Wrong Place, Right Time

The photographer Arthur Fellig who is known for his brutal depictions of big city life, is said to have gotten his nickname, Weegee (the phonetic spelling of Ouija) from police officers who marvelled at his ability to arrive at crime scenes often before they did. While his uncanny talent for being in the right place at the right time, so to speak, Speed Graphic camera and bare bulb flash in hand, was more the result of sheer determination and the help of a police radio rather than any supernatural power, today the photographer, whose work resides in the collections of art museums all over the world, is officially known by his psychically inspired pseudonym.

Just blocks away, something newsworthy happened
exactly at the same time
these photographs were taken...

Needless to say, I am no Weegee, especially in regards to being in the right place and the right time. Sometimes I feel if I have any remarkable talent at all, it is for always, and I mean always, picking the wrong checkout line in a supermarket. So great is this talent, I've often thought of hiring myself out to grocery stores who could use me to inform other customers, suggesting they observe me to determine which checkout line NOT to enter.

Never has my un-Weegieness been more apparent than the other day when as I was making these rather mundane photographs of an L station. Unbeknownst to me, at the exact same moment one station away, a newsworthy incident was taking place aboard a train. Now I did notice that southbound trains were backed up and I saw the train where the incident was taking place, stopped at the station, but train backups such as these are hardly unusual occurrences. So I went about taking these pictures for my picture-of-the-day series, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else.

...Do you think I can sell them?

Then as I headed to my car, one police vehicle after another, sirens and flashing lights ablaze, headed south toward the station. Hmmm, I thought, something must be going on, I wonder what it is. Rather than following the trail of the sirens, as Weegie would have, I headed straight to my car, as I had a much more important task at hand, I had to pick up my daughter from school. You see my wife is out of town and this job was by far my most important one, in filling in for her. As is common with school children these days, my daughter is involved in different after school activities, and each day her schedule varies. To help me out, my wife prepared a very detailed calendar describing each day's events and what time to be there to collect her. She then read me the riot act about what would happen if I were to arrive late, and the fines we would accrue compounded upon each minute of tardiness. To me, the fear of fines is almost as dire as the fear of God, and getting to school on time took on an almost religious significance.

But I still was curious as to what was going on such a short distance away, so when I got in the car, I turned on the radio to the all news station. Like most of these urban incidents, the first mention of them usually occurs during a traffic report. Sure enough the traffic reporter said trains were backed up on that line due to police activity at that particular station. Obviously, nothing I didn't know already.

News of what had actually happened didn't make the airwaves until after I had picked up my daughter. It turned out that a man had set himself on fire while riding on the train, not at all a common occurrence, even in a big city like Chicago.

Naturally my daughter was dumbstruck. "Why would somebody do that?" she said. "And especially on a train?" I had no answer. Then she added rather comically: "Why wouldn't he do it in the snow?"
"Good point" I thought.

It turned out the man who ignited himself survived the ordeal. A police officer was slightly injured during the melee to put out the fire, as was a transit worker, the real hero of the story, who actually extinguished the fire.

And yes there were bystanders present who recorded the incident on their cellphones, although at least from what I saw, none of them got anything close to as compelling an image as Weegee would have captured.

Had I been there, I certainly would have done no better. My typical response in bad situations (never been in one this bad) is to see if I can be of assistance, or get out of the way if other people are handling the problem. Even though I'm a photographer, typically the last thing on my mind at a time like that would be to take a picture of someone else's misery.

But by far and away the most chilling thought on my mind as the incident unfolded behind me was what would have happened had that day I left work just slightly later. I most certainly would have stuck on a train for maybe an hour, and had been late to pick up my daughter.

That evening for one of the few times of my life, I kept thanking my lucky stars for having been at the wrong place at the right time.