Mary Chind
Des Moines Register photographer Mary Chind, a former Tucson Citizen photographer, won the Pulitzer Prize today for breaking news photography. The award was for her dramatic photo of a construction worker rescuing a woman from the Des Moines River.
Chind told her own paper that she had mixed emotions about the accolades for the photo. She said everyone should remember that a man died in the incident, and that a woman became a widow. “I think about that a lot,” she said. “I do. A lot.”
Chind initially went to the river that day to drop off a lens and a battery to another Register photographer already at the scene. When she got out of the car, she took her own camera along out of habit.
She said she thought at first that whatever had happened was over, because people seemed to be standing around calmly on the riverbank. She noticed a crane boom moving on the east side of the pedestrian bridge, which was under construction. She thought the crane might be lifting something – maybe a body – out of the river. “But then I realized someone was still in the water, and I realized the crane wasn’t taking someone out of the water, it was putting someone into the water.”
A woman who fell from a boat is submerged by the swift moving waters of the Des Moines River near the Center Street dam is pulled to safety by a local construction worker from a nearby bridge project who harnessed himself to a crane to make the rescue near downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Another male also fell from the same boat and could not be rescued and was swept downriver and died at the scene. Photo by Mary Chind/The Des Moines Register
Chind’s camera had a 300 mm telephoto lens, much shorter than she would have liked. The rescue was happening almost all the way across the river, and the least wobble of the camera would have led to a blurry picture. She stood on a small pier on the west side of the river, braced her elbows against a metal rail and started shooting. She wasn’t sure how good the results were, but she sent them into the paper, where editors quickly decided to play one of her photos all the way across the front page.
Chind worked for the Tucson Citizen in the late 1990s winning several awards, most notably for a series she did with writer Gabrielle Fimbres on fetal alcohol syndrome.
She also was the pool photographer for the Moon Smoke Shop and firefighter union hall murder trial.
Karen Brown (facing camera), sister of Chip Odell and another family member embrace after the sentencing of Scott Nordstrom to death in the Moon Smoke Shop and Firefighters Union Hall slayings. Pool Photo by Mary Chind/Tucson Citizen
Information about Chind’s winning photo and her quotes taken from Des Moines Register story, a Gannett publication.