Through the lens of her camera, Annie Sakkab has captured the Syrian refugee crisis and profiled people who came to Canada in search of safety and stability, revealing stories that needed to be told. But one assignment, in particular, stands out as a pivotal point in her professional journey – an International Women’s Day project from her school days as a Loyalist College photojournalism student.
She visited Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory near Belleville, Ont., a decade ago to shoot portraits of mothers and daughters in that community – a suggestion from a First Nations elder who believed it would be a meaningful way to celebrate Indigenous women, who are disproportionately more likely to be victims of violence.
“We felt it was a way to give the women confidence and allow them to engage in something really beautiful,” Ms. Sakkab recalled in an interview.
Born and raised in Jordan, the Palestinian-Canadian photojournalist said the experience inspired her to focus on uprooted communities and displacement among marginalized groups like her own and she credits her career to Loyalist College. But as a new academic year begins, the educational institution is no longer accepting students for the postsecondary course, after shutting down one of the only dedicated photojournalism programs in Canada.
Alumni and faculty members have warned that the diploma’s demise will leave a void for aspiring photojournalists at a time when other postsecondary institutions are closing or scaling back their programs.
The college first announced its decision to close it late last year. Students who started the two-year photojournalism program in September, 2023, are allowed to complete their final year of studies and graduate next spring.
In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, Carolyn Pratt, Loyalist College’s executive director of marketing, said the cut is in response to “consistently declining student demand and enrollment trends for these programs, as well as broader trends in the media industry.” Ms. Pratt declined to comment further on queries from The Globe and did not address the question of whether the college would consider bringing back the course in future.
Loyalist grads have captured some of Canada's defining moments, such as Blair Gable's shot of Justin Trudeau's 2015 swearing-in. 'The college has made a tremendous mistake by shelving this program,' Mr. Gable says of Loyalist's move.Blair Gable/Reuters
The program, which was launched in 1985, was lauded for offering the only two-year diploma in the country dedicated solely to photojournalism. It prided itself for what it called a “triple-threat skill set” approach, which introduced students to multimedia storytelling through video production, digital photography, and news and feature writing. Over the years, it has produced some of the country’s most talented and renowned photojournalists.
Chris Donovan, who graduated from Loyalist College in 2017 and has won several accolades including a 2021 World Press Photo Award, noted the discontinuation of the course is part of a pattern over the past year that has also seen postsecondary journalism programs suspended or cancelled at Humber College, Wilfrid Laurier University, Mohawk College and the University of Regina. “Photojournalists are history makers,” he said. “Now, we’re at risk of losing history.”
Mr. Donovan criticized what he sees as a shift at postsecondary schools to focusing solely on training students for jobs that are in higher demand, instead of valuing the skill of preserving history and teaching good journalism.
Patti Gower, who has been teaching at the college since 2008, said the Loyalist program offered something unique.
“The biggest asset the program had was that we didn’t want to cookie-cut people into what we thought were photojournalists,” said Ms. Gower, who was part of the second cohort of students to graduate from the program in 1987, two years after its inception.
Ms. Gower said class sizes in the photojournalism course have significantly declined over the years. In her first year of teaching, there were approximately 75 first-year students and 45 second-year students. Today, she said, the program struggles to retain even 10 students through the first year, with the Class of 2024 seeing only five graduates.
Frank O’Connor, who has taught at the college for more than two decades, said this decline in class size over the years can be explained by several factors, including the lack of marketing for the program and a change of leadership over the years. The college often fell short in celebrating its photojournalism students, he said, which ultimately meant fewer prospective students would know about the program or the incredible work its students have gone on to do. In 2010, Mr. O’Connor tried to fill that gap by starting a blog for students and alumni to showcase their achievements.
He added that the program is ending at a particularly precarious time for journalism in Canada.
“Journalism is under attack from so many sides,” he said. “Visual journalism is such a specialty and it’s needed more than ever right now. We need people who can communicate the human condition visually, to communicate the powers of humanity in an honest and accurate way.”
For a series on Koreans displaced from the north, Hannah Yoon took this photo of Jung Won Jun, 91, at home in Seoul. Without Loyalist, 'I don't think I would have been able to carve out a freelance career as a photographer,' Ms. Yoon says.Hannah Yoon
Mr. O’Connor said the program’s advisory board had long been fighting to make the college understand the importance of keeping it. Ultimately, he said, the college had a business decision to make and it seems cutting the course was the best way they saw forward. “The light at the end of the tunnel was never ever going to be anything other than a train,” he said, adding that many, including himself, saw this day coming.
