(J.J. is a college student studying photojournalism in Los Angeles.)
At 6:30 Wednesday evening, I turned on the Channel 5 news and first learned about the disaster in Minneapolis. The eight lane bridge that carries Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River had crumbled, sending anywhere from 50 to 100 cars tumbling more than 60 feet into the river. There was no early word on casualties, but rescue workers were not hopeful.
Journalism is a bizarre profession that requires you to act against your own best interests. Fire? Go check it out. Earthquake? Take me to the place with the worst damage. Civil war? Book me on the next flight. The only thing stranger than the patterns of a journalist are those of the journalism student.
To get a job as a journalist, you have to prove you already have the chops. School can teach you how to punctuate and how to keep your interviews interesting and how to get information from public officials, but to be truly successful, you have to have the natural shoe leather skills. That means landing an internship (and therefore a job) requires you to first play journalist as an amateur, crossing police lines and making a buffoon of yourself for the opportunity to someday do so professionally.
The bridge collapsed at 6:05. I turned on the news at 6:30. My internship applications are due in November, so I was naturally in the car and headed downtown at 6:40. My camera bag is always packed and by my side, a kind of depressing artifact to my constant vigilance for disaster and suffering. All I really had to do was throw on a decent shirt and make sure I knew where the 35W bridge was.
I drove to the 28th Avenue light rail station just north of the Mall of America and spent forty adrenaline-soaked minutes making my way north to the Cedar/Riverside station, as close as I could ride to the accident site. I had formatted my memory cards, checked my batteries and mounted my long telephoto lens in the two minutes before arriving, so the moment the doors opened, I took off at a full sprint. Cities are usually the best place to be a clueless reporter because grids of streets are easily mapped in the head. Even so, I was running around like a moron.
The best pictures from a disaster always come in the first hour, when reporters are closer to the action than law enforcement. As soon as the police bring out the yellow tape, every photographer gets knocked down to the same level. I ran from parking garage to balcony to highway to footbridge trying to find a unique vantage point. After crossing back and forth over the river three times and climbing a concrete embankment out of a rail yard, I hit yet another line of police tape. I'd completed a course all the way around the site, hitting roadblocks at every point.
"Who are you with?" The best moment you'll ever have as a student journalist is when someone mistakes you for a real journalist. That's how I met Jason, a freelance writer for the New York Times. He was on vacation with his wife, a copyeditor, when they got "the call." They had rushed down with Peter, a teacher in Roseville, to see what information they could get for the Times.
I watched as they worked the crowd of first responders and bystanders for information. Finally, somebody gave them what they were looking for: directions to the Red Cross command post. "You want a ride?"
Hmm, should I get in the car with a team from the New York Times or should I sit here next to some police tape where I can't even see where the bridge is? Tough call.
The first thing you notice about a breaking news event is that information is at a premium and chaos is the standard. This seems obvious enough, but it's still shocking to step up to a police officer or a firefighter to find they have absolutely no idea what's going on 100 yards down the road. As soon as we arrived on the west bank of the river, we saw a rescue boat team pull up. They had just been sent from the east bank and were asking for directions to the staging area, only to be told it was back where they came. Even our crack investigative team (vacationing freelance reporter and editor, journalism student, and local educator/wheelman) was stuck in the dark. Every official we spoke to was about as helpful. Jason and his wife Karron did their best to interview victims who had wandered in shock away from the bridge and over to the Noodles and Company where we had ditched the car. They called quotes into the news desk in New York as I scrambled to regain a line of sight to the bridge.
In photography, height is always an advantage, so as soon as Karron pointed out the parking garage of the Holiday Inn Metrodome, Jason and I took off in a full sprint. From the roof, I could get one of the most shocking angles on the tragedy. It's one thing to see the mangled bridge on the ground from the lens of a helicopter camera; it's entirely another to see freeway just disappear. Just after taking that picture and leaving the garage, hotel staff kicked everyone out of the structure -- "Good Morning America" had called and reserved it as an "exclusive" location for it's coverage the next morning.
I rode with the New York Times crew until we reached Hennepin County Medical Center. As they went inside to talk to families, I got a call from the photo desk of the Times, asking me to get to a computer and file all the photos I had. I jogged a few dozen blocks to a 24-hour Kinkos and spent $30 and the better part of two hours writing captions and e-mailing everything to New York. I didn't make it home until sometime after 1 a.m.
One of the skills that's useful in reporting is the ability to comprehend and be aware of your surroundings while completely ignoring the long-term ramifications. All the views I had of the bridge and all the victims I talked to and all the terrified onlookers I ran past have blurred together. I hadn't really reflected on what happened until late Thursday afternoon. This was the most traveled bridge in Minnesota and it will take well over a year to replace it. Most of Minneapolis near the river is roped off as a crime scene. Though the official death toll sits at four, it would be a true miracle if it didn't rise into double digits in the coming days. The emotional and logistical toll of this catastrophe will not truly sink in for weeks.
The New York Times didn't use any of my pictures. It wasn't really surprising -- there was much better art on the AP wire from Star Tribune and Pioneer Press photographers who beat the police to the scene to capture some truly harrowing shots of brave amateur rescue operations and from photographers who'd managed to commandeer helicopters to deliver better context on the scope of the destruction. Still, what started as an act of desperation to give my portfolio a much needed kickstart turned into one of the most memorable nights of my life. I met some incredible people, both journalists and everyday bystanders. I ran, walked, and climbed almost 10 miles through the streets of Minneapolis (and my legs won't let me forget it.) I got to play witness to history.
For the first time, I'm completely confident that this is what I want to do with my life.
See the rest of the pictures I submitted to the New York Times here (flickr.com). >> Hear the audio reporting of Jason and Karron, the New York Times staffers who took me under their wing for the night here (nytimes.com).
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