Monday, October 12, 2009

A Remembrance of Fallen Friends


The song was “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” sung beneath the birch and fir trees at the Eddie Adams Farm by Leah Latella. The occasion Sunday afternoon was the annual ceremony remembering six photojournalists killed in Vietnam, their names inscribed into a gray slate table, their friends and colleagues among the crowd gathered together on the grass. “These were our eyes,” said Ray Harrell, presiding over the gathering as a Native American ritual, his gray hair in long braids. “You are our eyes.”

He recalled the pictures of Vietnamese “Boat People” that Adams made in the final days of the conflict, which drew worldwide attention to the desperate refugee crisis: “He brought the boat people to America. If his eyes had not been there, they would have been lost.”

Then there was silence, and Nick Ut stepped forward and placed a sunflower on the stone table for his brother, AP photographer Huynh Thanh My. Sarah Burrows left one for her grandfather, Life magazine’s Larry Burrows. Others were placed for Henri Huet, Michael Laurent and Kent Potter. Also remembered were more recent losses: Sandy Colton, veteran of Stars and Stripes and the AP; and Workshop founder Eddie Adams, gone since 2004.

Eddie’s son, August Adams, wore his father’s iconic black fedora and stepped forward (accompanied by half-sister Susan) to place it beside the flowers. A black balloon was released into the air for Adams, a red one for Colton, followed by scores of yellow balloons in honor of the fallen photojournalists.

As ever, it was a profoundly affecting moment among the crowd of photojournalists, friends and family, and a dramatic illustration of what can be at stake in this profession. Many tears were shed around the stone. The annual ceremony had not yet been established when Getty conflict photographer John Moore was a Barnstorm student in 1990, but as a former longtime member of AP, he was moved Sunday by the remembrance in 2009.

“When you’re a student, you have no way of knowing how you will react when confronted with all the horrible things you will see in conflicts. It’s all just theoretical,” Moore said afterwards. “I really do have a strong emotional feeling for all of my AP colleagues, even though it was another war a long time ago. Having covered a lot of conflict the last few years, I feel a certain kinship with them.”

Steve Appleford

Publishing 'Vietnam'



The career of Eddie Adams spanned decades and genres, from the arrival of the Beatles in America to the private fishing spot of Fidel Castro, but he remained best-known for his history-making work in Vietnam. His shocking photograph of an execution on the streets of Saigon helped shift U.S. opinions on the war and awarded Adams the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. But he had been in the country for years, with a larger body of work to document his time there.

This year saw the release of “Eddie Adams: Vietnam,” edited by Alyssa Adams and Hal Buell, his longtime editor at the Associated Press. The book was published by Umbrage Editions, founded by Nan Richardson, who appeared Sunday afternoon at Barnstorm. Alyssa and Buell (later joined by Claudia DiMartino) discussed the making of the book:

Didn’t Eddie have mixed feelings about collecting his pictures into a book?

Hal Buell: I don’t recall him ever being pleased with any book he was ever involved with. I always thought that with “Speak Truth to Power,” his portraits really gave a dimension to the story it certainly would not have had without them. But he didn’t see it that way. He got into a squabble over the cover or title. With Eddie, he would get pissed off about this, and it would spread out like ink on a blotter. But the pictures were really wonderful. You go out and make 100 portraits and every one is different? That’s really something.

Did Eddie talk about doing books?

Alyssa Adams: He talked to a couple of publishers and tried to put a book together, and every time they would get so far, and he would just rip it up. And that would be the end of it.

HB: I used to give him a hard time. He’d say, “I’ve got the first paragraph …” and then he’d dictate this 25 words. And I’d say, What about the other 60,000? What are we going to do about those? (laughs)

It seems that since he didn’t do many books in his lifetime, and unless you were really in the know, you might know his work from only a handful of pictures.

HB: I don’t know if that’s really true. When I met Eddie for the first time in 1963, he had come to the AP from the Philadelphia Bulletin, and I had come back from Asia. We just connected and did a lot of good things. But at that point, Eddie was a very well-known photographer. He already had a wall full of awards that he used to make fun of and hang in his bathroom.

