Audience

Almost a year ago to the day I wrote this as an email and attached the photo to a close circle of friends.  Looking at it today, it still applies to me.  I know it's not a great photo, and it'll never be in any portfolio, but it matters to someone.

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I was done.  I was mentally checked out of the game and was thinking about other things - like cold medicine and my bed.  Jasper lost the basketball game in the third period and by the fourth both teams had put in their sophomores.  I was sitting in the second row of the bleachers (which had started to empty), camera in my lap and was waiting for the last few minutes to tick off the clock so I could snap a photo of the scoreboard and leave.

"Are you Neil?"

I turned around and a woman wearing a gray sweatshirt with "Jasper" emblazoned in yellow and black across the front introduced herself as the mother of Jack, a 10-year-old that I had snapped a feature photo of the week before.  It ended up running in color on the front page.

"I just wanted to tell you how thrilled we were to see it," she said. "We've gotten a lot of compliments."

We chatted a bit more about her son and I told her the circumstances of the photo, how it came about, how I had Jack hold my camera as I shimmied up the basketball hoop, how my battery died after blindly firing 12 frames.  It was one of those slow news days and we needed a feature.  I also needed to print out some DVD labels for my portfolio and on my way to Dave's house to use his printer I decided to swing up a side street to see if anyone was outside.  It was a cold November day and I wasn't expecting much but sure enough, there was Jack shooting free throws in his driveway after school.  The entire interaction lasted about 10 minutes.

As I walked out of the high school tonight I thought how easily I forget what it means for people to be in the paper.  It could years before Jack has another opportunity to be featured in his home town paper.  Whoever I'm photographing, whatever I'm feeling at the moment, no matter how rushed I am, they deserve my best.

When I was a counselor at a small camp in northern Michigan the director had a phrase that he started repeating after the first few weeks had gone by and the exhaustion had started to show up in our faces.  "You've been here X number of weeks, but remember, it's their first week here."  In the same way, by now I've turned in hundreds of photos and met hundreds of people while doing this job, but for them it could be their first (or only) time in the paper.