PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Stopping Time
David Peirini is the eye of Jasper, Indiana's Herald
On David Pierini’s first day as chief photographer at The Herald in Jasper, the priest sex scandal came to this town of 12,000 in the rolling farmlands of southern Indiana. He found himself in a church in nearby Celestine, tentatively searching for “the moment” as Father Michael Allen, or “Father Mike,” confessed to his parishioners that twenty-six years ago he had sexual relations with a sixteen-year-old boy. “It was awkward,” says Pierini, whose ample girth, clean-shaven head, and long auburn goatee make it hard to be inconspicuous. “I thought they would kick me out. These are people who know me from more positive moments.”
Father Mike showed little emotion as he spoke, and Pierini’s shots were ordinary. When the priest finished speaking, though, the congregation erupted unexpectedly with a standing ovation and Father Mike sat on a pew and wept. The “moment.” But Pierini was on the wrong side of the church, his view blocked by a stand of parishioners. He maneuvered into position in time to snap a few shots of Father Mike in profile, head in his hand, framed by the blurry contours of his forgiving flock.
“I knew that was the picture,” Pierini says, but he worried that people would consider his eagerness to get it inappropriate. “It isn’t ‘get the shot at all costs’ here.” Jasper readers understand the role of the press, he says, but they also trust The Herald’s judgment and respect for boundaries. “I realize that philosophy would probably be scrutinized by a big-city editor.”
But Pierini, who has been taking pictures for The Herald for four years, doesn’t work for a big-city editor. He works for John Rumbach. And when he talks about judgment and philosophy, he is talking about Rumbach’s as much as his own. In the case of Father Mike, that judgment produced a dramatic front-page photo that distills all the agony and power of the story into a single frame, and it was had without trampling the dignity of the predominantly Catholic community around Jasper. The kind of photo that has become The Herald’s signature.
Over the last twenty-nine years, the fifty-one-year-old Rumbach, who is The Herald’s co-publisher (along with his cousin) as well as its editor, turned his paper — the family business since 1919 — into a refuge for young photojournalists. They go there because The Herald, with a circulation of 12,600 and an editorial staff of seventeen, is that rarest of things among U.S. daily newspapers: a place where photography is the marquee player and text a supporting cast. In 1988, Rumbach was the National Press Photographers Association picture editor of the year. In 1996, Torsten Kjellstrand, who now shoots for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, was named photographer of the year by NPPA. In both cases, The Herald was among the smallest papers ever to win those awards.
That kind of success has drawn a stream of talented photojournalists
through Jasper. As many as sixty applications roll in twice a
year for the paper’s six-month photo internship. “Nobody
in the country is doing what they are doing with photojournalism,”
says Steve Mellon, who was at The Herald from 1984 to 1987, and
now is a photographer for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The centerpiece of Rumbach’s visual show is the Saturday Feature. Begun in 1978, these stories are a weekly marriage of photos and words that fills the first two to eight pages of the tabloid. No ads. Subjects range from the routine (first communion) to the profound (a year with a brother and sister who were paralyzed in a car wreck). The stories reflect what is happening in Jasper and surrounding Dubois County.
“It is one of the few places that puts out a paper built around real documentary work,” says Kjellstrand. With only two photographers and an intern, the workload is brutal; Kjellstrand says he once shot some thirty photo stories in a year. And while the finished product varies in quality, when it works the words and pictures have a simple power that even video cannot replicate.
It’s hard to imagine a paper more suited to its community than The Herald is to Jasper, a German-American town full of tidy brick homes with wide, lush lawns that, if not kept well-trimmed, may draw a twenty-five dollar fine. Furniture factories put Jasper on the map, and the wood products industry is still the town’s main employer. High school sports are major social events that produce near-nightly work for Herald photographers.
The Herald arrives in the afternoon — factory shifts start early — and still carries the service club meeting reports that Rumbach’s father, J.T., who died in 1997, considered part of the paper’s debt to the community. (His grandfather, A.T. Rumbach, ran the Ku Klux Klan out of town by publishing the names of local members.) The paper still shoots film — black-and-white film — at a time when digital cameras have made darkrooms quaint. Herald employees get a turkey at Thanksgiving. “I grew up with this feeling that the newspaper and the community are tied together,” says Rumbach.
But until the mid-1970s, when Rumbach finished at Notre Dame and came to work at the paper, The Herald was mostly unremarkable. “A community bulletin board,” he says. It didn’t even have a full-time photographer. To hear Rumbach tell it, some flack from the local Kiwanis club sparked the paper’s visual revolution. The guy called the paper one day and wanted a photographer to cover the guest speaker at the club’s next meeting. Rumbach told him that the paper didn’t have a photographer, but that he would send a reporter over to write a story. “He said, ‘You know, people won’t read a story unless there’s a picture with it,’” Rumbach recalls. “I thought about it and realized that the majority of the story ideas that came in from readers involved photos. The readers were telling me something.”