He did not promote his own work per se, but he did promote his ideas of photography and what photography meant. He sometimes used his own pictures in that, but Eddie was always dissatisfied with his work. That was one of his driving forces. Sometimes that inhibited him because he didn’t think he was good enough, it should be better, or ‘Did I miss this?’ -- all the anxieties that photographers feel.

How did the Vietnam book come together?

AA: The idea was to put a retrospective book together. Honestly, I hadn’t seen a lot of Eddie’s pictures, because he had his favorites and those were the ones that I saw. It wasn’t until after he passed away that I saw more –- there’s still pictures I’ve never seen. It just became obvious that Vietnam was the thing to focus on first.

Not only did we find his pictures, we found his diaries. Hal had once interviewed him about the picture, so you really hear Eddie’s voice a lot in this because there were other pieces we had to put together.

HB: The idea was: This is how photographers covered Vietnam, as shown by Eddie Adams. I did a lot of research into the newspaper files. Eddie wrote a lot of stories -– or he called in stories that others wrote. Eddie was not a bad writer. That provided us with a lot of information. There was a lot in the journals, but the journals kind of ended at his first tour in Vietnam, and they were a little cryptic. But there was a flavor in the journals that was very important, and very Eddie.

His most famous picture won the Pulitzer, but was there a general quality to his work that the execution picture does not capture?

Claudia DiMartino: I absolutely love his portrait of Mother Teresa holding a baby. That is the antithesis of the Saigon execution picture, and it shows Eddie’s range. He can lock into that sense of intimacy and emotion that you don’t get in a picture of a guy shot on the street. And his photo essay on the boat people, that’s a tremendously touching story and one that showed great courage on his part to cover.

HB: The Saigon execution picture is not like Eddie’s pictures. It was his signature picture because of its fame, but Eddie was especially effective when he could put a picture together.

Was there a picture you especially liked that you’d never seen before?

AA: Yeah, there’s one of a man with a wife on his back as they’re fleeing. I had never seen that picture. I don’t think anybody ever saw it before.

Are other books planned?

AA: Not as of yet, but I just donated the archives to the University of Texas. I’m hoping we can spend a couple of years and do that retrospective book. I also think it would be fun to do a book just of his AP images.

HB: I don’t want to sound conceded, but I guess I will: I think Eddie did his best work at AP.

Steve Appleford

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Photo Session!


“I want everyone between the pumpkins!” Scott Allen of the Black Team was shouting, attempting to help direct a couple of hundred Barnstormers for a group photo: students, teachers, volunteers, most of them with cameras and ideas of their own. As they gathered in random formation in front of the Barn, some climbed onto the roof, stood on chairs, sat on the grass and generally crowded together as the sunlight slipped in and out of the clouds. The lucky photographer was Mark Kettenhoffen, another member of the Black Team and a Nikon employee, with five big strobes and a nice camera. After a half-dozen frames, the photo was done.

Steve Appleford

“Mr. President, Will You Show Me the Love?”


London-born photographer Platon made a playful, and triumphant return to the Eddie Adams Workshop as Saturday's final speaker. He was carried to the podium wearing a pork-pie hat by the esteemed photo editors MaryAnne Golan and Scott Thode. “I’m always amazed to be invited back after last year’s atrocities,” Platon said. He also noted this week’s passing of the influential magazine photographer Irving Penn, telling students, “Of course, losing someone that great means passing the torch onto you guys.”

He then shared images from throughout his career, shooting celebrities and politicians, from Barack Obama and George W. Bush to Willie Nelson stoned and Pamela Anderson draped in a U.S. flag. He recounted photographing Michelle Obama and his mortified apology after asking the new First Lady to “bare her soul.” She was fine with it. “She kissed me on the cheek, and she said, ‘I’m just Michelle.’”

Platon described meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He was quite nice. We talked about the Beatles. He said his favorite song was ‘Yesterday.’ And I gave him a cuddle.” As his brooding image of actor Christopher Walken filled the screen, Platon recalled, “He was weeeird!” Walken was the only celebrity ever to arrive an hour early (and alone) for a shoot, and then went through Platon’s cabinets. Dustin Hoffman sent the photographer’s mother flowers on her birthday, Prince handed him a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet, and P. Diddy demanded Platon turn off a classic Miles Davis CD so that he could primp in the mirror to one of his own.

