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Show LANKER The Topeka in Topeka. Kanworking full time in Capital-lourna- l. sas. He'd only been the business for five years. That was just the beginning Three years later he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. And a few years after that the National Newspaper Photography Association again selected him their Newspaper Photographer of the Year. By the time he was 27. Lanker was graphics director for The Eugene Register-Guara respected Oregon newspaper. Lanker' s mercurial rise to the top of the heap in newspapers ended only when he left newspaper work to concentwo years trate on magazine ago. He started on the right foot, regularly contributing photographic stories to Life magazine and becoming a contract photographer for Sports Hustrated. Lanker was an artist before he was a photographer. An oil painting class taken at an early age proved frustrating but his creative instincts were joyously rewarded in photography in the fine arts classes at Phoenix College. There he found he could communicate through the photographic print. "The sensitivity that is so instrumental to my work right now was drawn out of me at Phoenix College. The artistic expression, the openness and a willingness to express a point of view." He combined camera and art for three years as a Phoenix Gazette staff photographer after he left Phoenix College. "But the mechanics are the easiest part," he says, and the aesthetics were second nature to him. In some ways the hardest part was the journalism. "When I left college was shooting very artistic photographs but not journalistic. That came in Topeka." Headmaster of that experience was Rich Clarkson, the newspaper photo director who made his working photographic department an photojournalism school for bright, eager young men and women willing to work day and night on their craft. To this Lanker learns and day the changes his skills and tools because he remains dedicated to showing us what he sees in life. "As human beings we do a lot of looking but very little seeing. I think photography has the ability to make us see, and I want to do it with my photographs." d, free-lanci- I on-the-j- 6 f a I I w i n t e r 1984 break |