January 2002
Photo Op
University of Texas graduate and Pulitzer prize-winning photographer John McConnico talks about Pakistan and the perfect shot.
JOHN MCCONNICO, THE SOUTH Asia photo editor for the Associated Press, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor of journalism degree in 1987 and received his master's degree in 1994. Since 1993 he has covered events including the U.S. invasion of Haiti; eight hurricanes; the burial of Che Guevara in Cuba; Pope John Paul II in Cuba and India; the Guatemala coup; elections in El Salvador, Guyana, Panama, Nicaragua, India, and Sri Lanka; the Maoist movement and the royal massacre in Nepal; earthquakes in Afghanistan and India; the Kumbh Mela in India; and the exodus from Kosovo to Macedonia. In 1999 he won a Pulitzer prize in spot news photography for his photo of the U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya.
texasmonthly.com: How long have you been working for the Associated Press? When did you move to India and why?
John McConnico: I have worked for AP since 1993. I started in Panama, then went to El Salvador and covered Central America from 1993 to 1994. In 1994 I moved to Puerto Rico and covered mostly Haiti and Cuba from there, the northern parts of South America, and a lot of hurricanes. In 1998 I moved to India, feeling I had seen most of Latin America. Mostly I wanted to see a different part of the world, so I accepted the job without ever having been to India or to Asia, for that matter. I knew that, visually, it was as stimulating as any place on earth and that was enough for me.
texasmonthly.com: Have you adjusted to living there? What is a typical day like for you?
JMC: I have very much adjusted to living here, and in fact, most ask if I will be able to adjust to living outside India. My girlfriend, Sandie, and I have a cook and a housekeeper, so many of the things one takes for granted here are a big hassle in the West. Twice weekly massages are not bad either. I am sick more often than not with one form of parasite or another, but you just work through that, knowing how great the reward generally is at the end of the day.
texasmonthly.com: What do you look for when you take a photo?
JMC: Most of what I look for in pictures is the expression on someone's face, or a simple moment which makes a piece of the story easy to understand in one frame. Photographers do not really have the luxury of allowing the story to play itself out in several frames, so you have to get it right in one generally, because that is what the papers are going to use. Many times you convey a pretty large idea with one picture, and so you just have to do the best you can to tell the story as accurately as possible with what you are given. A lot of photographers talk about moments, but the longer you do it, the more you push it, and the more you look for moments within moments, so that when you do get it right, it is like a good film, or a wine, or a symphony. Obviously that does not happen very often, but it's what you aim for each time you go out.
The two photos used in "You Are There"—"Flagtear" and "Women in Burqas"—are good examples of how every situation is different and that there is no cut and dried way to shoot pictures, or to approach your subjects. During protests, it is often best to dive right in and become part of the flow of what the protesters have created. When they move toward you, you instinctively move with them. If you don't become part of the flow, you get pretty frustrated and often end up getting hit or trampled. You see a few photographers who want a protest to happen a certain way, and they often end up getting unusable pictures, or worse, set on fire by a burning effigy that has gone out of control. The protests got a little dicey at times because of the way I look, and I am a symbol of the people they feel have wronged them. You try to keep your eye on the viewfinder as much as possible and ignore what they are saying, but most of the time the hair is standing up on the back of your neck and you get a kind of sick feeling that something terrible is about to happen. You don't even need to know the language to understand that they are saying to kill all Americans.
As for the more quiet pictures, obviously the key is to blend in as well, but in a different way than the protests. Mainly it is about patience and expressions or maybe the look in someone's eye. Jim Nachtwey, who is considered more or less the top photojournalist of our generation, will stand for hours and hours in one place until he has gotten the picture he wants. And frankly, most of us are not that patient. In Haiti I drove past Jim on a road next to a market at six in the morning and then came back at nine; he was still in exactly the same place and same position. Clearly he knows what he wants and refuses to leave without it. He is also an avid fisherman, and I would say it shows.
texasmonthly.com: What kinds of photos were you taking before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers? What about now?
JMC: The pictures from India now and after the attacks are pretty much the same, though my view of the world, like almost everyone's I would guess, has changed. India remains a real constant, as it has been here for thousands of years and will be here for thousands more. So, in a way, it felt a little like home when I came back here after six weeks in Pakistan and on the Afghan border.
texasmonthly.com: How long were you in Pakistan and from what time frame? What was a typical day like when you were in Pakistan?
JMC: I arrived in Pakistan the day after the attacks after an intense twenty-four hours of trying to get a plane ticket and a Pakistan visa. I was at the gym in New Delhi when it happened, and as soon as the second plane hit, I went to the locker room, got my stuff, and started packing for Pakistan. We all pretty much knew right away it was bin Laden or someone close to him, and the entire press corps from India was on the plane that next day to try to get into Afghanistan. Then the protests began to happen, and every morning I woke up at four, not because I needed to, but because of the nervous energy. I was mostly in Peshawar, the center of the ethnic Pashtun community in Pakistan, and because of their closeness to the Taliban, the energy level and the anti-American sentiment at the protests was high. During the first few days, there were not many journalists there, and those of us who were there stuck together as much as possible. When a mob gets angry, it will turn on a small group, but if there are seven or eight, they tend to leave you alone. So we mostly traveled in convoys around the city in the first weeks and treated one another more as traveling companions than as competitors. Hours were long and diversions were few, with the exception of the Gulbar at the Pearl Continental in Peshawar. And that is where we spent the later part of the nights—in a drab, undecorated cell block of a bar. They had rum, though, and that tended to take the edge off things.
texasmonthly.com: Did you tell people you were American? Why or why not?
JMC: In this climate, never tell anyone you are an American at a protest—Canadian or Swiss works best. I am certainly not ashamed of it, but it would make doing your job next to impossible. I was learning French when all of this started, so I used a lot of that to explain to confused zealots that I was from Montreal and that I did not speak English.
