A boy and a bullet

By Tom Burton

It had been just two months since Tavon Tanner had been shot and the bullet was still lodged in his body when he met Jason Wambsgans. The photographer from the Chicago Tribune had been working on a portrait series of other children who had been shot in Chicago during 2016 and he wanted to make a photo of Tavon outside his home.

Wambsgans had heard that young Tavon had attended a summer photography camp, so he let the boy help carry the lights and a softbox as they set up the shot.

About 20 minutes later, the 11-year-old helped carry the gear back inside. The two had already struck up a great rapport, and Wambsgans asked the boy about the first surgery he’d had after the shooting. He asked Tavon if he’d be interested in showing the photographer his scar.

Wambsgans swiveled the soft box toward Tavon and without directing the boy, Wambsgans made only two frames.

“I gasped, seeing what a powerful image he gave me,” Wambsgans said. “He was sharing this with me.”

The resulting portrait is part of the story that won Wambsgans the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. It is his first Pulitzer, but Tavon’s story is just one in a continuum for Wambsgans that stretched back a few years and was continuing as the Pultizer was announced.

Shootings in Chicago had become more common in 2013 and the Tribune moved to focus more coverage on these crimes. Many of them happened overnight and the photo desk knew they were often on the scenes early the next morning, several hours after the crimes. If the photographers could be there at night, closer to when the shootings happened, they had a better chance of picking up on story threads.

The photo department needed to start staffing an overnight shift. Robyn Daughtridge, the associate managing editor for photography and video at the Tribune, knew it would stretch her staff and the managing editor questioned how they would make it work.

“We’ll find a way and maybe we will do less of some things that we have to do every day,” Daughtridge said she told her boss. “When people have something we feel is important, we carve out time for that.”

They set up a rotation schedule of four to five photographers to work overnight with police reporter Peter Nickeas. Wambsgans was glad to take one of the shifts. He said photographers on staff had been saying that this story had been a hole in their coverage. Until then, only the high-profile cases were covered and the others were overlooked.

The goal wasn’t to find more police activity at a crime scenes, but to find leads for deeper stories. Wambsgans said the the staff began finding stories that were nuanced or unique. With new sources, they were able to humanize the stories in a way they couldn’t before.

Working closely with Nickeas was also a plus. The overnight crime reporter was young and aggressive on his beat and he found stories that lend to not only words, but to visuals.

“He’s a reporter who sees the world a like a photographer does. He observes things,” Wambsgans said.

In 2015, the pair worked on the story of Tyshawn Lee, a 9-year-old boy who had been killed in a gang shooting. It was a high-profile story that captured the attention of the city in a way that rarely happened. The family allowed the journalists access to the child’s funeral, including the morticians preparing the body. Wambsgans photographed the scenes and said the experience was both intense and sad.

A year later in the spring of 2016, Wambsgans was brainstorming with Todd Panagopoulos, the director of photography at the Tribune. There a large number of kids becoming targets and by the end that year, 24 children under the age of 12 had been shot. The Tribune wanted to focus more on that story.

Wambsgans decided on making a series of black-and-white portraits that were dark and moody. He also recorded interviews with the subjects and had a half a dozen nice portraits in hand.

But he felt nothing was “earth-shattering.”

On a Monday night in August, Tavon Tanner was on the front porch of his home, looking at the moon. On that day in Chicago, 19 people would be shot and nine of them died. A couple of the shootings had already happen in Tavon’s neighborhood and sirens could be heard. Then, a bullet hit Tavon.

His mother, Mellanie Washington, described the scene of panic to Tribune writer Mary Schmich. Washington remembered how the bullets “seemed to come from nowhere, like the crack of thunder,” and Tavon’s twin sister Taniyah screaming “Twin, don’t leave me! Twin, don’t leave me!”

Schmich, a feature writer and a Pulitzer-winning columnist for the Tribune, had come on to the newspaper’s project as an additional writer. She had been reaching out to family after family, trying to find someone who would talk about children being shot in Chicago. Gang affiliations and fear of retaliation stopped many of them from talking.

Washington, though, came to believe that if she and Tavon told their story, people could see what happens to a family and the difficulties of recovery when a child is shot.

Wambsgans came into Tavon’s story early, working closely with Schmich. Visuals editor Daughtridge said that though Wambsgans is tall man, and can seem imposing at first glance, he has a way about him with people.

“He cares very much about telling this family’s story,” Daughtridge said, adding that Wambsgans is a good example of how honesty and kindness pays off.

Working with the family and the hospital, Schmich arranged access for her and Wambsgans access to follow Tavon through the surgery to remove the bullet and then on to the boy’s return to school.

A story like Tavon’s can be emotionally exhausting for a journalist to cover. For Wambsgans, it was one in a series he’s done about the violence in Chicago.

“It’s always a struggle to temper the effects of sustained exposure to that kind of grief,” Wambsgans said.

“Part of it is, this is my city,” he continued. “Tavon lived just over a mile from me.”

One coping mechanism Wambsgans has is he can switch up his assignments every so often. When the long-time studio expert retired from the Tribune photo staff, Wambsgans picked up some of those assignments to spend time photographing food in the paper’s test kitchen. He also has spent time photographing the replanting of a prairie in Wisconsin for a gardening story.

Wambsgans was at a daily courthouse on assignment when the Pulitzers were announced. The news came in the middle of his busy schedule and frankly took him by surprise. Wambsgans said his daily focus is on the stories he covers and not on contests so his intentions can remain pure. The attention of the Pulitzer “kind of upset my world,” he said.

His focus, along with the rest of the staff at the Tribune, will remain on those stories because journalism is important to them.

“It feeds the reader and it feeds the soul of the photojournalist too,” Daughtridge said.

Wambsgans continued to cover the violence in Chicago. He covered a story called Little Village that focused on two former gang members in a Mexican neighborhood who were mentoring youngsters, hoping to steer them away from trouble.

“I’m working on this woven fabric of stories that intersect with the violence on different layers,” Wambsgans said. As he was being interviewed for this story, he and crime reporter Nickeas were in the early planning meetings for their next project.

Wamsbgans was still on rotation for the overnight shift, covering crime stories. He comes home to his family tired, and stressed. His long-time girlfriend, who is also a journalist, can sense when he’s hurting and can help pull him back. Still, there are nights when he couldn’t sleep, as he worried about Tavon and his family.