John Boal Photography

Today was the last day The News & Messenger (Manassas, VA) published a newspaper.   I worked as a staff photographer at the N&M from November 2008 until I left to freelance back in March of 2012.   Before that, I was a part-time photo intern at The Potomac News (which eventually merged with the Manassas Journal-Messenger to create the N&M) from June to December of 2006.   Before that I was a 10 year-old paperboy for The Potomac News, which was then a M-F afternoon paper.   I can only speak from 7 years experience.   But what I see is this:   the biggest reason The News & Messenger closed is that those in charge were trying to fill the paper with “hyperlocal” news, when the vast majority of the county population were increasingly disinterested. While I was a staff photographer at the N&M, we received a bunch of demographic data from a company about who lived in the county, where they were from, what they preferred and, presumably, why they d

Several weeks back I got this idea to create a series of postcards to send out to the many people who helped me out in 2012.  I thought it would be fun to recreate a photo from when we worked together (either when I worked as an assistant, or as the photographer) and turn it into a holiday themed photo. I figured it'd be easy enough to re-create these photos inserting Santa into the scenario.  The first such photo I planned on re-creating was a job I worked on with Stephen Voss .  I worked as an assistant on a job where he photographed Sandra Fluke, for Newsweek , and I really loved that image.  I thought it'd be easy enough to re-create that with Santa instead. So I checked that off the list.  And I kept going down the list of people I worked for.  Combined with the clients I worked with as a photographer, the shot list started getting large.  But a funny thing happened.  It was the rudiments of what appeared to be the faux documentation of Santa Claus.  Traveling on pu