(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - [Speaker] We told stories to our community, and I'm so proud of that.

There is your power of photography.

There is your power of photojournalism.

(camera snapping) (gentle music) (machine whirring) (gentle music continues) - The Courier Journal's staff, I mean, it was truly Camelot.

I mean, that's where everybody wanted to go work.

And that was the reputation that paper had.

- The time that we had as photographers, I just thank God that I got a chance to experience it.

- [Speaker] Deep, honest storytelling is the legacy of the Courier Journal photo department.

- [Speaker] It is the world's coolest job ever.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - It would be hard to overstate the emotional rollercoaster ride photojournalists are on.

Ranging from alien sightings and state fair shenanigans to unspeakable tragedy, sometimes in our own building.

(rollercoaster rattles) - I covered several mine disasters.

We'd go in and cover after an explosion in a coal mine.

We'd go in and stay all the way through the funerals, and for several days, body recovery and funerals.

We'd get to know the families, and there were two or three of those mine disasters back to back, and we got to know the people at the funeral home in that area pretty well.

At the second explosion, there was a funeral with three brothers that died in the explosion.

I made a pretty powerful picture of family members digging their graves up on the side of that hill, and it's a pretty dramatic picture.

And the hill's sloped like this, you know, and they're digging those graves on the side of that hill, and it's mostly rock, and just using picks and shovels, you know, to dig the graves for their family members.

It was pretty wild.

And so there were three hearses there, and they loaded the caskets into the hearses at church, from the church, and the guy from the funeral came up to myself and the reporter I was working with, Ralph Dunlop, and he said, "We're short of people."

He said, "Could you drive this hearse for us?"

And we said, "What?"

And he said, "Yeah, we don't have anybody to drive this hearse, the first hearse, you know?"

And there's CNN's up there, you know, NBC, all the networks are up here filming everything.

And so we said, "Okay."

So Ralph gets behind the wheel and I hop in the shotgun, and we're driving their hearse, and we started up this hill to the cemetery, and it's just mud, I mean, it's just... And Ralph didn't hit it quite fast enough to get up very far up the hill, and we just bogged down in the mud.

And so that stopped the whole parade, you know?

All three of the hearses had to stop, we're at the bottom, and they had to carry the casket all the way up that hill by hand Pretty amazing, really, some of the things that I've seen in this career.

(unsettling music) (camera snapping) - Yes, my ethnicity has been an asset and has been a liability turned asset.

It can work for you, it can work against you.

There was a shooting down some small town in Kentucky, where these Black fellas had shot a white fella.

And Jack Flynn, who was the pilot photographer at the time, who was charged with flying me down there to this, essentially, a Klan rally.

I didn't know it.

And so we went down there, we had a little single Cessna, and we landed, and we had to rent a car.

And the car was a great, big Mercury, great, big Buick, some big throwback '60 car with a big V8 engine down there with headers on it or something, it was like a hot rod.

And we get a little, like, "Dukes of Hazzard", man.

We were running down there.

Jack was driving.

White fella.

Very personable guy When we came into town, we had the guys with the cones on, the white cones.

Jack had the windows down because the thing didn't have air conditioning, so he comes up to the window, he hands me this leaflet about this rally that was gonna be at the cemetery where this white fellow had been buried.

And Jack Flynn told me, he said, "No matter what happens, Durell, I'm with you."

I said, "Oh, okay, Jack."

So there I was between the Klan and another white fellow, "I'm with you," and another guy I know didn't care nothing about me.

And we went to the little grocery store at the crossroads there.

It was ran by a Black couple.

We asked them, you know, "Where's this place at that's supposed to have this gathering?"

They say it's on the other side of the road, down about a quarter mile.

Blacks on one side, whites on the other side.

And we drive down there to the cemetery, and nobody was there.

So I get out with all my gear on, you know, my two motor drives and all my glass hanging off me so I could look like a photographer.

And then all of a sudden, I started hearing these, like, diesel trucks, you could tell, heavy trucks.

And man, up over the ridge came a parade of people.

Parking lot filled up.

Came to the grave site.

There was cars everywhere.

People got out their trucks, put up confederate flags.

