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When Charles Brill was a photographer for the Minneapolis Tribune, he won several awards and participated in such first-person stories as a 50-mile hike (after a challenge to the country from President John F. Kennedy) and a day at a nudist camp ("they participated native-style," the editor's note said).
But the assignment that might have had the deepest effect was documenting a July 4th wacipi, or powwow, in the early 1960s on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Inspired by his visit, he returned again and again to take thousands of black-and-white photographs that eventually were edited into a 1974 book, "Indian And Free." It was updated in the early 1990s as "Red Lake Nation: Portraits of Ojibway Life."
Services were held June 28 in Michigan for Brill, who spent 30 years teaching photojournalism at Kent State University in Ohio. He died June 25 from complications following a fall from a ladder while painting his house in Paradise, Mich. He was 71.
In an October 1958 article in the magazine of the National Press Photographers Association, Brill was called the "first University of Minnesota School of Journalism graduate to specialize in photojournalism."
He joined the Tribune in 1958, and left for Kent State in 1964.
"I admired his ability to teach the things that mattered in a picture -- that a photo can transcend two dimensions" and capture a bit of the personality of the subject, said Gary Harwood, a former student who is the Kent State photographer.
Brill had a saying that he wanted his students to get "on the inside of inside," Harwood said. Photojournalists have access to places that most people won't ever see, Brill would say, so it's not good enough just to be invited in. He expected his students to see something beyond the ordinary and to capture a special quality inside that invitation-only world, Harwood said.
Jan Brill said her husband was especially proud that two photojournalists who had been his students won Pulitzer prizes -- John Paul Filo in 1971 for coverage of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, during war protests, and J. Ross Baughman in 1978 for coverage of guerrilla activity in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
In addition to his wife, survivors include a son, Mark of Tucson, Ariz.; daughters Lisa of Cleveland and Amy Selke of Boston, and six grandchildren.
Trudi Hahn is at thahn@startribune.com.
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