Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Remembering Life Magazine

At the risk of showing my age and yours, I would like to ask; do you remember Life Magazine? THE Life Magazine, not the wimpy re-make that has shown up from time-to-time in recent years. I remember when Life Magazine was a common sight in many households. I remember pouring over photographs of the Kennedy children in the Oval Office and crying over the emotional images of President Kennedy’s funeral. Even as a child, I was impressed by the stunning Black and White photos.

Ask any photographer to name the premier American photo magazine of all time and you’ll probably get one of two answers. He or she will name the National Geographic if they treasure exquisite color travel and nature photography or Life Magazine if they love classic Black and White photojournalism. (When I started out in photojournalism, my hands-down favorite hero was W. Eugene Smith, one of Life’s finest.) I suppose a younger photographer might have a different answer and if you fall into that category, I would love to hear your take on this.

Today, Life and Getty Images has launched Life.com, an online playground for those of us whose memory banks are richly papered with images from Life Magazine. As stated on their About page: "LIFE.com not only lets you wander through the legendary LIFE and Getty archives, but with more than 3,000 new photos added every day, it also gives you the best pictures of the people and places shaping our world now."

Check it out.

Online Grazing

I just read a New York Times column by Nicholas D. Kristof called "The Daily Me", in which he talks about the ongoing demise of newspapers and how "the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online". He goes on to say: "When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about."

This does make sense but I would argue that most people do that anyway when reading the newspaper or watching TV. They tend to skim the pages and read the stories that interest them. They usually read the editorials by writers whose opinions they agree with. On television news, they have plenty of left and right leaning news shows to choose from. As Kristof points out, people look for "information that confirms our prejudices".

It's an interesting phenomenon and if we are honest with ourselves we may find we are all guilty of reading our own "Daily Me". Maybe with a bit of clarity thanks to Kristof, we can make the effort to include some other views in our daily news consumption, whether it's by "ink-on-dead-trees" or "grazing online".

And as a career newspaper photographer and reader, I hope I can continue to get my news the old-fashioned way for a while longer.

Today I Have Hope

 
On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration I am thinking about race relations in our country and what this new president means to America.

I grew up in a small Quaker neighborhood in Delaware in the sixties that consisted of twelve houses.  Three families were African American. Two were Italian, one was Polish, one was German/Chinese and I believe the rest were Caucasian unless my memory is missing something. We were a tight-knit group and it was a wonderful atmosphere for a child to grow up in. When my parents bought the house, they were approached by the neighborhood association and told that if they were prejudiced in any way they were not welcome. This was during a time when most neighborhoods were doing the opposite.

Fast forward to the nineties in Lexington, Kentucky. I was covering race riots that resulted from when a white cop shot and killed a black kid. I inadvertently got caught in the middle of a crowd of angry protestors. I was alone in the projects. They surrounded me, taunted me, tried to steal my cameras, punched me in the head and tried to pull me to the ground. Somehow, I managed to keep my cool, get to my car and drive off, very badly frightened and bruised.

I ended up interviewed on national television and I think the interviewer was a little disappointed that I wasn’t angry and didn’t say anything more divisive. But I honestly believed that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could understand their frustration and anger. And there were many blacks there that day that did try to help me.

A year later I worked on a race relations project for the Herald-Leader (see my “Coming Together” post from June). The whole experience left me wondering if we had made any progress at all since Martin Luther King’s time. Of course we have, at least legally, but  on a more subtle, personal level---have we?

Today, I have hope. Today, as I see what very-soon-to-be-president Obama has done for our nation I am more proud of my country than I have ever been.

Today I feel like my country comes a little closer to matching that little neighborhood I grew up in.

The Big Chill

In sympathy for those in the path of the arctic system that has blanketed much of the United States with record cold temperatures...

The Future of Newpapers

I googled “The future of newspapers”.

The first story I read (from Time Magazine) started out: “The word newspaper is going to disappear.”

Further down in the article is a line that explains quite a lot:  “The cost to reach 1,000 people is $20 for newspapers, but just $5 for those online.”

And: “Today, teens don't read newspapers and they never will. If there were a newspaper strike across America today, almost no one under the age of 30 would notice.”

