the funeral

to catch up on something old - a week old to be exact - last saturday was the funeral for the little girl who was killed...as we thought we may have teams going on to the state baseball/softball finals that same day, i was switched to work that day to cover the funeral - turns out that all our teams lost (which NEVER happens, least not since i've been here - typically they all go on to the bitter end, THEN they all lose...but whatever); so since there were now 2 of us on and only that one assignment, we just teamed up on it - they were going to drive through town, past the park where she loved to play and then on to the cemetery, from which all media were banned - at least, the obvious media - meaning those of us bearing large cameras - our reporter of course strolled into the whole thing - funeral service, burial etc....anyway, a group of people decided to line the road of the park and release balloons as the procession passed, so i went there and the other fotog, our current intern Jenny, (who makes very good cookies on a totally unrelated note) was staking out the area closer to the cemetery, then i was going to go there and see what we could get, if anything of that - the balloon thing wasn't quite what i was envisioning i'd get, and since from the time i got there and to when the procession passed was about 3 hours, i made the mistake of second-guessing myself as to who would be the right group of people to stick with when the moment arrived - really, the whole thing just turned out to be a bust, as you can see from what i shot...

that done, and feeling completely like i'd blown it - cos it sounded like it would be really cool visually, and i made the other mistake of pre-visualizing beforehand, which is a sure path to disappointment - i went to the cemetery - i'd driven around there that morning, cos you can normally tell where a burial is going to be, and i wanted to know about where in this very large, packed cemetery everything was going to be, but i couldn't tell a thing....turns out that was because she was being buried in a back corner, behind all the office and mausoleum buildings - ie completely invisible from the road.....unless you go to a different road, that is...there's a side road in a neighborhood that essentially dead-ends to the cemetery right in that area....Jenny and i thought we'd just go over that way and see if there was anything you could shoot from that angle.....

so, we get there, i grab the 300, and we walk up to where it's totally this wall of weeds - Jenny just plows on through, and i'm standing there thinking, hmm, should i be doing this - cos now it's making a real back-door effort to see and photograph (maybe - i got no idea what's behind this wall of weeds) something the family has specifically asked us not to  - it's one thing if the media pack is outside the gates shooting the far-off gathering, but this seemed to be going beyond that....and to be honest, a big part of it for me, too, was i got no idea where or in what i'm heading - think of the poison ivy , the lurking large spiders that love to live in weeds (and of which i am deathly phobic) - so after a few minutes of mulling this over, and noting that there was a tv van parked at that dead-end, too, and they were nowhere in sight, i thought - c'mon kim, don't be a wimp, and what if the tv is in there shooting it and we don't, so in i went.....there wasn't too much weediness before you came to a clearing, and then there was a small fence...as i walked up to its end, crap, right there they were, not 30 feet away - the whole thing, and i can see it plain as day....so, now what to do, i just started shooting - people are passing by the coffin and laying flowers atop it or just touching it as they passed, and they're hugging, and there's no tv anywhere - just me and Jenny, and having the 300 that close, i can get a lot of really clear shots....til one of the funeral guys noticed, and then he said to please respect the family's wishes and leave....so we did, and i was feeling really torn about what i'd just done - i mean, technically, we were outside the property, we just happened to know a back-way to get to where we could shoot something, but it still felt pretty sneaky, and i decided i wasn't going to submit any of those pictures...

we got back to the paper, and Jenny and i were looking at what we'd shot, and the copy editor saw those pix and knew that no one else had anything like that...so he's getting interested, and i'm like, we can't run this, and i'm not going to make them available to run - he called the head editor to get her opinion, and she basically agreed - if we have other stuff from the procession, we don't need this - of course, the procession stuff is pretty bad, but i still would rather run that and not deal with what i think would be a morally "iffy" photo, which isn't that great either really, as you can see here....

it just was one of those days when i felt really torn ethically about 1) having shot this at all, and 2) running it -especially after the reporter came back and handed over the point and shoot he took with some shots we could use of the cemetery gathering - the editor still decided against it, and we just ran what we had, which i think was the right decision in the end - just too much moral quandary for the day, and not something i've had to deal with much at all since i've been doing this - just left me feeling pretty uncomfortable all the way around, and i was glad to finish that day and put it behind me....