David and Peter Turnley: McClellan Street

1955 — present

The most decorated photographers Fort Wayne ever produced started on one downtown street: David C. Turnley and Peter N. Turnley, twin brothers, were born in Fort Wayne on 22 June 1955, sons of Dr. William Loyd Turnley, an orthodontist, and Elizabeth Ann (Protsman) Turnley, and grew up on McClellan Street in downtown Fort Wayne, in a house where, David has written, the family ate at a dinner table with a great-aunt and a grandmother who lived in the house across the street. At Elmhurst High School, the Waynedale News tells it as the family's founding legend — flagged as legend there, and repeated as such here — that David's football knee injury brought a camera from his parents and that Elmhurst art teacher Don Goss aimed the twins at photography. What is documented: in 1971–72, at sixteen and seventeen, the brothers spent a year photographing McClellan Street, a three-block working-class street of railroad families, more than 1,200 photographs in all; some of the work appeared in 35MM Photography magazine in 1975; and the twins were mentored in a summer photography workshop by Gabriel DeLobbe, the Belgian photographer of the entry above. The street book waited thirty-five years: McClellan Street was published by Indiana University Press in 2007 (some listings give 2008), and the brothers returned for a lecture and signing at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art on 2 November 2007. The street itself, David wrote, is now one block long with no houses on it, beside a new minor-league baseball stadium.

David Turnley joined the Detroit Free Press in 1980 and stayed eighteen years; he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his coverage of the political revolutions of 1989 in China and Eastern Europe, along with two World Press Photo of the Year awards and the Robert Capa Gold Medal, and later worked for Getty Images. Peter Turnley was a contract photographer for Newsweek from 1984 to 2001 and shot forty-three of the magazine's covers; he is a contributing editor and photographer for Harper's Magazine and the author of Parisians, having lived in Paris since 1978. Together they were the subject of the International Center of Photography exhibition In Times of War and Peace and of the 60 Minutes profile "Double Exposure" in 1996. The archive of the hometown work keeps growing: the Allen County Public Library holds among its Quest Club Papers a twenty-five-page paper of 2021, "The Photography of Peter Turnley." Beyond the Turnleys, the searches behind this section surfaced no other nationally documented photographer born in Fort Wayne; the class's other ties to the national record are a worked-here chapter (Chip Somodevilla, above), a settled-here career (DeLobbe), and a pre-Fort Wayne apprenticeship in Mathew Brady's gallery (Edwin Bronk, in the McDonald entry). The roster is thin, and it is printed thin, as found.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, T-surnames biographical page — David C. and Peter N. Turnley, born Fort Wayne, 22 June 1955; The Waynedale News, "Turnley brothers return home to showcase photography book," 7 November 2007.
2. David Turnley, "McClellan Street: Introduction," The Digital Journalist (2008); Festival Photo La Gacilly, David Turnley biography — the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the two World Press Photo of the Year awards, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal; published biographies of Peter Turnley (Newsweek contract, 1984–2001, forty-three covers; Harper's).
3. Allen County Public Library, Quest Club Papers — "The Photography of Peter Turnley" (2021), twenty-five pages.