Photographer Melvin Grier covered politics, sports and 2001's civil unrest among many other topics during his 33-year career with the Cincinnati Post. He started at the newspaper in 1974 and described himself as self-taught.
"I tended to think I had an advantage in that my approach to photography was my own and not influenced by formal education," he says. Grier says he had very little experience shooting some of the assignments, but his experience walking Cincinnati's streets helped.
Grier's work with the Post not only took him on assignment in Cincinnati, it also took him around the world, traveling to Cuba, Kenya, Vietnam and elsewhere, capturing the lives of people there.
His retirement date of Dec. 31, 2007 was the same day the Post ceased publication. But Grier didn't cease photography. He has created popular bodies of work, including his series of photographs of jazz musicians and his one man show, White People: A Retrospective, at the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
Now, dozens of his photos are on display in a retrospective exhibition It Was Always About the Work, at the Weston Art Gallery.
On Cincinnati Edition, we discuss his long career and his retrospective at the Weston Art Gallery.
Guests:
- Melvin Grier, photographer
- Dennis Harrington, director, the Weston Art Gallery
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