Not every moment can be a Kodak moment, photojournalist Vincent Laforet said, which is why sometimes a photographer’s job is to make “something out of nothing.”
About 50 students, faculty and Evanston residents attended “An Afternoon with Vince Laforet” in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum as part of the Crain Lecture Series. Laforet, Medill ’97 and former Daily photo editor, detailed the work and planning involved in many of his assignments, including photographing the dwindling bodies of water in the West for National Geographic and life in Pakistan just days after Sept. 11 for The New York Times.
In the last decade, his work has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Time and Vanity Fair, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for post-9/11 coverage overseas in 2002. As the media is changing and the market is converging, it is even more important for photojournalists to find creative ways to capture their surroundings, said Laforet, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
“It’s becoming less about how you capture it, whether it’s a still image or a video or multimedia, and more about the ideas you are capturing and how you’re conveying those,” Laforet said.
Over the course of the presentation, Laforet shared anecdotes about some of his unique experiences. For one photo, he braced himself on the three-foot crow’s nest on the needle of the Empire State Building to take a shot vertically downward of workers making electrical repairs on the antenna. In another, he photographed Donald Trump standing on his golf course pointing at the camera in his “You’re fired!” pose and recounted that Trump asked him if he would like to be “fired.”
Laforet called the final series of photos he presented, which chronicled the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the toughest assignment he has ever had. In one of the photos, a man who was awaiting rescue on top of a bridge had spelled out “Need water to drink bad” in large letters on the ground. Laforet said he watched the exhausted man raise his arms up and then slump over on the ground, and said it is difficult sometimes for a journalist to not feel like a “vulture.”
Still, he said he learned an important lesson about the role of photojournalists during his time in New Orleans.
“Sometimes just documenting what’s in front of you is the most important thing you can do,” he said. “It’s not about a war, it’s not about recognition, it’s not about your photography, it’s about having someone there to witness what’s going on and telling people outside that environment how bad it is.”
Medill graduate student Kathryn Grim attended the lecture as part of her design class. Because her concentration is in reporting and writing does not delve deeply into photojournalism, Grim said it was interesting to hear about the subject from specialists.
“It’s nice to get someone else giving us more perspective on what it’s actually like, as opposed to one of the professors here giving us a little slide show about the rule of thirds,” she said.