And some of 'em, oh, they had suits on.

Jack came to me, he said, "Durell, no matter what happens, I'm with you."

I wasn't afraid, but I was concerned, 'cause when you put that camera on, it's like a shield.

It's like an S on your chest.

I did things with that camera I wouldn't do without that camera.

It's almost as if it empowered you.

With that glass on, with that motor drive, you're on a mission, you're gonna do your job.

So there was this lady who had this southern attire on, southern belle dress on, with the fray on the end of it with the puffy sleeves.

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and I turned to this guy with a suit on, he walked up to me, he said, "You got more nerves than I do."

That's what he said.

And I smiled at him.

And the woman looked at me, and I guess she must knew this is the only Black man within a mile of this place.

I walked up to her, and she smiled at me.

I said, "Ma'am?"

She said, "Yes, son?"

I said, "Can I take a picture of you?"

She said, "For sure."

I said, "Can I take a picture of you by the grave site, by the marker of this fella who was gunned down?"

She said, "Yes, you may."

So she walked over and she kneeled down by the marker, and looked up at me, and I took a picture of her.

And the place, you could hear a dime drop.

You could hear nothing.

It was silence.

And she got up and she kind of bowed, and I bowed, and, you know, very respectful.

And she shook my hand, I shook her hand, and she went away.

Everything changed.

They gave me complete access.

They had guys that I know just a half hour ago would've put a noose around my neck said, "Move out the way, let the press go, let the press do their thing."

And this guy run around here, you know?

He got out that big monster truck and he say, you know, he said, "Let him go.

Here, here, come here, come here, take a picture of this."

And I took a guy by this confederate flag, I said, "You mind if I take a picture?"

"Oh, no, go ahead."

(imitates camera snapping) And before I left, "Have a good day now.

You be good.

You tell the truth.

I said, "Yes, sir, will do."

He said, "Now, you take care of yourself.

You come back any time," you know?

(gentle music) - Imagine there were no pictures I mean, imagine the pictures didn't exist, that everyone said, "No, don't take my picture.

No, don't come into my life.

No, don't show this.

No, don't show that."

Imagine none of this stuff exist How would we as a society really exist?

How would we continue?

(gentle music continues) (whimsical music) (birds chirping) (horse galloping) - You know, the Kentucky Derby's an interesting event, and it brings with it all the people and all the celebrity and all the status, and all the out of town media come in.

And it's interesting, but I don't think anybody quite does it as well as we do.

You gotta remember that the Courier Journal was six years in before the first Derby ever ran.

Before Aristides crossed the line with Oliver Lewis, we were already six years old.

So, we've been around a while, and we get it.

- You want to be able to have a picture that they don't have as they come in with their guns, and we are the home guys, and I'm pleased to say that I don't think we ever got beat.

(engine puttering) (whimsical music) (crowd cheering) (crowd chattering) (whimsical music continues) (whimsical music continues) (crowd cheering) (upbeat music) (camera snaps) (upbeat music continues) (birds chirping) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - The Courier was a mid-size newspaper, but it had overly large owners who wanted to invest in the product, the newspaper.

They lowered their profit margins because they put more money into the product, reporters, photographers, artists, and it all worked together so that there was a expectation of high quality.

Without that expectation and the investment in the employees, if you will, and their work, it doesn't work.

Fortunately, we had the Binghams, and then we had more Binghams, and they all wanted to have a good quality product.

(gentle music) - I think the thing about the family history that to me is really interesting is in this ever evolving technology of media.

The family was perpetually on the forefront and innovating and getting into the new businesses and figuring out, like, how to make money and how to communicate and how to serve the community in a way that only journalism can really do.

- My father, Barry Junior, because of a tragedy in the family, his older brother dying in an accident, he stepped into the role to be the editor and publisher of the Courier Journal and Louisville Times newspapers.

So, an evening and a morning paper that were both published every single day in Louisville, Kentucky.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (machine whirring) - So the legacy of the Courier Journal photographers has always been this kind of pursuit of excellence no matter what.

