On January 8th I found myself on a plane bound for Tucson.  I didn’t wake up that morning anticipating that I’d be sleeping in one of my favorite cities in the southwest and I also didn’t anticipate that the reason for the trip would be so ugly.  Really, Tucson has never held any stock in my mind as a place for tragedy.  The purpose for the trip is something that seems to have drifted in and out of our national psyche with disturbing speed, because, well, these events have fallen into a regretfully normal part of the news cycle.  Wikipedia hosts a list of school shootings that, when you read it, really dwarfs what we think of as being isolated events.  Columbine and Virginia Tech are just single lines on a much longer itemization of similarly motivated shootings.  Although this shooting wasn’t another school shooting, it’s impact definitely fell into that vein.  In my unscientific opinion, these shootings don’t really even blip on our radar any more unless they have some kind of superlative value.

And, really, that’s something that I think we all should give a little pause for.  

For me, this assignment had two very distinct challenges to it.  First, and most obvious, the shooting was completed by the time I arrived.  Access to people and places was limited to the peripheries.  In these kinds of situations the photographer’s task changes gear a bit.  It’s no longer a question of photographing action or nondescript nouns; it’s a matter of finding ways to construct a set of pictures that captures the broader tone of the event without tipping too far off the core narrative.  This isn’t the first time I’ve had an assignment like this (see coverage of terror suspect Najibullah Zazi for Time, for example), though it definitely stands out as one of the more logistically trying ones.  Speculation about Jared Loughner’s motives changed almost hourly from the day of the shooting until the magazine closed the issue.  It spanned the full spectrum of issues: immigration related, Tea Party incited, politically motivated, anti-liberal, anti-conservative, gun-nut, before finally coming to a rest on just plain nuts.  The items at the start of the list are a lot easier to illustrate than those towards the end.  Ultimately, the plan for the photo package took the form of trying to find tonal and unique images from various landscapes related to the shooting: the crime scene, the hospital, the shooter’s house, the place where he bought the gun, and public vigils.  Time’s online gallery does an excellent job working these photographs into an essay that spans those places.

The second challenge was personal.  In the immediate hours following the shooting, I found myself filled with emotions that I had left untouched since the Columbine shooting, an event that I worked in a very different capacity, more than ten years ago.  At the time, I relegated the scope of that tragedy to something that was just a fact of life, the ultimate and almost inevitable consequence of human nature.  Tragedy is something that has been a part of human history for as long as it’s been recorded and its explanation afforded me some degree of detachment from the actual event.  In retrospect, it was an absolutely chickenshit and immature way to approach something so horrific.  Much to my surprise, I found myself in the middle of Tucson experiencing the full range of emotions that I had packed up and locked away almost a decade earlier.  The reality of Tucson hit me with a sense of loss that was not polemic.  It wasn’t a matter of good vs. evil or winners and losers –the way I had envisioned Columbine.  I found myself unable to place the shooter, his family, the victims, or those connected to the victims on any hierarchy.  Everybody lost something.  And loss and struggle are not quantifiable or measurable things.  In the moments following an event like this, tragedy really only has one side to its coin and that’s something we shouldn’t let the pundits undo.

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You can see more material from my three days in Tucson here: http://mattslaby.photoshelter.com/gallery/Archive-Tucson-Shooting/G00004bQVH3qendE/

On January 8th I found myself on a plane bound for Tucson.  I didn't wake up that morning anticipating that I'd be sleeping in one of my favorite cities in the southwest and I also didn't anticipate that the reason for the trip would be so ugly.  Really, Tucson has never held any stock ...