TEARS

Tears are something that don’t come too easily for me. Oh, I whine a bit. No, I whine a lot. But real tears don’t come easy. Maybe it has something to do with the way I was raised. While my parents heaped love and devotion upon me, I was taught that men don’t cry. Well, I do feel sad. But, I find it hard to cry. I wish that I could. It would probably relieve a lot of the stress that I am feeling lately in my personal life. But, men don’t cry. That’s what I was told.

When it comes to other people’s tears, I find that I can shed a few of my own in sympathy. And being a news photographer certainly places me in context with a lot of other people’s sadness. For example, during the funeral for President John F. Kennedy, when the Navy Band played his favorite hymn, “Nearer My God To Thee,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the press section and I shot the event through a very blurry viewfinder. But, we were hundreds of feet from the gravesite, so no one could see us tough skinned journalists expressing our emotions, so it was ok. And because we were so far away and using long lenses, we didn’t feel that we were intruding on the private grief of the mourners. Or, at least I didn’t.

It took awhile for Aronson to get the old man to understand what the question was about, but he soon started giving a most cognizant response. Aronson took notes and then asked the old man, “Tell me sir, what must it be like to be old; to be poor; and to be black?”

With that, moisture gathered in the old man’s rheumy eyes and a huge tear rolled down his dark cheek. I had a 135mm lens on my old Nikon F. The man was standing in open shade and in those days, a strobe wouldn’t synch at anything over an 80th of a second, which was too slow to hand hold with that lens. There were no built-in meters. I had taken a reading with an old hand-held Weston meter earlier and my exposure was about a 1/125th wide open at f.3.5. When I saw that tear, I moved in from a head and shoulders crop to a tight head and I cranked off as many frames as my fingers could manage. No motor drive, then, either. I got off about 8 or so images before the mood changed. Thankfully, that old 135mm was as sharp as a tack and the negative was so crisp that you could count the hairs on the man’s face. It was one of the best photos of my career and the paper ran it across a full tabloid page.

An old Black man sheds a tear when asked by a reporter what it's like to be old, to be poor and to be black. This was for a story on the passage of Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Bill in 1964.© Newsday

Now, ask me if I felt that I was intruding on a private moment in this man’s life, and I will admit that I was. I felt for this poor man and his plight. Whenever I think about it, I still have feelings for him, although he must be long gone by now. But, my photo evoked a sense of the despair that was prevalent among blacks in those days and I have always felt that it was important to tell that to the rest of society.

Last week was another of those times. I was sent over to the Nassau County Criminal Court to photograph a witness whom our court reporter was interviewing. I didn’t get any details about the story because this was a last minute thing. The reporter was talking with the man and his wife on the front steps of the building when I showed up. I started to photograph the man as he answered the reporter’s questions. As I listened, I could sense that this man had been an inmate in the Nassau County Jail and had witnessed a fatal beating of another inmate by jail guards. He was testifying before a Grand Jury today. He had been told in court that his parole might be revoked and he could be sent back to jail to serve the remainder of his sentence. And, he was terrified of being beaten and maybe killed by jail guards because of his testimony.

At one point, his wife broke down and became hysterical. Without even thinking, I zoomed wide and included her in the shot. I adjusted the exposure change, thanks to the meter in the prism of my Nikon F-5 and I used my SB-25 to give me flash fill on the backlit scene. (Oh, we’ve come a long way in our technology and equipment since 1964.) It’s still tough to record someone else’s grief. I don’t enjoy it and most of the time, I am operating on instinct with my feelings on hold. But, I am a newsphotographer. A journalist with a camera. And, I record events as they happen. People do need to know what goes on around them, good, bad or indifferent. And, I make no apologies for what I do.

Marc Turkfeld, a former inmate in the Nassau County Jail was a witness to a fatal beating administered to another inmate, is shown with his distraught wife, Jacqueline, outside the court in Mineola.

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