Assignment #7 – Funeral for Fallen Officer Jared Francom
We had four photographers covering the funeral of a police officer killed in a drug raid. We had one tasked to the motorcade, one to the service, one doing video and then me at the graveside service…
Pallbearers with the flag-draped casket.
Fellow officers leaving their gloves.
Just before she left, Erin Francom walked up to her husband’s casket and stood quietly. It was a very quick but powerful moment.
Your photo of Erin Francom packs all the emotion of the day into a single image—a very very powerful image. Great choice by the editors to let it dominate the front page of Thursday’s paper.
It was interesting to contrast that photo with the photo of the motorcycle escort that ran on the front page of the Ogden Standard-Examiner. In my opinion, both were great photos and that were prominently placed on the front page. The Standard-Examiner photo seemed to emphasis the spectacle (maybe that is the wrong word, but I can’t come up with a better one right now) and magnitude of the outpouring of support for Officer Francom while yours hit the “emotional button”—hard. Again, two totally different photos, but with both capturing the essence of the funeral service.
Lastly, I wonder how you cover both the funeral service itself and the gravesite ceremony without disturbing the mourners while still respecting the dignity of the service? It seems to me to be one of the more sensitive assignments a photojournalist can have. Little things like how you dress and how closely you position yourself to capture the raw emotion of mourners have the potential to intrude on the solemnity of the occasion.
I ask because when I watched the KSL-TV live feed of the gravesite service, I could see five or ten what appeared to be photojournalists running alongside the route the casket took as it made its way from the fire truck to the internment site shooting “Hail Mary’s” above the heads of the mourners. It seemed from the vantage point of a TV viewer to be almost paparazzi-like. I don’t make this comment to demean anyone, but more to again ask “…at what point does a photographer’s action cross the line from photojournalist to papparzzi?”
I know it has to be an issue that photojournalists struggle with as they go about their assignments. Again, well done to both the Tribune and Standard-Examiner photo teams and their editors for their coverage of this solemn occasion.
Thanks for the kind words and sorry I’m so late in responding. I’ve been out of town on an assignment that kept me pretty busy.
The important thing to me while covering any funeral is to be low impact. I don’t want to disturb anyone, and no photo would be worth that in such a situation. But let’s face it, everyone has a camera now. So it’s not like when I started my career and I was the only one. In fact, at the Francom funeral one of the pallbearers was taking photos with her phone while she stood over the casket, waiting for things to start. So that makes things easier. But you do use the usual techniques, stay back with a longer lens (don’t crowd anyone) and pay attention to the body language of your subjects so that you can back off it they are uncomfortable.
As for the photographers running along making the hail mary photos, I thought that was an unfortunate thing. They seemed so harried, scrambling along for a shot. Part of that was due to where we were kept in the scene, blocked out from all but one view. There’s something to be said for going with the flow of the moment. If the movement in the situation is slow, you go slow, too. If it’s fast, then you can go fast. But if you’re going fast while there is a solemn occasion going on, you are out of sync and disrupting things. That said, you saw that on TV in this situation but those photographers were mostly unseen by the funeral goers, who were on the other side of the situation. For the record, I took a couple of photos over the heads of the officers in that lineup but did not follow the casket down the line with the “hail mary” photographers you saw.