A Brief History of the ƒsc
A little more than 50 years ago, the president of the Los Angeles Press Photographers Association complained in a letter to NPPA founder Joseph Costa that, “as far as the NPPA was concerned, the West Coast didn’t exist.” Irvin “Buck” Forbes voiced the feeling of many West Coast photographers who felt NPPA’s programs and interests were too rooted in the East and Midwest. The Southern Short Course in Chapel Hill, NC, in 1950 had been a huge success. Then in 1951, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica saw NPPA as a possible source of pictures for his books and offered a $3,000 fund for an NPPA “short course.” At about the same time, an NPPA committee was looking for a way to provide “at least one short course that’s available to every press photographer in the nation.” In 1953 the committee decided the best way to provide quality speakers at all of the seminars, and to make the most efficient use of their time, would be to fly them from one city to the next in a few short days. To top it off, in return for putting on a program at a military base each year, and for letting military personnel attend for free, the U.S. Air Force offered to provide the transportation.
And that’s how NPPA’s Flying Short Course was born.
