A Little News

After spending two days covering the tornado that struck Lawrence County, I went back to a more or less normal assignment load on the third day after the tragedy. I have been doing this a long time so it came as a big surprise how difficult it was to shift my mindset back to “normal” mode, whatever that might be. As I walked around covering the immediate aftermath and the beginnings of the recovery effort, it felt a bit like being in another world. Stepping back into the every day assignment load was jarring. My Friday jobs included photographing a group of high school seniors who are graduating in the spring, a profile for the Meals on Wheels Program, a profile on a man and woman who met on the job, married and now work together and the swearing in ceremony for a new district judge.

All day Friday, I spent thinking about what was going on in Lawrence County and how the people were doing that I had photographed. You never think about the impact the things you shoot have on you because your everyday work load doesn’t normally produce the mental impact that a tornado produces. I find myself linked to these people who I mostly didn’t know prior to Wednesday in a way that is surprisingly strong. Although most people don’t think about it at all, or if they do think about it, think that journalists are recorders at best and some kind of uncaring low life at worst. In reality, we do care about the people we interact with. There are people I photographed years ago and I have never forgotten. Many of them I will never see again. I just dipped into their lives for a few minutes and never saw them again.

If you remember how I said in an earlier post that there is something of you in every photograph you make and if I see enough of your photographs I will have a pretty good idea who you are, you will understand what I am talking about. A photographer invests himself in the subjects he shoots whether it is a person whose life was ruined by a calamity or a kid running down the street playing with friends. That is what makes photojournalism appealing to me. If not for that, I could just go off and shoot flowers or sunsets and be perfectly satisfied.

As photojournalists, we are continually documenting whatever is going on around us. The good, the bad, the ugly, and sometimes the miraculous happen right out there in front of our lenses. The camera is something of a shield but it also is the open door we walk through into and out of the lives of our subjects. No camera can shield you from the emotion of what you are photographing.I was once called upon to shoot a photo of a little girl who was stricken with leukemia, and I have never forgotten her. I did that sixteen years ago in Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Before I left that room I was invested in the little girl and her family. She died two days after I shot her picture. That photo stayed on my office wall until I left North Carolina to move to Alabama. That photo still hangs in the gallery in my mind. You just don’t forget.

Too many times I hear people say, “Man, you have a really great job taking pictures.” Most of these guys have very physical jobs and I know what they mean. They don’t know that I carry around the image of that little girl who died from leukemia, that she never really leaves me. They don’t know that I have seen death raw and ugly way too many times and have had to see too many famalies grieving over their loss and still have to find a way to tell their story without making the situation worse than it already is. They don’t know about the guy who shot a Pulitzer Prize winner a few years ago of a kid dying in Africa and just couldn’t deal with it and later killed himself. That’s the part no one thinks about so you just nod your head and say, “Yeah, most of the time it is really great.”

It’s not all about sadness. Fortunately, there are many joyful moments as well. Probably the good things I have shot outweigh the bad by at least ten to one. I know that outside the 1/8th mile wide, seventeen plus mile long path of that tornado life is going on pretty much as it always has. I also know that inside that same path, life will never be quite the same again. That is the dichotomy of being a photojournalist and that is why the job is both bitter and sweet.

The photos in this post are from our Sunday edition on the miraculous story of one woman surviving the tornado because the chimney of her house fell on her and kept her from being blown away with the rest of her house. The other is a photo of a little, sweet lady who gets Meals on Wheels and must use a huge magnifier to read her Bible because she suffers from macular degeneration.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily express those of my employer.