Once upon a time, I wanted to be a photojournalist…
Time was, I had several small newspapers running my photos. But for a kid fresh out of high school there was scant little money in it, and my soul was never competitive enough to keep pounding doors for work in a market that was saturated with other guys like me looking to get their pictures printed. By the mid-70s I’d given it up, and for a decade I just wandered aimlessly in the workforce. But my interest in what news photographers do has never flagged, and I’ll reliably stop to listen whenever a photographer comes forward to tell the story behind a photo. Their stories are worth hearing, to understand the struggle it sometimes is just to take the images that can keep the public informed, let alone deal with the fallout…
So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera — the story of his death became my responsibility.
The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.
You’ve probably already seen the photo of supreme court justice Scalia making an obscene gesture in a church, after a reporter for the Boston Herald asked him how he would respond to people who question his impartiality in matters of church-state separation. Scalia responded thusly:
…telling the reporter, "To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’" Michelangelo Signorile, himself of Italian descent, said on his show the other day that the word translates roughly into "get fucked up the ass". This is the man the right has been for years calling the most intellectual justice on the court. You have to figure they think it’s too bad Al Capone wasn’t available when Reagan had an opening to fill.
Whether Scalia knew there was a photographer there when he did that I’m still not sure. But the moment he heard the camera go off, he said "You’re not going to print that, are you?". So at minimum he knew he’d been caught being the crude barstool asshole he always is when he thinks the cameras aren’t there. But this time one was.
The photographer, Peter Smith, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University, was freelancing for The Pilot, a newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese. The operative word here is freelancing. Had he been staff, the photo of Scalia making an obscene gesture would have been the newspaper’s property and likely would never have seen the light of day. But, at least when I was doing it, a freelancer owns the photos they take, until they sell them to a newspaper. Whether The Pilot offered to buy the photo I don’t know, but I know had that been me I’d have held onto the rights for dear life.
For a couple days the photo stayed in the shadows, while the republican Mighty Wurlitzer went into operation, to convince the public that Scalia had made no obscene gesture…that the reporter was lying…blah blah woof woof… I was watching the whole thing unfold from the sidelines, knowing from my own experience just how suddenly things can happen, and how being just a fraction of a second on either side of the moment means you missed it. You get yourself back home to your darkroom (or nowadays I guess your computer), and you develop your film and you look over what you got and you see that you were close, but not spot-on enough that the picture is clear and unambiguous about what that moment was. Where the difference between capturing the moment and missing it entirely is less then a heartbeat, less then the blink of an eye, to be good at what you do you have to train your mind to see it coming and be there when it happens, just to stand a chance of getting it at all. The rest is chance, and chance can do even the best photographers wrong sometimes. I’d expected the photo of Scalia would hit the papers and the Internet almost at once, and when it didn’t I started to wonder if either Scalia had successfully managed to have it suppressed, or the photographer simply didn’t get a good shot of it.
Then, after several days of republican spin machine bellyaching that Scalia didn’t do it, the photographer came forward with the photo.
“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.
Despite Scalia’s insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper “got the story right.”
Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ”
The Archdiocese of course, fired Smith immediately. Only I’m a little fuzzy about how you fire a freelancer. I guess what they meant was never darken our door again… Well, they covered up for child molesters. You have to figure that demanding a photographer cover up for a gutter crawling thug, who feels perfectly free to treat a church like it’s the corner bar, would be even less likely to strike them as unethical behavior. Morals. Values.
Peter Smith has taken what will become one of the iconic photographs of our times. That face, and the gesture, say it all, not only about the man, but about the times we are living in. That is what photographers live for. The god of shadow and light smiled on him in that one instant, and he captured an image that says it all, and he did not just the right thing, but the only thing a photographer could do with it; he showed it to the world. Because the world needs to see.
