A revised version of adulthood

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

From the time I was very small, my mother had rules for my life.

1. You can't get married until you're 32.
2. College is not optional.
3. Get a master's degree immediately after college (because once you get into the workforce, you won't go back, my mother says).
4. No tattoos.
5. No living in California (because they're weird out there, so says my mother).
6. Backpack through Europe.

It goes on and on, and occasionally she makes one up that I know wasn’t on the list when I was 10. And while other parents' desires for their children's lives were perhaps less specific, they reflect the middle-to-upper-class ideal that young people should go to college and establish careers before “settling down” with a spouse, a mortgage and kids.

I think my peers and I bought into this hook, line and sinker.

The Missourian recently asked, Why are Americans taking longer to grow up? Apparently, we young'uns are still dependent on our parents for money and housing and are making our parents wait longer for grandchildren. This makes us an economic strain in hard times on the older generation, or something.

I say just because I don’t have kids and am still in school at the ancient age of 24 doesn’t mean I’m not a real grown-up. Adulthood is simply being defined differently these days.

It’s true that my parents still pay for my car and I’m still on my father’s health insurance plan. It’s also true that I’m putting myself through graduate school with teaching assistantships and loans (also known as mounds of soul-crushing debt).

When societies demand that young people make a small horde of money before becoming truly independent, the age of marriage rises. Stephanie Coontz wrote in "Marriage, a History" that "In England between 1500 and 1700 the median age of first marriage for a woman was twenty-six, which is higher than the median age for American woman at any point during the twentieth century."

The expectations of young adults amongst the commoners during this period were not unlike what seems to be expected today. Although college wasn’t on the menu in 1500, according to Coontz, the ability to independently support children and a separate household was. Not to mention many of the trade guilds required apprentices to remain single, so if a man wanted to learn a trade to support a wife and family, he would have to wait.

There are other pressures on today’s youth that contribute to this supposed delayed adolescence. First, the economy has been rather miserable since 2001 and went from bad to worse in 2008. With unemployment hovering above nine percent, jobs are scarce for young people with thin resumes.

Furthermore, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed in the past 20 years — it has well outpaced the rate of inflation. My mother, who wrote these rules for me, put herself through the University of Michigan in the late '70s working for $2.35 an hour at a gift shop, which along with an $800 scholarship from the state of Michigan and working as an resident-hall assistant for room and board, was enough to pay the $660 per semester to attend school full time.

This is simply not possible these days. Without my parents and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, in addition to the $7-an-hour job I worked at Shakespeare’s Pizza as an undergrad, I wouldn’t have made it through college, much less a master’s degree.

And so here I am: 24-years-old, single, childless, overeducated and on the brink of homelessness and unemployment (or so I think on my cynical days when my job hunt doesn’t go well). My mother was married and gainfully employed at my age.

Maybe I’m not an adult by the most prevalent societal standards of adulthood, but society is changing. It has given us a revised standard of adulthood.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her mother, Carol J. Homkes, lives in Georgetown, Ky., and is a manufacturer’s representative in the gift industry.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Friday, June 25, 2010.

Would you go in front of the lens?

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Would you, dear reader, let a photographer into your life?

Considering Columbia has been over-saturated with journalists since the establishment of the School of Journalism in 1908, many of you have probably been photographed by the Missourian or an eager student.

But I speak of allowing a photographer to have deeper access to the private moments of your life. Would you truly allow a photographer access to your private, intimate moments — for weeks or months at a time?

And if you would, why?

I’ve been asking myself — along with people who have been photo subjects — these questions for the past five months.

I’ve been researching the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop, which took place in September 2009 in Festus and Crystal City and the people who let these workshop photographers into their lives.

The workshop serves as a microcosm for the documentary photojournalistic experience. In one week, a photographer must find a photo story and then spend morning until night with their subject.

As a journalist, I ask to see the most intimate, emotional and sometimes difficult moments of my subject’s life — all in the name of getting the story.

As a photojournalist, this is an even bigger undertaking.

A writer does not need, per se, to bear witness to these moments — for them to be recalled in an interview is enough. But a photojournalist must view and capture these moments in real time.

I was told ad nauseam throughout my education, “People want to have their story told,” but I was suspicious that this was not the case; As much as I loved journalism— I suspected that the profession was infected with a light strain of opportunistic voyeurism.

The nine photo story subjects I interviewed all described the experience as being awkward at first. One of my interviewees, Annette Bauman, said multiple times that she’s “not a picture person.”

Most said that it became less awkward as the week went on, as they became accustomed to their photographer and being in front of the lens.

Jason and Sara O’Shea, who homeschool their four children, were photographed during the workshop by photographer Michele Kraus. The O’Sheas said the experience became a family-like affair.

“I think it very quickly stopped feeling like someone was at our house doing a documentary,” Jason O’Shea said. “It more felt like we had a family member over that we don’t get to see a lot, so she wanted to take a lot of pictures ... I know that it sounds silly, she (Kraus) was only here three or four days, but it was almost like she was more of a little sister and she was just taking pictures of family.”

Jason O’Shea thought the photos that were taken by Kraus were “phenomenal.”

“They capture what our life is really about,” O’Shea said. “I guess in a way (the photos) made a difference because I realized that when I look at those pictures, they really do capture a lot of what is important to me and that helped me to realize, I guess, that the direction our lives are going is the direction I want them to go. ...I felt the pictures were, to a great extent, an affirmation of the fact that our life is really what I want it to be.”

Private moments were also photographed. Laverne Austin, a resident of Crystal City who lives with a rare form of multiple sclerosis was photographed by John Liau during the workshop.

“John didn’t mind coming in the bedroom,” Austin said. “I’d be getting ready to put something on and the he’d be with his camera going, click click click. I’d say, ‘How long have you been here? I’m going to tell on you to your fiancé.’”

To me, the most amazing story I heard was that of the Bauman family. Annette and Josh Bauman have two sons, Jackson and Kade.  Kade, who is now 2 years old, could not support his head, crawl or talk because of multiple medical conditions including epilepsy, cortical vision impairment and hypotonia. The Baumans allowed their photographer, Julia Robinson, to visit the emergency room with them when  Kade had a seizure.

“It was cool of Julia to come to the ER with us,” Josh Bauman said. “Trips to the hospital with Kade are intense. She didn’t back down, she went right with it. ...We thought it was going to get difficult when we went to the ER because hospitals are picky — we thought it may get hairy, but they didn’t mind. ...We wouldn’t have agreed to do it if there was going to be something off limits.”

I’ve been photographed by classmates as a class exercise, but I wonder every time I send a Missourian photographer out on assignment if I would say yes to a photographer in a similar situation. If it was my nine-year-old brother in the hospital, would it be OK with me?

What it comes down to for me is this: The power of these stories is extraordinary. They have the power to inform, to enlighten, to show and examine the nature of human emotion. One could (and I have) debate the measurable effect of these stories but I believe that revealing a common humanity is the highest cause that could exist. Photo stories are unique in their ability to do this.

If my story had the capacity to exhibit something so true, how could I possibly say no?

What would you say?

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. She volunteered twice for the Missouri Photo Workshop, and she is weeks away from completing her master’s project about the people who were photographed during the 2009 MPW in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Friday, June 18, 2010.