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a journalist's life
'You're Writing With Light'
by Dan Fesperman
Dan Fesperman has been a reporter at The
Sun since 1984, working first for The Evening Sun and later for The Sun. His
first novel, Lie in the Dark, which was published in June, is set in the besieged
city of Sarajevo.
"A Journalist's Life" will appear regularly in CJR. We begin with news photographer Jed Kirschbaum, a veteran at the Baltimore Sun.
It is a Wednesday morning in Baltimore, and a press conference is in progress on a sun-washed sidewalk outside an inner-city school. The guy who called it is a Republican running for mayor, a species that in this Democratic town has the survival chances of a crab poised above the steamer.
Onto the scene bustles Jed Kirschbaum of the Sun. With his loaded vest pockets and sagging camera bag, he resembles an undersized Viking with a haircut. Lenses aclatter, he arms himself for the moment with a gruff forbearance, and his motor drive is wheezing in almost no time as the candidate continues to speak.
Not until a few minutes later, while the TV crews are packing their bags, does the essential Kirschbaum emerge. It is then that he pops a blunt question to the candidate: Why bother? Why waste your time and money when you know you don't stand a chance? To the two Sun reporters present, it may seem an intrusion. To the candidate, yet another dose of media impertinence. To Kirschbaum it is a device, every bit as useful as a light meter or a long lens.
For one thing, he figures, he has asked a question the reporters wanted to but couldn't. But more to the point, his query was a lever, an attempt to pry loose the mask that just about everyone wears whenever they come face to face with a camera.
"Everybody has this ‘Guard-all' shield around them, like in the old Colgate ad," Kirschbaum says later, seated in The Sun's photo department. "And nobody is going to let you past that shield if they think you're trying to steal something. The best images are when you can get past that shield people are trying to put up, especially in portraiture. You can look at a roll of film and almost see someone dropping it."
At fifty, Kirschbaum has shot flood and famine, earthquake and oil spill. He has covered war and revolution abroad. And he has occasionally joined the hordes snapping at the gestures and sighs of presidents and kings. But those sorts of images tend to arrive gift-wrapped in power and majesty. To bring out the best in Kirschbaum, send him to a kids' party in a working class warren like Dundalk, or set him loose on a rowhouse avenue on a summer's day in Hoboken. He's the go-to guy when you want to squeeze something from nothing, the shooter who will talk up his subject and, yes, get him to drop the mask.
Kirschbaum has been a Sun photographer for twenty-one years, and for a year and a half before that he shot for The Hudson Dispatch in Union City, New Jersey.
He's won an ample supply of awards — New Jersey Press Photographer of the Year in 1978, a third place for pictorial in 1985 in the forty-second annual Pictures of the Year competition, to name two of the biggest. But his talents are best appreciated day in, day out, in those something-from-nothing specials.
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| Summer delight: Towel courtesy of Good Humor man (Edgewood, Maryland, August 2, 1995) |
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| Grief at a funeral (Baltimore, August 8, 1986) |
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| Mary Fox keeping cool (Hoboken, 1976) |
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| Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer on the mound for Baltimore (June 27, 1982) |
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| Lorie Peters: The Sun decided not to run photos of her because they offered suffering without inspiration. |
On the day of the mayoral candidate's press conference, the play of the accompanying story doomed Kirschbaum's shot to a tiny, one-column display at the bottom of page 4B. But flip to the front of the section and a three-column beauty beckons from the top of the page, and it stretches all the way to the fold. It is a Kirschbaum frame from another assignment, a shot of a five-year-old girl standing at the foot of a darkened stairwell. She is backlit by an angled beam of sunlight that spreads before her like stage lighting. Clad in a pink tutu for ballet, she is practicing a pirouette in an unlikely corner of the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts.
Not only is the photo visually stunning, it is the perfect illustration for the story below, a piece describing how the Maryland Hall is bursting at the seams and needs more room. This is the sort of shot his editors have come to expect.
Kirschbaum came to the business later than some. After growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut, he moved south to Baltimore as an English major at Johns Hopkins University, class of '71. He didn't own a camera until his senior year, and that one was an Instamatic.