When I was coming through as a young photographer at the University of Kentucky, what I was noticing about the photographers at the Courier Journal was that they would be at an assignment, let's say a press conference, and then I would be at the same press conference they were, and I would look at the paper, and the next day I'd think, "They really loved politics 'cause they really blew that press conference out of the water."

And then the next day I would see them at a sporting event, like a UK game or U of L game, and I'd be like, "No, no, no, no, it wasn't politics.

They really love basketball and they love the Cardinals."

And what I think I really realized after a while is the photographers here didn't necessarily love the individual topics they were going to shoot so much as they loved storytelling.

It didn't matter if it was a press conference or if it was a daily feature or kids playing in the park or if it was an inauguration of a president, the photographers here pursued it as if each one was the most important thing that they'd ever come across, because everybody was treated as if they were the most important thing, and the topic was the most important thing, the story was the most important thing.

So, the legacy for us has just been to be all in.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - We used to go downtown to the newspaper, to the building, with my father a lot.

The thing I remember the most was getting taken down what he called the rat hole.

And so we would go downstairs to where the presses were, and as a, you know, five, six, seven-year-old kid, like, these huge rolls of paper coming down these conveyor belts, and like the smell of the ink, you know, it was dark and really loud when the presses were rumbling, right?

And it was just like super impressive for a little kid, and kind of scary, actually.

And I remember having to, like, jump off the pathway to let these big paper rolls come by.

(sirens wailing) (dispatcher speaking indistinctly) (sirens wailing) [Gary] Seven people were killed, and an entire community was shocked and wounded when a man with an assault rifle went on a killing spree this morning in downtown Louisville.

Joseph Wesbecker roamed the halls of Standard Gravure with a semi-automatic weapon, and every time he pulled the trigger, he shot to kill.

Tonight, 13 people who are working inside Standard Gravure are hospitalized, five of those in critical condition.

It was an assault weapon, and doctors said the wounds were like those you would treat in a war.

- Concerning the Standard Gravure shooting and my photograph that I took after getting access to the building, it was a very sad day in Louisville.

Sadly, that type of shooting is almost commonplace today.

That day started, Cindy Stucky, who was the dispatcher at the Courier, that's before we all had cell phones, we had (chuckles) beepers and these old clunky radios (chuckles) that didn't work half the time, well, she gets on the radio, everybody could hear at one time, there was no private channel, and she said, you know, she's talking to me, and then she said, "There's been someone sighted with a weapon in the press room."

Well, that's no big deal.

We all know press men carry guns That's why you never mess with 'em.

(laughs) The press men, those guys were all packing.

Those guys were rough.

We working as a press man, it was a tough job.

- So the surgeries lasted all day, many of them going until just a few hours ago.

In fact, we are told one man who is in the hospital who underwent surgery today could very well possibly be going in again for another operation.

He is in that kind of condition.

- I got in early that day to write my column.

I always went in early to write the column.

And where I was sitting in the sports department was just one wall away from the Standard Gravure printing shop, where it was.

And over the loudspeaker comes this announcement, "There's a man in the building with a gun," just outta nowhere.

"Please exit Boom on toward Broadway."

So we all clamber down and go out the building, we go across Broadway, and we're standing there watching as the sirens screaming ambulances came up, cops came up and then they started carrying people outta the building on stretchers There was seven people murdered and 13 wounded that day.

And it was 1989, this was before all this other killings been going on in the country.

A complete and total shock.

And we stood there for about an hour watching this.

I'll never forget this, George Gill, who was the managing editor at the time, come out of the building, he saw us across Broadway, walked across the street, and looked at us standing there, and he said, "The son of a bitch is dead," talking about Wesbecker.

And that's just frozen in my mind every time I hear or see of another shooting.

Wesbecker, of course, killed himself after killing seven people and wounding 13 more.

- And then she gets back on the radio, she says, "There's been a firearm been discharged in the building."

And literally comes back on, screaming, "Everybody, drop what you're doing!

Come downtown, there's a shooting!"

And it's Gravure in the basement, there's a shooting.

Superman mentality.

We got that camera.

You know, top gun, let's go.

I was late getting down there because I was way outta the county.

