Home > Metrospective

Capturing Taos
Metro student journalists tackle the Southwest in social doc trip
By Taylor Sullivan
tsulli21@mscd.edu

Photo by Lauren Conner • connerla@mscd.edu Metro senior Ian Bisio photographs the grounds surrounding the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, N.M. Ian was participating in Metro's social documentary journalism class, which not only explores different cultures but also different approaches to covering them.

We abandoned the ant-farm city, where the streets are our all-night bartenders and there is always something to drink, driving south like mad because our Denver lives wouldn’t let us slow down. We slammed into Taos like a rabid hoard of vampire bats, looking to suck the story out of anything that showed any sign of life. But Taos has thick skin, worn dry and leathery from decades of persistence: persistence of personality, of creativity, of autonomy. Taos taught us to hear the people we met, not just record what they said, to see what they looked like, not just snap a picture of them. Like its artist residents, Taos carved better journalists out of us. It chipped, cut and sanded better students and better people out of our former selves.

I crawled into the 9 a.m. critique a half hour late on the last morning of the trip. Karaoke at the hotel bar led to an ill-considered thirst for adventure the night before. The discovery of some infamous hot springs seemed like such a Cortez-inspired idea eight hours earlier. We drove, seven of us folded into a Jeep with the worst-off hugging the spare like a toilet, following a bellhop-scrawled map to the fountain of youth; it seemed so reliable at the time. We found an end to the dirt road and felt around for a trailhead on the lip of the Rio Grande Gorge. We didn’t have any lights, nothing to illuminate the death path in front of us. And as we stood frozen at the invisible course to our near future, the question hit us: what are we doing here?

Three hours of sleep later, the question still plagued me. My compatriots and I stumbled and tripped through our stories, rendering Taos as two-dimensional as the pages we were writing on, despite how hard we worked them. The pictures we took may have shown what Taos was, but we couldn’t figure out the shutter speed to show what it meant. It became clear to everyone that we owed our subjects more; that everything that we’ve learned in class did nothing to prepare us for the responsibility we now face as journalists. The Social Documentary class that led us to Taos was invaluable to this education. It force-fed us the real world, the rude awakening we needed. Taos proved that it was going to take more than just a diploma to earn our place as the world’s storytellers.