Gateway Town

On the banks of the Ohio River in northeastern Kentucky, nestled between the water's edge and the steep hills rising from it, is the city of Maysville. One of the oldest communities in the state, just shy of nine thousand people call this 'Gateway to Kentucky' home.

Spent last week in Maysville participating in the photojournalism portion of the 50th edition of Western Kentucky University's Mountain Workshops. Now that I've finally started to work off some of the sleep debt that accumulated during Mountain, it's time for a few photos.

It was a lot of late nights and early mornings, but I'll grudgingly admit that it was worth it. So much learning in so little time, in a lovely little town.

There were eighty-seven of us there to document Maysville and the surrounding Mason County in the span of a short five days. After drawing a slip of paper from a hat with a name and phone number on it, we were turned loose to chase down a story and document it.

Well not entirely loose. They divided us up into small groups of six or seven photographers and assigned each group its own photo and writing coaches. My group was lucky enough to have Jabin Botsford of the Washington Post as photo coach, and for five whirlwind days they guided, taught, and encouraged us to produce a story.

My story was the fire chief of the Maysville Fire Department, but I'll get into that in a separate post, these are just scenes from the city. Did manage to cause a bit of a scene while I was there, got detained at the power plant for about an hour while covering my story. They weren't expecting press to show up with the fire department. Jabin showed up with director of Mountain Workshops and Maysville's tourism director and got things sorted out and us released, which was just one of many learning experiences last week.