It was actually a tip-off - unfortunately an inaccurate one - that lead me to park in an overflowing church car park. A journalist I was working with had heard that Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition in Australia's government, might be attending the funeral of Father Gerald Iverson. Father Gerald had been one of Mr Abbott's first priests, and the chance to photo-journalistically capture Mr Abbott at the funeral was something that both the journalist and the editor deemed to good to pass up. Mr Abbott, being a leading politician, would be no stranger to having his photo taken in all manner of situations, but others attending might not be quite so understanding. A large dose of sensitivity was to be administered...
Like weddings, funeral tend to be a gathering that's fraught with emotion. Wedding attendees tend to expect having a photographer buzzing around - funerals tend to be a more sombre, introspective affair, so charging straight up to someone with a wide angle lens and hitting them with the flash was not a direction that I wanted to go. So it was the 70-200 f2.8 to keep my distance, and a higher than normal ISO to make use of the available light.
Just like people can 'feel' when they're being watched, subjects 'somehow' know when there's a lens pointed at them. So in order to avoid influencing the scene, and to keep things as natural as possible, it was a case of camera up, compose, release a few frames and then down - all done as quickly as possible.
Funerals are occasions where people that knew the deceased go to mourn, to grieve, to be able to cry with others. Sometimes it's a chance to celebrate the life lived. In this case I found myself documenting the final chapter of a man's life who had touched thousands of other lives. There were Italian Catholics who lived in his diocese, Sudanese immigrants who he'd helped settle in Australia, school students at the local Catholic school who he'd taught.
It didn't matter that Tony Abbott didn't attend. It did matter that it was raining, that the streets from the church were lined with school kids, that the Sudanese quietly sang a farewell lament as the coffin was carried to the hearse. It mattered that I didn't aggressively chase images, but instead stood back and let the mourners grieve. Viewed through a long lens, very few people acknowledged my presence. I tried to show the subjects what I wanted back - respect. I respected them in their time of grief, and no-one hassled me for photographing them during that time. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, and while it wasn't comfortable being 'that guy' with the camera at the funeral, it was satisfying to see the response to the images when they were mounted on the local newspaper's on-line gallery. It's a community paper, showing the locals celebrating the life of a valued, and missed, member of their community.
RIP Father Gerald Iverson.
All images copyright News Local 2012.
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