Photographers Blog

By Jim Young

“How does a trip to Revillo, South Dakota sound?” asked my editor. “Sure, ok?! And where is that exactly?”

I have been to quite a few places in my life, but I don’t think that is one of them.

It was for a story on 12 foreign exchange students, mostly from Asia and Europe who came to this town in the middle of America, population 152, to attend a school which is one building housing 140 students from kindergarten to grade 12.

My day started at 3am to head out for a flight to Minneapolis, followed by another 3 and a half hour drive to the town. First, never trust your GPS getting to Revillo. I made it the first 160 miles in good order but the last 10 miles put me on a makeshift gravel road with farm fields as far as the eyes could see in all directions. When recounting the story to the locals, they had a good laugh. They too were not even sure what “road” I was on.

I was curious as to how the students assimilated into the school and their life after hours. Not only did they have to cross barriers of language, culture and thousands of miles from home but also to adapt to a Midwestern winter climate and the isolation of small town America, where everybody knows everybody.

By Beawiharta

On Wednesday morning I received an image on my twitter feed (@beawiharta). It was a photo from a local newspaper that showed a student crossing a river on a collapsed bridge. The picture caught me. I needed to find out where it was so I could go there to capture it.

Shortly afterwards I arrived at the office. I had forgotten about the collapsed bridge because we were very busy. I had two assignments for the day, a breast milk courier story and a story about Indonesia’s rising investment rating. This was a big financial story because Moody’s ratings agency restored Indonesia debt to investment grade.

I went to Jakarta’s business district to find photos of middle-class workers returning to their homes. When I had finished, I realized that I had something different to shoot for the next day. I searched Google maps to find the location of the collapsed bridge but I couldn’t find the exact location. There was a blank map with only the name of the village, Sanghiang Tanjung. Surprisingly, it said the village was just 130 kms (80 miles) away from our Jakarta office – a travel time of about two hours. My estimation was it would take 4 hours.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last Thursday, April 7, a gunman entered under a false pretext the Tasso da Silveira school in a Rio de Janeiro suburb, carrying two pistols and dozens of rounds of ammunition. An alumnus himself of the same school where he had a history of being bullied and mental illness, he lined children up facing the wall and shot two dozen of them, before turning the gun on himself. Twelve students were dead, and others are still agonizing in the hospital.

This is the most painful type of story for most photographers, when a senseless tragedy involves children. The two Reuters photographers who covered the shooting and subsequent funerals speak here of their experiences, and how they coped professionally and personally.

Sergio Moraes, 49, father of two, writes:

I woke up on April 7, the morning a gunman attacked students at Tasso da Silveira middle school, with a slight headache only hours after celebrating my son’s 18th birthday. A journalist from the newsroom called early to tell me that a man had entered a school in a Rio suburb and injured a few people. It sounded serious but since there were no apparent fatalities I called my colleague Ricardo, who was closer, and asked him to go to the school. It was only when I began to monitor my news sources that I realized we had a huge story on our hands, and I raced to Realengo, the middle class neighborhood where the school was. I called Ricardo and assigned him to the hospital as I arrived at the school.