From 1990 to 1996, I had the best job in the world: I was a full-time staff photographer for a series of newspapers in southern New Hampshire. Granted a lot of what I was assigned was pretty mundane, small-town happenings like little league games, local town meetings and children’s library parties. I always wanted to work for a big city newspaper and then move on to an agency like Black Star or Magnum, but I did my early days in small towns across southern New Hampshire. At the time, I didn’t really appreciate how wonderful it all was and today I would love to do it all over again.

Sometimes, I had to photograph carnage: huge fires, fatal accidents, murders and courtroom dramas. That’s just how it was back then. We published everything but the most gruesome of images, many I can still see clearly some 30 years later. Some photos you never forget taking. I learned quickly that you had to compartmentalize any feelings you had witnessing death and destruction and concentrate on getting The Shot. Perhaps it was callous, but that’s what shooting hard news was all about. You got the photo first and after you could fall to pieces when no one was around.

Fortunately, not all news photography revolved around blood and guts. There was the daily slice of life, high school sports and the occasional visit by the President or presidential candidates. For me, that was what I loved about the job.

Today, news photography has largely become a thing of the past, as have many small papers. Sadly, the photo staff is the first thing that gets cut when papers start to downsize and merge, so staff photography positions are as rare as hens teeth in today’s world. Journalism in general has moved on as well thanks to online social media platforms that makes anyone with a smartphone an amateur “journalist” or “photographer”, but thanks to AI, there is always doubt cast on everything that is published online. We still need trained reporters and photographers to bring us real news and real images as our world continues to become more complicated to understand and interpret.