Slice of Life

I was shooting a high school JROTC inspection recently, and shot this image of a couple of the JROTC members practicing before the inspection started. I loved the photo, but I quickly started to get the same question: What's up with the guys head sliced off?

I got the question from one of my editors, who thought the photo may be a bit confusing to the average reader. I started to wonder if she was right. Did it tell the story, or did I shoot this just for me? Well, I kind of thought it was both. After talking it out with her and a designer, it ended up the lead photo on the front page. I was excited.



But guess who wasn't excited: Mom. The next day a coworker said she got a call from the photo subject's mother. She said the mom wanted to know if I had a copy of the photo where her son's head wasn't cut off. Unfortunately the answer was no. I shot about four or five frames of the kid, and in all the shots I had cropped out the guys face in camera. The photo wasn't about him, I tried to justify. It was about the action and the drawing of the sword and the pagentry of the event and so on and so forth. In other words, the photo was really about me.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think I should shoot more for me when I go out on assignments. It's my job to make photos with impact, though I definitely see the mother's point. It's a tricky balance sometimes.