Houghton welcomed 11 new faculty members this year, including new photography and digital imaging professor, Ryann Cooley. Professor Cooley comes to Houghton after several stints as a photographer in both the advertising and missionary fields.
However, before pursuing his career in photography, Cooley worked as a financial planner. In the late 80s, on what is known as Black Monday, the stock market crashed and Cooley marks this as the start of a series of events that happened in his life where he said God started speaking in his life, “convicting [him] of [his] motivations for being in the financial sector.” After the revelation that money was his “primary motivation”, Cooley said that he realized he could “only serve one master”, something which “shook [his] world.”
Eventually Cooley stepped away from the financial sector and said that this time in his life was one without “a sense of direction, motivation, or drive.” The next six months were spent in prayer, Cooley said, almost “like [he] was in a monastery.” This intense period of prayer ultimately left Cooley with a dream in which he was “a photographer for missionaries, traveling the world to document various missions” as a graduate of Brooks Institute, a school he heard about in high school.
Initially following his dream, Cooley contacted Brooks Institute and learned that both the tuition and admission requirements were out of reach. Dismayed, he began to look elsewhere. Yet a month later he received a call from Brooks offering him admission and scholarship. After being accepted into the undergraduate program at the Brooks Institute under the Alumni Scholarship Program, Cooley immediately enrolled and successfully completed his degree. Following his graduation, he began to contact missionaries to see if he could come along on their missions and take photos. When Cooley was denied these opportunities, he said his next step was to “go and make a name for [himself] as a photographer,” so he moved to New York City, “the hub of photography”, in order to do so.
In NYC, Cooley worked as an assistant photographer for several years with his first client being Levi’s. His work in advertising gradually grew and was followed by an opportunity to shoot for a Presbyterian mission organization while they were on a mission in Mexico for three weeks, an opportunity Cooley said he “jumped at.” His work with missions organizations continued with groups like the Arab World Missions in Morocco and the International Bible Society based in Colorado Springs.
Following the birth of his son and the start of his family, Cooley said that his career direction changed. “My dream had come true,” he said, and it was now time to return to the advertising world, which Cooley said he sees as “much [of] a mission field” as those he had worked in before, calling advertising a “foreign country itself.” In 2012, after a reasonable stint in advertising, Cooley pursued and received his MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in NYC so that he could teach.
Before coming to Houghton, Cooley looked into and interviewed at several schools, but he said it was the students at Houghton that stood out to him because they were “easy to talk to and articulate;” students he wanted the chance to work with. After receiving and accepting the position at Houghton, Cooley and his family moved from New York City to Angelica, and he said that the transition was big, but that he was “ready to move on from the city.”
When asked what he hopes to bring to Houghton, Cooley said that he wants to bring an “NYC edge,” and introduce more conceptual art that will help in his goal of “pushing the boundaries of what people expect of art.” Additionally, he would like to see the number of photography classes grow to include more advanced classes that offer students the opportunity to specialize in areas such as lighting. Also important to Cooley is the relationship between the music and art departments. He hopes to help bring the departments together in combined performances, and said that there may be a collaboration with Professor Brian Johnson in the works for this year’s Christmas Prism.