Mary Ryder, left, Steve Ryder and Dean Tim Gleason look on as Amanda Moke cuts the ribbon for the new Lynne Ryder Moke Digital Photo Lab. Photo: Hannah Cole

An “outdoor girl” who met her husband on a nordic club ski trek around Crater Lake, Lynne Ryder Moke “had a great love of life and a great desire to learn more, see more, do more,” says her dad, Steve Ryder.

Luckily, Moke crammed a lot of life into almost fifty-two years because that’s all she would have, dying of melanoma, a form of skin cancer, on January 2, 2001.

Moke’s passion for photojournalism and for life is significant not only to her family but also to the hundreds of photojournalism students who are learning how to scan, adjust and print images in the School of Journalism and Communication’s new digital photo lab. The lab was dedicated in Moke’s name on October 24 in recognition of a $100,000 gift to the school from her parents, Steve and Mary Ryder of Medford, in memory of their only child.

While neither Lynne nor her parents attended the UO, the family made connections here after moving to Medford in 1973, when Steve was named publisher of the Mail Tribune. Moke was a 1971 alumna of St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and attended the Ansel Adams Institute for Photography in Monterey, Calif. The Ryders are both graduates of the Syracuse University School of Journalism in Syracuse, N.Y.

“We were so far away from Syracuse that we just sort of adopted the UO journalism school as our alma mater,” says Mary. Steve, who served as Mail Tribune publisher from 1973-81, was a vice president of Ottaway Newspapers from 1964-89 and has been a member of the UO Journalism Advancement Council since 1990.

“When [Dean] Tim Gleason told me about this opportunity to be a donor for this digital lab, I thought instantly that this would have been Lynne’s thing if she were still here,” says Steve Ryder.

Moke was a staff photographer for the Mail Tribune from 197781. She and her husband, Richard, ’57, moved in 1984 to Palm Springs, Calif., where she worked as a photographer and assistant to the society editor at the Desert Sun, covering benefit performances and celebrity events. She also served as a photography instructor on two photo safaris to Africa sponsored by the Living Desert Museum in Palm Desert.

“Of all her accomplishments, she was most proud of her daughter Amanda,” says Mary Ryder. Amanda is a senior at Mountain View High School in Bend, where she lives with her father.

“Steve and Mary have been longtime friends of the journalism school,” says Gleason. “For us to be able to honor their daughter in this way is very special to all of us in the School and a tribute not just to Lynne but to Steve and Mary.”

Julianne Newton, an associate professor of visual communication in the School, says the Moke Lab serves students in three beginning photojournalism courses and two advanced courses plus the staff of the awardwinning student magazine Flux and many students working on individual projects.

“The digital lab has put our curriculum on the cutting edge of photojournalism education,” says Newton, who came to the UO in 2000 after heading the photojournalism program at the University of Texas at Austin for fifteen years. “I have visited probably 20 daily newspapers in three countries, and we have as fine a facility right now as any of those newspapers.”

“The digital lab at the UO is actually better than our facilities at The New Yorker in terms of equipment,” says Kipp Wettstein, a 2003 journalism graduate who is working as assistant to the visuals editor at The New Yorker. He describes the UO lab as “a top-of-the-line digital facility capable of producing professional results and giving students an understanding of digital post-production that I think many photographers working today do not have.”

Journalism major Joel Fischer says his experience in the UO digital lab prepared him well for an internship last summer at The Bulletin in Bend. “After interning this summer at a newspaper that has gone completely digital, I could not imagine how I could have prepared myself for a career in photojournalism without the knowledge and experience a digital lab affords,” he says.

Fischer says the lab is also “a HUGE benefit” to production of Flux, which he served as photo editor last year.

“We’re so honored to have Lynne’s name on our lab,” says Newton. “It engenders this deep sense of responsibility to her and her work as we’re teaching our students.”