Niemeir, Frank

Hutchinson native Frank Niemeir started taking photographs in 4th grade when his older brother Ray joined a 9th grade photography club and they built a darkroom in the basement of the family home.

He was a paperboy and then he took photographs for his high school and junior college newspapers and yearbooks.

Frank was a music major (concentration in music theory, ear training and dictation) in college who got a part-time job at the hometown newspaper The Hutchinson News while in school. He worked in photojournalism for 37 years at four different newspapers.

He was a staff member of the Kansas City Times that won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Local General or Spot News Reporting for coverage of the Hyatt Regency Hotel disaster.

In addition to placing in the top three and top 10 portfolios in the Pictures of the Year contest, he is the 1987 Missouri Press Photographer of the Year and 1991 Runner-up Georgia Press Photographer of the Year. He has won First Place General News/Documentary Photo in the Pictures of the Year contest. While working for the Simi Valley Enterprise in California they won the "Best of Photojournalism" for all circulation categories from the California Newspaper Publishers Association contest.

Most recently Frank had a full-page photograph of Ansel Adams with his assistant Alan Ross featured in the book "Ansel Adams' Yosemite: The Special Edition Prints."

Frank is a 16-year volunteer and board member and former co-chair of the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, and webmaster of their domain www.photojournalism.org for 10 years. He promoted taking their photography contest digital making it the first photography contest to be held digitally while other contests were still judging prints or slides.

He has authored Frank's photo list (www.franksphotolist.com) since 1994, making it one of the web's best photo references with most recently 27,896 photojournalists listed.