Tampa Photography Blog

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Maya Tucker shot this photo of a neighbor holding her baby out of her window as her apartment filled with smoke from a fire that started in a closet. What’s even more interesting is that Maya Tucker is not a professional photographer. When I first saw this photo, I thought it was a great moment caught by a New York Daily News photojournalist and “right place, right time.” Not so.

Great moments can be caught by anyone but it’s rare to have a news-worthy moment documented by an amateur photographer. I applaud Maya for having the guts to photograph this—most bystanders do not think to pick up a camera during a crisis situation.

As newspaper photojournalists, we are trained from day one to do our job, do it well and shoot first, and then ask for forgiveness. If there was a photographer on scene, I’m guessing neighbors might have been watching him or her, wondering how he or she could take photos at a time like this. In the news business, we are forced to separate ourselves from the subjects, even if those subjects are victims.

During my five years as a newspaper photographer, I witnessed countless situations that broke my heart. The last and final adventure I had was covering Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I realized after that week that I was not born to be a newspaper photographer. Some are born to cover natural disasters, wars and devastation. I am not one of them.