Meet Ken Hassell
Monday, November 10 2008
by Frank Stasio and Olympia Stone
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Ken Hassell wasn’t a good student growing up in Chicago. So instead of college, he embarked on a different kind of education. He spent ten years working a series of jobs-- from driving a taxi in Chicago to working on assembly lines, and even delivering circulars door to door in San Francisco. But while he was busy making a living, Ken always had an interest in documenting the things around him. He eventually settled on photography as his medium of choice. In 1990, he moved to Raleigh and began photographing coal-mining communities in Appalachia, a subject he has been focused on ever since. Today he is an associate professor in the Art Department at Elon University. He joins host Frank Stasio to talk about invisible laborers and the importance of empathy in documentary photography.
