It's the nightmare every photojournalist knows. You're at the scene of a major news event, something violent and fast and chaotic, but when it's over you're not sure you captured it. Jack Thornell knew that feeling better than most.
On a Mississippi highway in June 1966, the Associated Press photographer heard the blast of a shotgun and scrambled out of his car, clutching his camera. But when the dust settled, his felt not relief, but dread. He feared his rival had a picture of the gunman and he didn't. He thought he was going to be sacked.
He wasn't. He won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for photography. Last week on April 23, he died in Metairie, Louisiana, aged 86, following complications from kidney disease. Photojournalism has lost one of its most significant witnesses.
Article continues belowThe picture he didn't know he had
Here's some context to that Pulitzer-winning shot. Its subject, James Meredith, had already made history in 1962 by becoming the first Black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi, doing so under federal protection amid riots that killed two people. In June 1966 he launched what he called a March Against Fear: a solo walk through Mississippi to encourage black people to register to vote. It was, by any measure, an act of enormous bravery.
Thornell, then 26 and a relatively recent hire at the AP's New Orleans bureau, was assigned to cover the march. He and a rival photographer were sitting in a car by the roadside on US Highway 51 near Hernando when Aubrey James Norvell stepped out of the undergrowth and opened fire with a shotgun.
In the chaos, Thornell photographed Meredith on the ground at the highway's edge. Arms outstretched, hands flat on the tarmac, his head turns to look directly at his attacker, who's visible at the left of the frame, half-hidden in the ditch. It's not clear whether Meredith is still falling or pushing himself up. That ambiguity is part of what makes the image so powerful. It catches a man in the suspended, terrible moment between being shot and understanding that he's been shot. A second photograph shows Meredith grimacing as he drags himself to the road's edge.
Thornell didn't know he had any of this, though, until he developed the film. In fact, was convinced his rival had the gunman and he had nothing. Instead, Thornell had captured one of the defining images of the civil rights era.
A time of struggle
Thornell spent 40 years at the AP, from 1964 to 2004, and the civil rights struggle ran through his career like a thread. On his first day at the New Orleans bureau, he covered the integration of a Mississippi Gulf Coast school. He also captured the burned-out station wagon belonging to three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County in 1964; the Selma-to-Montgomery march; and Martin Luther King Jr. attending demonstrations in Memphis, the week before his assassination.
Later, Thornell photographed King's family at the open casket, an image he obtained by clambering over church pews after arriving late; an act of professional desperation he was instantly ashamed of. "I was shaken when I left there," he said later. "I had my eyes on the floor because I knew everyone was looking at me for my despicable behavior. But I didn't leave without the picture."
That line tells you who Jack Thornell was as a photographer. He was frightened, often. He was sometimes reckless. He was frequently uncomfortable with what the job demanded. But there was one fear that overrode everything else. "The greatest fear for me," he said, "was coming back without the photograph."
An accidental career
Much like Raghu Rai, who also passed this month, Thornell stumbled into photography by accident. The US Army, through a clerical mix-up at Fort Monmouth, sent him to photography school instead of radio repair training. He didn't know an aperture from a back focus when he arrived. He left with a trade that would define his life.
His son Jay said that only in later years did Thornell begin to appreciate what he'd documented. The stress of the civil rights beat, the deadlines, the physical danger, had made it hard to step back and see the weight of what he was witnessing. By the end, he was signing prints for admirers and telling the stories behind his most famous images to his granddaughter.
The nightmare of the Mississippi highway, it turned out, had produced something that would outlast almost everything else from that day: the image of a man on the ground, looking his would-be killer in the eye. Not bad for a picture he was sure he'd never got.
