« Best of - Happy | Main | Best of - Portraits »

Best of - Strong Emotion

Counter balancing the happy emotion that is easy to photograph... is the sad strong emotions that aren't

Photographing people who are crying is pretty hard for me. I'm a fairly emotional guy to say the least and having a camera in front of my face doesn't always protect me from getting misty-eyed too.

Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Rider defender Kelly Gill and goalie Collin Bowersock hang their heads after ending their season with a 3-1 loss to El Paso Del Valle during the UIL Class 4A Regional Quarterfinals Friday afternoon at Grande Communications Stadium in Midland.

Sports is usually where the emotional toll of losing your final game makes one of the strongest impacts. It's hard for me to photograph these local kids in one of their darkest hours.

I try to be respectful and get my shots from a distance... but that is not always the case. It's not my job to decide if these type of photos run in the paper... it's only my job to shoot them and tell the story of what I'm seeing.

Gloria Barrios (left) is comforted by Juan Torres (right) after giving a press conference outside of Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas on Friday, Oct. 3, 2008. Barrios' daughter, Senior Airman Blanca Luna was found in her base housing room with an apparent stab wound and died on March 7, 2008. Barrios came to Texas from Chicago seeking answers from the ongoing investigation into her daughter's death. Torres' Army soldier son died in Afganistan in 2004. (AP Photo/Jason Palmer/Wichita Falls Times Record News)

This was a tough story to work on... This mother came from Chicago to find any information about what happened to her daughter, only to be met with virtually no answers from the Air Force.

Her "translator" was more of an activist than anything, and was paraphrasing much of what she was saying (she was more comfortable speaking in Spanish)... but the emotion didn't need a translation. It was in plain sight and without a doubt what she was going through.

This next one... it was the toughest assignment from the entire year without fail.

Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Elvira Gutierrez cries as she hugs Lorenzo Gipson, from Shreveport, after listening to his heart through a stethoscope. Gipson received her son Joel's heart in an organ donation after Joel was murdered just over a year ago on April 22, 2007. Gutierrez said hearing the beating sounds brought back a flood of memories including feeling her son's heartbeat when she was pregnant.

Because of the nature of my job, I remember exactly what the club scene looked like when Elvira's son was murdered. I photographed the aftermath of that scene. While those type of scenes are tragic, then don't really bother me like they used to and I can control the emotions.

This though... this story still makes me tear up. It did at Christmas when I told my parents the story about this photograph. Heck... it made them both cry too. We're all a bunch of crybabys anyways, but if you don't get misty eyed at this story, then you don't have a heart.

This photo was just after a still-grieving mother heard the beating of her murdered son's heart in this man's chest after he got the life-saving heart donation. She said it was like when she was pregnant and feeling the heartbeat of her baby.

I cannot even begin to imagine what that must have felt like. Even as I'm writing this blog, the screen is getting blurry from my eyes welling up.

She must have hugged him from 3-4 minutes solid... and he wasn't about to let her go either. It was a far cry from the first 20 minutes or so of the meeting. That part was awkward in a way that I've never felt before.

It took a while for the ice to break, but once it did, it was a flood of tears.

Posted by Jason Palmer at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)