One particularly noteworthy assignment was a session with President Bill Clinton for the cover of Esquire. It was to be Clinton’s final editorial portrait sitting in office. Their meeting would be in a New Jersey hotel, cleared out for the occasion, and Platon wore his father’s 1974 suit. Esquire requested a simple, undistorted head-shot for the cover.

After enduring the inevitable security measures, and the spectacle of Secret Service agents giving play-by-play for Clinton's every step, the pictures went as planned. Platon reached for the wide-angle lens the magazine warned him not to use, turning to his assistants, as he recounted at the Barn: “Lads, will you pass me the ‘portrait lens’ – double code.”

He lifted the camera once more and asked Clinton, “Mr. President, will you show me the love?”

The resulting image, which Esquire put on the cover, had the president's crotch in the center of the frame. Many saw Phallic symbolism in the way his chair hung below him in the picture, as if reflecting Clinton’s recent troubles with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment trial. “He was a rock and roll president, and I was a new bred of portrait photographer," Platon said. "Putting us together was dangerous.”

Larry king called the photo “disgusting” and brought investigative journalist Bob Woodward on CNN to analyze the insidious image. Platon’s reputation was secure.

Steve Appleford

Bring On the Games







Sports are a great American tradition, but for photojournalists aiming to document the great contests of 2009, it’s crucial to look beyond the obvious and familiar. That was the message Saturday night from sports photographer Al Bello, who urged students to step outside their comfort zones and experiment with gear, angles, lighting, remote cameras, shutter speeds, ISO setting, anything. “Try something different,” Bello said. “If you make no mistakes, you’re not trying.”

Bello, the chief sports photographer for Getty Images, whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek and elsewhere, sounded much like a coach as he breezed through a presentation of dynamic images from his career. He’s captured unusually vivid sports photographs by setting up cameras on catwalks above boxing rings, on the floor of tennis tournaments, he's strobed bull-riders inside arenas, created a series of boxer portraits on Polaroid film (“Rest in peace, Polaroid”), and shot into the sun at baseball games.

“Angles are huge in sports photography. A pitcher pitching is very boring. You might want to spice it up sometimes,” Bello said. “You’ve got to put the work in to get lucky.”

Bello also reminded students to take full advantage of the Barnstorm experience. The professionals among the faculty and staff are here to help. “You learn from the people in this room,” he said. “You learn by asking questions. It’s a world of knowledge in this room.”

At the end of his talk, Bello said that after all the images of war and sadness presented earlier in the day, he had one more story to share: “I need to make you guys happy again. I want to take you to Santa Clause school!” What followed was a playful multi-media slide show of his pictures and sound from two days he spent at a Michigan Santa Clause academy. Turns out sports are not the only way to have fun.

Steve Appleford

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Foreign Tongues

John Moore's career as an international conflict photographer began in Central America, he told students gathered at the Barn today. "I learned Spanish the old-fashioned way: I got myself a girlfriend and six months later I was all set."

Moore, now a senior staff photographer for Getty Images, is also a proud alum of the Eddie Adams Workshop, passing through the program in 1990. Less than a year later, he was working abroad. This decade, he spent three years living and working in and around Pakistan, and was present at the 2007 assassination in Pakistan of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and barely escaped injury in that explosion. He was also the first photographer allowed into the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad after the prisoner abuse scandal exploded in 2004.

Moore noted how tightly the military has tried to control media access: "The rules are not the same as when Eddie Adams was in Vietnam, we all know that." Moore still managed to bring back some searing black-and-white and color images from Abu Ghraib and other U.S. prisons in Iraq. On Saturday, Moore also showed pictures from the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, with angry Muslim protesters in Pakistan seeming to lunge towards Moore's camera lens. "To be fair," he said, "most Pakistanis are very moderate."

Despite his success shooting overseas conflict, Moore is content to be working increasingly in the U.S., photographing such major national issues as health care reform. "There is so much happening in the U.S. right now," said Moore, who is based in Denver. "There's all kinds of stuff to do in your own backyard."

Steve Appleford

Words and Pictures

"I always consider myself more of a journalist than a photographer," Pulitzer Prize-winner Carolyn Cole said during Saturday's first session of Barnstorm presenters. "I don't have the natural eye like many do, and it's something I've had to work on." It's clearly been working, with far-flung international assignments as a Manhattan-based photographer for the Los Angeles Times, with tours through Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other trouble spots.

