Read a remarkable letter to the Beacon Blog from Los Angeles Times news photographer Rick Loomis about his frontline experience with the U.S. Marines in bloody Fallujah: upclose, detailed and thoughtful.
... at that moment I knew that photographing a gunfight can be like photographing a triple play in baseball. While it's certainly a dramatic moment - a photograph sometimes can't serve to capture the essence of the drama you are witnessing. The pictures of the men shooting out of the window in the next room conveyed little of the life and death intensity of the moment, the sound of gunfire, the smell, the gulping sense of mortality. They could have just as well been during a moment when they were shooting at tin cans in the alleyway.I knew the bullets were aimed at people who were in turn shooting back at them. But my photographs did not depict the intensity that ultimate sense of risk. But was I going to make a target of myself when at least two men were already shot and RPG's were bouncing off the walls as fast as the men shooting them could reload.
Tip via Blackfive.
A gallery of Loomis's photographs is available via the L.A. Times.
Posted by Alan at August 1, 2004 09:55 AM