…where will it all end?
I was assigned at the last minute to go down to the North Korean embassy to doorstop the North Korean envoy once his talks with Christopher Hill ended – an assignment that due to language difficulties turned out to be problematic for text, but provided an out-of-the-blue scoop for pix.
The North Korean embassy was about 10 mins from my home and it was raining dogs and cats, so I thought it would be a better idea to borrow my dad’s car and drive over to stake out the embassy rather than take a cab. When I got home, I decided to bring my Canon S5 along, just in case I got a chance to use it. When I got there, there were no other media there because of the rain, so I just parked by the side of the embassy and waited.
About an hour later, when the rain eased, the Japanese/Korean media started coming back. I got out of the car to join the crowd around the embassy house entrance, armed with my camera and tape recorder. After 30 or 40 minutes a black Mercedes finally appeared and moved towards the entrance of the ambassador’s home, and I got my camera ready. Trying to shoot the envoy thru the windows of the car was really difficult because of the reflection from the windows and the rest of the media jostling with each other to get a clear view.
The story behind the Pulitzer picture
Reuters Bangkok senior photographer Adrees Latif tells how he took the pictures which won him a Pulitzer Prize. The pictures were taken in Myanmar during the protests in September last year and include the photo of Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai being shot.
“Tipped off by protests against soaring fuel prices, I landed in Yangon on 23 September, 2007, with some old clothes, a Canon 5D camera, two fixed lenses and a laptop.
For the next four days, I went to Shwedagon Pagoda, two-three kilometres from the centre of town and waited for the monks who had been gathering there daily at noon.
Since I was at the same pagoda every day, dozens of people, including monks, asked me who I was and what I was doing. As the ruling military regime is notoriously secretive, my replies were guarded.
Barefoot in maroon robes, and ringed by civilians, the monks chanted and prayed before starting their two-kilometre march to the Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. Each day their numbers grew, from hundreds to thousands.
By 27 September, the city had become packed with troops. Soldiers and government agents stood at street corners.
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The Wall
I was waiting for Christopher Hill’s briefing to start in the lobby of a hotel near the U.S. embassy in Singapore. I knew that Jennifer had gone down to the North Korean ambassador’s house for a stakeout – knowing that if there were any murmurs of an appearance by the elusive North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-gwan, she would inform both her text colleagues and us.
As it turned out, things happened very quickly, and by the time we got wind of the fact that Kim would appear in front of the gates, the event was almost over. There was a panic in the lobby of the hotel as South Korean and Japanese media also received word of the sudden appearance, but everyone soon resigned themselves to not making it in time, as the residence was around 30 minutes away and there was no way any of us would make it before the doorstop ended.
I felt disappointed that I missed an opportunity to picture Kim, as our picture clients would have rather seen a few frames of him instead of Christopher Hill who we had already pictured the previous day. In retrospect, maybe I should have been standing in front of those gates all along, waiting for Kim’s car to turn up, rather than in a hotel lobby, waiting for Christopher Hill’s car to turn up.
In the last few minutes of Hill’s news conference, I started downloading pictures from my cards to my laptop. As the presser finished and I was sending my first picture from the event, Jennifer tapped me on the shoulder and said something like “I have pictures of him, do you want to see them?”
“You’re joking!! Really?!?” I blurted out as I took a thumb drive from her and copied the pictures to my laptop. I dropped what I was doing, as these pictures were more important and had to be sent to the desk first. As I looked quickly through Jennifer’s take and found 3 frames that could be cropped down to make pictures we could use on the wire. I thought her pictures of the tabby walking in front of the North Koreans were funny, but with the people being a bit blurry weren’t really sharp enough.
I checked with Jen and the other agencies that were at the hotel and found out no one else had been there to snap Kim at the residence – only reporters and Japanese and South Korean TV cameras – Jen had just given us exclusive pictures of an elusive character, all thanks to a canon powershot s5 she was carrying with her.