She showed a selection of that work, including a series on Afghan women, many still draped under burkas, but others not. She said one Afghan husband assured her that he would kill his own wife if she ever appeared in public without the traditional garment. But as Cole displayed the image of two smiling Afghan women outdoors without the head covering, she said other women "were expressing more freedom from day to day."

She's covered local and international news for the L.A. Times since the mid-90s. Her series of pictures from the civil crisis in Liberia was awarded the 2004 Pulitzer for feature photography. Some things are closer to home: In the U.S., she's covered everything from the OJ Simpson civil trial to high stakes presidential politics. And as part of her job at the Times, Cole is also called on for the occasional celebrity portrait, too often with too little time and a different set of problems. "This is a different kind of challenge for me. I usually have five minutes in an ugly hotel room."

Steve Appleford

An Afternoon With Howard Schatz



Howard Schatz is in the Barn shooting portraits. The editorial and commercial photographer has been a regular guest at the Workshop since 2000, after Eddie Adams walked up to him one day and said: "I want to be like you." Now he's working up a series of afternoon portraits, each of them silhouettes of staff and students standing in profile against a bright 4-by-6-foot soft box.

“It’s a way of my saying thanks," Schatz explains. Later, he'll take the best of the day's playful portraits back to his Soho studio and transform them into a collage that commemorates this year's Barnstorm. (Anyone who participated will get an email from Schatz with a thank you and a ftp link to the finished hi-res image.) “It’s fun. I get to shake everybody’s hand, talk to everybody a little bit, it’s sort of a family and nice.”

This morning, the photographer drove up to the Farm and gave a lecture about his work, showing highlights just from the last year of assignments and personal projects: elegant pictures of pregnant women, boxers immediately before and after stepping into the ring, prisoners behind bars, a series on actors improvising to Schatz's directions, plus excerpts from many years of dreamy underwater photographs.

Schatz is accepting applications for a year-long internship at his studio. Between some of today's silhouette sittings, Schatz spoke about the Barnstorm experience and why he keeps coming back.

How are Workshop people as subjects?

They are creative. I let them be creative and crazy. I never say no, no, don’t do that. I say, good, good, let's try. What’s going to happen? I’m positive and reinforcing all the time. It makes you feel sort of nice. It’s a win-win, happy few hours.

How did you meet Eddie Adams?

Eddie came up to me and said something nice. He paid me a compliment that was a little remarkable coming from him. But we became friends. There was a lot of mutual respect. I felt lucky. He said: “I want to be like you.” He was just saying, you’ve done really nicely, and I’d like you to participate, I want people in photojournalism to see all the other possibilities of photography.

Is there something special about facing an audience of students and your professional peers?

Students are like sponges, but I’m very aware of the peers. I’m very aware that an editor from National Geographic is here. I’m very aware that Jimmy Colton from Sports Illustrated is here. I’m very aware there’s people from Reuters and AP and Corbis and magazines. So I am conscious of that when I put the talk together. The students will appreciate many, many things, but somebody who’s been out there and seen many things … I shoot to surprise and delight myself. It’s hard to surprise and delight people who look at 10,000 pictures a week. It’s like when a bunch of comedians get together and go,
"That’s a good joke, that will work." You don’t hear them laugh too much.

Why do you keep coming back?

I’m hooked. It’s an addiction. I like sitting around talking to people. At dinner tonight, you can sit around talking to people. Six or seven conversations will be meaningful for me. "What are you doing?" is a question you can ask anybody, and it will come out interesting.

A lot of people know your work underwater, but you do a variety of things photographically, from portraits to reportage.

I am voracious. I’m interested in lots of things. I’m interested in the prisoners, and I’m interested in the boxers and the actors. But you can’t do one project. I can only get a boxer in my studio once every other week. A pregnant woman doesn’t come along every day. We can’t go into the prison every day -- we go once every month or two. I shoot all the time. John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist who died at 96, after having written about 48 books, said a page a day is about a book in a year. I started to work like that, constantly accumulating. The nice thing about doing a project over a long time is you learn things. And I learn about me.

Do you have a core philosophy about photography?