So I come down there, and at that time, firemen and police scrambling everywhere, and they had to put the yellow tape up on the army side.

I saw them taking these rolling, you know, these beds in, on the army street side there.

So I just cradled my motors underneath my sports coat and ran in with them.

And I went downstairs, and oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness, that assault rifle is a terrible weapon.

It's an awful weapon to be in the hands of civilian people.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) And then I just kind of walked through the basement, 'cause see, the Courier and the Gravure had a common basement.

And they had these tracks that these huge rolls of paper, these rolls of paper were like 10 feet, almost like eight feet, 10 feet high, and probably five, eight feet wide, huge rolls of paper that would go into the presses.

And they had these little tracks And I looked there at one place where it kind of went up to the second floor, and this guy was upside down.

And I said, I called the medical professional, I said, "Hey, look, there's a guy over here, there's a guy over here, he's down!"

They say, "He's gone, we can't help him."

So I got up on top of one of those rollers and I shot that picture.

He was upside...

Apparently he was going up the steps, and Wesbecker, you know, shot him, and he fell backwards and his hands spread open.

It was like the crucifix upside down.

And then as soon as I got up, this all happened probably within 15 minutes, and when I got out on the army street side, I said, "Well, that's the best I can do.

I'm sure everybody's got more stuff."

And I looked out, and behind the yellow tape was the whole photo staff.

I knew then that I was the only one that got in.

It was horrible.

(machine whirring) - One of the big news stories that we covered over the years was the Standard Gravure shooting, which was in our backyard, in the same building.

And fortunately, we had some of the early people on, and they photographed the events not only inside the press room, but also around the building itself, where the employees had been outside, were evacuated and so on.

It was, you know, it was a terrible situation.

Every ambulance in the county responded to 6th and Broadway.

So the question became what to publish.

Photographers came in from the shooting, and so we took all the prints down to the conference room, and I laid 'em all out, probably 30 or 40 prints.

And we looked around the table, everybody walked around the table, which was a very long, probably 14, 18 foot table, maybe longer.

I think it was David Hawpe who looked up at me and said, "Which one for the front page?"

And I thought a minute and I said, "This one."

And it was the photograph that Durell Hall had made of one of the pressmen lying on his back, dead.

And it was in black and white, so there was no blood or even no evidence of a black substance like blood.

That was used on the front page.

Six columns, I believe.

The width of the paper.

To this day, I'm sure that people have their own opinion about that photograph, the use of that particular photograph, but yet it symbolized what had happened that day.

People died.

(machine whirring) (bell dings) - You tell that to your camera, your TV man, your radio man, and you right there in the whole world.

If Sonny Liston whoops me, I'll kiss his feet!

(gentle music) - I saw an assignment come across the assignment desk of Larry Switzer that said that Muhammad Ali was going to be fighting a exhibition boxing match at Trinity High School against a then very unknown boxer by the name of Greg Page, who later went on to become a heavyweight champ.

And so Larry Switzer let me go.

Oh my God, I was so excited, Muhammad Ali.

And again, I mean, I'm right outta college.

So I went into the locker room and just, like, walked in, and he was in the locker room with his family, and I shot a bunch of pictures, and there were kids and they were having a good time.

And then I saw him grab a roll of tape, and he got up and he went into a room that I later found out was the bathroom, and he shut the door.

And I went up to the door, and I knocked three times and I said, "Champ, can I come i And he said yes.

I went in and I shot four frames of him taping his hands, and I said, "Thank you," and I l And I really didn't think a lot about it.

And I got back to the newspaper and made a print, took it to the sports editor, and he looked at me and said, "What the blank did you do to get in there and get this photo?"

And I said, "I just knocked and asked," and everything nice, and then I started to get upset, and I thought, "Oh, God, I'm gonna get fired 'cause I did something wrong.

I went into a famous person's space."

It ran huge in the paper.

Certainly my most iconic photo of my career.

(upbeat music) - He knew that I was from Louisville, Kentucky, Muhammad Ali did, and he started taking me under his wings.

He would let me go to places that he went to that you wouldn't normally go to and I would see a lot of things.

The Courier Journal has some pictures that I made of Ali when he came back in Louisville and won the championship from Leon Spinks.

