Walt Calahan returns this spring to SSCC not as judge, but as speaker. His topic on May 1 is “The Myth of Thinking Outside the Box.” By this, Walt means that innovation begins and never ends by “mastering the box,” not thinking outside of it. He says we know this as photographers because the camera is our metaphoric “box”; if we don’t master the camera, none of our ideas outside of the camera will be captured successfully by the camera.
This is a viewpoint that Walt puts in practice not only in his own photography but also as a teacher of photography. As an adjunct instructor, he teaches photography for the art departments of both Stevenson University and McDaniel College. He feels that teaching helps insure a love for photography in the next generation of image makers.
Walt Calahan’s career has propelled him on adventures that demand superb mastery of the “box.” His photography assignments have taken him under the Atlantic Ocean aboard a U.S. Navy Trident submarine, down lava tube caves in Idaho, into surgical clinics for Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, canoeing the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia and the great northern woods of Canada, and being launched off the deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. As if that weren’t enough adventure, Walt has photographed such subjects as the tumult of the Romanian revolution.
Hundreds of magazines have used Walt’s work, including the National Geographic Society, Boys’ Life, Time, Fortune, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. General Electric, Yamaha, The Washington Performing Arts Society, Hillel Foundation, and Harvard Business School, among others, have commissioned him to illustrate their publications and advertisements.
Walt graduated with honors from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and then earned a Master of Liberal Arts degree from McDaniel College.