Leslie Boorhem-Stephenson
Dallas, TX, USA
I fell in love with images sprawled out on my grandmothers floor as she identified every person I asked about in each worn frame, which was every person in every photo in a collection of hundreds. I needed to know who they were, if and how they were connected to me. Their faces sparked more questions than the image could ever answer but it still captivated me. In high school I got to explore the 35mm film and darkroom process. As the first image magically appeared on the most expensive paper I had ever bought, I caught a whiff of the same pure, feel-it-in-your-whole-body, joy that some feel in religious contexts. I went to The University of Texas at Austin to study fashion, then urban geography THEN after a somewhat typical college existential crisis introspection I remembered the excitement I felt about pictures, so I switched to photojournalism. After realizing my party-to-future-planning ratio was pretty out of order despite graduating with a decent GPA in 2009. I got my act together (after traveling Europe for a few months) and began interning, assisting, freelancing, anything I could do to learn more about making images. I interned with the Texas Tribune (Austin, Texas), contributed to The New York Times and freelanced headshots and events. Then I decided to pack up and go intern with The Victoria Advocate (Victoria, Texas) and later that year drive across the country to the Chesapeake Bay Program in Annapolis, Maryland to gain more reporting and video experience. Since, I returned to my hometown of Dallas, Texas and work in photo/video journalism, digital marketing content creation and personal reporting projects.
- Audio capture
- Audio editing
- Breaking news
- Environment
- Landscape
- Portrait
- Video capture
- Video editing