George Vecsey: Friends with cameras
I’m a sports columnist for the New York Times, but in my home office I have only two photographs of sports celebrities − Secretariat, taken a few weeks before the great red horse was put down in 1989, and Casey Stengel, the immortal New York baseball manager, clowning around in a hospital bed in 1965, recovering from hip surgery. Casey signed his; Secretariat did not.
These two photos are part of my tiny one-wall collection of photographs. One of my favorites shows me treading carefully on one of those swaying footbridges of Appalachia, crossing a tributary of the Holston River, or maybe it was the Clinch. Ken Murray took that photo on a sunny day in October of 1971, for a story about isolated pockets not easily reached by automobile. There is a white church on the far shore, with hills rising in the background − perfect day; a perfect photo.
Until I became a national news correspondent for the New York Times in 1970, I had seen newspaper photographers mostly as the merry band at sports events, snapping away at anything that moved on court or field. But when I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to cover Appalachia, I began to spend hours in the company of skilled photographers who have graced my life with skill, friendship and advice.
I met Ken Murray at the coalmine disaster in Hyden, Kentucky, at the end of 1970, when 38 miners were killed by illegal blasting methods. I was a New Yorker, enchanted by the mountains and the rural people, but I needed plenty of help getting to know the area. Ken and I ran the ridges together for the next few years. He would become one of the great photographers of Appalachia, who could capture the devastation from strip mining or the beauty of a pony on a snowy hillside with equal perfection. His work graces books and galleries, but back then he was a freelance news photographer, frequently hired by the Times.
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© Ken Murray
One evening Ken heard about a church in the woods, where the elders were handling serpents, to demonstrate their faith in the Bible, not far from his home in the Tri-Cities region where east Tennessee and southwest Virginia come together. Ken got up close to the copperheads and rattlesnakes gliding on the arms and shoulders of Brother This and Brother That. He also snapped a picture of me, cowering in the second pew, taking notes for my story. (A few months later, the same elders graduated to carbolic acid to test another passage in their Bible. We ran a short story to report their demise.)
In 1972, a coal mine’s earthen dam crumbled, killing 125 people in the black floodwaters of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, after the company had not bothered to inform the people that the dam was falling apart. My office wanted to know if there were more of these earthen dams around, so Ken and I began poking around, until company guards discovered us climbing halfway up a hillside.
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© Ken Murray
The guards were not pointing their pistols at us, but they most definitely had guns in plain view, demanding to know what we were doing on company property. (In 1967, a well-known Canadian filmmaker, Hugh O’Connor, had been shot dead after walking onto somebody’s property while making a documentary in a rural corner of eastern Kentucky. We all knew that cautionary tale.)
I am still grateful for Ken’s wisdom that day. “Let’s get down to the state road,” Ken whispered. “That’s public property.” We made small talk, casually putting one foot after another as we edged downhill, until we touched state property. Then I apologised profusely for making such a gross mistake as wandering onto company land, and we got into our car and drove off. I don’t think Ken got any photos that day, but he would do fine on many other occasions. More to the point, I got used to working as a team, knowing that the photographer and I covered each other’s backs.
I was fascinated by Appalachia, and got to know one of its most famous daughters, Loretta Lynn, the Coal Miner’s Daughter, who came from Butcher Holler in eastern Kentucky. Later I was fortunate to help write her autobiography, which was made into a movie by the great English-born director, Michael Apted, with the wonderful Cissy Spacek winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Loretta.
On the wall in my home office, I admit, I have an Italian movie poster for the movie, which was called La Ragazza di Nashville.
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© Ken Murray
Based in Louisville from 1970 to the end of 1972, I got to meet great photographers like Ford Reid, Tom Hardin, Bill Strode and Bill Luster who worked for the two newspapers then owned by the admirable Bingham family. (The closing of the afternoon paper, the Louisville Times, and the sale of the morning paper, the Courier-Journal, to the Gannett chain is part of the trend toward homogenous regional papers in the US) The Courier-Journal had a great feel for using photos to explain the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a state that was grievously divided during our Civil War. Its photographers could capture a cow breathing steam in a wintry day, out in the countryside, or basketball game in an urban park. One day the Courier-Journal ran a photo straight across the top of the front page, showing the traditional ‘topping-out’ ceremony with a tree placed above a new building in downtown Louisville. In those pre-historic days, the New York Times often minimised photographs to make room for a few more precious words, but it still sent great photographers to run around with me.
Perhaps because I am married to an artist, I formed a bond with these visual people. I am hopeless with a camera. On our annual European jaunts, in pre-digital times, I ruined many a well-planned pose with my clumsy fingers. (Thumb Goes to Normandy; Pinky Visits La Sagrada Familia, etc) I never talked shop with my photographer pals, never asked why they stood in a certain place, or what equipment they used, but I did observe them scuttling around, getting a better angle, seeking better light, pulling a different lens out of their sacks, and I knew I was in the company of perfectionists. If I had a free hand, I would help carry some of their equipment. It was the least I could do.
Since moving back into sports in 1980, I sometimes sit down with photographers in the press dining room. My dear friend, Luis Requena, a freelancer who has been around New York ballparks since I broke in during the early Sixties, used to joke about it: Was I perhaps in the wrong place? No, Senor.
Like some of the best athletes, the great sports photographers put on their “game face.” Barton Silverman of the Times is one of the most driven people I have ever worked with. He has to know everything. “What are you working on?” Barton will ask, hours before an event.
At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, Barton badgered me about the best spot to cover the figure-skating finals. When I didn’t know enough to satisfy him, Barton badgered the press officer and a few skating experts, too. Needless to say, when Oksana Baiul tossed off some gold-medal-winning moves at the end of her routine, Barton was in the right place. He’s always in the right place.
Barton is not alone in his preparation. Chang Lee, who arrived from Korea knowing nothing about the English language or photography, is one of the most ambitious journalists I have ever met. I watched Chang, coming down with the flu, positioning himself in the sleet and slush of Nagano, Japan, during the cross-country finals of the 1998 Winter Olympics.
Years later, when the Times sent him to Iraq, I would email him to keep his head down; I exhaled when he got home safely.
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© Vincent Laforet
Then there’s Vincent Laforet, who photographed the man who changes the lights on top of the Empire State Building. Vincent did it from above, from some little ladder high above Manhattan. Some of the best times I’ve had on assignment I’ve shared with Don Hogan Charles, Michelle Agins, Paul Burnett, Joyce Dopkeen, Marilyn Yee, Chester Higgins. I can’t name ’em all.
The freelance tennis photographer, Carol Newsom, who would die much too young, would lug her equipment from the sunny courtside at the United States Open and give me a sweaty hug and then tell me what Connors or Navratilova had been muttering out there during the match.
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© John McDermott
A lot of what I know about soccer I learned from John McDermott, who used to chat with Roberto Baggio during practice of the Italian national team. We spend so much time watching Champions League or Serie A matches that sometimes I have to check out John’s website to remind myself what a superb and diverse photographer he is.
On my modest wall of photographs I have six Tennessee miners with coal smudged on their stoic faces, from Jack Corn; red pebbles, with fence and blue skies of an above-ground cemetery of New Orleans, from William Greiner; a muscular construction worker on a scaffold, from Joyce Walker; a shady corner of an ancient temple outside the national folk museum in Seoul, from Susan Ragan; Pope John Paul II with a young girl in Madison Square Garden, from George Kalinsky; and one of me interviewing the Dalai Lama in the Waldorf Astoria in 1979, from Bill Sauro.
The photos have a theme of sorts − a celebration of work and place and people. They are also a tribute to the friends who took them.