Said, "You're there to tell a story so that others will understand what's going on."

They have some pictures when I went to Los Angeles when he was in retirement and photographed him there.

One of my best pictures was a picture of...

There's a street in Los Angeles where it was known for people that were alcoholics to hang out, and fights would break out.

There were two men that were on the street, about to start to fight.

I think one of 'em maybe had a beer bottle or something like that.

And Ali was driving by, and he saw them, and we were in the car, and he jumped outta the car and said, "If y'all wanna fight, come here and fight me."

And it just changed the whole situation.

They started laughing.

They were pleased and happy that here's the heavyweight champion of the world, coming out to speak to them and talk with them when they were in a combative situation.

And policemen would see this crowd and they would immediately think, "Oh, there's something bad going on here," and they'd walk off to the crowd, and they saw Ali there, and they just started laughing and saying, "Oh, it's Ali," and they'd take off and laugh.

(upbeat music continues) (crowd cheering) - The whole world watching me, Christian and Muslim, and I'm sure this is not a mistake.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Hey!

Rumble, young man, rumble.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (unsettling music) - So Highland Park was a small incorporated city about two miles south of city of Louisville that grew up in the late 1800s around the Louisville and Nashville railroad yard.

Highland Park was a mixture of Black and white, mostly blue collar workers.

There was not any racial strife in the neighborhood.

Most of the people in the city at the time worked either on the trains or in the yard.

In 1922, city of Louisville won a five year court battle to annex Highland Park, and that court case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

So, for the next 60 years, the people of Highland Park had a real distrust for the city of Louisville.

And then over the years, land around Highland Park was used for, say, the Municipal Airport, the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, which included convention space and Freedom Hall.

There was a lot of light industry in the area, and then an interstate highway sort of dissected the community in half.

And then by the late 1980s, the city of Louisville, the Regional Airport Authority, and Urban Renewal were looking at how they could expand the airport to make way for parallel runways for the amount of flights that UPS would be running in and out of Louisville And the plan they came up with was to designate three neighborhoods in and around the airport as being blighted due to the proximity, their proximity to the airport, and noise pollution and so on and so forth.

- In my 30 years at the Courier, the worst time I had was when the neighborhoods of Highland Park, Prestonia, and Stanford were declared blighted because UPS wanted the property and they wanted to throw these people out of there, and it was just a (beep) disgrace to have that happen.

And I'm still mad about it because the area was not blighted, and the city council and everybody went along with UPS, 'cause it was UPS, including the Courier Journal.

It was just wrong.

It's the one black mark in the Courier Journal that I have in my entire time there.

They should never have done that They should have never gone along with it.

(airplane engine roaring) - [Pat] Multiple generations of same families lived there.

<any, many elderly folks lived there due to having worked at the railroad.

So I covered, you know, the public hearings and the government rubber stamping sessions, the aldermanic session and the county commissioners, and really, anything leading up to it, any events, any press conferences that I could cover.

- Yeah, the reason UPS wanted the property was they wanted more runways, they wanted dual runways to grow the business.

And I understand that, but these poor, innocent people got in the way of UPS's plan, and actually, it was the Louisville Airport Authority that was condemning the land on behalf of UPS, which was the expansion.

- I stopped at the neighborhood association office, and the president of the association was a man named Bill Gatten.

And Bill was probably in his late 50s at the time.

In his youth, he was a boxer.

He was still pretty stout.

And he always had a ever present cigar with him.

So there were a lot of people in there he was dealing with, and I waited my turn, and I came up and told him who I was, who I was with, and what I wanted to do.

And his face turned blood red.

And he was so angry with the city and the airport and the Courier Journal that I thought he was gonna just throttle me on the spot.

But I listened to him and I had a lot of patience, and, you know, I didn't get unnerved by him.

And little by little, as he would see me at all the different events that were going on and see me in the neighborhood, he began to trust me.

I was working in the photo department, and the phone rang, and it was Bill, and he said, "You gotta get out here.

Myrtle Bishop just got her offer from the city, and she's threatening suicide."

And I said, "Well, you need to call EMS.

