Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

Jeff Stack is the coordinator of the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation and legislative coordinator of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, both organizations that lobby against the death penalty in Missouri and the United States. Stack is a principled dissenter of capital punishment. “I recognize the preciousness of every human being in our world – of every life, really,” he says. “I feel some fire and righteous indignation that people are being murdered in our name.”

I did this project for my Picture Story and Photographic Essay class as a first step toward my professional project that I plan to do on capital punishment. Jeff is one of the corner stones of the anti-death penalty and the peace movements in Columbia, and he knows everything there is to know about the issue. I figured that he would be a great person to start my research, and he has been incredibly helpful so far.

However, I’m not yet entirely happy with the outcome of the project that I did on Jeff. I wish I would have had more time to spend with him, but because of MPW two weeks ago and having to catch up with class work afterward, it was really difficult to dedicate the time that this character profile would have needed before the deadline for the class yesterday. Jeff’s schedule in the week that we worked together didn’t include much actual anti-death penalty activities, so that the audio and the images in the slideshow don’t complement each other too well. I hope that I can work with Jeff a little more in the coming weeks to add another dimension to that.

Here’s a short video that I did on Paul Dickerson, the brewer of the newly opened Broadway Brewery, a brew pub here in Columbia. I’m still experimenting with the proper export settings in the editing software, so forgive me if the quality is not too good or the loading times are too long!