Monday, May. 05, 1952
A Problem of Pictures
A news photographer has the job of recording events, often tragic ones. Does this excuse him if he takes a picture rather than trying to prevent a tragedy from happening? This journalistic question arose last week in San Francisco. On the high (220-ft.) Golden Gate Bridge stood Ned Wells, 26, a commercial photographer who makes his living taking pictures of incoming ships from the bridge for a studio that peddles prints to crews and passengers. Fifteen hundred feet away, Wells saw a woman climb over the rail of the bridge and stand hesitantly on a girder. She was Mrs. E. Noel Durant, 61, a retired banker's wife who had been brooding over her health.
Wells, camera at the ready, began running toward her, but a passing motorist, Cyrus A. Samuel, beat him to the scene. "Don't jump!" cried Samuel. Replied Mrs. Durant: "Nobody can do anything. I'm very ill." But as Samuel kept pleading, she seemed undecided. According to Samuel, she grew noticeably more nervous as she caught sight of Wells, aiming his aerial camera with its long-distance lens. "Is he going to take my picture?" she cried. Samuel reassured her: "He's an engineer, holding a measuring box." But Wells continued snapping his shutter, and Samuel said they could hear it. "He's taking my picture!" cried the woman, and jumped to her death.*
Photographer Wells, who later insisted that he was too far away for his presence to make any difference, raced to the studio and put in calls to newspaper city desks. Hearst's afternoon Call-Bulletin bought one of the pictures for $85; Scripps-Howard's News got another for $25. Both papers ran them on Page One, and next morning Hearst's Examiner ran others. The only San Francisco paper that did not run the pictures was the Chronicle, whose deskman could not be reached when the agency was peddling the prints. Next day the Chronicle ran a story that plainly condemned taking the picture under the circumstances. Said Managing Editor Larry Fanning: "We wouldn't have printed the pictures if they'd been offered to us for nothing . . . There might have been one chance in 100 of preventing the suicide if Wells had stayed away. Instead, he may have been the last straw."
* In a similar case recently (TIME, March 10), police warned New York Mirror Photographer Bob Wendlinger that he would be arrested if he took flashlight pictures of a man hanging by his hands from Manhattan's George Washington Bridge. Just after the man let go, the photographer got his picture.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.