otherJuly 10, 2017
Longtime photographer Fred Lynch discusses his more than 40-year career at the Southeast Missourian
Moment by moment, day by day, year by year, decade by decade. Fred Lynch has documented the events and changing faces of communities for the Southeast Missourian. He's captured natural disasters like the Blizzard of '79, the Great Flood of the Mississippi in 1993, the Jackson tornado of 2003 and paralyzing ice storms like the one that hit the area in 2009...
Moment by moment, day by day, year by year, decade by decade.
Fred Lynch has documented the events and changing faces of communities for the Southeast Missourian.
He's captured natural disasters like the Blizzard of '79, the Great Flood of the Mississippi in 1993, the Jackson tornado of 2003 and paralyzing ice storms like the one that hit the area in 2009.
He's even been on hand for the disaster that didn't happen, a member of the media that descended on New Madrid, Missouri, on Dec. 3, 1990, to record the impending doom-and-gloom earthquake forecast by Iben Browning.
He's clicked away at the careers of local politicians, from the rise of former U.S. Representative Bill Emerson to the construction of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge.
National politicians have worked their way into his focus upon visits to Cape Girardeau, including two sitting presidents in Ronald Reagan (1988) and Bill Clinton (1996) and two future presidents in then Vice President George H. W. Bush (1982) and Gov. George W. Bush (1999).
He's followed bouncing balls, from dimly lit high-school football fields on Friday nights to dusty ballfields on sweltering summer days to glitzy venues, like the Jon M. Huntsman Center in Salt Lake City, where the Southeast Missouri State University men played their lone NCAA basketball tournament game in 2000.
He's captured the everyday activities of the communities: Children smiling, checks passing and workers fixing and improving.
Some of the children he froze in time are now his co-workers, one a photographer on staff.
Calculative in speech and often stealthy in movement, his work can be bold, front and center.
And while technology has changed his cameras since he first started in 1975, evolving from a film-shooting Konica Autoreflex T2 to a current digital Nikon D700, one thing has remained basically the same. What he sees through his viewfinder one day is there for all to see the next.
"I feel it's such a privilege to document history on the local level like that," Lynch says. "When people see the newspaper the next day or nowadays, they look at the coverage of the Southeast Missourian on the internet, on our website, it's meaningful to have a part that will freeze those moments in time that people in succeeding generations will be able to see."
The Illinois native and graduate of SIU Carbondale has been on the staff for 42 years. Equipped with an appreciation of history and others' work, he likes to document change in an "f/8 and Be There" blog he's been presenting since 2009. He'll often display the archived work of one of his predecessors, Garland D. Fronabarger, recently posthumously inducted into the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame, in the creation of more than 1,100 blog pieces during that time. Sometimes it will entail going to the same spot Fronabarger stood to give viewers a feel for the change of scenery around town.
"I like to take old pictures and then take a picture today that shows what it looks like," Lynch says. "I call it 'Then and now,' and those are fun to do."
He doesn't have to go far to find change. Browning would have been hard pressed to predict the seismically altered landscape of the Southeast Missourian newsroom, where computer servers now occupy the space once used as a darkroom, one Lynch used to duck into with film, and, after a long, laborious process, emerge with black-and-white prints.
He doesn't mind bypassing those steps in the era of digital photography, which began to replace film at the Southeast Missourian in the late 1990s.
However, technology does not replace the fundamentals of photography.
"To me a good picture has to have an element of magic," Lynch says. "I mean, it can be a slice of life, something ordinary, but even in the ordinary you can capture it in a way that reveals a bit of magic. It might be just the right moment, it might be the right angle, but it just has to set itself apart from, shall we say, just a run-of-the-mill snapshot."
Despite advances such as autofocus and rapid-fire cameras, some of his personal favorites are photos taken before the dawn of digital.
