Photojournalism is a more than snapping pictures on your smartphone and editing them on some Photoshop app. Not only do people have to be up to date with current events going on around the globe, but they must be willing to make sacrifices. Capturing the perfect shot can be difficult. Photojournalists may find themselves face-to-face with gut-wrenching sights.
But as Carol Guzy, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner said, “There’s something about that still moment in time that does touch people.” Guzy, who traveled with fellow photojournalist and friend Michel duCille, rushed to Tolima, Columbia, in 1985 after news of a huge mudslide. More than 20,000 people were killed. “Michel and I have a bond forever from that experience,” she said. “You get to the edge of the site where you have to just start hiking and walking. You get to the point where it’s mud and you’re walking over bodies. It’s pretty grueling.”
One of her most memorable shots, however, is also one of her hardest to understand. The image is of a woman named Omayra Sánchez, who was 13 when the mudslide hit and killed her. In the photograph, Sánchez is seen submerged in water up to her neck. She had been stuck there for 72 hours as locals worked to free her. “No one could understand how they could be so close and holding her and she was talking to us and talking to her mother,” Guzy said. The photograph shows what appears to be a man holding onto Sánchez’s hand as she looks up at the camera from the murky water. “Someone once told me that empathy was not imagining how you would feel in a particular situation, but actually feeling what the other person is feeling,” Guzy said.
Not all photojournalism captures fragile moments. William Snyder, a photojournalist best known for his shots taken at the Barcelona Olympics in 1993, said “It’s not a photography contest. It’s about telling some of the biggest stories of the year.” He and his partner, Ken Geiger, snapped shots of wrestlers doing headstands on the mat, pole vaulters from the United States hurling themselves in the air over bars and swimmers celebrating sweet victory after winning a race. “What we wanted to do was kick everyone’s butt,” he said. “You’re always having to push that shutter before something happens.”
Don Bartletti, known for his series “Freight Train Migration, 2003,” is familiar with the idea of pushing the shutter before something happens. Climbing aboard a speeding train and clinging to a roof is how Bartletti gathered his shots. “I wanted to show the reader I was on a speeding train and that these branches were coming just over the tops of these kids’ heads,” he said. “I lay my head down flat on the train and put my hand out and I did what I call mash the shutter.”
Bartletti’s most memorable shot is one he originally thought he had surely missed. In the photograph, hands can be seen reaching out of the train’s freight car. Locals standing alongside of the railroad bed can be seen handing oranges to the travelers. “There’s something about this business that can catapult you to the highest sense of being and purpose,” he said. “But when you miss, I’ll tell you. You’re only as good as your last picture.”
“I don’t think you can go out and hunt and say I got to make a Pulitzer Prize winner today,” Stanley Forman said. Forman is a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. His work entitled “Boston Fire, 1976,” was featured in the Boston Herald American. What he thought was going to be just another fire ladder rescue quickly turned deadly. “I’m taking the pictures and all of a sudden you hear this crunch and people just started falling,” Forman said. “And then I turned around because I didn’t want to see them hit.”
One of the most republished shots, taken by a photojournalist, to this day is Joe Rosenthal’s “Iwo Jima, 1945.” In the image, five U.S Marines and a Navy Sailor can be seen raising an American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. Since Rosenthal was unable to comment no his photograph, a fellow photojournalist summed it up perfectly when he said, “It’s a front seat to history.”
Being a photojournalist is more than taking beautiful candid photographs. The physical as well as heavy emotional toll it can take on people is large. It takes a special type of person to do the work these amazing people do every day. Leaving their homes to cover breaking news and risking their lives in some cases, photojournalists are a different breed. Publishing their work for millions to see, they allow regular people a glimpse of life through their cameras’ eye.
