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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Photo Assignments that Haunt Me.
Nic Coury, Photographer
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Monterey | CA | | Posted: 6:37 PM on 04.30.10 |
->> I just posted a blog I thought some of you all might be interested in about photo assignments I have done in my career that still haunt me.
http://mcweekly-photoblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/from-archives-haunting-photo...
Figured it was a nice, Friday afternoon entry...
I'm curious if anyone else has assignments that they will never forgot and still "haunt" them, as it were.
I'm also curious to why we as photogs hang on to these such stories.
I know there are others' work that still makes me think too, like Melissa Lyttle's "Girl in the Window" piece.
Interesting food for thought...
~ nic |
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Steve Ueckert, Photographer
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Houston | TX | | Posted: 8:59 PM on 04.30.10 |
->> May 14, 2003 Victoria, Texas
Sixteen dead in the back of an 18-wheeler truck from an illegal alien smuggling operation gone very bad. Men, women and children suffocated in a sealed trailer. It was the scratching on the inside of the doors that suggested how desperate was the situation, as if the dead piled upon each other wasn't sufficient.
Then there are the military funerals. Once after covering one at the Houston National Cemetery, I waited after the formal ceremony to photograph the actual burial and was stunned at all the names on adjacent head stones I recognized, having also covered their formal military services.
No one held a gun to my head and made me work as a news photographer, I have no regrets. I do have a pretty good memory, however. |
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David Manning, Photographer
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Athens | GA | | Posted: 9:00 PM on 04.30.10 |
->> I'm still dealing with seeing a detective i know walk away from a crime scene holding a newborn who's mother was shot and killed.
Somehow i knew that is how it would play out when i clicked the shutter. |
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Sam Morris, Photographer
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Henderson (Las Vegas) | NV | USA | Posted: 12:31 AM on 05.01.10 |
->> During my first internship, I was driving to the paper from my home (paper happened to be only 30 convenient miles away) when I came upon an accident. Two motorcycles, each with two riders, were hit by a car.
I stopped and started taking photos from a distance of the scene. One of the injured motorcycle riders was in shock and was screaming, screaming, screaming and looking (I thought) right at me as she was being attended to. After the scene was cleared I took some more photos. There was no helmet law in Iowa at the time and the results were evident on the pavement.
It wasn't those later photos that bothered me. But when I found out that the screaming woman I was taking photos of died on the way to the hospital, I started to understand what I had witnessed.
In my career, I have seen things that are more gruesome and have had to take photos in situations that are more personal and difficult. But for whatever reason, that woman screaming in pain on the highway between Charles City and Mason City has always been in the back of my head.
Thanks for posting this. It has given me some things to think about. |
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Charley Starr, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Ketchikan | AK | USA | Posted: 12:38 AM on 05.01.10 |
->> For me there are several but the first one that I thought of was from the first few years working for a newspaper after college.
I had heard on the scanner of a river rescue (one of these cement lined rivers in So Cal)
I arrived on the scene in time to photograph the paramedics giving a boy about 12-14 years old CPR as the medical helicopter was landing nearby. The story was the boy had jumped in the river to save a younger child that had fallen in while trying to reach a ball. He was able to push the kid to the side and save him. However saving the younger kid cost him his life. As I was walking along the river to get back to my car I came across a small waterfall and caught in the swirling water was the ball. The sight is still a vivid memory almost 30 years later. |
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Nick Morris, Photographer
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San Diego | CA | USA | Posted: 1:47 AM on 05.01.10 |
| ->> Responded to a spot news lead where a recently pregnant women showed up not so pregnant anymore with no child. Police searched the neighborhood for hours and then got a tip the grandmother lived close by. I raced to the neighborhood before they taped off the entire block and shot a detective digging in the garbage can outside the grandparents place. She lifted a plastic grocery bag up and then placed it on the ground behind the can. I didn't know what I had shot until I started chimping. I called the editor and asked that they send another photographer to take my place. First time I ever had to leave the scene. I have two kids and that one hit home. |
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Thomas Webb, Student/Intern
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Gilroy | CA | USA | Posted: 2:17 AM on 05.01.10 |
| ->> Nothing too bad as a photojournalist, but I work as a seasonal firefighter when I'm not in school. 10 year old girl riding a horse without a helmet ran into a tree. By the time we got there she was having major personality shifts and had lost fine motor control in her upperbody and was becoming extremely combative. We were forced to put her in full restraints, which isn't a fun thing to do to a 10 yr old. They had to airlift her to the hospital. The next day we went to woman having a brain aneurysm, she was screaming and thrashing from the pain, but we aren't paramedics so we couldn't give anything for the pain. Rough couple of days. |
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Kolman Rosenberg, Photographer
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Matthew Bush, Photographer
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Hattiesburg | MS | USA | Posted: 8:59 PM on 05.01.10 |
->> Hearing a boom outside of my home and walking out to see what happened. Two full sized pickups had hit head on at full speed. I missed the noise from the crash . The boom I heard was the fuel tank blowing on one of the trucks. I grabbed my gear and took off towards the wreck. I started shooting and it hit me that there was victim who was on fire near one the trucks which were both fully involved. I shot another victim and a guy without a shirt who I though was involved in the wreck also being treated by neighbors. I sucked it up and kept shooting. Six minutes later the firefighters and police showed up I shot some more and then I went to transmit. I walked back out of my house to a group of tv shooters who informed me that there were two more people in one of the trucks who never made it out and that the guy I had photographed without a shirt had pulled the surviving victim out moments before the tanks blew. Three teenagers never left my driveway and one was in the burn unit for 6 months after the incident and I will never forget it.
