Professional Courtesy

Chasing news lies at the core of any journalist’s work. The professionals who walk the streets instead of enjoying the comfortable seats on talk shows, discussing ‘life, the universe and everything’ (cit. Douglas Adams), are like sharks with a sense of blood.

They can smell news from a distance or are part of an ‘intelligence’ network that tells them what and where. Indeed, photojournalists experience a particular challenge: reclaiming a vantage point from which to take the shot. This necessity often ends up in being ‘assertive’ when entering a scene or ‘elbowing’ those nearby to make room. Sometimes, though, there is also a show of professional courtesy, like in this photo I took during a bomb alert in the vicinity of the Italian Parliament: the man with the camcorder bowed while moving so as not to intrude into the zoom field of view of the other photographer standing by.

In the end, the bomb alert turned out to be a false alarm, so all the efforts to get there first and catch dramatic footages were rendered futile.

In this case, however, it was better to have no news than a tragic one.