What started me thinking about this stuff is my visit yesterday to the Lexington Herald-Leader where I worked for 18 years. I’m back in Kentucky for a 12 day Christmas visit with family and friends and you know what? It really is hard to go back. It’s hard to go back to the place I once worked and see the shell-shocked faces of former co-workers who have fresh memories of the latest round of layoffs. The photographers no longer blame my departure for increasing their workload, now they say I may have saved a job by leaving.

I find it intolerably sad to see this once-great industry die a slow death this way. I have had a wonderful career, full of exciting memories. I talk with many young photographers who hope for the same kind of career and sometimes I don’t know what to tell them. What kind of career will they have in this fast changing world? Should I tell them to turn back now while they can and go into something more marketable?

But then I think, there will always be news and when there is news, people will always want to see pictures of it. The trick is to stay on top of the ever-changing ways of delivering it. We may not view those pictures in a newspaper in the future (as sad as that makes me feel). Our news consumption may be entirely web-based or there may be other technologies yet to be revealed. The important thing is to stay flexible and keep up with it.

For now, learn all you can, shoot video as well as still, stay fluent on the web and keep your eye on the future—there will be photography there somewhere.

Serial Killers

In 1999 Lexington had the dubious distinction of having two serial killers loose within the same area of town. Since 13-year-old Haley McHone was killed near the railroad tracks, it was assumed for awhile that the "Railway Killer" had murdered her. He had, after all, killed a college student not far from there in 1997 and was reportedly seen in the area more recently riding the rails. But it was eventually discovered that another serial killer was at large and had killed Haley. I took this emotional picture of Haley's mother and sister on Haley's 14th birthday as they released balloons in the park where she was killed.

This story hit a little too close to home for me. Skipping back to the earlier crime in 1997 when the "Railway Killer" struck. It was somewhere around 2 in the morning on the railroad tracks and the victims (a college student and his girlfriend) were walking home along the tracks when they were attacked. My daughter was a student at the same university, walking home at the same time two blocks away, alone. She didn't tell me about it until a month later, knowing it would scare me.

She never walked alone at night again.

Coming Out

For the entirety of my career as a photojournalist I have never made my politics or religion publicly known. I have never slapped a bumper sticker on my car, never knocked on doors for a candidate, never put my name on a petition and certainly never put a yard sign in front of my house. It was my job to remain outwardly neutral. It was even in my official job description. That's not to say I didn't have opinions. I just had to keep them to myself in public. And for good reasons.

Now, however, for the first time in 26 years, I am not on staff at a newspaper and I am free to express myself. And that is just what I have been doing. I have a bumper sticker on my car now. (Once though, when USA Today called me to photograph the McCain campaign's ground game I had to cover it with duct tape.) I have spent weeks canvassing, knocking on doors and as a challenger in voting sites. If Barack Obama didn't win, I wanted to know that it wouldn't be because I didn't try.

Well he won big. And it sure feels good.

Balloon Fiesta

It's that time of year again. Which means I've lived here in Corrales for a year now. Wow.

The Balloon Fiesta Starts today. I can see the whole thing from my backyard from about five miles away. This year the economic state of affairs has pared the number of participating balloons down to under 700 for the first time in many years. On top of that, we are due for a storm to hit tonight or tomorrow. So in case we are denied the Balloon Glow tonight I'll post a photo from last year. The good news is that the Fiesta lasts all week so there will certainly be other days with cooperating weather. And if I'm lucky, on at least one of those days, the wind will blow the hundreds of balloons my way so I can sit in my backyard and wave as they float by.

Patrick Swayze in the Windy City

We are in Chicago staying at Hotel 71. Our first view from the 26th floor was of the back alley where Patrick Swayze (with his hands up) was filming his new A&E pilot, "The Beast". It was a little hard to spot him from that high up, but his distinctive walk convinced me it was him.

The Big Race

In what has been billed as the most exciting two minutes in sports, Big Brown and Kent Desormeaux pulled off a win over Eight Belles. Unfortunately, the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby was marred by the fatal injury to the second place horse.

I was sitting on the track at the finish line for this picture. I used a Canon Mark III camera with a 70-200 mm, f2.8 lens. The difficulty here was that the shadow of the clubhouse was covering nearly the whole track at race time. There was no telling if the winning horse would cross the line in shadow or bright sun. On these races I usually go with a manual setting but in this situation I didn't dare. Luckily the automatic exposure on my camera was accurate.

Click here to see all of our coverage of the Kentucky Derby--the results of many hours of work.