Relay: Words Get In the Way

The first photograph of mine that was published in this paper was, I believe, in 1979. It was on the cover, and it was of Pete Kromer, a haul-seiner and a friend, kneeling on the ocean beach at the end of a giant bag of weakfish while simultaneously tossing two in the air to his truck.

It was one of those Decisive Moment kinda photographs, that still stands with the best of my work. It was also shot on Tri-X, the once much-revered weapon of photojournalists the world over. The only problem with this photograph was the caption, which I didn’t write and only saw when the paper came out the next day.

The caption read, “Bass, mostly.” This meant striped bass, and the problem with that was that there was not a single striped bass in that net. They were all weakfish.

We haul-seiners at that time were facing mounting pressure on the political side and from the lobby of sports fishermen, who were trying to end a way of fishing that was a tradition out here for over 300 years. So any reference to large numbers of striped bass caught by us were just used as ammunition against us. Needless to say, I was in a boatload of trouble for weeks back down at the beach.

I had caption trouble and just plain photo trouble two more times at The Star, and while I won’t name the person who did me in the second and third times, I will say that I had nothing to do with either incident.

The second debacle came when I gave a photograph to the then-photo editor to hang on her refrigerator to help motivate her to stay on her diet. It was a photograph of my good friend Carlos Anduze sitting cross-legged on a kitchen floor in the Dominican Republic with a makeshift white turban on and dark sunglasses. Lisa de Kooning was with us, and being the animal lover that she was, there was a lot of canned dog food at our cottage that she would give freely to all of the underfed island dogs.

So my (it was just a joke between Carlos and me, and he even said, “Cono, take my picture”) photograph of the sinister-looking Arab with a heaping spoonful of Alpo inches from his mouth goes on the letters page of The Star. I don’t even remember what that caption said, and it did not matter because the angry “how dare you, there are starving children in the world” letters to the editor came pouring in.

The third and final incident involved a photograph that I took and would have actually put in the paper myself, but again, it was the caption that hung me out to dry. These three incidents are in my mind not a bad track record considering the fact that I’ve probably had thousands of my photographs in The Star.

Anyway, this was an early morning, nicely lit pastoral scene photograph of a black woman holding a white baby down near Town Pond. Again, I took it and I would have, and probably did, put it in the paper myself. It was the caption (that I didn’t write), the single word “Harmony,” that brought on a second torrent of “How dare you? Racial inequality, you should be ashamed of yourself” and on and on, letters to the editor.

I really disagreed with these people because I took this photograph and I didn’t see that at all. It was the caption, I guess, that really rattled them.

In defense of The Star, there are many people out there poised to strike whenever anything is printed these days, and although it is now more in the form of an online comment, as opposed to a letter to the editor, many of them, plainly put, have nothing better to do than chip away back and forth on and on at any topic. The ones who are really good at it can take a topic a simple as making gazpacho and turn that into a hateful tirade against President Obama.

Tonight, I’m traveling to Greece for a week, and hopefully the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, which is now home to over 90,000 people who have fled the war in Syria. The camp is eight miles from the border of Syria. It is in these two locations that I hope to take a lot of photographs that don’t need any captions. Not one single word.

Doug Kuntz, an award-winning photojournalist who once served as this paper’s photo editor, is now a contributing photographer to The Star.