Tales from the Trail

NC 2000 and the funeral of Mother Theresa

5/16/2019

How I used the NC2000 to document a major news story.

The Associated Press' News Camera 2000 has been a much-maligned piece of equipment. I was in the first class to learn this camera, used it during the Oklahoma City bombing and was the first to use it in Southeast Asia.

It was new technology on a grand scale. The push back from die-hard film users was just noise to me. All the camera's detractors were based mostly on quality or the lack of. My job back then was to get images to the world newspapers but a fair amount of my shooting brothers and sisters were locked in the mindset that sought the best possible quality of images that would be printed on newsprint. Newsprint was then and is now only a short step from toilet paper.

I was never concerned with having a portfolio of printed images. I did, however, care about winning and the NC 2000 was the first of several cameras that allowed me to do that.

When assigned to document the funeral of Mother Theresa in Calcutta, India I was thrilled to be given the opportunity.

The streets of Calcutta around the church where Mother Theresa was being displayed was chaos being looked over by bamboo cane wielding Calcutta police. Each night they would harrass mourners to end the day's procession.

While there I also shot a photo package on Calcutta, which was mainly photos of the poor, which Mother Theresa championed. The one distractor was that the NC 2000 and the technology necessary to work the images was new and few editors with the AP had taken the time to learn it. So while an editor poured over rolls of film I sat down to a laptop and went to work.

In the end photos of the gun carriage carrying Mother Theresa's body and the India soldiers accompanying her was the front pages of many newspapers around the world. And then, there was that photo of a poor boy standing in the rain with a handful of red flowers waiting to pay his respects.