For half a century, the Mountain Workshops have helped shaped visual storytelling for countless numbers of individuals, and this year, we celebrate our anniversary! Join us in historic Maysville, Kentucky, on Monday, Oct. 20 to honor this legendary experience.
DINNER ONLY
WORKSHOPS PARTICIPANT + DINNER
Come join us as we celebrate our 50th anniversary on Monday, Oct. 20 at 6:00 PM EDT and consider staying an extra day to witness our annual "hat-draw" and opening ceremony of the Maysville Mountain. All proceeds after expenses will go towards the Mountain Workshops Vision Endowment Fund.
MONDAY, OCT. 20
An evening of celebration that honors the past and looks forward to the future of visual journalism education.
COX BUILDING
Our 2025 Mountain headquarters THE COX BUILDING 2 E. Third St Maysville, KY 41056
6:00 PM EASTERN
Festivities include Hors d'oeuvres and cocktails, comments, the premiere of "Through the lens of time" and strapping on the ole' feedbag of a classic Kentucky style dinner.
THE EVENING EMCEE
One of the original lab staff directors Jonathan Newton, showing how a light table can provide fill light at the 1997 Russellville, Ky. Workshops will be your host.
SPECIAL GUESTS
Former Mountain director Mike Morse, blessing the lab staff at the 1984 Albany, Ky. Workshop, will speak and other legendary dignitaries are rumored to make comments.
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
Longtime friend and coach of the Mountain, David LaBelle, getting a kiss from Jack Corn at the 1996 Workshop in Cambellsville, Ky. will discuss the role Mountain has had on community and industry.
Celebration Dinner
Join us Monday for a special evening celebrating half a century of Mountain love.
Oct. 20
Cocktail + Dinner
All proceeds after expense will go to the Mountain Workshops Vision Endowment.
$50
Cocktail Hour
Hors d'oeuvres and cash bar.
6:00 PM
THIS EVENT HAS LIMITED SEATS • RESERVE YOURS TODAY
DINNER ONLY
WORKSHOPS PARTICIPANT + DINNER
LOCAL HOTEL OPTIONS
There are three hotels within walking distance from the celebration dinner. The faculty and staff are being lodged at the French Quarter Inn. The Lee House Inn and the Moon River Bed and Breakfast are also located in downtown Maysville. The greater Maysville area has many charming AirBNB options worth exploring and the Hampton Inn and a more budget friendly Quality Inn are just outside of town.
TRAVEL
If you are flying in for the event, the nearest airport is Cincinnati, Ohio. (CVG) and is 66 miles from Maysville or Lexington, Ky. (LEX) which is 72 miles away. It is always worth looking at other airport options to perhaps find better prices or connections but it can come with double the driving distance. You can consider Louisville, Ky. (SDF) at 137 miles from our headquarters. Another option would be Columbus, Ohio (CMH) at 127 miles away.
A brief history of the Mountain
Since 1976, the Mountain Workshops has been gathering stories of our shared history. This unprecedented visual collection of a rich past reveals the everyday life of the people and places that make our Commonwealth unique and truly, one-of-a-kind.
1976
WKU students and faculty member David Sutherland (left) gather for a group photo while documenting one room school houses in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. This off-campus learning event laid the foundation to what has become an annual educational event for the past 50 years.
1979
Three short-years later, the off-campus learnign opportunity became a fall tradition at WKU as coaches from across the country began to come and share their knowledge with participants. In Clairfield, Tenn. students sit through a public critique of their work from Art Goldsmith, photo editor of Popular Photography Magazine.
1983
The Workshops continued to grow in popularity but still held on to its traditional roots of documenting people and their lives in rural communities focusing specifically on the Cumberland Gap region of Kentucky and Tennessee. The workshop took on the name Mountain People's Workshop as the locals of this region were known locally as Mountain People. Participant Gary Hairlson worked this scene in Morgantown, Ky.
1993
Being a few years ahead of the "multimedia" movement, the production team began collecting audio from participants and subjects to create end-of-week audio slide shows highlighting the images from the community.
1997
This year marked a historic shift as the Mountain Peoples Workshop name was changed to The Mountain Workshops as a result of a Knight Foundation grant that allowed us to scan negatives on location and offer our first year of the picture editing and book production workshop that coincided with the now 22-year-old photojournalism workshop. A book from each community has been published since then and shared with the town and the photojournalism community.
2002
The Mountain continued leading the industry in new technology use by turning the Glasgow Ky. year into our first all-digital camera workshop pushing the photographer, the picture editor, the coaches and our staff to the cutting edge of this new form of storytelling device. Because of the immediacy of this technology, we created our first live website from the community posting our images and stories online for the world to see.
2006
After 30 years of service, Mountain workshops director Mike Morse handed over the reigns to James Kenney, a WKU faculty member and Mountain Workshops attendee since 1993.
2007
The Mountain continued to flex its cutting-edge muscle by offering the first video workshop in 2007 in Danville, Ky. followed by time-lapse photography and digital story-telling workshops starting in 2013 - 2019.
2015
The Mountain turned 40-years-old in Frankfort, Ky., the state capitol, as its enrollment continued to accelerate making a shared experience at the workshop with visual storytellers from all walks of editorial creators from across the country and the world.
2020
The COVID epidemic may have shut-down the world but the Mountain continued strong offering a one-day long three lecture series ZOOM seminar on the state of the industry capturing a world-wide audience. In 2021 university travel was still being restricted so we held a remote nation-wide shooting workshop where participants worked in their own hometown and were coached remotely.
2025
In May the location for the 50th annual Mountain Workshops was announced to be held in historic Maysville, Ky.
KEEP THE LEGACY ALIVE
You want to help add to our scholarship opportunities and keep tuitions as low as possible so more visual storytellers have an opportunity to attend the Mountain? Your tax exempt donations can be given here!
DONATE TO OUR MOUNTAIN VISION ENDOWMENT FUND
In 1976, two Western Kentucky University faculty members took a dozen photojournalism students into eastern Kentucky and Tennessee to document the 11 remaining one-room schools there.
The teachers didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of an annual trek designed to sharpen students' skills while documenting small towns in Kentucky and sometimes Tennessee.
Over time the effort morphed into the Mountain Workshops — four concurrent workshops that fine-tune photography, picture-editing, video story telling, and digital story telling skills of college students and mid-career professionals in an intensive weeklong effort that documents a town and its surrounding countryside.
WKU faculty members are joined by volunteer shooting, editing and writing coaches who travel here from across the country — from The New York Times, from the Los Angeles Times, from National Geographic and a host of other venues — to guide trainees and produce content for a photo exhibit, several multimedia productions, and a book of 100-plus pages.
From their humble beginnings of travel with cameras, black-and-white film and sleeping bags, workshops staff now spend months planning and setting up sophisticated facilities with state-of-the-art computing and digital imaging equipment.
Below is a list of the communities that have been documented since the Mountain began. A book has been published every year starting in 1997. Our recent online archive of the past 20 years is no longer available online, we apologize for this change in our website.