Newspaper photographer Ray Bourgeois was relaxing with a good book when
his police scanner alerted him of a PI-10-50. Translation: Personal injury
car accident. Moments later, he heard two ambulances dispatched as Code 4
to the scene. Bourgeois knew it would be a bad one. Code 4 is an extreme emergency.
What might have been a typical road accident turned into a photojournalist's
nightmare -- someone you know has died and your job is to take pictures. Two
cars had collided head-on. Inside one car were two teenage sisters who Bourgeois
had known since they were toddlers. Their mother worked as a secretary in
the newsroom. Bourgeois took pictures of the wreck and they ran on the front
page of the paper.
"Often you must shoot without compassion," he says.
Neil Barker, a photojournalist in England, agrees. "The ability to separate
yourself from your subject matter is often useful -- you don't want to get
too involved in some of the things you have to photograph. If you did, you
wouldn't last a week. You see some pretty strange and gruesome things at times."
On the upside, you're not stuck in an office all day. There's plenty of
variety and you never know what may happen next. "I can come into work on
a Monday morning and it might be a routine day, or I could be photographing
a plane crash."
Depending on the size of the newspaper coverage area, you can become quite
well known, even a celebrity of sorts. Barker likes that part of the job.
If you're looking for a job with regular hours and meal breaks, this isn't
it. And bear in mind that it's an outside job and "you'll get wet, cold or
sunburned," warns Barker.
What's the worst part of the job for Bourgeois? "A mother crying over her
dead children at car accidents, fires. Shooting pictures of funerals, inquests.
Going to a home and asking a young boy's mother for a photo of her son who
died a half hour before."
So why does Bourgeois stay in the business?
He stays because despite the horror of some of his assignments, his photos
can have a significant impact on people's lives. He can make a difference.
For example, one particular street in the city was the site of many traffic
fatalities. His photos were presented to city council and were the deciding
factor in rebuilding the street.
Or there was the time that a house in the country burned to the ground
because the fire department's tanker truck ran out of water. A photo of a
firefighter holding a hose with no water was used to raise funds for a new
tanker truck.
Lydia LeDrew is a freelance commercial photographer and photojournalist.
She understands this brand of storytelling very well.
She had been working as a student photographer at a large daily newspaper
covering spelling bees and city hall functions when she was asked to cover
an environmental rally.
"It was supposed to be a really big protest about the indifference...on
the issue of the environment. But when I arrived at the rally there were only
about 30 people there. I was depressed at first, because I thought the low
turnout had ruined my big break. Then I realized that the low turnout was
my story -- only 30 people had cared enough to show up."
LeDrew took her photos of the sparse crowds at the rally and then returned
to the newsroom to develop them. Front page.
"They were great. I was so proud because I had really captured the dejection
on the protesters' faces, really captured their bewilderment at the lack of
concern for this issue." LeDrew isn't sure whether her photograph actually
changed people's opinions about environmental activism, but she hopes it made
a few people stop and think.