|
|
“At the start, The AP in New York didn’t take the Reuters pictures service seriously; nor did I. The service was founded in 1984 by Charlie McCarty, someone I knew well. He was an experienced UPI guy, who knew his business. He developed the photographic style of the agency and hired many young photographers. McCarty it was, who brought the German photographer Gaby Sommer to Reuters. She had been working until then for the AP. Gaby was the first accredited photographer for Reuters in communist East Germany, based in West Berlin. It was she who captured the image of the ‘hug and kiss’ between Erich Honecker and Mikhael Gorbachev at the communist party congress in East Berlin on April 18th, 1986. This picture infuriated the Associated Press management. They just couldn’t understand why our photographers, though they were on the spot, didn’t manage to get that picture, too. This made me want to find out how Gaby went about it. I asked her.
‘Gorbachev was addressing the 11th congress of the communist party. When he finished, the delegates stood up to applaud him. The photographers of the Western media were standing far away from the podium. It was so far away, that I took my longest lens, a 600 mm together with a 1:1,4 mm converter which made it an 840mm. I used a monopod to hold that heavy lens. When Gorbachev finished, I sensed that something would happen between Honecker and him. Though I am tall, I had to stand on tip-toe. I pre-focussed the lens and held it over the heads of the delegates, unable to look through the range-finder. My colleagues didn’t manage to get that ‘hug and kiss’ picture because they had mounted their lenses on tripods.’”