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Photos of the Year 2000
Sunday, December 31, 2000
After making way for A Century of Photos in 1999, the Sunday Magazine revives Photos of the Year, when we focus on images that represented the big story or related a small moment in a big way.
There were many such moments for Post-Gazette photographers in 2000, a year when an Election Day actually lasted more than a month and two new sports stadiums rose alongside the doomed Three Rivers Stadium on the North Side.
For this section, we also offer a behind-the-camera glimpse from a few photographers who tell the stories of how the images arrived in your newspaper. Other pictures stand on their own as a retelling of events that shook up and otherwise shaped the lives of Western Pennsylvanians during the past year.
Joyce Mendelsohn, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
When the call came in that five people had been shot in Wilkinsburg, I thought it was going to turn out to be a false alarm. False alarms happen all the time - but not this time.
PG staff writers Cindi Lash and Mike Fuoco and I drove to where the police had the shooter cornered. We then split up, each hoping to find someone involved in the shootings. I eventually came upon three women about a block from where the gunman was still holding police at bay in a medical building. The women - from left, Patty Papenmeier, Debbie Nicomede and Joyce Ambrose - were wearing clothes nurses would wear, and I wondered what, if anything, they might know of the shootings.
People can be put off when a camera is thrust in their faces. So I inconspicuously approached them and learned that the gunman had pointed his weapon at them as he went through the offices where they worked. There was my photo, but there was also a dilemma: Should I capture images on film or write down what they were saying?
I raised my camera and shot some frames, then grabbed a pen and scribbled quotes, then shot more photos, then wrote some more. Finally, I got one of their phone numbers to pass on to a reporter.
As a photographer, I know that an image happens in a fraction of a second and if you miss it, it's gone forever. I'll never know what I missed while I was hastily writing quotes, but I felt so fortunate to happen upon these women that I knew whatever I wound up with would work out.
Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
Alex Myers had just turned 9 when he took this plunge into the Settlers Cabin Park diving pool.
He was finishing up his treatment for leukemia, and I liked this photo because I felt his floating through the water was a visual metaphor for his getting past his disease.
I also liked that it showed him as a healthy 9-year-old kid, which was a counterpoint to the earlier photos of him struggling with his leukemia, either at home or in the hospital, clinic or doctor's offices. (Andy Starnes had been photographing Alex's struggle with leukemia for a series of articles that began in 1997.)
Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
A photograph that speaks for itself: Johnny Malone, 7, and his father John, of Connellsville, are among the revelers who said goodbye to Three Rivers Stadium after the Pirates season finale.
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