'The eyes of the paper'
Sometimes, you gotta shoot from the hip.
When Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun-Times photojournalist John H. White was sent to check out a gas leak near North and Clybourn in 1998, his legendary quick draw was put to the test.
(Brian Jackson/Sun-Times)
PHOTO GALLERY
60 years of photos
While he was photographing the evacuation, the roaring natural gas leak ignited and shot a massive fireball into the air. The camera he needed was at his hip, so White lifted it, turned and squeezed off a shot in one motion -- capturing the fireball and the horror-stricken evacuees on his first try.
"All at once, the ground under me starts shaking," White recalls. "You hear this huge explosion. In a moment, everything changed. There was this wall of fire. That moment, while others were running, my job was to capture that. And that's what I did."
White's photo (at right) is one of 60 we've chosen as among the best, most telling and most powerful images from the Sun-Times' first 60 years. We're republishing some of them here -- and all online at www.suntimes.com -- to help mark our 60th birthday this month.
The photos cover the tragic to the historic to the amazing to the bizarre. They also cover some of the many famous faces in Chicago, including those who just passed through. From Marilyn to Martin, Richard J. to Barack, the Beatles to Britney.
"The photojournalists are the eyes of the paper," says White. "In life, in events, there's almost a moment -- there's always a moment within a moment. And that's what we must capture."