The Art of Trauma Reporting: Pulitzer Prize Winners Reflect

Oklahoma City Bombing: The Story of a Photograph

By Alex Hannaford

In 1995 Charles Porter was working as a lending credit specialist for Liberty Bank in Oklahoma City. He was shooting weddings and took the odd freelance assignment in his spare time to indulge his love of photography. On April 19, he was at work on the ninth floor of his office when he felt the building shake, looked outside and saw nothing but dust and debris. Porter thought a controlled demolition was taking place downtown and decided to grab his camera and shoot a few pictures for his portfolio.

On the street outside, he found glass everywhere and people sitting on benches, covered in blood. Porter ran around the corner to discover what he now describes as the Murrah federal building looking like somebody had taken an ice cream scoop and scooped away the front edge. The Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, would kill at least 168 people and injure hundreds more.

Porter began taking pictures of paramedics when he noticed something in his peripheral vision. He turned to see a police officer carrying a child from the wreckage before passing the baby to a firefighter. Porter shot a couple of frames, not realizing that the image would change his life.

The police officer was John Avery, the firefighter Chris Fields, and the baby, who had died in the explosion, was Baylee Almon. Later that day, a friend of Porter’s suggested he take the images he’d shot to the local office of The Associated Press. Porter left his negatives, thinking he might possibly see one of them in The Daily Oklahoman the following morning.

The next day his phone rang.

“It was this lady with a really deep British accent who said she was from the London Times,” Porter said. “And she was trying to help me understand, but she just couldn’t. I was only 25, and the furthest I’d been was Montana, and it just wasn’t registering. She asked how I’d feel if she told me my photograph was going to appear on the front page of every newspaper in the entire world.”

Later, when Porter met Avery, he said his first reaction was to apologize to the police officer.

“I was scared he was going to be mad at me because I put his face out there. But he couldn't have been nicer,” said Porter.

The response to the picture from firefighter Chris Fields and Baylee’s mother Aren Almon-Kok, however, was different, Porter said. “Their reaction is not the same now as it was in the immediate aftermath. I don’t know why it changed, but I know that everything else afterward in the news was, you know, they hated the photo; that they were sick of looking at it. And to be quite honest with you I get sick of looking at it, too. I wish it had never happened; I mean that makes total sense.”

Porter says he has always been ethical when deciding where to license the image. “You never saw it on T-shirts, plaques, coins, stamps. I had all those things offered to me because I owned the picture. I’d get ten offers a day, but I turned them down because it wasn't right.”

But, he said, he hasn’t shied away from licensing the photo to media organizations seeking to use it. “I mean it’s in textbooks, history books. If they wanted to use it for a story, then it was used.” He didn't say how much money he has made from the images.

Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, Porter never became a professional photographer. He said he was offered a job as a stringer with AP, but it would have meant a considerable pay cut and possible relocation.

“It was a pretty simple decision,” he said. “One of the best pieces of advice I got was never make your hobby your job.”

Bailey Almon's mother, Aren Almon-Kok, said she was mortified when she first saw the image.

“It seemed like nobody stopped to think that that was somebody’s child and that child is dead. I had to see my daughter’s dead body on the front of every magazine. For everybody else it was a symbol of innocence lost in the bombing. But this was my daughter, my child. And Charles Porter was making money off it.”

Almon-Kok also said she had to deal with the unthinkable experience of parents of other children killed in the terrorist attack blaming her for the fact that the media was focusing on her loss, her child.

“I was only 22 at the time, and these other parents were so mad at me. It was a horrible reaction,” she said. “And to this day they still hate me for it.”

Almon-Kok also said when other children were written about in the attack’s aftermath, they were humanized. The media “would say things like 'this child used to like running and playing' but Bailey was always just the baby in the fireman’s arms. And it sucked to deal with all that by myself.”

She remembers going to a Fourth of July carnival and seeing a pop-up shop selling, among other things, a small statue of the image.

“I started crying. They said, ‘It’s really moving, isn’t it? It’s $89.99 if you want one.’ I said, ‘No, it’s my daughter.’ It was devastating for me.

“But I understand the impact the picture had,” she said. “I understand that picture spoke volumes, and when I look at it I think of all the people who lost their lives. Every one of them was someone’s child. But the way they went about [using it] was all wrong. Using it from a journalistic standpoint is one thing; using it to make money is another. And Charles Porter wasn’t a journalist, which played a lot into [how I felt about] it.”

“It’s now been 21 years and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I’ve learned to live with it.”