Tag: Journalism

Night Out Against Violence (2004)

Posted on by andrickmike in Photography

charleston night out against violence

On Wednesday I referenced the Instagram hashtag theme of “Woman Crush Wednesday.” So today I go with the “Throwback Thursday” theme. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did a terrible job archiving my image files before 2006. Most were saved as small JPEGs on discs. This photograph — along with the image I posted last week — is one of the very few that remain from my stint in Charleston in 2004. The photo was from an assignment I did on the city’s Night Out Against Violence, which took place in a downtown housing project. When I saw this boy watching from the other side of a fence, I found it unfortunately ironic that he was holding a plastic gun and also blowing a party horn. That summer I had reported on half a dozen murders in the city, so that moment has always stuck with me.

Dana December Smith (2004)

Posted on by andrickmike in Photography

dana december smith

In 2004 I was a reporter for the Charleston Daily Mail in the capital city of West Virginia. When needed, I was asked to be the photographer for other reporters’ stories. For one story, I was asked to go with a reporter to the Mount Olive maximum security prison to interview Dana December Smith. Thirteen years earlier, Smith had been sentenced to two life sentences for murdering a mother and her daughter. The story was about how Smith had discovered evidence proving his innocence, and I simply photographed him in a room in the prison explaining this to the reporter. Based on a web search, Smith is still in prison today, and still maintains his innocence.

(Pardon the quality of the image, which was taken on a Nikon D1 and poorly preserved as a JPEG over the last 10 years.)