Kansas City Philly Awards and eight national Telly Awards.
Born in St. Louis and raised in Springfield, John Trotter originally intended to pursue a career as a professional cyclist. After winning five Missouri State cycling championships and graduating from Parkview High School, he was invited to race with an amateur team outside of Paris at the beginning of 1979, where he competed regularly against future Tour de France winner Laurent Fignon.
Though not unsuccessful, he eventually took a different path and returned to the U.S., enrolling at the University of Missouri-Columbia to pursue journalism. By the end of his first semester, he was the photo editor of The Maneater, MU’s student newspaper.
After completing his School of Journalism education, Trotter went across town to work on the staff of The Columbia Daily Tribune before moving to California, where he worked for the San Jose Mercury News and then, for a decade, at The Sacramento Bee. There, he worked locally and internationally, covering the U.S. invasions of Panama and Haiti, and the devastating famine in Somalia.
On March 24, 1997, while photographing in a Sacramento neighborhood he was nearly murdered by a half-dozen young men. Photographs he took during his long recovery from his subsequent brain injury are becoming a book, “The Burden of Memory,” in 2025.
In 2001, Trotter began photographing in Mexico for his project No Agua, No Vida about the human alteration of the Colorado River. He has photographed along the entire 2,200-kilometer length of the river, from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the desiccated remains of its delta above the Sea of Cortez.
He has lived in New York City since 2000 and in 2017 became one of the founding members of the collective photo agency, MAPS.