Epilogue

"Hold on, I'm coming, I want to finish a journal for the web site, first."

(With a laugh) "You mean that's more important than your family?"

And so it's been, for two and a half rich years, being part of the Behind the Viewfinder (BTV) web site. Now it's time to bid you farewell.

I was cautious and cynical about the initial invitation to join BTV. I didn't know who was involved, I worried the time commitment that it would entail, and I had not idea what I'd write about. It was, frankly, like trying to decide how to respond to a cyber-version of a telemarketer. However, my first journal almost wrote itself on January 19, 1998), and I was off and running on a two and a half year adventure. I've taken you through almost every corner of my job and through parts of my life off the job.

The original concept was for us to write for our readers, rather than preach to a choir of fellow professionals, and take them deep inside community photojournalism, to counter the "paparazzi" perceptions flying around after Princess Diana's death. The site was truly photojournalism: though we are all photographers, our words were as important as our images on this site. Many people measure things by numbers. I've written some 65 journals. I have some 300 saved messages in my BTV mail folder, and I have no idea how many BTV messages have flown back and forth since December, 1997 that I have deleted. We've had days when over 10,000 people have visited the site. BTV is more than statistics, though. BTV has been an integral part of my life these two years. It has given me a chance to think and write about what I do automatically at work. It has been an important outlet for me, an important part of my professional life.

Sometimes I couldn't go to bed at night until I'd written a journal about something that had happened at work. As I look back at my collection of journals, I like some more than others. I wonder why I even wrote some of them, but I know that those words were important to me at the time. BTV is about people, a wonderful, talented, diverse group of people.

We've been honored with numerous "site of the day" honors and a Special Citation from the National Press Photographers Association. The real honors, though, have come from our readers around the world, the people who have taken the time out of their lives to read what we have written about our lives. The site is linked out of photo web sites in Brazil, France, Greece, Japan, and Sweden, among other countries.

I'm still amazed that someone in Asia could see and read a journal within minutes of my posting it, sometimes a day before readers of my own newspaper would see the photos I'd taken.

In closing, I need to thank my family, Cindy, Adam, and Aaron (and even poor Fenway, our dog, who was so often neglected when she would lay down next to me, and I'd tap the keys rather than pet her) for their patience through the hours of writing journals and reading BTV e-mail.

In the last words I am writing to each of you, our readers, here's to you, more than anyone, because without you, well, we might just as well have been sending e-mails to one another. You are the reason BTV was created. Thanks for giving us your time to read our words and look at our photographs. It's been a privilege and an honor to be part of this project.

Mark Hertzberg

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
http://www.digitalstoryteller.com/YITL
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