I will never forget three people who I never meet. I was a WRECK
Three weeks later I was sitting in the office getting ready to shoot football and an train vs car call came over the radio a few blocks from the paper. I actually told the other shooter I was not going because I had seen enough death. I agreed to drive the other photographer and a freelancer to the wreck. I dropped them off and parked the car. I walked up on the other side of accident and lost my breath when I saw firefighters comforting two very small children and working on an injured but very alive mother. I could not believe they had made it out of the wreck. I shot a photo that will remain in my folio for a very long time that day. It helped me put the triple fatal behind me.
I placed 3rd in Oct. here with an image from the wreck but it is an award I wish I did not receive. The train wreck photo won Miss. AP POY and I am much happier that it won an award.
A professor once told me that you can pick to shoot the things you see but you can never choose not to remember them. |
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Thomas Campbell, Photographer
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Houston/San Antonio | TX | USA | Posted: 12:13 PM on 05.02.10 |
| ->> I'm not sure I will ever get over seeing the sick and dying children in the Sudan. Watching a little boy die as his mother and grandmother cradled him. Hearing their wails the entire next two nights. The swollen bellies of the famine and tribal wars. I hope I never get over those sights and sounds. |
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Thomas E. Witte, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Cincinnati | OH | USA | Posted: 2:24 AM on 05.04.10 |
->> Flight 587 when it went down in Rockaway. I was on my way to JFK as it happened so I ended up being one of the first ones on the scene. I remember looking at essentially nothing and realizing that there was a gigantic airplane pulverized in to a very confined area. Then I realized that there were probably 100 or so "people" in there as well.
The visual isn't what sticks with you though, it's the smell. Freely burning Jet-A has a distinct odor. When you combine that with smell with carbonizing blood soaked meat, burning hair, melting aluminum and burning structures, it forms a smell that you can't ever forget.
My flight was canceled and low-and-behold, I was rebooked on the first flight out the next day. There wasn't enough alcohol in the club lounge to calm my jitters, but I've flown over a million miles since and honestly, I think that's the way I want to go. There are a few moments to realize what's going so you can make peace (if you can keep your senses) then in a flash you're disintegrated.
I've actually got over that one pretty quickly though. The one that I still remember was about, oh, 11-12 years ago in my last year of college.
On a long uphill stretch of I-75 I saw a car about 1.5 miles in front of me flip through the median (about 50 yards wide) and land in the opposing lanes. Then the bright yellow flash. THe first thought was to go help this guy and I'm one of the few that tried. I drove across the grass on to the opposite side and drove up the opposing lanes. By the time I got to within 100 yards the others had already been driven back by the heat and we couldn't do anything.
He was hanging upside down in his seat trying to unbuckle his seatbelt with his head completely engulfed and screaming for his life. Either the belt melted or he unbuckled it and managed to pull himself about a foot out of the window when he just stopped, laid his head down, and that was it.
Needless to say that one stuck with me for a long time and was the defining moment when the switch flipped and I turned in to one cynical son-of-a-bitch. |
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Robert Scheer, Photographer
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Indianapolis | IN | USA | Posted: 7:21 AM on 05.04.10 |
->> I've seen some wicked things over the years, but am fortunate enough to have never witnessed something that I see in my dreams/haunts me, although a couple come close: A city worker who'd gotten the business end of the trash truck he was working on, and a couple of animal cruelty cases.
Last summer, I spent some time with members of the Dart Society, for just a couple of days, but what I learned is that except for unlucky bystanders, journalists are typically the only ones on these scenes who receive little to no training about how to deal with and process these horrific events. It's often harder for us to deal with them, and they can have long-lasting effects.
We have some Dart Society members here, perhaps one will chime in, if one hasn't already? |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Denver | CO | USA | Posted: 9:20 AM on 05.04.10 |
->> Two spot news assignments stay with me...
One was a fatal house fire. Six people died, many of them kids. I was on the scene pretty quickly. Shot that made the front page was of a gurney being rushed to an ambo with two paramedics "riding" on it while they did CPR on a woman...who later died. Shooting that image was tough, particularly surrounded by a crowd of relatives and onlookers. That image sticks with me.
The other was a rollover SUV accident in the middle of the night in a city park. SUV packed full of teenagers. All but one made it out. It happened about a mile from my house, so I made it there first as the police were sorting it out okay. It was in a dark, relatively isolated area of a very hilly park, so it was really quiet.
I'm shooting the scene from a distance with long glass when a older woman comes up the road from the scene towards me and the reporter. She's disoriented, wide gaze, hysterical. She comes up to me, grabs my arm and says, "Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen her? They're telling me she's dead but I know she's here. Have you seen her?" The reporter and I say a few things, probably not enough. Then she wanders off behind us. A police officer comes up and takes her back to the scene.
About five minutes later, the father comes up the road in a very similar manner, crying, sobbing, not looking for his daughter, but in total unreserved grief. Says things to me and the TV shooter that was there...saying he knows we're only doing our jobs. Same thing...police take him back to the scene...then move the line back a ways.
That was a tough edit. |
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