Pulitzer photo show tells moving, tragic stories behind famous images

On April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, a photograph by Charles H. Porter IV moved across the Associated Press wire — and into history.

The photo — of a firefighter cradling the lifeless body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon — became an icon of America’s worst act of home-grown terrorism.

The Palm Beach Post, like most newspapers around the globe, published the image on the front page.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1996.

Charles Porter, now a physical therapist who shoots weddings on the side in Texas, will speak Saturday at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, as part of an exhibit “Pulitzer Back Stories.”

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On the day of the tragedy, he was 25 and working at a bank across the street from the Murrah Building.

After he heard the explosion — what sounded like a “sonic boom,” he has said — he grabbed his camera and raced to the scene.

He shot all his film, then took it to be developed. A friend suggested he go to the Associated Press office, where editors knew immediately Porter had captured a historic image of that tragic day.

On the 20th anniversary of the bombing last year, Porter told interviewers he realized his picture defined the tragedy, but he didn’t want it to define him.

“It’s not about me,” he said. “The photograph is what lives.”

And living with the photograph has sometimes been painful.

This year, Porter told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper about a Facebook exchange he had with Aren Almon-Kok, Baylee’s mother. Porter sent her a message on what would have been Baylee’s 21st birthday, and she wrote back that she hated the photo and had wished it had never been taken.

Taking an iconic image has consequences, says Scott Mc Kiernan of Zuma Press, who curated this exhibit. He met Porter shortly after he took his famous photo. He was an amateur who could not imagine the responsibility it would place on him.

“That’s what makes a Pulitzer winner — the whole story,” says Mc Kiernan, whose exhibit includes images from The Palm Beach Post’s 1970 Feature Photography win, for a series of photos of migrant workers in the Glades, and from one of The Post’s three Pulitzer finalist portfolios.

Alan Diaz of The Associated Press also took a photograph destined to make history: The April 22, 2000, seizure of Elian Gonzalez.

As Diaz explained in a 2015 Newseum interview, he’d spend all day, day after day, at the Miami home where Elian was staying with American relatives — waiting out front, knowing that government agents could show up at any time to take Elian.

The 6-year-old had become the center of an international custody battle when he was found floating off Florida’s coast in 1999. His mother drowned when the boat capsized.

Diaz was leaning against a wall in a bedroom of the home in pre-dawn darkness when agents stormed into the room. He took 11 shots in eight seconds, then called his boss and said: “They took the kid, and I got the shot.”

Diaz won the Pulitzer for breaking news in 2001. The Pulitzer Back Stories exhibit will show several frames Diaz took that morning, and he will be at the photographic center this weekend to discuss his work.

Also there will be Carol Guzy, who has won four Pulitzers for photography, more than any other photographer.

Guzy won her first Pulitzer in 1986, as a Miami Herald photographer, for images of devastation caused by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia. Her second came in 1995, when she worked for The Washington Post, for photographs she took in Haiti after a military coup. In 2000, she won for images depicting the plight of Kosovo refugees. And she won again in 2011 for a portfolio of graphic, heartbreaking images from the Haiti earthquake.

“Carol Guzy is the greatest storyteller with a camera ever,” Mc Kiernan, a longtime friend, says.

Her work embodies the best of the Pulitzers, he says.

“People say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but I’d argue that a picture is worth 1 million words — because it triggers feelings, emotions, memories.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs: The back stories