My name is mike hensdill and i have been and continue to be a small town photojournalist.

I guess it began in college at Virginia Intermont in Bristol, Virginia. I was working on my BFA in fine art photography and vowed NEVER to prostitute myself by devolving into a children's studio photographer, a commercial shooter or deviant photojournalist. I did however find myself with few options after graduating. I worked on a lawn care crew. I worked as a janitor, as a member of a road survey team. I worked as a roofer on log homes in Vermont in the middle of winter (what was i thinking). I worked briefly as a midnight gas station attendant, and as a record store clerk (remember Peaches?). My last job prior to becoming a photojournalist was as the assistant manager at a family run bookstore in the suburbs of Richmond. It was after being fired from the Book Gallery that i told myself that maybe i should put my degree to work. After all, i had a ton of unpaid loans to remind me that i indeed had some experience in something.
The very next day i found a listing in the Time-Dispatch classified for a entry level photojournalist. Hurray! I didn't have to live out of my car and shower at the local YMCA after all (several years later i did exactly that after a messy divorce, but that's another story). I sent in my resume and waited a week until i began calling the managing editor every day asking for his decision. After three weeks i wore him down and he invited me up to Culpeper, Virginia for an interview. I was ready, except that i did not have any newspaper experience and no printed photos of any kind to show as a portfolio. Hmmmm.
At Virginia Intermont College, we learned how to hand color photographs. We learned how to use 8X10 view cameras. We learned how to process and print E6 color slides. We learned how to make tie dye tee shirts. We learned how to bullshit our way through an endless number of photo critiques. And now i found myself preparing to bullshit my way through an interview about a form of photography that i knew nothing about. I dug through my last remaining negative notebook looking for something worth printing up. Finally i came across a series of images that i had forgotten all about. In 1981 a man had taken the librarian hostage at the campus library. Police surrounded the building and locked down the dorms. My dorm was next to the library and i had gotten myself and my AE-1 out before the police had shut everything down. For over 5 hours i clicked. I clicked police crouching around corners with their guns drawn and worried students and faculty peering out of windows. When the police finally made their way into the library, it was empty. No one was ever found and within a couple of weeks the entire ordeal was forgotten about. These would have to do.
They day before i was to go to the interview i discovered that no one in town would make prints from my negatives so i met with the editor the next day with a portfolio of one plastic sheet of eight-year-old negs. I think, in the end, it was my firm grasp of bull shittery that got me the job.
In the spring of 1989 I packed up my life and moved north to Culpeper to begin my life as a photojournalist for the Star-Exponent. The last place I stopped before leaving Richmond was Main Street Pawn where I bought a Canon AE-1 with a 50mm lens. I guess it was time to remember how to take pictures again....

the photo of me was taken by my wife....J