My Three Decades with the Anchorage Daily News

Presented by Jim Lavrakas

Monday, November 1, 2021

7:00 pm

Zoom link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/74909264555   (meeting link opens at 6:45pm)

Jim Lavrakas was an Anchorage Daily News photographer for 30 years. Over his three decades at the newspaper, his assignments encompassed an astonishing diversity of news, northern people,remote places, and wilderness lifestyles.

He learned photography and darkroom skills from his father at the age of 12. Growing up in the dairy farm country of Massachusetts, he started his career in photojournalism when he was 14 years old, as a stringer for the Lowell Sun. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English, he moved to Alaska in 1975 to find newspaper work. Working a variety of jobs, from “gandy dancer” on the Alaska Railroad to camera salesman, he talked his way into a job at the Daily News in January 1981.

He was awarded the 1988 Joseph Costa Award from Ball State University for taking the best courtroom photograph in the nation. In 1989 he was part of the Daily News team effort that won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for a series of stories, called “A People in Peril”, dealing with alcoholism and self-destructive behavior of Alaska Natives.

He retired from the newspaper in October 2008, and moved to Homer in 2010, where he ran Skookum Charters, a saltwater eco-tour business, until August 2013 when he took over as the executive director of the Homer Chamber of Commerce.

In 2012 he published his first book, Snap Decisions: My 30 Years as an Alaska News Photographer, a photo memoir of his time at the Anchorage Daily News. You can learn more about Jim from his website.