Embracing the Challenge: A Journey into International Photojournalism and Multimedia Journalism
In 2008 I was questioned if a Masters degree on international photojournalism would be interesting to achieve, in order to impulse my career. I took this as a challenge because I didn’t had much experience on my belt, at least, enough, to get the best and well paid jobs to engage on Portugal’s market.
I was slowly engaging as a pro photographer, not through journalism, since the better paid jobs I was getting were on events, publicity and documentary. But this could change everything and why not grow and become better!?
The Masters degree, on focus, was a pioneer program developed between the University of Bolton and Dalian Medical University and its college image arts, through the British council. This program was created around an international group of teachers and students between Europe, USA and China in order to promote a new and different way to produce media, able to face the international trends and changes due to the internet and the fast paced technological advances demand: the beginning of Multimedia Journalism.
I felt this could be a step greater than my leg, but I wanted to enrol anyway. So I manage everything possible to moved to China, to the city of Dalian, a industrial city located on the Manchuria’s peninsula. It felt like a relief, I finally was able to get again a new way to get out of my comfortable zone on a country with a millennial culture where my language, my physical endurance, my way of thinking was completely out of place.
Duarte Lima Villas Photography 