PITTSBURG, Kan. — For 26 years, he has been the man behind the lens. The name underneath thousands of photographs depicting the raising and tearing down of walls, the handshakes of presidents, the crowning of queens.

On the campus of Pittsburg State University, that is.

Half of Malcolm Turner’s workspace is a large, well-lit room on the first floor of Whitesitt Hall. When he began the job, he used a darkroom, chemical processing and cameras loaded with film.

“This is about as far as you can get from a darkroom,” said Turner, gesturing at his environment as it is today.

From the hallway, the workspace is unassuming, marked only by a sign that indicates it is a storm shelter. On the inside, the studio lights, collection of cameras and his large color prints lining the walls reveal its true purpose.

Several computer monitors -- including one that is 30 inches wide -- and an archive of about 200,000 digital images illustrate the changes Turner has seen since he began as the PSU chief photographer. The other half of Turner’s workspace is the 275 acres that comprise the university campus. In each area, inside and out, he knows exactly what position to shoot from and what camera settings to use.

“I’ve been doing it so long, it has become second nature,” he said.

Turner went all digital in 2000, and in the past year has begun shooting high-definition video using a digital single lens reflex camera. Way back when, he sent color film off to be processed and got it back in about a week. Today, he fires off 10 to 15 frames per second and can upload the shots within minutes of shooting them.

“My first camera, a Nikon, was not as high a resolution as my cellphone today,” he said.



University sights

Turner’s career has included photographing a head-and-shoulders shot of every Gorilla athlete in every sport every year for media guides and other materials -- about 100 a sport, he said. It has included shooting the construction and dedication of new buildings, and in the past decade there have been many.

“We’ve had the Bryant Health Center, the rec center, the veterans memorial, the Crimson Commons, the Polymer Center, the family and consumer sciences building and, of course, the renovations of Russ Hall,” he said, tallying them from memory. “And the work on the stadium and the ball fields. And the Weede.”

He also has captured images of several buildings that have since been torn down, such as the fire station on the corner of Joplin Street and Lindburg Avenue.

His career has spanned the terms of four university presidents: Don Wilson, John Darling, Tom Bryant and Steve Scott. It has included the famous, such as White House correspondent Helen Thomas, and the not-so-famous, such as students walking across the oval on the way to class.

And it has included the routine: Annual homecoming convocations, parades and scholarship presentations -- the “grip and grins,” as Turner calls them, when the shots don’t vary much from year to year. That, he says, is OK.

“Some things you can never change,” he said. “A grip and grin is a grip and grin. It is what it is.”



Capturing school spirit

Turner grew up in Pittsburg, attended high school at St. Mary’s-Colgan, and later took classes at PSU in 1969. He then went on to journalism school at the University of Kansas. He recalls 1971, just before his graduation, going to a Nikon symposium in Kansas City with his photography instructor.

“A guy there told us that one day we would use our cameras to shoot video,” Turner said. “We said it would never happen.” He was 20 then, 61 now.

While the bulk of his career has been at PSU, he also spent time in the newspaper business at The Chanute Tribune and in multimedia in Dallas before returning home to Pittsburg.

“We all love the work that Malcolm Turner does, but I don't believe it is possible for us, today, to fully appreciate what he has done at Pittsburg State University,” said Ron Womble, director of media relations, who has been on the Pitt campus since 1987. “Future generations of the Pitt State family will find a treasure trove of images that will tell the Pitt State story in vibrant detail.”

Among Turner’s favorite images: A photograph of Brian and Gina Pinamonti’s young triplets decked out in their PSU cheerleading uniforms, which is displayed prominently in his studio, and an image of Gus Gorilla waving a flag.

“You see this everywhere,” he said as he pulled a printout from a drawer filled with photographs. “It’s on posters, billboards, the back of the scoreboard. They just really use the heck out of that.”

“Malcolm has done more than just document events. He has captured the very spirit of the students and the people who work here,” Womble said.

Turner said he can retire anytime -- he has enough points.

“It’s hard to tell, though,” he said. “It’s part of who I am. Any photographer will tell you that, I think.”

After flipping through dozens of 100-year-old black-and-white digital images he had scanned into the archive, he concluded the interview to prepare a photo shoot of Gus Gorilla, using a D-SLR in front of a greenscreen. It will be shown on the Jungletron at Carnie Smith Stadium.

“The business has changed so much. My job has changed so much,” he said. “Moving from film, black and white to color, digital and now into video, everything is new now. I enjoy that.”