Photojournalism is about “the moment”

RIVERDALE MUNICIPALITY — To photograph wild foxes tumbling over each other for the Brandon Sun last month, photojournalist Tim Smith returned to a den, judged it was active for the year, and waited three hours for the kits to come out.

The resulting photos depicted baby red foxes emerging from their den, pinning each other, and embracing the changing season. Smith considers the photos nearly a throwaway, but the process still showcases the most important part of his work: being there when stories happen.

The distinguishing feature for photojournalism is that the work is bound by the moment, Smith said in a recent interview. Photojournalists cannot go back in time and snap a shot, nor can they capture stories, like wildlife transitioning into spring, from their living room.

“We have to be in the moment. If we miss it, we miss it,” Smith said in June, while driving down a country lane near the fox den. “Theres no guarantee that you’re going to get an amazing photo, but you put yourself in place so that that luck happens.”

Photojournalism sometimes requires three-hour waits. It also requires an understanding of the community, so that the camera can be where the foxes are, when they are there, for the time that they stay.

While Smith emphasizes that the fox photos are casual, the photos do highlight his connection to the community. Who else could tell you where kits are holed up in dens in the Brandon area at this exact moment?

“I know of at least a dozen different ones in Brandon,” he says. “Usually by March or April I can tell if they have been dug out. Then I know mom is getting ready to have her litter.”

Smith, who has worked at the Brandon Sun for nearly 20 years, has photographed all aspects of the community in his career as a photojournalist. He photographed the historic floods of 2014, including the visit of then prime minister Stephen Harper. During the downtown Brandon building fires in 2018, which razed the Christe’s Office Plus building, he was up overnight capturing the flames. Following the 2023 Carberry bus crash, he photographed a critical care team lifting a victim into a plane for transport to Winnipeg. And he photographed the resulting town halls when Carberry residents slammed the province for a proposed RCUT intersection at that site, and later when the residents were pleased to receive an overpass announcement for the intersection instead.

Major stories are the most widespread photojournalism moments, however Smith said that he lives for the smaller and lesser-known days in his work.

He is more proud of a year-long project in which he captured images of a Brandon mother and daughter as the girl underwent cancer treatement. Or the shots he took when Clear Lake froze “crystal” clear in 2015 and was used as a skating rink.

The most famous work of Smith’s has been to photograph the personal moments of Hutterite colonies since 2009, a still-ongoing personal project that has won multiple awards, been featured in publications such asthe New York Times and exhibited all over the world, including in Romania, the United Arab Emirates, Europe and Korea.

The work is more valuable to him because it involves years and years of deeper understanding, which in turn allows for deeper and deeper storytelling, something that tells more powerful stories, he said.

“I like building relationships and building trust, and gaining access to things that people wouldn’t gain access to,” he said. “The deeper you know it, the more intimately, the better access you get to deeper moments.”

He refers to a photo from his Hutterite project. The picture, set on a sunny day in winter, with a foot of snow, shows a group of men dressed in black, their heads down, carrying the closed casket of Susanna Wollman of the Decker Colony to the community’s church for her funeral.

The caption tells that the woman had 154 great-grandchildren and 52 grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild in her more than 100 years of life.

Loved ones are then seen in the church, crammed around her open casket, her face all-but hidden by the angle of the camera and flowers in her hands. Her family and friends and loved ones are singing hymns around her in the church ahead of the funeral.

It’s these types of moments that are difficult to access as a journalist, not because of timing, or knowledge, but through the obstacle of trust, Smith said. He notes that he could never have covered that funeral had he not established a connection with those community members for years.

“That funeral photo is a perfect example — you can’t just walk off the street,” Smith said. “People have to trust you and that you’ll handle those delicate situations.”

Those situations wind up being some of the most important and valuable work, he says.

The photo of baby foxes playing at their den may not check these boxes of the highest attainment of photojournalism in Smith’s eyes — he asserts several times that he’s in journalism to do more intimate, long-term projects. But despite his insistence, it is clear that his ability to capture foxes is one and the same with his ability to capture funerals: understanding and meeting the community to tell local stories through his favourite medium — photographs.

“They distill memories and moments down to an image, and it holds onto something important,” Smith said. “You can learn a lot about a story or person very quickly by just looking at a picture.”

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com