Photographers High and Low
A year and a half ago Tribune photographer Phillip Greer wrote a famous letter to editor Jack Fuller. Morale in the photo department had hit rock bottom, and Greer gave voice to the general distress.
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“I agree with the new Tribune philosophy that we must cover the suburban area better,” Greer wrote, “but we must also cover the city, state, national, and international news with as much drive and resources as we now give to the suburbs. I view with alarm what is transpiring at the Tribune.”
We called Greer because we’d heard that good photojournalism had just been paid a singular tribute at the Tribune: in a sharp expression of in-house frustration, someone had tacked up in the newsroom two exemplary photo displays from the Sun-Times. One was a two-page color essay, “Black cowboys ride again”; the other had been torn from the Sun-Times’s four-part series on street violence, “After the shooting stops.”
But as we were saying, low morale is not news. A staff that admits to enjoying itself is. So the real story here is not that despairing Tribune photographers are tacking up the competition. It’s the competition.
“There’s a lot of BS we have to shoot,” conceded Daughtridge, who’s the key to her department’s high spirits. “Like a picture every day to go with the celebrity column. It’s a portrait. There’s nothing particularly challenging about it. We try to spread the good stuff around evenly so everybody gets a chance.
Banished From the Tower
