By EMILY NOHR
J Alumni News staff
Back row: Patrick Breen, Kyle Bruggeman and Clay Lomneth; Front: Professor Bruce Thorson
Imagine an out-of-towner approaching you while you’re shopping for groceries, filling up for gas or driving down Main Street in your small, rural community in Nebraska.
He says he’s a professor at the UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communications, making a photo documentary about life in Nebraska during the Great Recession.
He, and the three students accompanying him, would like to take photos of you and tell your story.
That’s exactly what professor Bruce Thorson, along with UNL journalism students Clay Lomneth, Kyle Bruggeman and Patrick Breen, did last summer.
“It was pretty amazing in that virtually every place that we went, after giving people the 30-second pitch on what the project was about, they were ready to open their doors, open their lives and let us document whatever we wanted to document,” Thorson said. “I expected people to be friendly, but I wasn’t expecting them to be that friendly.”
The project took all summer
Sponsored by the CoJMC, the Center for Great Plains and the Nebraska Humanities Council, Thorson and the students spent more than three months and drove almost 4,000 miles across Nebraska in a 23-foot trailer, documenting the effects of the national recession through photography.
Thorson’s plan, quickly nicknamed The Great Recession, was to find out how Nebraskans worked, played, lived and to what degree, if any, the recession had affected them.
The photographers went from Lincoln to Alliance, up to Niobrara and down to Falls City.
They photographed festivals and county fairs, a rodeo and a wedding. They photographed failing ethanol plants and closing auto dealerships as well as farmers and ranchers dealing with severe weather patterns — anything to get a better glimpse at Nebraska’s economy.
Their plan for each place they visited was to get into town, park the trailer and head down to the café or convenience store. In most places, the photographers found that the people were willing to tell their story or direct them to some who had a good story.
Things in Nebraska aren’t too bad
Economically, they found the state was in good spirits.
“We didn’t really find a recession state mostly because a lot of these small towns are really self-sufficient,” said Kyle Bruggeman, a news-editorial major. “There weren’t the tattered, dirty faces you find in Great Depression photos.”
Clay Lomneth, a senior news-editorial major, agreed.
“Nebraska wasn’t that hard hit by the recession because people were in the habit of saving money anyway,” he said. “I remember one person in Gordon, Neb., said that Gordon, Neb., has been in recession for 20 years.”
Still, the group snapped hundreds of photos, capturing what the real Nebraska looked like during the summer of 2009.
Thorson and his students’ second round of work, called “Searching for the Real Nebraska: A Photo Essay on the Great Recession — Part 2,” was showcased at the Center for Great Plains Studies from Jan. 5 to Feb. 28.
For more information on their work, go to unlphotojournalism.blogspot.com.
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