John Paul Filo (Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania) photographed the 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a 14-year-old runaway girl (Mary Ann Vecchio), crying while kneeling over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings. At the time, Filo was a photojournalism student at Kent State University.
Bio
He continued his career in photojournalism, eventually rising to a picture editing job at the American weekly news magazine Newsweek. He now is on staff in the communications department of CBS.[2]
Taking the picture
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Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller
The Kent State shootings occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. At the time John Filo was in the University student photography lab when the shots rang out. He quickly ran outside and below recalls what happened:
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The bullets were supposed to be blanks. When I put the camera back to my eye, I noticed a particular guardsman pointing at me. I said, "I'll get a picture of this," and his rifle went off. And almost simultaneously, as his rifle went off, a halo of dust came off a sculpture next to me, and the bullet lodged in a tree.
I dropped my camera in the realization that it was live ammunition. I don't know what gave me the combination of innocence and stupidity... I started to flee--run down the hill and stopped myself. "Where are you going?" I said to myself, "This is why you are here!"
And I started to take pictures again. ... I knew I was running out of film. I could see the emotion welling up inside of her. She began to sob. And it culminated in her saying an exclamation. I can't remember what she said exactly … something like, "Oh, my God!" |
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To take the picture John used a Nikkormat camera with Tri X film and most of the exposures were 1/500 between 5.6 and f 8 depending on if the sun was behind a cloud or not.[2]
Altered photo
In the early 1970s, an anonymous editor airbrushed the fence post above Mary Ann Vecchio's head out of Filo's Pulitzer Prize Winner. Since then, the altered photo has circulated and has been reprinted in many magazines.[3][4][5][6] Numerous publications, including Time (Nov. 6, 1972, p. 23; Jan. 7, 1980, p. 45) and People (May 2, 1977, p. 37; April 30, 1990, p. 117), have used the altered image without knowing.[7]
References
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