A copy of the Feb. 27, 1979, issue remains a favorite. It features a series of three helicopter-rescue photos above the headline of "New yardstick, blizzard of 1979." The photos were taken two days earlier, as 2 feet of snow paralyzed the region, including the newspaper.
Receive Daily Headlines FREESign up today!
Lynch lived across the street from the National Guard Armory at the time and was able to trudge to the National Guard helicopter and accompany the mission. He says he was one of the few people in Cape Girardeau to work that day.
"At one place we actually picked up a woman and her child and we flew them into Perryville to a shelter," Lynch says. "The newspaper did not publish that [next] day. It was the deepest snow on record, ever."
A theme began to weave its way into his work in 1980, when he captured Emerson celebrating at the Holiday Inn banquet center after winning the then-10th district. It was a monumental occasion for the Republican Party, which had not won that seat since 1935.
"The shot was Bill Emerson and his wife, JoAnn, and they were raising their hands in victory," Lynch says. "It was just a really happy time at the Holiday Inn. That was the first time that he ran for Congress, and he won."
In 2003, Lynch photographed then U.S. Representative JoAnn Emerson commemorating the state-of-the-art bridge, which bore the name of her late husband, who was re-elected seven times to his position in Washington, D.C., before dying in office in 1996.
"She used a power cutter, sparks flying to cut the ceremonial cable," Lynch says.
Between those two points on the timeline were some heavyweight politicians, often stumping for an Emerson re-election.
Air Force One touched down at Cape Girardeau Regional Airport with Reagan on one of those occasions.
"You couldn't move around while the president was here," Lynch says. "You had to be in one place, and that's where you stayed."
His positioning was spot on, emerging with an iconic shot of the president walking down the steps of Air Force One with Bill Emerson, Senator John Danforth and Senator Kit Bond.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Bob Dole, who stopped in Cape as part of his vice-presidential campaign in 1976, were among his captured subjects.
He notes Clinton was campaigning for his own re-election when he visited a jam-packed Capaha Park on Aug. 30, 1996.
"You can tell your children and grandchildren, 'I was here when Bill Clinton was at Capaha Park,'" Lynch says. "It was just a phenomenal time to have that many people here to see a sitting president who was running for re-election."
Lynch jetted off to Salt Lake City a few years later to document Southeast's first and only foray into March Madness. He had access to the players away from the court and was further aided by the digital age, a facilitator in regards to both time and mobility.
"They are riding the bus from the airport to the venue," Lynch says. "I made a picture of the players getting off the bus, and another of their 50-minute practice. When I got to the hotel, I transmitted the pictures back to Cape Girardeau, and they made the next day's newspaper."
He also got a shot of what could have been the biggest shot in Southeast basketball history. The image of Roderick Johnson gathering a loose ball and eyeing the basket for a potential game-tying shot at the buzzer with LSU's Stromile Swift looking on.
Johnson's 3-point shot banged off the rim as top-10 ranked LSU escaped the upset bid with a 64-61 victory.
"I played that moment back in my mind, and I realized that image that I shot, that movement was over in like a half second, but the click of the camera froze that moment like they were there for quite some time," Lynch says.
He's even been involved in the action on a couple of occasions, risking body and limb.
A tight shot of the action at a frigid football game once left him holding a camera lens in two pieces and a cheerleader querying about his physical well-being. This past winter, TV video footage caught him being helped to his feet by one of the players after being knocked down behind the baseline.
Despite occupational hazards, he admits he's spoiled by the best "seat" in the house -- free of charge, he notes -- at athletic events.
"I do say I like to cover sports, and I do like being around people who are good at what they do, and that would go for just anything," Lynch says. "I like to photograph people being good at what they do. I consider it a privilege to capture an image of someone being their best."
Story Tags
Connect with the Southeast Missourian Newsroom:
For corrections to this story or other insights for the editor, click here. To submit a letter to the editor, click here. To learn about the Southeast Missourian’s AI Policy, click here.
Related
otherMay 31
Advertisement
Receive Daily Headlines FREESign up today!
