Photojournalists are street soldiers - and my heroes
In March 2011, I was on the ground in Japan, in the wake of a killer tsunami, looking for stories of sudden death and survival.
But I couldn’t find them alone.
I was working alongside newspaper photographer Carolyn Cole.
We were a team.
One overcast afternoon, we came upon a group of parents who had converged outside the Ookawa Elementary School, some 200 miles north of Tokyo.
They were there to grieve, and for something much more terrible:
Reclaim the bodies of their children, who’d perished en masse in the surging seawater, the sucker punch that came a half hour after the original offshore earthquake.
It was a cruel and ironic way to die: The students had dutifully followed instructions, sheltering under their desks until teachers directed them to walk single-file out into the schoolyard, where the rogue waters staged an ambush.
Eighty-four children and ten teachers drowned.
By then, all these parents knew their young ones were gone, but they congregated on atop a steep ridge overlooking the school grounds, waiting as responders dressed in hazmat gear solemnly carried the bodies out of that field of wreckage and heartbreak.
I stood with a mother who patiently awaited the inevitable. Her child’s body had not yet appeared, but she knew it was coming.
As I whispered questions through an interpreter, I got a tap on my shoulder.
It was Carolyn.
“Over there,” she said, pointing. “There’s a mom with her son.”
She didn’t have to take the time to come over and alert me. The scene was unfolding quickly and she needed to be there when it did, or she’d forever miss her chance.
But Carolyn did more than take pictures. She was a team player on an important story.
Without her help, I would have missed it entirely.
After we left the school, I wrote the story on my laptop as the car bumped along, including a parent’s last desperate contact with her dead child:
“Workers carried the boy’s small frame up a muddy rise from the school, laying it beside several other covered bodies. Masako Karino calmly lifted the brown shroud from her child’s face, and she and her husband moved their hands along the body, a silent gesture of reassurance, as if to say, “Everything is going to be OK, son.”
Then, slowly, they carried his body to a waiting truck.
“He was so clever,” Tatsuhiro said later as he sat on a curb consoling his wife. “He wanted to one day design computer games. He loved the cookies his mother made. I’ll always remember that.””
Newspaper photographers do more than take pictures. Like writers, they’re storytellers with a unique perspective on any event.
In my years, these camera-carrying pros have become my co-conspirators and partners in crime, fellow story-strategists as equally invested as I was in any project. They shared time behind the wheel, lent an ear as late-night therapists over beers and Bloody Marys.
Ultimately, many have become good friends.
For me, the relationship resembles the bond of soldiers serving side by side in combat.
In the newspaper business they’re known as shooters, but they’re really saviors.
Heroes.
Many have shown me the way on complex stories.
Like Carolyn, they had my back.
And another thing: they ask the best questions.
I can’t tell you how many times I have conducted interviews, blathering on about this or that when, during a rare pause when I catch my breath, my photographer colleague politely interjected with a question that cut through the fat, right to the bone.
Usually I marveled at the insight and brevity, turned to our interview subject and said,
“Well, yeah, what about that?”
Often, these salient questions suggested an entirely new angle to the story.
And so this post is a hat-tip to all the photographers I’ve known before.
In the early days, when I got started in journalism, photographers somehow got less respect. I’d see older reporters refer to the person with the camera as “my photographer.” Or they’d point magisterially and say “Shoot that.”
Then one day, I heard a shooter speak up.
“For starters, I ain’t your photographer,” he said. “And I’ll shoot what I want.”
On long drives to reach distant story sites, I’ve gotten to know my colleagues as both people and professionals. And I’ve learned to ask them: “When we get to the story, what do you want me to do?”
The last thing I want is to make a shooter sit through one of my long-winded interviews. The point is to work together. On a recent story with photographer Chase Stevens, we profiled a gay mayor in a small Nevada town.
We got the mayor to give us a tour, allowing Chase and I to work simultaneously — me with my pen, he with his camera.
Over the years, as the stories came and went, I developed a strong sense of camaraderie with my photographer comrades. Many are retired, and some are gone, but I celebrate them all.
And yet all work and no play sometimes made us dull boys.
In Las Vegas, I used to take male colleagues to Cheetahs, my favorite strip club, to blow off steam. One later begged me not to tell his wife, who I did not even know. Another stayed so long in the private lap dance room, getting multiple dances on the house, that I almost had to take a cab back to the hotel.
While reporting a story in a small town outside Los Angeles, one old-school photographer decided to drive home for the night rather than stay in the dumpy motel I’d booked. But before taking off, he used my bathroom, leaving behind such a reeking odor that I had to throw open the door and windows and take a long walk.
Talk about leaving your calling card.
But what I remember most about shooters is their professionalism and empathy.
And now, facing threats and attacks from over-aggressive cops on the streets of America, their bravery.
Like Tom Colton, who once broke down as we interviewed a Japanese firefighter who for months conducted an exhaustive and very personal search for the bodies of his wife daughter daughter, lost in the tsunami.
In halting words, he talked about love lost and Tom broke into tears.
It was such a human reaction and I respected him so much more for it.
Sure, he was a photographer, and a good one, but he was a human first.
I have chased wild horses with the girlish and whip-smart Randi Lynn Beach, reminded there’s only so far she’ll drop her lodging standards in the wilds of the Nevada Outback.
I have spent weeks on end traversing the Philippines with Lee Sinco — laughing, strategizing, drinking, working our tails off. Lee took me to the town of Dumaguete, where his mother was president of a small family-founded college.
The visit taught me why Lee is such a ferocious photographer.
He gets his pizzazz from his mother.
I have laughed with world-jaunting photographer Michael Robinson Chavez like we were the cartoon crows Heckle and Jeckle. It felt like we’d been friends forever.
I once tramped through the rock and sand with Paul Morse In search of the Mojave Desert Phone Booth. When we found it, Paul sized up the scene for ten hours to find just the right photo at just the right time of day.
Shooter Francine Orr and I spent months profiling Dolores Westfall, an elderly woman without savings forced to live out of her RV, doing part-time work to stay afloat.
When Dolores died, Francine and I helped spread her ashes at her favorite spot in Death Valley.
We were like her adopted children.
I can honestly say we loved Dolores.
Watching Francine behind the camera, she is without peer as someone who brings such emotional depth to her work.
I have worked with the just plain fearless, like photographer David Becker, who sat in the middle of U.S. Route 50, looking over his shoulder for oncoming semis, to get just the right shot for our story on the so-called Loneliest Road in America.
I have travelled America inside an 18-wheeler with my photo mate Perry Riddle, now gone. On that long trip, I needed Perry and his years of wisdom and he needed me.
To understand what we were seeing.
To break it all down.
And then there’s Carolyn.
Quiet but aggressive, Carolyn gets the story, period.
In Japan, we drove the damaged countryside days after the tsunami looking for scenes of officials pulling bodies from the ocean-wracked earth.
Even with so much death in our midst, such moments were hard to find.
As we drove on one rural road, Carolyn called out to the driver.
“Stop!”
She’d recognized a photographer competitor from New York City.
If he was on site, there had to be a story.
And there was.
Our piece ran on the front page.
It wasn’t the first time that a photographer’s talent, instincts and sheer chutzpah made my work possible.
Nor would it be the last.