Photographing life as it is

The picture of Tavon that Won Wambgans a Pulitzer Prize

E. Jason Wambsgans has been working with the Chicago Tribune since 2002, and in that time he has made it his mission to capture life as it is, with all of its imperfections and realities. This is a journey that has sent him on a 15-year trek covering stories from the rainforests of Madagascar to the war in Afghanistan, though he has spent much of the last five years here in Chicago documenting the city’s gun violence. 

Wambsgan’s beginning in journalism was much more humble, however, as he began in a small-town Michigan newspaper, the Gary Post-Tribune. When he started there, he had no formal journalistic training, instead having studied filmmaking and cinematography in college. 

E. Jason Wambsgans

This gave him a very different perspective than many other photographers, a fact that was only compounded by his first years at that Gary-Post. Wambsgans was the only photographer on staff, allowing him to become comfortable creating his own style without any direct outside influences. This resulted in the opposite of Uzzi and Spiro’s small world networks, which are “highly locally clustered and [have] a short path length” as he was as cut off from the mainstream of journalistic photography as possible. His autonomy, combined with the important distinction that the town was small enough that he would see his subjects on the street every day, also gave him a drive to portray them as accurately as possible.

To get his pictures, Wambsgans is a textbook perfectionist. He is willing to do whatever necessary for the perfect shot, often taking the graveyard shift to get pictures others would not, or even spending months at a time trying to get a single picture in just the right moment. His success is not necessarily on taking the perfect picture, but on getting the opportunity to take that picture. The series of pictures that Wambsgans won his Pulitzer Prize for spent over three months to capture, as he got to know a young shooting victim and his mother.

This was not because of the time he took to take the pictures themselves, as he only ended up taking two quick shots of Tavon for the picture that became famous. He instead spent his time attending Thanksgiving with the family or going to school and church with Tavon to make him feel comfortable enough around Wambsgans to act naturally and give him the time to take his pictures.

Wambsgans was initially hired at the Tribune for his unique coverage
 of mundane things such as weather (seen here)

Ironically, this often meant giving Tavon and his family space, and not taking a shot when it came up. Instead, his focus was on just spending time with them to get a better shot in the future, and to understand their story better. According to many in the field, it is this restraint that sets Wambsgans apart. In the words of Todd Panagopoulos, the Tribune's director of photography and video, "Jason really knew how to give Tavon space, and when to shoot and when not to shoot."


He has also used his skills to tell different stories than most. After getting “sick of always portraying shootings the same way, showing up and telling the same story every time,” he decided to show the full story. Not just covering the crime, Wambsgans wanted to show the aftermath as well as the full lives of the victims instead of just one day.

This dedication to his work has paid off. In 2017, one set of Wambsgans’ photos won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award for journalism. His pictures of Tavon and his mother have won international acclaim for his unique approach to revealing Chicago’s gun violence.


https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-tribune-pulitzer-wambsgans-20170410-story.html
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/e-jason-wambsgans
https://www.instagram.com/ejwamb/?hl=en
https://nppa.org/magazine/e-jason-wambsgans-pulitzer-photography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqZ7cG1o0ok