Julia Dean

"My passion lies in educating people through my photography," says Julia Dean '78, social issues photojournalist, teacher and director of Julia Dean and Associates, Marina del Rey, California. "I can show people how other people live."

Dean has traveled to more than 20 countries as photographer for relief groups and magazines. She is also the author and photographer of A Year on Monhegan Island, a children's book. She began her career as an apprentice to photographer Berenice Abbott, and was also a photo editor for the Associated Press in New York. Attracted to the style of photojournalism developed during the Depres-sion, which focused on documenting history as it happened, Dean says, "I felt the whole social issue idea come up for me. I wanted to make a contribution." Since then, she has reported on the last of the true American general stores, and the life of the people on the island of Corfu.

During a trip to India and Malaysia, she turned her attention to child labor. "I was disturbed by seeing children in the workforce," she says. Deciding that documenting the entire issue alone would take too long, she has pulled together a team of photographers, each assigned to cover a portion of the problem in the world. Dean plans a national exhibit of the photographs; a series of stories on the project by cable network MSNBC is currently in the works.

Dean says: "It's a moment, an emotion; it's light or shadows; it's something hard to look at, something beautiful to look at. . . . Knowing what will make a good photograph is hard to describe."

Socially concerned photographs by Julia Dean, from top: Guatemala, 1988; village in south India, 1993; leper colony, India, 1993; from a Lifeline Express story about a train converted to a traveling hospital that provides free medical care.