I'm not the guy to be counseling someone in crisis like that."

And he said, "No, no, no, it's fine.

You just need to come out here."

So I drove out, reluctantly, went to her home, he met me there, I walk in, and there's Myrtle sitting in her chair in her living room with her little dog in her lap.

And as she gained composure, she told me about how her husband had passed away just a few years before.

She made the decision that she wanted to spend the rest of her life in her home in Highland Park.

And in the meantime, she had upgraded her home.

She put a new roof on, she put a new aluminum siding on, and her property value was assessed at $45,000.

And the city's offer that day was for 26,000.

So I went back to the newspaper and went around to the reporters and editors that were actually writing about the project, and told them the story and really got sort of a, you know, "Gee, that's too bad."

I realized the newspaper didn't wanna hear any bad news about this project, but I could see what was really going on behind the scenes.

So I thought about, you know, who could I approach in the paper to work with me on this?

The Sunday magazine at the time was somewhat independent of the daily newspaper, so that might be a way to go.

And plus, probably the most respected writer at the paper at the time was Bob Hill, and he was on the magazine staff at the time.

So I approached Bob and I said, "Look, you know, this is what I see is going on.

The elderly in the neighborhoods are getting low balled by the city and by Urban Renewal.

Why don't we just follow this, all the events, through, see where this leads?"

I would take Bob to meet these people, and he would interview them and write about them.

And as businesses began to close and churches began to close their doors as well, I would be photographing all of these different events.

In the meantime, the residents of the three neighborhoods had banded together and began fundraising and hired a team of attorneys to sue the city and the airport and Urban Renewal.

And that case, about a year after the project started, ended up in the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Even though the judges in the Kentucky Supreme Court sided with the residents that Urban Renewal could not use eminent domain in this case, the city, airport, and Urban Renewal still won by attrition because they were already busy buying up homes and demolishing houses in the neighborhoods.

So it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of the neighborhoods being blighted, but the blight was really coming from the destruction of the homes by Urban Renewal.

Now that the court case had been settled, Bob and I had a, you know, we knew we were ready to run the story in the Courier Journal Sunday magazine.

And they ran a beautiful piece.

They gave us, like, eight or 10 pages of coverage.

Bob was one of the probably two reporters in my long career that could write to photographs.

Most reporters, their egos will get involved and it'll become their story.

And Bob was fantastic to work with.

So, our piece ran, and we sort of waited to see what the reaction would be, and were disappointed we only received maybe three letters, and it was, you know, they were basically, you know, "This sure sucks what they're doing to these people, but you can't fight City Hall."

I felt like I had accomplished what I set out to do.

I documented what was happening to these people in this community.

But about a year and a half late I was handed a photo assignment for the next morning to photograph a woman named Marilyn Cooper, who was a resident of Highland Park.

She had already made the deal to sell her house to Urban Renewal, and was being allowed to stay there until the demolition process began.

Now, Marilyn's mother lived across the street, which was ideal, because a city work crew came along and cut the water line to her home, and then the city refused to repair it since the home was condemned.

So, Marilyn would have to cross over to her mother's house every day and either bathe or come back with a gallon jug of water.

The photograph I made was not the best photo I made in Highland Park, but it depicted what was happening to this woman at the hands of the local bureaucracy.

And the next morning when it ran, all hell broke loose.

Local radio shows were talking about it, the TV stations were in Highland Park interviewing Marilyn Cooper and writing about it.

There was a local plumbing contractor that went and repaired the water line free of charge for her.

And you know, it just shows what the power of photography can do.

You know, a photograph doesn't blink.

You can't unsee a photograph.

A photograph doesn't lie.

And in this case, it quite simply told the story that I'd worked probably a year and a half to tell.

And after 33 years since that story ran, just this year, the airport built a hangar right smack where Highland Park sat.

And so it's taken all these years for them to finally use the land that they had to have.

(airplane engine roaring) - I hadn't been on the staff very long.

I started Christmas Day.

I had an assignment to go photograph something at the YMCA building.

It was just before dark, just at dusk.

