Vincent Laforet:
In Tight in Torino
There are no medals awarded for photojournalism at the Winter Olympics. But anyone watching photojournalist Vincent Laforet run with 50 pounds of equipment from the Oval Lingotto — where he’d just photographed 5000-meter speedskater Chad Hedrick winning America’s first gold medal of the 2006 Games — toward Palavela, the pairs figure skating venue, a chilly mile away, might easily believe that he was witnessing an unannounced leg of a new Olympic test sport.
Inside Palavela, that impression would only have strengthened. Laforet, after clearing security, took one of the 50 ice-level positions available for hundreds of competing photojournalists only minutes before they were locked down. He set up his cameras, caught his breath, and began shooting the first of 30 scheduled pairs of figure skaters, commencing the next stage of his photojournalistic biathlon.
The athletic analogies are not so far fetched. “We’re all very competitive,” says Laforet. “But we all use the same cameras and lenses, and we have equivalent positions for the most part. So what gives you an advantage as a photojournalist are your wits, your eye, the amount of research you do, and the speed with which you can deliver images.”
Digital Dilemma
A veteran Olympics shooter, Laforet arrived in Turin looking for any edge he could get. So although he would be shooting the events with digital cameras, like nearly every other photographer there, Laforet arrived with plans to avoid the digital recoil the cameras typically carry for photojournalists — the expectation that they will photo-edit their images even as they’re shooting them.
For most photojournalists in Turin this meant they would need to decide when to turn away from the action to download thousands of accumulated images from their CompactFlash cards, scan through them, and then choose and transmit a few optimal “selects,” all under onerous deadlines.
Laforet believes these on-the-floor decisions can be as destructive as they are difficult. “You ask yourself which pairs couple to ignore, because you have to transmit at some point,” says Laforet. “And more often than not you blow off the couple that ends up falling or that has the routine of their life. They end up being the news of the day, but you missed it because you were busy editing and transmitting your photographs. And that couple that you thought would be the story, they’re no longer a story.”
A Shooter’s Strategy
But Laforet (until recently a staff photographer for The New York Times, now the first Times national contract photographer) is famous for getting the story. His arresting photographs from events like the Super Bowl, the Iraq war, post-9/11 New York, and Hurricane Katrina — some shot leaning out from open helicopter doors — have earned many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.
Eager to optimize his chances for getting the story in Turin, Laforet decided to create a new digital workflow that would keep him behind the camera as much as possible. It was very much an attempt to restore in his cover strategy the primary shooting responsibility of the traditional analog news photographer, whose job was generally finished when he handed off a roll of film.
After racing between venues with his gear, Laforet gathers himself to shoot pairs figure skating.
“People have no idea how little time a photojournalist spends actually making photographs,” he says. “Between all of the negotiating, travel, editing, and archiving, it has to be close to five percent. But before digital, it was probably 15 percent.”