Self-doubt is a huge toxin to creativity. The brother of self-doubt is imagining the eyes of others. If you think someone else is going to look at it, you go "What do they think? Should I do that they’ll like? What should I do that will be popular?" You have to dig inside and find it yourself.

You can’t prepare too much. If you put a lecture together, and you’ve gone over it three or four times, and you have time to go over it a fifth time, do it. A sixth time? Do it. Seventh time? Do it. You can’t prepare too much.

The third thing is the huge advantage I call the brass-butt syndrome. To be able to sit one place and not get up, do the self-sacrifice and do the work. You just sit and do it. There is something about staying focused and being able to work and work and work and put certain things out. And Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. If you can let yourself go and not be constricted by rules and assumptions, you have a greater chance to create unusual things that are special.

Steve Appleford

Uncle Jim


Jim Colton has been a part of the Eddie Adams Workshop for nearly two decades. Currently the photography editor at Sports Illustrated, Colton has been a top photo exec at Newsweek and Sipa Press, but sees his ongoing role with the Workshop as among the most rewarding things he does in his life and career. "You are the chosen ones," he told students during his Friday night talk, and then proceeded to lay down the law, demanding mutual respect among the students, faculty and staff. "We will not coddle you. We will not pick up after you." He then instructed each person in the barn to turn to the one closest to them and say, "I love you." It was Uncle Jim's tough-love fest.

For most of his years at Barnstorm, he's been there with his father, Sandy Colton, another leading photo professional who was equally dedicated to the Workshop, even as his health began to fail in recent years. Four days before last year's Workshop, the former Associated Press director of photography suffered a heart attack, but checked himself out of the hospital so he could get up to the Farm. He died Christmas Day.

“When he passed away, I got so many emails from people saying, ‘The person who influenced me the most was your dad, when I got to sit down and talk with him for five minutes. He made me feel like I belonged here,’" said Jim Colton. "That’s really what this workshop is all about.”

Sandy Colton was also an active collector of photojournalism, and had gathered a staggering collection of signed prints by Pulitzer Prize-winners. His family has now taken that collection of photos, along with new donations from the likes of James Nachtwey and Neil Leiffer, to the Christie's auction house for evaluation. The estimated value is in the tens of thousands, and the Colton family plans to donate the proceeds to the Eddie Adams Workshop to create an annual award in Sandy's name for “the student who best embodies the spirit of the workshop,” said his son. (More details to come on Monday.)

Jim Colton stood before the gathered students again Saturday morning, and presented a stirring collection of sports photography drawn from the "Leading Off" section of Sports Illustrated. And he invited students to keep in touch long after Barnstorm was over, to "email Uncle Jim." He promised to reply, to be a sounding board and career counselor.

“It’s a very magical place here," Colton said after announcing the award. “The network, the family, is really a remarkable -- and it's emotional to me -- group of people. It’s important everybody remembers that everybody here is our brothers and sisters. We should keep that family bond no matter what happens.”

Steve Appleford

Friday, October 9, 2009

Meet Eddie Adams


The 2009 edition of the Eddie Adams Workshop got off to a rousing, but an often emotional start Friday night, with remembrances of friends and family, and a suggestion about how lasting the Barnstorm experience can be. Producer Mirjam Evers welcomed students, noted the 17,000 emails she'd received this year, and said: "Enjoy your journey. Take my advice -- be open to anything. The Eddie Adams Workshop will become part of your soul."

She soon introduced Alyssa Adams, who said of both students and staff, "Everyone is here because they want to be here." She noted the continued support of Nikon and other sponsors during a tough economy and the massive changes in the photography and publishing industries, plus the personal costs of students to attend. She said the experience will be well worth it. "That money you spent on air fare will be the best money you ever spent."

She was followed by Hal Buell, formerly a longtime top executive and guiding force for the Associated Press, and Walter Anderson, the former chairman, publisher and (for many years) Eddie Adams' editor at Parade magazine. Both were longtime friends of Adams', and both told stories of what that sometimes could mean, including the experience of landing on the late photographer's notorious "shit list." Anderson explained to laughter, "You didn't know how you got there, you just knew you were there." But he also explored the depth of feeling Adams had for what he did, quoting Adams: "A good picture reaches into your heart and twists it."

