Seattle Times to Present 2010's Year in Photos at SPL on Thursday

Photograph by Mike Siegel; courtesy of the Seattle Times

The Olympics in Vancouver. Mariner Ken Griffey Jr.’s retirement. President Obama’s sonic boom of a visit. We’re bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that it’s hard to believe that all of these major news events happened only last year. Thankfully, the Seattle Times will remind us of the year that was with their second annual Year in Photos presentation at the SPL’s central branch on Thursday. Overflow attendees at last year's event sat in the aisles and on stairs; eventually guests had to be turned away, so if you'd like an actual chair be sure to get there in plenty of time for the 6:30 p.m. doors.

We spoke with Seattle Times director of photography Barry Fitzsimmons about the cultural importance of photography in the news (and photography as news), the photos amassed by the staff in 2010 and the evolution of photojournalism over his decades-long career — which he stumbled upon thanks to a college job as a clerk at his local paper and a camera for Christmas.

How did you learn on the job?

Following photographers around night and day, seeing how they responded to news events and to lightning situations and picking up tidbits — and reading books on it on my own. I wouldn’t recommend it nowadays; I’d recommend going to college.

How did you develop your sense of news judgment? For instance, you were at the center a 2004 decision to publish a photo sent to you of veterans’ coffins on a plane in Kuwait preparing to come home. [This was before the government’s ban on media coverage of returning war dead was lifted, in 2009.] How do you decide what to publish and what not to — both on that larger scale and also on a smaller scale of going through rolls of film and deciding which shot to run with?

Well, now we don’t use film anymore, so it’s going through images on a computer screen. With the coffin photo, I got a phone call from a woman who said she had this image. I’m always willing to look at people’s pictures, and so I took a look at it and said, “Do you realize what you have here?” I spent 10 days showing it around the newsroom, talking to other editors, making sure that it was real — it’s so easy now to manipulate pictures. There were 18 coffins in that plane with flags on them, so we made sure that a certain number of people had passed away during the previous week. I spent nights talking to her, because she was in Iraq, so I would talk to her at two in the morning our time, which was daytime her time. It was a lot of back and forth to make sure it was the real thing. And the paper had the fortitude and the guts to go ahead and run the image, because the government was against running those types of images ever since the Vietnam War. It caused a big stir. It was a big deal.

Once you verified its authenticity, was there ever any doubt that you’d run it?

No, not at all. In fact, for the editor then, who’s since left, Mike Fancher, there was no question at all: If this is good, we’re good to go. We’d run it and we’d deal with the consequences. A lot of people complained and said they were going to cancel their subscriptions. By calling them back and explaining to them what the image was — people were saying we were against the war or for the war — it was just a demonstration of how much respect was given to these people.

So on a smaller scale, how do you go through photos from, say, a car accident and select which is the most suitable for publication?

Sports action, car accidents — it depends on the moment. Light, moment, and composition are the three elements that make up a really good photograph. Some pictures have all of those elements, some have two, some have one. If you’re at a bank robbery, you may not have the light or the composition but you might have the moment of a guy running out of a bank with a bag of money. An ideal situation would be to have all three of those. So as we edit, we ask: “Is it a good picture? Does it work with the story we’re working on?”

Photograph by Steve Ringman; courtesy of the Seattle Times

What are you hoping people take away from this year’s presentation and discussion?

The pictures that we’ll show at the library are pictures just from the staff. They’re the best pictures that they have taken throughout the entire year. There are 40 to 60 that we have in a slideshow that we’ll show as people are being seated. We have a video that has four photographers and a photo editor talking, which is really well done. We’re starting to get more and more into video, so I wanted to keep that in the presentation because last year we had none. And then two photographers will speak about their images from the past year — John Lok and Steve Ringman — and both of them happened to have gone to the Olympics. So they’ll tell vignettes that will give people a chance to see the stories behind the pictures. I’ve talked to people who think these guys are so lucky for going to the Olympics — I think people believe they get a ticket, they sit down, they shoot the event. John was in line at 6 in the morning for an event that didn’t start until 7 that night. Waiting to get in, waiting to get a spot to shoot, then once you get that spot waiting hours and hours for it to begin because you can’t leave because then somebody else will take it. There are photographers from all over the world trying to get where you’re at. There’s very little glamor.

It’s an opportunity for people to have some face time with photographers who are in the field. One of the interesting things at the end of last year's presentation were the tons of questions, and it was fun to field questions on the fly. I look forward to that.

How has photojournalism evolved during the course of your career? Going from film to digital to video — how has your job changed and where do you see photojournalism going?

It’s hard to tell where it’s going because it’s changing so fast. A year ago at this presentation we had no video. Since then we have trained a photographer to shoot nothing but video for online every day. It’s kind of hit and miss depending on how the assignments run, but we definitely know that it’s a priority. The other thing that photographers are doing that they never did before is they’re shooting and instantly sending a picture in. They may have an assignment at 10 this morning and they’re done at 10:30; they’ll send pictures in so that we can get them up online. Before, they could come in [to the office] in the afternoon because the paper didn’t go to press until that night. So there was a much longer time delay.

[Now it's] shoot it, we need it, let’s get it. We go to football games and we’re sending pictures before the game, during the game and at halftime so that we can put things up online before the game’s even over. The last Seahawks game had people checking scores in India and China. It’s become worldwide now instead of being just Seattle. The response time that photographers have to have in sending images back has changed dramatically.

Besides shooting video, now we’re also shooting pictures with smartphones — a photographer who responds to an accident can jump out of their car can shoot a phone picture and send it back to the paper while they get their camera gear and start taking regular photos for the newspaper. And online has something instantaneously for the morning commuters.

That sense of immediacy must make for a hectic newsroom.

It is, especially because we’ve integrated the online people. They used to be separate in another room in another building; now they’re spread out in the newsroom. They’re in the sports department, they’re in the features department, they’re in the heart of the newsroom now. And so they’re part of everything, and they’re constantly wanting to be fed: “Do we have anything to go with? There’s a house fire, can we get something right away?” It’s changed dramatically.

I would say two years ago, we’ll go back that far — the staff here are a mature staff, and so they had a hard time. “Well, what do you mean you need something right now? I just shot it.” It’s like, “No, we need it.” I would almost say — for very few people — there might have been some foot dragging. And now they get it. And they see the opportunity: Instead of getting one or two pictures in the paper, they can get 10 pictures up online.

It’s changing every day, and really fast. It’s hard to keep up. And it’s hard to keep up with what’s really important. A couple years ago everybody had to have video, so we put a larger effort into it. Video is good, but it’s not the thing that gets the most hits on your site. I think it’s something that’s a necessity, but not everything has to be video.

You mentioned that instead of having one or two photos in the paper, photographers can have 10 of their images online. How do you edit yourself? Is it more difficult to choose when you have more to choose from?

No, it’s not. What we look for is redundancy. Some online places, if they have 40 photographs then they’ll put 40 photographs up. And as you click through their gallery, you see that an image is the same as the last one except the person’s head is turned one inch more. What we try and do is take those 40 photographs and maybe put up 15 and try and get rid of the redundancy and tell the story all the way through.

Thursday at 7 p.m. // Central Library // FREE