Friends from the Seattle Tibetan community gave me a gift recently, a beautiful Tibetan shirt. My friends were gathering at a staging area at the Seattle Center, lining up to march in the city’s annual Seafair Torchlight Parade. Because the Tibetans were dressed in their celebratory finest and I would be walking along with their group taking pictures, the Tibetans gave me the shirt so that I would better blend-in.
Blending-in felt a bit like a conscious stepping-over-the-line for me. Wearing that shirt as I photographed the Tibetans in the parade was a quiet acknowledgment that, after 30-plus years in newspaper photojournalism -- where I was, day after day, assignment after assignment, a professional observer and a documentarian, but not a participant -- I could no longer even attempt to be unbiased.
It’s been four years now that I’ve been doing pictures of the Seattle Tibetans, and, somewhere along the way, I began thinking of them, not as part of a story I was covering or a photographic project I was doing, but as friends.
That evening when I put on the Tibetan shirt, I became part of the group I was photographing, not someone separate. I thought about my first editor, a colorful fellow of the old school of journalism, who every day preached to his newsroom staff about journalistic ethics and a journalist’s responsibility of fairness and honesty in reporting. In my mind’s eye, my old editor was wagging a judgmental, ethical finger at me, saying “You are no longer one of us. You can’t cover an event and also participate in it.”
And yet... if you look at the pictures I shot that night at the parade, you’ll see the eye of a documentarian. Perhaps Rudyard Kipling was right when he wrote: “Once a priest, always a priest; once a Mason, always a Mason; but once a journalist, always and for ever a journalist.”
