(May 7, 2007) - Photographer Howard G. Buffett told a gathering at the University of Southern Calfornia’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2004 that “A well-presented image needs no explanation.”
Back then the occasion was a talk about his book of photographs, “Tapestry Of Life,” which represents 10 years of Buffett’s photography documenting more than 40 international trips to photograph the struggles of people trying to survive in the Third World.
Funding that many foreign trips is not a burden for Buffet, the adult son of industrialist Warren Buffett. The photographer is chairman of Lindsay Manufacturing, a global leader in the manufacturing of agricultural irrigation products, and he also serves as president of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation while operating BioImages, a photography and publishing company. He’s also president of Buffett Farms, an 840-acre family farm in central Illinois and a 400-acre farm in Eastern Nebraska. So Buffett can afford to make as many photographic journeys as his calendar allows.
Which is not always the case for aspiring photojournalists, who often barely have enough money to buy photography equipment and pay their college tuition. This year, Buffett, a Nebraska native and life-long photographer, decided to do something about that.
Last week the College of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln announced a $730,000 endowed gift from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation that will be used to fund global projects by aspiring photojournalists who will travel the globe to document instances of human need. Photojournalists Joel Sartore and Thomas Mangelsen each gave an additional $10,000 to the fund, the school reports, and an additional $250,000 will be added to the effort from UNL private funds, the school says, to bring the fund’s total to $1 million.
Buffett attended the announcement and shared some of his photographs with the group. “It’s a big world out there. We want the kids to see that the world is very different from what they grew up in, in Nebraska or wherever they came from,” Melissa Lee of the Lincoln Journal Star reported Buffett said. “There's poverty everywhere, and there's nobody really doing anything about it on a larger scale. The freedoms we have, most of the world lives without them.”
Lee reports that Buffett showed pictures of a Pakistani girl with burned legs, a child in Ghana with meningitis, malaria, and malnutrition who died days after being photographed, and a young Romanian child missing a foot who sniffed glue to numb his pain. Buffett used the images as examples, Lee reported, of the type of images students “must bring back to the United States to enact foreign-policy changes.”
The UNL journalism school’s dean, Will Norton, said they hope to use the new funds to send three to five students abroad sometime in 2008, Lee reported.
Buffett has authored and published more than a half-dozen books on the human condition, wildlife, and conservation. His book “On The Edge: Balancing Life’s Resources” focused on global population and food consumption.