The working relationship Adams had with his longtime editors was recounted as a powerful example to follow for any photographer. Anderson pointed out that even the most experienced photographer has insecurities, and whenever he gave Eddie the call, Adams would anxiously ask him specifically what he was looking for. Anderson would tell him, and Eddie would always come back with something better. "Not once in 20 years did I publish a photo (from Eddie) that was my idea. He always came back with something better." Any photographer who didn't, Anderson said, was never hired by Parade again.

Then, as with every Workshop since 1988, the 100 students in the Barn heard from Eddie himself, during a 20-minute excerpt from the new feature documentary "An Unlikely Weapon." (The entire 90-minute film will be screened at the Workshop on Monday morning.) What they saw and heard was a sometimes cantankerous, larger-than-life character in a black fedora, a tough guy who would sing Johnny Cash songs at karaoke bars. And he was a photographer who cared about what he did and strived to improve at every stage of his career. "Like anybody, I always wanted to be the best," Adams says in one scene from the film, as he walks the streets of New York. "I'm not, but I'm still trying."

He saw war close up, captured one of the most significant images from the Vietnam war, and he wrestled with the consequences of that. The final image on the screen was a handwritten statement from Adams: "Life goes on -- we photograph it. But, it's much better with love."

Steve Appleford

Get On the Bus


The road to the Eddie Adams Workshop begins on a big air-conditioned bus hurtling towards the Catskills. That's how it began for me back in 1993, when I was young photographer lucky enough to be one of just 100 students at that year's Barnstorm. Not a lot has changed since then, beyond the shift from slide film to digital and the absence of Eddie himself, who died in 2004. What he left behind remains a unique gathering of top photography professionals and students, each of them ready for an intensive experience of shooting, editing and learning.

For today's trip up the rain-soaked New York Expressway, I am in the front row of the bus with a bag of bagels and Scott Allen, longtime Black Team member and a Workshop student in 1989. He spent 25 years as a photojournalist for the U.S. Navy, and earlier this decade did a tour through Iraq, and was there when one of Saddam Hussein's mass graves was discovered. Allen was soon face-to-face with the deposed dictator at his pre-trial hearings. "He was sitting as close as you are to me now," Allen remembers. "He was very charismatic. You could see how people would be drawn to him."

In the row behind us is Susan Sinclair, Eddie's daughter, somehow making her first trip ever to the Workshop. "My dad would tell me for years to come up," she says with a laugh. At the 22nd annual Barnstorm, she has finally made it. Next to her is Cindy Lou Adkins, sister of Workshop co-founder Alyssa Adams, and the producer of this year's award-winning documentary film about her brother-in-law, "An Unlikely Weapon." As students fill out their forms, the concrete landscape of Manhattan outside slowly recedes into the distance and the the bus speeds into the lush pastures and forests of rural New York state, with the rich fall colors of green, yellow, orange and shades in-between. Those colors will factor heavily in the thousands of pictures created by students during their Barnstorm assignments.

After an orientation at the hotel in Liberty, students are finally bused up to the Farm. As they walk en masse up the muddy dirt road, they are greeted by a round of applause and cheers from Workshop staff, volunteers and others, as the recorded voice of Paul Simon blasts from a PA singing his '70s hit "Kodachrome": "Got a Nikon camera, love to take a photograph / So mama, don't take my Kodachrome away..."

It's a joyous beginning to a big four-day weekend, and students are taken by surprise by the greeting, a tradition that dates back to the very first year of the Workshop. Eddie used to sometimes have a local marching band on duty.

As students gather by the barn, a pickup truck suddenly rolls up the drive. A long green canoe is on top, and a tall, bearded man emerges with an armload of purebred labrador puppies. Alyssa sees the the three-week-old dogs and yells across the field, "One of the subjects is here!"

Alyssa is deputy photo editor at TV Guide, and she's been running the workshop she started with her husband these last four years. "I'm comfortable with it now," she says. "This is the first year since Eddie passed away that I've felt comfortable with it. Eddie used to be who was on the phone making sure things were happening." Now it's up to her and her staff. In a moment, a basket of apples and bananas tumbles from the back of a truck. Alyssa and Barnstorm producer Mirjam Evers run over to help gather them back up. In seconds, a photographer jumps into action, capturing the moment. The Workshop has begun.

Steve Appleford