After graduation he hitchhiked across Europe for six months, picking up a Pentax along the way. While in Brussels he dropped off a few rolls with an American working at the embassy who did photo-finishing on the side.
Nice stuff, the guy told him. Ever considered doing this for a living?
But first there was the Army. After active duty at Fort Eustis, Virginia, he headed back to Baltimore, where he took a Saturday morning photography class at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Then Conn ecticut again, pumping gas for a while and taking more classes in photography, this time in night school. From there, he enrolled in the photojournalism program at the University of Missouri, sometimes fin agling weekend press passes to shoot professional baseball and football games in Kansas City. And by 1976 he was ready for the Dispatch, a paper with a newsroom just three blocks from the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.
On a summer day at the Dispatch, among the rowhouses of Hoboken, he came across Mary Fox, an old, wrinkled woman in her swimsuit and shorts, cooling herself in the spray of a fire hydrant. The picture he took that day remains one of his favorites. It is the sort of shot that some photographers, even good ones, might foul up, either by trying to sneak a shot without telling her or by creating an image that would demean her.
"She was just wonderful, and very open, and kept saying it was just like Coney Island," Kirschbaum recalls. "It could have been raw and derogatory, but it has a warmth to it, I think. You like her, you don't have a disdain for her. It isn't just a matter of snapping a shutter. You're writing with light, and photographers have to build a vocabulary the same way that a writing reporter does."
From that experience and others like it, Kirschbaum has developed two cardinal rules that he passes along to students whenever he teaches a course. "You never steal a photograph, and you always try to leave people with their dignity," he says. "The last thing you want is for someone to get their radar up thinking you're going to take something from them when you take their photograph."
In 1978 Kirschbaum joined the photo staff of The Sun. Part of the job has been shooting local icons, ranging from film director John Waters to Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. There has been plenty of travel, too — to El Salvador in 1983, to northern Ethiopia and Eritrea in '85, to the U.S.-Mexico border in '87, to the infamous Devil's Island (for Smithsonian magazine) in '88, to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89, and to Rwanda in '96.
His most dangerous assignment, however, came last year when he least expected it. A reporter doing a first-person piece on trying to hit a batting-practice home run at Oriole Park at Camden Yards nearly knocked Kirschbaum unconscious with a line drive to his forehead.
Newspaper photography has its frustrations, of course. Equipment fails. Editors misuse nice shots. And photographers known for getting something from nothing can find themselves with an excess of nothing assignments.
Or, worse, a picture doesn't get used at all. That happened to Kirschbaum in 1993 to some of the most evocative and exhaustive work of his career. It was a story of a thirty-three-year-old woman named Lorie Peters. Suffering from a devastating skin condition known as scleroderma, she was slowly shriveling up and withering away, barely able to move without help. With her bones at her joints practically poking through the skin, and with her eyelids gone, she is hard to look at.
After having spent most of her entire life in hospitals, Lorie was finally moving out on her own, and Kirschbaum wanted to record her brave attempt at self-sufficiency, even if it meant doing the job mostly on his own time. He spent months with her, trying to capture the dignity and spirit beneath the gnarled covering, and he spent further months writing a lengthy story to accompany the photos.
But after great deliberation, Kirschbaum's editors spiked the story, along with the photos. Sun editor John S. Carroll says the paper's coverage then was already suffering from an excess of "urban pathology" stories offering liberal doses of misery but precious little insight on what it all meant.
"I'm not sure a story should focus a great deal on that type of suffering unless you can draw some kind of lesson, or inspiration. That's what was missing in that story, I thought," Carroll says. "I felt bad about it, because I have a world of respect for Jed, and I know he put a whole lot into that one."
For Kirschbaum, the most difficult part of the experience was breaking the news to Lorie. "I had trouble seeing her after they rejected the story," he says. "I felt like I'd let her down. It took the wind out of my sails."
He soldiered on, however. "I guess the older you get, you're not quite as quixotic," he says. But newspaper photography "beats working for a living. The thing is, you get paid every day to go out and try to take a beautiful photograph. And when the light is beautiful, and you have an interesting subject. Well . . ."
