“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange

Laura L Camden is a professor at Northern Arizona University (NAU), where she teaches courses in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. Her creative and research interests focus on international photojournalism, American studies ethnography, and editorial photography. She is the author of the 2006 photographic book Mennonites in Texas: The Quiet in the Land (Texas A&M University Press), and her photographic archive is housed at The University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History. She has been an award-winning professional photojournalist for the past 25 years, covering such events as the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush for Reuters News Pictures in Washington, DC. and Austin, Texas. Before coming to NAU in 2007, she taught at the University of Montana as a visiting professor (2000-1) and The University of Texas at Austin as an adjunct professor (2001-2005). In 2012 Camden directed multiple documentary projects with her students at the Mainpat Tibetan Refugee Settlement in northern India. Many of these projects including “Voices of Mainpat: The Long Journey” can be viewed on this site under the tab MORE, above.

Camden was invited by the University of Wollongong in NSW, Australia in 2014 to teach photojournalism classes for a semester and help set up a faculty and student journalism exchange program with NAU. The collaborative curriculum from this exchange was published by the United Nations in a book titled, Teaching Journalism for Sustainable Development:New Syllabi.

More recently, Camden self-published a book of photographs compiled from her study abroad trips with students to Cuba: “Viva Cuba!:Photographic Collection 2014-2019,” 2021.

To contact Laura, please send an email.