And as I was coming outta the building after the assignment, had my cameras on my shoulder, and I've always been, I've always looked around and just been able to spot stuff that other people don't notice for some reason.

And way off, I saw this figure on top of a tall building that didn't look right.

And I looked at it, and it looked like a person sitting there on this building.

And I looked, and it was, it looked like a person sitting there with their legs dangling over the edge of this 18 story building.

It was obvious they were contemplating suicide.

I told the guy at the desk, I said, "There's a person that looks like he's ready to jump off that building.

Call the fire department," and I called the police.

Looked like the person's going to jump.

And I described the building where it was, there was a giant cross behind her, and it turns out it was, I think a Christian retirement home of some kind.

And I could hear a siren coming in the distance, you know?

Maybe they shouldn't have done it that way.

Maybe they should have come quietly, you know?

I don't know.

But she pushed off and jumped.

And I just hit the motor drive, you know, and shot it going down.

That was my job, you know?

You don't sit and watch something.

If you see something happen, you gotta photograph it.

But she jumped.

And it turned out it was an elderly lady whose husband had died, and she was, you know, depressed about that, and she ended her life.

But I had a really hard time with that.

You know, it's hard to see that.

Because I was a young kid, I was I don't know, 23 years old maybe And boy, I mean, it was awful.

And I turned around and went back to my car and drove to the office, and I took the film outta the camera and handed it to the night photo editor at that time.

I believe it was Ryan Moss.

And I said, "You guys get paid a lot more than I do.

You decide what to do with it," you know?

"Here's what I saw."

I said, "I'm going next door to have a drink."

And I went over, went next door to Teaks and had a couple of shots of whiskey and just tried to calm down.

It was awful.

It was an awful thing to see.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (rollercoaster rumbling) (rider screaming) - I think rollercoaster ride is exactly right.

I think on any given day, you can be put into any situation.

Part of the skill that people develop in this job is that you learn to kind of compartmentalize what you feel versus what you have to go do.

For me, what it feels like is when I'm doing my work, I'm doing my work, and I'm able to stop and really just think about the photos.

But later on, that's when you really start thinking about where you were and what you just saw.

As difficult as sometimes our job is, I can't imagine what it would've been like as a police officer or a human being, period, having to go into any of the situations where people have been killed.

I'm always trying to be mindful about that.

I've never felt like there's been an issue.

I understand the police line is there because it's there.

I think as a younger photographer, I would've treated that police line as a suggestion.

But now that I'm an old man, I treat that police line a little bit more like there's a reason.

- [Demonstrator] There you go.

(demonstrators yelling) (weapons exploding) - The Breonna Taylor demonstrations sort of came out of nowhere.

I remember I got a call from Michael Clevenger, the Director of Photography, and it was in the evening after my shift was over with, and he said, "Hey, you wanna cover a demonstration?"

I was like, "Sure, when?"

Thinking he was talking about the next day.

And he said, "Right now, 6 and Jefferson."

I go, "Okay."

There's so many people, you know you really weren't sure what was gonna happen.

Was it going to escalate?

And then as it got dark, those concerns became even greater.

I remember that first night, protestors attempted to overturn a police vehicle, and then shortly thereafter, there was some shots fired, and I was about 30 feet away from that.

So you really needed eyes in the back of your head.

As the protest went on and the protestors began to recognize your face, I began to learn that they saw the still photographers as being okay.

They had a problem with the local TV stations, because the TV station, some of the TV stations had a rant line where people could just go on and express their opinions.

And some of those opinions weren't appreciated by the protestors.

And so they took it out on some of the TV crews.

A friend of mine was beaten.

A window and one of the TV trucks was smashed.

And it was funny because all the TV crews started showing up with bodyguards, but the still photographers didn't need bodyguards.

- Still photographs matter because people can look, it's a frozen moment in time, and a lot of times, if you're doing it the best, you can actually change somebody's outlook and frame of mind.

I don't know how often I've actually been able to do that.

Probably the one that sticks with me that's one of my photographs was on the first night of the protest that happened over the shooting and killing of Breonna Taylor, were five men locked arm in arm, protecting a Louisville metro police officer.

It was the first night of the protest, and Louisville hadn't seen anything like that in decades.

