Terre Haute Mayor Brandon Sakbun
Portraits
Unwritten rights
Back in the fall, I spent part of an afternoon capturing Indiana University student Etain Prill while they worked in a campus printmaking studio. I was fortunate to have this opportunity as part of a recent issue of The Washington Post Magazine examining unwritten constitutional rights in the wake of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Writing in a concurrence to that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to also reconsider several other cases that established such unwritten rights – including the right to same-sex intimacy established in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.
IU Rhodes Scholar Elvin Irihamye
Violinist Mehran Fanoos
When Mehran Fanoos was just 7 years old, he enrolled at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and started violin lessons with Indiana University Jacobs School of Music alumnus William Harvey. Following the collapse of the Afghan government in 2021, Harvey immediately started to think of ways he could use his non-profit, Cultures in Harmony, to help Afghan musicians long-term, including connecting them with educational opportunities in other countries. With Harvey’s help, Fanoos was admitted to the Jacobs School on a full scholarship.
Indiana University President Pamela Whitten
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to make a few portraits of Indiana University President Pamela Whitten for the cover of the Indiana University Alumni Magazine. Whitten was in town for meetings before officially taking office, giving us a chance to snag her for a quick six-minute photo shoot. My colleague Chris Meyer and I worked with folks from the magazine to scout locations that morning, allowing us to quickly run her through four different “looks” near the front entrance of the Indiana Memorial Union. To light President Whitten I used a Flashpoint (Godox) XPLOR 600 fired into a Westcott 7-foot Parabolic Umbrella, a pandemic lighting gear purchase that has quickly become my go-to modifier because of the soft, wrap-around light it creates.
