Award-winning photojournalist Melvin Grier discusses the influences and circumstances that led him to tell stories through the camera.

Over the last six decades, Melvin Grier’s work has vividly portrayed community, humanity, irony, fear, war, elegance, art, and, most notably, the unexpected. It Was Always About the Work includes nearly one hundred black-and-white and color photographs, including photographs from Grier’s most famous exhibitions and news stories. Whether covering local events, Cincinnati life, impoverished villages overseas, young future Marines on their way to their first post, or high fashion, Grier's photos are unmistakable and evocative.

Starting with his early years as a boy growing up in Cincinnati, this book tells the story of a young man who won his first photo contest while in the Air Force. He came home determined to make a career as a photographer, and, despite his lack of formal training and experience, he secured a job as a photographer for the Cincinnati Post. After the closure of the Cincinnati Post in 2007, Grier continued his career as an independent artist, featuring work in exhibitions such as “White People: A Retrospective” and “Clothes Encounters.” In collaboration with one of his journalist partners, reporter Molly Kavanaugh, Grier shares why it was always about the work.
 

Melvin Grier was a staff photographer at the Cincinnati Post for thirty-three years. Grier was named 1999 Ohio Photographer of the Year by the Queen City Chapter, the Society of Professional Journalists, and was inducted into its Greater Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame. In 2004, he was named the Taft Museum of Art Robert S. Duncanson Artist-in-Residence and inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Cincinnati Chapter Hall of Fame. Grier has also exhibited his photographs at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Kennedy Heights Arts Center, and Arts Consortium of Cincinnati. Grier, a lifelong resident of Cincinnati, lives in South Avondale with his wife Brenda. Molly Kavanaugh is a Cincinnati native and graduate of Ohio University’s College of Communication. She was a reporter at the Cincinnati Post for ten years and worked on many assignments with Melvin Grier. In 1990, she and reporter Randy Ludlow won the Queen City Chapter, Society of Professional Journalists Gerald White Memorial Award for a series of articles exposing favoritism in the Hamilton County Auditor’s office. She ended her newspaper career in Cleveland at The Plain Dealer.