Photo Op
University of Texas graduate and Pulitzer prize-winning photographer John McConnico talks about Pakistan and the perfect shot.
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texasmonthly.com: What do you think about when you are photographing something? Are you trying to tell a story? Take an award-winning photo?
JMC: I just try to represent the story as honestly as I can. You do look for drama or something that will grab people's attention, but never at the cost of telling the story accurately. As for the awards, you cannot worry too much about them. I have won a couple, but they were almost always for pictures that I did not expect to win. Plus, many of us forget that the picture belongs to no one. If it belongs to anyone at all, it is to the subject of the picture.
texasmonthly.com: Have you ever been afraid for your life while on the job? If so, would you elaborate?
JMC: Journalists inevitably fear for their lives a few times during their careers, some more than others because they are in harm's way more than others. I think it is directly related to how much you choose to put yourself in bad situations. I am not one to put myself in a bad spot too often, but sometimes it just happens. There is a lot of dark humor among journalists, particularly the photographers. The most popular one is that dead photographers take lousy pictures. We are not there to be martyrs, but you want to get as close to what is really happening as possible; sometimes that involves going places or doing things you would not ordinarily do. Jerome Delay, our photographer in Paris, is always at the very center of the storm, but I think he does it well because his instincts are so good, and he is so fluid in dangerous situations. Personally speaking, I probably look more like a cornered dog than a warrior when things get bad, but I often use that to empathize with what the subjects of my pictures are going through. So I guess it works both ways. The beauty of it is that there is no one way to do it and different types excel in different situations.
texasmonthly.com: What kind of camera do you use? Why?
JMC: I use Canon if for no other reason than that is what I have always used. I doubt I would ever change, because it is now like an extension of my hand and I know where everything is. It is kind of important the same way as wearing shoes you like is important, but nothing more than that. I am not big on gear. It is just a tool, like anything else. What is in your head and in your heart is a lot more important. I could probably take more or less the same pictures with a cheap point and shoot.
texasmonthly.com: Do different images require different types of equipment?
JMC: Yes. But not in photojournalism, for the reasons listed above. Fashion photographers, fine art photographers, and perhaps documentary photographers are much more reliant on their cameras. All I want is something that will keep shooting after I have dropped it down a flight of stairs. I don't want to belittle what we do, but wire photographers are certainly the grunts of the business, and we just want the camera that will get the job done in less than ideal situations. You want to be able to forget the camera and just see through it.
texasmonthly.com: Have you ever had your camera taken away? Your film? If so, would you elaborate?
JMC: My camera has been taken away several times and usually the film is taken. If you know it is coming, you just put a dummy roll in and make a huge stink about it when they take that roll. Most of the cretins that take cameras from you are not intelligent enough to understand that there may be other rolls of film or that the roll you gave them is blank.
texasmonthly.com: Looking at your photos from Pakistan, it is easy to see that you've seen many people in pain, people who are hungry, suffering, and angry. How do you keep a perspective on your job?
JMC: Seeing people suffer all the time has an almost anesthetizing effect, especially when you live in India. You try to never become cynical about it, and in fact, when I am feeling sort of down or confused about the state of the world, I go down to a slum on the Yamuna River—not to make myself feel better, but to give the people who see my pictures perspective about how bad others have it. There is so little of that these days, as we spend more and more of our time in front of computers, DVDs, televisions, and Sony Play Stations. People should occasionally go out and see how bad things are for others, the ones at the bottom of the heap. We are all the same species, but often it does not feel that way. So in a way, that is my contribution. Even if you are in front of your computer, maybe you can get a bit of a glimpse of what that person's life is like and understand how blessed we are to have a simple thing like a roof over our heads.
texasmonthly.com: Do you think photographers take too many risks? Why or why not?
JMC: Some photographers do, some don't. It all depends on how far you want to push the envelope. Ninety-five journalists have been killed so far this year, and 86 were killed last year. That sounds pretty high to me. In the span of three weeks, 8 journalists were killed in Afghanistan, and those numbers are just absurd. No story is worth your life.
texasmonthly.com: When did you decide to become a professional photographer? Do you remember the first photo you took?
JMC: The first picture I took was in England. My mom had given me a point and shoot and I seem to recall that most of the pictures taken with it were on self-timer as I whirled it around my head by the strap. So I guess I was off to an innovative start right from the beginning. I don't really recall what any of the pictures looked like other than not much was recognizable as being England. I decided to become a photographer when it appeared I was not really exceptional at anything. I tried English, then economics, then a little philosophy, art history, and finally decided photography was the one thing that would allow me to join a lot of my interests. I thought, "How difficult could a degree in photography be?" I was a fairly lousy student and did not excel in my photography classes until pretty late. I took my first serious pictures when I was 21, and I developed pretty slowly because I was distracted by a lot of other things. I would say it took a good five years before I had anything that I would now consider to be even remotely decent.
I can remember the first picture I ever had published was a one column mug shot of some professor at UT. It appeared on page 5 of the Daily Texan. My name was so long that it ran beyond the width of the picture. I was enormously proud of it, though, and I ran around campus raiding the newsstands for every copy I could find. I must have had a hundred before I realized it was just a mug shot and that maybe I was capable of something even more grand than that.
texasmonthly.com: What is your favorite photo you've ever taken? Why?
JMC: I am not sure I have one because I think I have yet to take it. Photographers are extraordinarily lucky in that the longer you do this, the better you seem to understand what it is that makes a good picture. So I would say my favorite is the last one I will take. That gives me something to aim for, I suppose.
texasmonthly.com: Is there anything you would like to add?
JMC: I think that the most important thing for photographers is not the pictures you take, but what you see and absorb along the way. I am remarkably fortunate that my job takes me places other people will never see. And I think most of us in the business lose sight of that eventually. The world seems to be more and more fractious these days, and perhaps a photographer's duty is to bring it all back together. There is no language in photography, much like there is no language in art or in music, and so I think we have to use that to strike a common cord in everyone. Pictures throughout history have been used to start wars and to end them. And almost every photographer I know hopes that theirs will be used to help stop suffering, or at least give people an idea of what it is to go through something as terrible as war.
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