'When I took this picture, I knew it was the one,' says Anthony Suau
Twenty-two years after his first win, US photographer Anthony Suau has secured a second World Press Photo title for portraying the current economic crisis and its devastating effect on the city of Cleveland. Suau tells Olivier Laurent how he's been following a story no one seemed interested in one year ago.
Image © Anthony Suau, USA, for Time.
Anthony Suau's picture shows an armed officer, Detective Robert Kole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, moving through a home in Cleveland, Ohio, following an eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. He took the image on his second trip to Cleveland, after he begged Time magazine to send him back to a city he now compares to a post-Katrina New Orleans.
'It was a little bit more than one year ago,' Suau tells BJP. 'It was not a huge story at that time, but it was already obvious that it would become critical. I had seen something about Cleveland in Paris-Match. The reporter had compared it with New Orleans after the hurricane. People at time didn't really know about it, but when I got there, I was overwhelmed with what I was confronted. It was like New Orleans.'
He describes a devastated city. 'There wasn't a single street without a house – sometimes five or ten – boarded up.' On his first trip there, Suau worked for three days, from morning to night, and still thought there was much more to report on. 'I suggested to Time to go back. They wanted to look at other places in America, but I thought Cleveland was the epicentre. I proposed to go out with the police officers charged with conducting the evictions. So I went back for three more days and it was more intense than the first time. This time, I really got inside the story.'
For much of his three days there, Suau followed Detective Kole, who would, on most days, deliver up to 20 eviction notices. 'When you drive up to these situations, you never know what you will find,' he says. 'At one point it was an old woman crying. She dropped in the detective's arms and cried, and when Kole went back to his car, he cried too. But other times, Kole told me, people carrying weapons would face him; they were ready for a standoff, refusing to leave.
'You deal with an enormous range of emotions. You had to be prepared for any situation.' In another house, Kole was called as back up after one of his colleagues had smelled 'death' when he entered. 'There was a dead dog on a leash. The previous owner had left the dog starve to death there,' Suau says.
Detective Kole's job is to make sure that the house being foreclosed is clear 'so that the movers can get rid of anything left there. It's the initial five or 10 minutes of the eviction. He goes in there alone and armed. In a lot of cases, the home has been vandalised,' Suau says.
The house in the winning photo used to belong to an old couple, according to the photographer. 'It had been vandalised, and we found evidence that vandals had taken a gun that used to belong to the couple,' he says. 'The gun was now on the streets of Cleveland.'
The houses are boarded up to prevent vandals from stripping away the copper of the plumbing and electrical systems, which on the black market can be a profitable source of income.
'It's a national disaster area,' the photographer tells BJP. 'It can't get out of it without federal help. I was talking to security companies, who work for mortgage firms, and they told me that this situation repeated itself throughout the US. Detroit is lost; it's gone. Cleveland is on the fast track to become the new Detroit.
'At the time, I would tell the other journalists to get out there and report on that story, but they didn't. By September and October, when the crisis really hit, they thought I was Nostradamus or something. But all they had to do was go out there and look.'
Suau used to cover conflicts. He won a Pulitzer Prize for pictures of famine in Ethiopia. But he finds photographing an economic disaster far more complicated. 'It's important for a picture to elicit questions and to drive reader to the entire narrative; to see the full extent of the crisis. I've covered a lot of wars. It's a challenge to cover an economic story, but it's great as it pushes you to touch ground that not a lot of photographers have touched on themselves. It's amazing if you get it right. When I made this picture, I knew that it was the one I was looking for.'
The picture wasn't published in Time, but made it to Time Online.
European publications had picked up Suau's story. 'Laura Schmid of Le Monde 2 put out the best publication for this series,' he says [see affiliated story].
Suau learnt of his win on Thursday afternoon. 'They called me, and I happened to be at Time magazine discussing another project I wanted to do about the economic crisis. The editors at Time knew right away I had won, probably because my jaw dropped.'
The win is expected to bring Suau some more exposure at a time when assignments do not come easily anymore. 'It has been a very difficult last couple of months for me,' he says. 'I had one assignment in two months, and that was the [Obama] inauguration. Even my stock sales have dropped. I've been in this industry for more than 20 years and this financial crisis is the worst I've seen. And it's affecting everybody.
'It's very frustrating for a lot of photographers because we know what's going on our there. We know there are places like Cleveland that are dying and we want to cover it, but it's very difficult to get funding to go there.'
The financial crisis, which has led many publications to cut their photo budgets, has made an impossible situation worse for photographers. 'I last won the World Press Photo title 22 years ago – wow, this is kind of scary. The industry itself has changed dramatically,' he says. 'Magazines and newspapers had much better budgets. It was a lot easier to get an assignment. Now, it's very difficult. Advertising revenues are falling. Just at Time, MaryAnne Golon, Hillary Raskin and two other editors I've worked with have all taken packages. Many of them are still looking for jobs. It's frightening.
'I've never seen anything like this. And I have a good reputation, picture editors know me, so I can't imagine what it is like for people who aren't quite as established.'
To see more of Anthony Suau's work, visit www.photoshelter.com/c/anthonysuau.
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