From Lancer to Freelancer: Anna Petrow

One Saturday in 2010, Alumni Anna Petrow, Whitaker Sherk and a few other friends broke into the school. They didn’t vandalize property and they didn’t pull their senior prank. Instead, they were there to work on all things yearbook

One of them shimmied up the brown brick building to find a window to slip through in order to open the locked school doors for the rest of the group. They were there to finalize spreads, edit pictures and keep the theme cohesive throughout each page.

This same drive for journalism still exists inside Petrow today. Her photography classes with East art teacher Adam Finkelston, as well as her time as head photo editor for The Hauberk under journalism advisor Dow Tate, gave Petrow the unparalleled skill set that allowed her to pursue a photography career.

After college, she began working as a freelancer for the “food heroes of Kansas City” and the editor-in-chief of Made-In-KC Explore (MIKC)–– a curated guide to Kansas City’s best including restaurants, activities and people. From Hauberk to the New York times, Petrow transformed into a student journalist to a featured photographer in established publications all over the nation.

After receiving an old film Nikon camera from her dad in eighth grade, she would pull out the camera to snap pictures of friends or to capture memories on vacations. But it wasn’t until she took her first photography class at East that she really began to learn the basic functions of a camera. And to her, Finkelston’s photo class was the best way to begin her experimentation with photography.

“Mr. Finkelston[‘s class] was the best way to learn, because if you learn with a digital camera you lean on a lot of the automatic functionings, and you don’t have a full understanding [of the camera],” Petrow said. “So really, the foundation of everything I do was Mr. Finkelston to begin with.”

Developing film and adjusting aperture were just the beginning. She decided to take it one step further and join the yearbook staff as a photographer. By her senior year, she had worked her way up to The Hauberk’s photo editor. Through this, she learned the true dedication and work it took to be a journalist.  

Along with Finkelston, Tate became her second mentor. By trusting his students to maintain the reputation of the program, Tate pushed them to be independent and autonomous, two skills that only lifted Petrow up in her later career. Tate helped Petrow realize she could never stop carrying her camera around to capture the little moments –– even after she graduated. Until Tate, she hadn’t considered her passion for photography as a future career.

“A lot of people have a creative streak, but they don’t realize that it could be a lucrative thing,” Petrow said. “Learning that so early on from him was pretty powerful in terms of enabling me to make the decision to pursue it as a career rather than a hobby. [Tate] made it seem like for all of us [journalism] was a very viable life path.”

Making the decision to attend University of Missouri and study strategic communications in their school of journalism stemmed from her passion of photography – a passion aided by both Tate and Finkelston.

In college, Petrow learned that traditional photojournalism, the type she did in high school, wasn’t the only form of photojournalism she could pursue. College allowed her to utilize her natural creativity in her pictures. Through advertising and commercial photography, she had the option to actually move and set up the perfect shot, rather than just capturing a specific moment.  

Her creativity in advertising photography has allowed for her passion to thrive in the KC area. The chance to create angles, texture and arrange things like a plaid tablecloth under a cake plate or a gold fork cutting into a pie into her camera lens excited her more than just taking portraits. She could finally make the pictures exactly how she wanted with no guidelines or restrictions.

She quickly shifted from taking family photos to taking menu shoots for award winning KC restaurants like Room 39 and Extra Virgin, as well as running social media for Dolce Bakery and Tribe KC. Her creation of MIKC Explore with East alumni Tyler Enders also allowed for her to develop and exhibit her innovation in advertising photography through photoshoots at local restaurants and new concepts for them to cover.

“It is really fun to be able to shine a light on the creatives of the city that people may know their products, but they may not know the person behind the products,” Petrow said, “It brought me back to a lot of what I thought were my goals in high school and it provided an outlet for sharing people’s stories. “

The portfolio she has built through MIKC Explore and her freelancing has given her opportunities to work for even bigger platforms – both in the KC area and other parts of the country. She has received recognition from the New York Times, being featured in print five times. She also works for an established local magazine, Feast Magazine.

“Anna is extremely easy to work with,” Art Director for Feast Magazine Alex Povis said. “She definitetly knows what she is doing. I feel like as soon as I saw her portfolio, I put her on my roster and I have been using her every [magazine] since. What I like about Anna is she really has her own style.”

A style based off natural light and color that she has developed from the beginning of high school and has continued to grow since. According to Petrow, everything that she does can be traced back to yearbook and photo classes. Learning valuable skills like functioning ISO and adjusting aperture allowed her to be ahead in her career, but also gave her the basis of her everyday routine including the edit flow she has used since high school.

Journalism taught Petrow the importance of getting her work done and done well and what it means to be independent. Working to please Tate and produce a product worthy enough to carry on the name of something that he had built for so long elevated her in her later career.

“With Tate, it was never an option to leave something unfinished, which is valuable especially if you are a freelancer because you don’t have someone hovering over you like your boss telling you to get something done” Petrow said, “I think the autonomy at a young age and having someone place their trust in you was a pretty meaningful thing.”