A few months ago, Clayton Steward packed all his belongings in his Jeep and drove west, joining The Park Record’s staff as its new photographer, sight unseen.
His first assignment? A hot air balloon ride over Heber Valley.
“I was very proud of myself as being, new guy on the scene, here’s my photos, here’s my first take,” he said. “There were photos in that that I was like, ‘OK, I’m glad I didn’t totally blow this assignment for the first time.’”
And his work hasn’t slowed down. Steward has kept pace with the never-ending stories to tell in Summit and Wasatch County, despite them being “small towns.”
But Steward is no stranger to small towns — in fact, that’s what attracted him to the position in Park City to begin with.
“I’m from a small town called Montrose, Missouri. It’s south of Kansas City, about an hour. … I went to the second-smallest high school in the state of Missouri at the time, graduated with nine people in a public school,” he said with a laugh.
He grew up on a 40-acre farm, over the years home to row crops, horses, cattle and even raccoon hunting dogs, whom his dad raised and trained.
“A very noisy farm to grow up on — it wasn’t peaceful in the traditional sense,” he said.
After graduating from high school, he left as a college basketball recruit, a power forward, for the University of Saint Mary. It was there, working on a Bachelor’s degree in digital communications, that he decided to pursue photojournalism. But he’d always loved photography.
“Looking back now, we have a lot of photos of me as a kid with a point-and-shoot in my hands,” he remembers. “There’s one picture of me at the zoo, carrying a camera around.”
Trained in journalism first, a college mentor connected him with Francine Orr, longtime photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times, who recommended he go to graduate school. So, he applied to the University of Missouri, or “Mizzou.”
“Part of the Mizzou method is hands on. Everything you do is going to be hands on, not through the student lens, but through the community lens,” Steward said. “So you’re doing reporting that people living in the town are actually going to be reading.”
Accepted, he completed a Master of Arts in Journalism, with an emphasis in photojournalism, in two years, earning real-world experience at The Columbia Missourian, a student-run daily newspaper.
School prepared him well to join The Park Record as the only full-time photographer and photo editor, managing a team of freelancers and juggling the image requests of the reporters.
“There’s so much opportunity here,” Steward said. “There’s so much opportunity for me to drive the visual storytelling that we’re doing, and I think that’s been the most exciting part. I feel like being someone right out of school, you don’t get that at other papers.”
The style he brings to the visuals at The Park Record are “slow and methodical,” he said. He considers himself a documentary photographer. Ideally, he spends months with a subject, capturing the moment as authentically as possible.
“Those are the stories that I get really excited about because, A, they’re challenging, and B, they’re so authentic. When you start spending so much time with someone, their mask falls away, they start to not notice the camera,” he said. “I just love getting to be like, ‘Can I come back tomorrow? Can I come back later? Can I come back this evening?’”
A lot of that strategy comes from his time at Mizzou, when he shadowed subjects for his master’s research focused on the ethics of photojournalism for healthcare stories.
“I’m really interested in any story that is very vulnerable in subject matter, where someone is letting you into their life in really important and tough moments,” he said. “I think when it comes to healthcare stories and healthcare communication, sometimes it gets hard when it’s coming top-down, when it’s like, ‘This is what the doctors say. This is what this health organization says,’ compared to when you flip the hierarchy upside down and you say, ‘This is what it’s like for a person with X to live in this community.’”
In addition to this on-the-ground photo coverage, Steward also brings his writing background to the job.
“I think writing is important because it’s the foundation for all reporting,” he said. “There’s the art side of photography, where you can put two photos together and you can create a third meaning — it’s called the third effect — but you’re straying away from the journalistic tradition of relying on captions for information. Someone without captions, they can get to a totally different place.”
More than just describing what’s happening in an image, Steward said he sometimes likes to include a short quote in his captions. And sometimes he writes his own stories to accompany his photo coverage: Grant Fisher’s training for Paris, toxic weed pulling, opera in the park, baby olympics and back-to-school scenes are some of the topics he’s covered himself for the paper, and there are plenty more ideas brewing.
And in each instance, he looks for ways to get behind the masks of his subjects, when they don’t realize he was there.
“When it goes to print, … they say, ‘Oh my gosh. When did you take this photo? I don’t even remember.’ That’s my goal anytime I’m doing an in-depth piece,” he said. “That’s what I’m looking for in Park City.”
To reach out with any visual story ideas, email Steward at csteward@parkrecord.com.