And that picture went out, and I heard back from people who said, "I had a really tough time with these protests until I saw that photograph, and it changed my mind."

The great power about still photography is that you can linger on it.

You can linger on an image, you can go back and you can see things.

The photo that I have behind me from Michael Kors I look at every day, because it reminds me every day that two people can find their way, even if the rest of the world can't.

(gentle music) - I was watching CBS Sunday morning, October 24th, 1979, in my home, when Ed Bradley was narrating a piece from Cambodia of the refugees fleeing into Thailand.

It was searing.

And during that session, he interviewed a doctor from Louisville, Kentucky, named Kenneth Rasmussen.

Well, I knew Kenneth Rasmussen because I had photographed him a few months earlier when he was leaving Louisville General Hospital, where he was an emergency room physician.

He was headed to posting somewhere in the world with the United Nations High Commissions for Refugees, but I didn't know that he was gonna wind up in Cambodia, so it was really kind of a shock to me to see him.

I thought immediately that this was an opportunity for the Courier to do a story on him and the evolving Cambodian situation, which the world soon became known as "The Killing Fields".

I pitched the story the next day and within a matter of hours, the story was approved, and Joel Brinkley was assigned to the story, and we needed to find the doctor to make sure that we could come and see him.

It took a couple of cables, but we did find him, and he responded saying, "The story's here, come on."

So within a few days, we had gone from virtually knowing nothing about the story to as much as we could possibly learn in a short amount of time so that we would be able to hit the ground and have some idea of what we were getting into.

We left the United States November 4th, 1979, the same day that the US Embassy in Tehran was overtaken for the next 444 days.

So, there was a lot going on in the world at that time.

We rented a car and did manage to get out to the border town of Aranyaprathet, Thailand, where we met Dr. Rasmussen and his wife, visited them in their home, and had our first tour of his clinic where he was treating refugees on a daily basis.

He was very helpful to us to find the camps, but basically, we were on our own because we had no escorts, so we were just on our own to go to the camps and kind of talk our way in.

Most of the time, we were able to do that, and we were pretty much welcomed The refugees that were coming in all the time were unaware of what we were doing.

They really were too sick and tired and near death themselves to really have much reaction to us being there and photographing them.

We were in country there for about three weeks, and during that time, we toured many of the camps, watched Dr. Rasmussen and his clinic.

Eventually got to the United Nations permanent camp in Thailand.

There was a big medical center there that was treating people, mostly ones with cholera, diptheria, typhoid, you name it, they had it.

Certainly starvation and hunger were rampant there, too.

We left Thailand and came home.

The problem was that Joel Brinkley contracted typhoid just before we left, wound up in the hospital for a couple of days and was out of commission for a while before he can set up and start writing his stories.

But eventually, he did.

The following April, when the Pulitzers were announced, it came as a surprise to me because I was unaware that the Courier had submitted both Joel's writing and my photographs in the International Reporting category In retrospect, I think the Courier's willingness and bold steps to send Joel and me to Cambodia really raised the bar as what a formerly highly regarded national newspaper was doing, but now we could do things on an international level as well.

- When Gannett bought the newspaper, I was on my way to Japan to photograph Toyota.

I got on the phone and started checking for new jobs right away.

- We didn't wanna believe it, I think, is part of the trouble.

You know, we just didn't.

it was this wonderful creation that we've all been a part of, it's one of the best papers in the country, and now it's gonna be gone.

- It was the best of the very best in the country, hands down.

- When the companies were sold in 1986, they were sold.

It was my grandfather's decision to sell them.

It was not my father's decision to sell them.

So, from my nuclear family experience and my father's experience, it was incredibly distressing for a decision to be made against his guidance and his will for the family companies to be sold.

- When you have a paper where the publisher, the owner, loves photography, and was a great newspaper, doesn't care what it costs, it was just like a dream almost.

It was just unreal.

And that's why everybody wanted to work there, 'cause we were paid well, we could go do all these great assignments anywhere in the world.

I was just so lucky to have worked there.

If I had to do my life all over again, I can't think of anything career-wise I would do different (uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (no audio)