University Daily Kansan, April 15, 1983
Page 9
Prize-winning photographer returns to KU
By DIANE LUBER Staff Reporter
The room darkens, and the slide projector clicks on.
A picture of dark eyes in a wrinkled face peer through a gap created by a chain lock on a door.
Click.
A PICTURE OF an elderly couple embracing on a Miami beach lights up the screen.
The audience laughs when a picture appears of an old woman wrapped in a Budwiser beach towel stepping out with her walker on the streets of South Florida.
So begins the slide presentation of the photo-essay that won Bill Frakes, a KU journalism alumnus, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award this year.
Frakes, who left the University of Kansas in December 1979 to go to work for the Miami Herald, yesterday showed slides of photographs he had taken of the South Beach section of Miami to a small audience in Flint Hall.
SOUTH BEACH was the oldest, poorest urban renewal project in Miami. Frakes said yesterday. And its first students have worked on working-class Jewish refugees.
"It if they didn't flee the czar, they fled Hitler," he said.
The city of Miami declared a moratorium on construction in South Florida.
"We went in to see what nine years of government interference and inaction had done to the area," he said.
ually come in with condominiums and hotels, he said.
The eight-page photo essay Frakes did with a Miami Herald reporter brought the plight of South Beach residents to the attention of many.
"THE BUILDING moratorium was lifted four months ago," he said.
His presentation also included slides of photographs he has taken that won him this year's National Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award.
The National Press Photographers Association will give Frakes a camera and $1,000 as part of the award at a benefit event on Saturday, June 6 at week at the University of Missouri.
Gary Mason, associate professor of journalism, taught the photography classes Frakes took at KU during the spring and fall semesters of 1979.
"I didn't teach him what," Mason said. "He already had it."
BUT FRAKES insisted that he had learned from Mason.
"He didn't teach me how to take photographs," Frakes said. "I'm probably not any better technically than I am with my school. But he taught me how to see."
In the early 1970s, Frakes had taken three photography classes while studying economics at Arizona State University, he said. But he was on his way to becoming a lawyer and, in preparation, graduated from Arizona
He went to law school at the University of Mississippi for two years before he decided that law was not for him.
State with a degree in economics in 1976.
So he left, not knowing exactly what he was going to do. Guided by his childhood aspiration to be a journalist, he gathered pictures he had taken in Arizona State.
AFTER LOOKING at the photographs, Mason assured him that the couple was in love.
While at KU, Frakes won awards for picture he took for the University of Chicago.
whatever Mason saw in Frakes' pictures must have been evident to recruiters from the Miami Herald when spring semester started, or bring spring semester to find summer interns.
They called Frakes and offered him the internship less than a week after their interview with him — an interview Frakes almost gave up in order to take pictures of an explosion at a penitentiary that day.
At the end of his internship, they offered him a job upon his graduation.
"JUST ABOUT anything that's nasty."
"JUST ABOUT anything that nasty domestically, I get to go to," he said.
Frakes has covered riots in Miami, including the racial riots this winter in Overtown. He has been shot at and, as he did last month, stabbed with a broken beer bottle.
His less violent assignments are no less challenging, he said.
This photograph of a Hassidic Jew is one of many in Bill Frakas' essay on South Beach, Florida. Frakas graduated from KU in 1979.
"I might have to talk to John Riggins and Ronald Reagan in the same week," he said.
In those cases, Frakes said, he doesn't regret the years he spent getting his economics degree or working on his law degree.
Closing-time beauty measured by students
By DAVID POWLS Staff Reporter
Yes, the women really did get prettier at closing time. And so did the men.
But after midnight, those perceptions changed abruptly.
Undergraduate researchers in the psychology department made those observations last week at the Pladium, 901 Mississippi St., where men and women were asked to rate the opposite sex on a scale of one to
MILLARD MANN, a social psychology graduate student who helped direct the research, said that people were represented in the study.
"This either says something about the Pladmium, the men or both," Mann said. "People knew that as closing time approached their chances of meeting someone of the opposite sex diminished.
"They knew they had to move it." Tom Hill, another social psychologist graduate student who helped direct the research, said the undergrads. "We have sections and took turns collecting data from each of those sections to
get a cross-section of people's perceptions.
The men researchers asked men and the women asked women what they thought of the opposite sex when the bar opened, at the band's intermission, at 40 minutes before the bar closed, after the bar closed, Hill said.
"IN THIS first study, we saw a trend reflect lower ratings after closing time," he said. "This might have been because people really went to see the band instead of trying to meet someone.
"Or they may have been too drunk to remember what people looked like."
Mann said, "After closing time, the goal of dancing with someone or meeting someone dimished and people gave up."
Hill said there had been a study in 1979 called "Don't the Girls Get Prettier At Closing Time."
That study's researchers did not collect data about perceptions of attractiveness after closing time, he said.
THE THEORY established in 1979 was that as closing time approaches, people try to reestablish the freedom to meet people." he said.
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