On a shelf behind Rumbach’s desk is a nameplate that reads “Clark Kent, Daily Planet.” Rumbach is kind of a self-taught photojournalism superhero, saving the genre from the onslaught of boring crops and postage-stamp pictures. He went to workshops and asked questions, then went home and experimented. When Alan Petersime, now a photo editor at The Indianapolis Star, joined The Herald in 1979 as its first full-time photographer, Rumbach “already had the vision of what he wanted the paper to become.”
That vision was to use photos to tell stories, not just to break up the words with pretty images. “Photographers should be reporters,” Rumbach says. “They should do the research.” It’s no coincidence that many of the Herald photographers, including Pierini, began their careers as reporters. “I can’t make a good picture unless I do the reporting,” Pierini says. “I don’t have a lot of tricks in my bag.”
When Rumbach’s new photo philosophy met his genetic commitment to community journalism, the result was visually driven stories that, as he says, “document the little things that make a community a community, and find interesting things to say about them.” Mellon recalls being sent to cover a spelling bee, and told to come back with not just a photo page, but a story with a narrative. “A spelling bee!” he says. “That’s unheard of.”
This blend of priorities means that a Herald photographer is not always the one with the best eye or the flashiest style. “People think that The Herald is this great showcase for photographers, and to a degree it is,” says Pierini. “But a lot of what we do here is take care of our community.”
Most photographers who come to Jasper leave after a few years — albeit with heavy hearts — burned out by the workload or spurred on by the hunger for bigger markets. Pierini, though, is someone you could imagine growing old there. When he was a photojournalism student at Western Kentucky University, The Herald published Friends & Neighbors, a coffee-table collection of its photography; Pierini drove two and a half hours from Bowling Green to buy it, then waited in the newsroom for Kjellstrand and Tim Myers, another former Herald photographer, to arrive so they could autograph his copy. “To me this isn’t a job, it’s a gig,” says Pierini, who is thirty-five and has worked at newspapers since he was a high-school kid covering hockey games for The Suburban News, a weekly shopper in Livonia, Michigan, outside Detroit where he grew up. “I still can’t believe I work here.”
He and Jasper move to the same rhythm. He loves the small talk with the farmers and the factory workers, the teasing with the school kids, the fried chicken at Heichelbech’s Wednesday night buffet. “No history book compares to meeting one of these guys,” Pierini says, standing in a cemetery just before Memorial Day with two old vets and the groundskeeper who are putting flags on graves. “Just listen. You can pick up so much.” What he picks up this day is a story idea about an automated egg facility on a nearby farm that cranks out 250,000 eggs a day.
At their best, Pierini’s pictures have an accessibility that is hard to describe; you know exactly how a person in one of his photos is feeling. “He takes pictures that make readers pause,” says Rumbach.
Starting in the spring of 2000, Pierini and Martha Rasche, the Herald’s city editor, who grew up on a farm just outside Jasper, spent a year with James Earls, a local man who weighed over 400 pounds and decided to have gastric bypass surgery to shrink his stomach. The result was essentially a Saturday story serialized over three days that took readers into Earls’s struggle.
Rasche and Pierini took turns leading the other through the piece as they dropped in and out of Earls’s world. Pierini became close to Earls. “I knew what that guy was going through, because I’ve been heavy all my life,” he says. “It was hard to make some of those photos.” Through this bond, though, he was able to let Rasche know when Earls was struggling, for instance, so she could go interview him. That collaboration, Rasche says, “really brought the words and pictures together.” (To read the Earls story, go to www.dcherald.com/stories.html.)
Once the words and pictures were in, Rumbach began leaping tall buildings in a single bound. “Learning how pictures interact with each other, and how they affect the reader, is the hard part of photo editing,” he says. “Getting the pictures so that they build on one another, leading the reader through the story.” In the Earls piece, we see him shrink from beginning to end; the expression on his face tracking the change from pain to fear to joy. “Dave captured feelings and issues that are hard to get on film,” Rumbach says.
And they do this every Saturday.
Several times a year, someone inquires about buying The Herald. “We just throw those in the wastebasket,” says Rumbach. The paper manages to thrive despite being blissfully out of step with the modern newspaper industry in so many ways, and the cycle of teaching and learning and documenting that Rumbach began years ago continues, far removed from the hand-wringing over corporate ownership, shrinking newsholes, and bottom-line journalism. David Pierini will move on eventually, even though he was born to work at Rumbach’s Herald. His girlfriend of thirteen years, now a contract writer with the Chicago Tribune, doesn’t want to live in Jasper, and they have been apart so much of those thirteen years that, as Pierini says, the next decision will be “for the couple.”
Andrew Otto, though, who was hired in May as the paper’s
second photographer, seems appropriately tuned to The Herald’s
wavelength. “People say nothing happens here,” says
twenty-eight-year-old Otto. “But what does that mean? Life
happens here."
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