Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
Five acclaimed photojournalists will expand the ranks of the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame during a Thursday, Nov. 13 induction ceremony at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s headquarters in downtown Columbia.
Marking the 21st group of inductees since the founding of the Hall of Fame in 2005, this year’s honorees are the late Raymond Corey; Torsten Kjellstrand of Portland, Ore.; Tammy Ljungblad of Kansas City; L.G. Patterson of Columbia; and Orlin Wagner of Lawrence, Kan.
Photographs from 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. These photographs will join the Hall of Fame’s collection of work by previous inductees.
The Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame was founded at the urging of Bill Miller Sr., former publisher of the Washington Missourian newspaper, to recognize outstanding contributors to visual communication with ties to Missouri.
Information about the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame and previous inductees can be found online at photojournalismhalloffame.org. You can RSVP for the Nov. 13 induction ceremony online at bit.ly/mophotoj or by email at kfortier@mopress.com.
Raymond Corey was born in 1936, in Kansas City, and at the age of 16, following the death of his mother and with little contact with his father, found himself on his own. It was during this time he took a position with the Associated Press located in The Kansas City Star’s building, tasked with transmitting and receiving photographs.
So began his lifelong love of newspapers and photography. And while Corey would never finish high school, he found mentors and teachers aplenty among the members of the Associated Press staff.
To pursue his dream of becoming a news photographer, he borrowed money to buy a used camera. He began shooting sports and news events and gained experience composing, developing, printing and even selling photographs.
His first newspaper job came in 1959 as a news photographer with the Coffeyville Journal in Kansas, where he stayed until hired by The Kansas City Kansan in 1963. At the Kansan, he earned a National Press Photographer’s Association Award for his photo of a bank robber being apprehended by police.
In 1965, Corey began working for The Kansas City Star as a staff photographer, covering social, political and sporting events, including the Kansas City race riots in 1968, the funeral of Harry S. Truman in 1972, and the teacher strikes of 1974. He worked for The Star until his retirement in 1979, after which he continued to work as a freelance photographer until his death in 1995.
Torsten Kjellstrand has spent a long and varied career telling stories that go beyond and challenge stereotyping in America’s rural, Native American and immigrant communities. The lessons he learned as a working journalist are now applied teaching future photojournalists as a professor of practice in the Pacific Northwest.
A native of Sweden, Kjellstrand attended the University of Missouri in 1991, knowing he wanted to learn from the best about being a photojournalist and focused almost entirely on such. As a teaching assistant for Bill Kuykendall’s Fundamentals of Photojournalism course, Kjellstrand fell in love with the Missouri flavor of photojournalism but also with teaching, setting him on the dual track of working photojournalist and teacher that persists to this day.
As a photojournalist, Kjellstrand learned early in his career that he loves telling the untold stories of America’s rural communities. His first job after graduating from Mizzou was at The Dubois County Herald in Jasper, Ind., where he learned to fully commit to rural stories. It’s also where Kjellstrand won Newspaper Photographer of the Year in the Pictures of the Year International contest.
Kjellstrand won a variety of awards during his stints at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. and at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore. His experience includes receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study comparative literature at Uppsala University in Sweden and later spending a year as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University studying links between ethnicity, language, landscape, and storytelling. He then worked as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in New York City before joining the University of Oregon faculty in 2013.
Tammy Ljungblad is driven to capture the perfect image, all in the name of sharing stories with readers of The Kansas City Star they won’t see anywhere else. As such, her career of more than 35 years has been described as a tour de force in visual storytelling, evolving with the community as much as with the tools of her trade.
When Ljungblad started at The Star in 1989, photographers were still shooting on film but as the technology changed, she found a greater ability to cover nearly all aspects of life in Kansas City and the surrounding region. As a true photojournalist, whether she’s working solo or with another reporter, she always makes sure her photography is accurate and complements coverage appearing in print or online, as stills or as a video.
Humble and willing to put in the work needed get a story, Ljungblad has convinced many wary subjects to be photographed because she showed them the care she would put in to depicting their story fairly and accurately. From some of her earliest years at The Star, Ljungblad has had an impact on the newspaper’s visual storytelling efforts, including working on the team that produced the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on failures at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Since then, Ljungblad has only continued to capture and share the emotions of Kanas Citians at their highest, such as Super Bowl and World Series wins, to their lowest, like The Star’s series on a children’s residential mental health treatment center. Colleagues working with Ljungblad know her work will always be her best and The Star’s reporting is better because of her dedication and skill.
L.G. Patterson was only six years old living in Liberty, when a friend invited Patterson over to show off his father’s darkroom. While the aura of the room’s red light fascinated Patterson, it was when the friend dropped some photo paper into the developer tray that he was hooked, slack-jawed as a picture emerged from the ether.
In his childhood, Patterson asked for cameras for every subsequent Christmas, finally getting his first several years after that darkroom incident. As a young teenager, he shot pictures of junior high and high school sports, first for fun and then for publication in the local shopper. While he didn’t get paid, the publisher bought Patterson all the photo paper he needed, and another local business owner offered use of a darkroom and the knowledge of how to make prints.
Thus started a photojournalism career that has spanned nearly 50 years, and seen Patterson reinvent his methods while shooting some of Missouri’s and the country’s biggest news and sporting events. His career included time at the Columbia Daily Tribune and later as a freelance photographer and picture editor for multiple magazines in Mid-Missouri, as well as working with corporate clients of all sizes, such as the Roots ‘N’ Blues ‘N’ BBQ Festival, the Associated Press and Major League Baseball.
Known by colleagues for his ability to capture the mood and spirit of a story, journalists who have worked with Patterson credit him with making them better storytellers. As an adjunct professor with the Missouri School of Journalism (his alma mater), he also shares his wisdom with the next generation of the profession.
Orlin Wagner has been a photojournalist since 1968. In the 50-plus years he has worked, his career has included everything from contributing to FAA reports as an industrial photographer for Cessna Aircraft to covering sports championships of all flavors and major tragedies like the Oklahoma City Bombing.
A University of Kansas graduate, Wagner first made a name for himself as a reliable freelance photographer working in the region surrounding Kansas City, contributing photography to the Kansas City Times and The Star for more than 20 years. In that time, he was also a freelancer for the Associated Press, working on contract for the organization’s Kansas City Bureau and becoming the de facto face of the AP for smaller towns and communities where he was dispatched.
Patient and helpful, Wagner had the unique ability to be laid back but somehow always in the right place at the right time to get the right photo that perfectly encapsulated the story being told. When he became an AP staffer in 1997, Wagner was known for helping the agency’s member newspapers cover major stories, assisting other photographers with processing film and meeting deadlines, and even giving career advice to new photojournalists.
Earlier in his career, Wagner also spent time as an associate faculty member with Baker University in Baldwin City, Kan. and as the Jayhawker yearbook advisor at KU. Since May 2021, Wagner has been enjoying retirement with his grandchildren and pets and the occasional photo excursions to Africa and Alaska.
