Photojournalism center to be created at MU

COLUMBIA — MU’s School of Journalism will soon be home to the new Angus and Betty McDougall Center for Photojournalism.

The center, funded by an endowment established by the McDougalls, will be dedicated in September with the Donald W. Reynolds Institute during the school’s centennial celebration.

Angus McDougall was chair of the school’s photojournalism sequence and director of the Pictures of the Year competition for a decade.

McDougall said he wanted to create the center to give photojournalism the recognition and accessibility that fine art photography currently receives.

“To put it simply, I just wanted my magazine and newspaper photographs to have a permanent home and access to researchers and students,” he said.

The gift will also create the Missouri Photojournalism Archive, an online collection of photojournalistic work, said David Rees, photojournalism chair and the center’s director, in an e-mail.

The archive will work in collaboration with Pictures of the Year International, College Photographer of the Year and the Missouri Photo Workshop to make those archives available online. In addition, the center will archive the work of individual photographers, the first being Angus McDougall.

In the future, MU alumni and friends could be added by invitation to the archives, according to an MU news release.

Space in MU’s Lee Hills Hall is being renovated to house the new center.