Mr. O’Connor noted that the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary has a two-year journalism diploma with a photojournalism major, but he said what Loyalist College had was unique. Its curriculum had students out on the field from the very first days of their course.
Ms. Sakkab is currently working in Jordan as a press assistant for the European Union’s Election Observation Mission. She said even though the program is gone, it will leave behind a tight-knit community of friends and colleagues.
“When you leave Loyalist and go into the world, you have a family everywhere.”
Yader Guzman
Class of 2018
“Taking the photo is often the easy part of the job,” says Mr. Guzman, a Nicaragua-born journalist who lives in Toronto. He says Loyalist taught him about the harder, more intangible skills of reporting. “Getting where you need to be and finding the right people to speak to, and then ensuring the work is done correctly and ethically, is what makes a photographer a photojournalist.”
Shelby Lisk
Class of 2019
Ms. Lisk is a journalist and filmmaker from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a short drive east from the Loyalist campus in Belleville. She credits the photojournalism course for building “a network of folks that you often run into on the job, who are always happy to help you out and offer advice.” Losing that “leaves a huge gap in the visual storytelling industry in Canada.”
Michelle Berg
Class of 2011
Ms. Berg, the only photojournalist at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, says she relies on her Loyalist training to do her own interviewing and writing, and be a mentor to others. At a time when trust in news media is low, she worries that “having young untrained photographers do a photojournalist’s job, without a reporter or senior editor to guide, is just going to compound this issue.”
Deborah Baic
Class of 1997
Ms. Baic fondly remembers her teachers and peers at Loyalist and credits them for building her skills before she worked as a freelancer and joined The Globe and Mail in 2006 as a full-time photojournalist. She is saddened that aspiring photographers will not get the same support she received throughout her studies. “I believe it’s a huge loss, not just for the photojournalist community, but for journalism in society, today and for the future.”
Donald Weber
Class of 2001
The end of the Loyalist program is especially unfortunate in “this age of the displacement of reality from the photograph,” says Mr. Weber, a photojournalist from Toronto with an associate professorship at Aalto University in Finland. “Rather than succumbing to this diminishment, Loyalist had a great opportunity to lead” when “photographic literacy is sorely needed,” he says.
Marta Iwanek
Class of 2013
More than 10 years since her time at Loyalist, Marta Iwanek, a documentarian of Ukrainian descent, says her teachers’ lessons still help her in her everyday work. “I can still hear Frank O’Connor’s voice saying: Good things happen when you talk to people. It’s a lesson I pass along to my students today as well.”
Carlos Osorio
Class of 2005
Mr. Osorio is a freelance photojournalist who spent 13 years on staff at the Toronto Star. “While in school, editors and photographers from major national publications and wire services seemed like unapproachable giants,” he says, but Loyalist changed that by bringing professionals into the classroom.
Justin Tang
Class of 2013
Mr. Tang, an Ottawa-based contributing photographer to The Canadian Press, likes how Loyalist encouraged both camaraderie between photographers and competition to do their best. To see the program decline, after 30 years of producing top-tier journalists, feels like “the loss of a place that Canadian photojournalism could call home,” he says.
Darren Calabrese
Class of 2005
From his home base in Halifax, Mr. Calabrese has reported across Atlantic Canada, and published a book last year about using photography to challenge stereotypes of his region as a land of lobsters and hardship. He says Loyalist gave him valuable lessons on “how to share stories about our communities in an honest and respectful way.”
Guillaume Nolet
Class of 2014
“It is unfortunate to see the program come to a bitter end” on top of so many other struggles in the news business, says Mr. Nolet, a freelancer based in Calgary who specializes in long-term documentary work. “However, I am hopeful that true, noble and distinct images will rise to the top and continue to circulate. This is what I learned and retained from Loyalist.”
Melissa Tait
Class of 2010
“While postsecondary isn’t the only pathway to any profession, I’m worried about what the loss of this unique program means for the future of journalism in Canada,” says photojournalist Melissa Tait, who has won three National Newspaper Awards and other accolades since joining The Globe’s visuals team in 2015. “I’m heartbroken to think of all the possible students who have lost the chance to even consider it as one pathway.”
This story was co-ordinated by Globe photo researcher Solana Cain (Loyalist College, class of 2014). With digital design and additional reporting by Evan Annett.