Behind the Lens with Sam Corum
13 questions for the photojournalist who captured the face of white nationalism
Sam Corum is a freelance photojournalist living in the Washington, DC area, working for various outlets including, the New York Times. He’s also a Marine Corps veteran, and served as a combat photographer on two deployments to Iraq during the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
A Thousand Faces had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Sam at his home in Maryland about combat photography and the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.
You actually began your photographic career in the Marine Corps. So there is a unit of dedicated photographers?
Yep. It’s called combat camera. Each division will have a unit of combat camera, which also includes videographers and illustrators, and it’s separate from public affairs, though now I hear they’re merging the two.
What’s the mission of combat camera?
Documentation for missions and intelligence gathering — for example, one thing I had to do was take pictures of the aftermath of an IED exploding at a crowded intersection outside our patrol base. I had to go take photos of the casualties so we could say ‘this is what happened.’
Or say, if we started taking fire from a mosque — my job was to get evidence that they were shooting at us from a mosque first, because there were rules that wouldn’t allow us to step foot in a mosque unless they were using it to attack us.
What was it like photographing the aftermath of an IED explosion?
Lots of times, in situations like that, you fall back on muscle memory and your training. That’s one of the reasons why they break you down, so that you can have control of your emotions. At the time I approach it like ‘this is my job. I have to take these pictures. You take ’em. Don’t really think about it too much.’
Sometimes the camera in front of my face is a little bit of a filter. That’s still true for the stuff I do now.
It doesn’t mean we don’t feel it, or it doesn’t affect us. Just like PTSD is a big deal for people who served in the military, I have journalist friends who suffer from PTSD — friends who were two feet away from the car attack in Charlottesville. The car flew right past them, and they still suffer from that.
How did fighting in Iraq affect you mentally?
There’s something different about fighting a force that is a ghost, that did not care about civilian casualties. The mental strain of always being on your toes: that soda can could have a grenade in it, that pile of trash is actually a bomb.
They knew that Americans, even hardened soldiers, didn’t like hurting kids. So they would tell kids ‘go jump out in the road in front of this convoy cause they’ll stop. And then we’ll blow them up.’
So eventually orders were issued. It didn’t matter what was in your way, you keep driving. Even if meant running over a child. And a lot of people suffer from surviving that.
Are there any sounds that trigger reactions like that for you?
Smell, not sound, is what takes me back to certain moments.
Are there any smells in particular?
Open sewage. Walking through Fallujah, they didn’t have underground sewage there. I remember one time I was walking around L.A. and I was walking around back behind a gallery that I had a photo in, and the smell just stopped me in my tracks.
Or, strong metallic smells. Because that’s what it smells like when there’s a lot of blood in the air. Fresh blood smells very metallic, and kind of sweet. Sometimes it raises my anxiety level, sometimes it just makes me pause.
Can you talk about covering the events in Charlottesville — of the white supremacist rally, and the experience being there?
I had already covered a lot of social unrest, starting with Ferguson and then Baltimore and the Pulse Nightclub shooting. So I had developed relationships with activists, sources. A few of them had given me a heads up that their own people had infiltrated these online white supremacist groups and that there was going to be a torch march that Friday night [August 11, 2017].
It wasn’t publicized. The groups made public the march planned for the next day. But we got wind of the torch march that was going to happen Friday night that no one else knew about.
You couldn’t find any info about it online, but I was able to convince my editors to let me go down half a day early.
We had gotten word that they were going to gather around nine o’clock, so I sat and waited for people to start showing up. And it got really, really close to nine and nothing was happening.
But then, slowly, one, two, five, ten groups started showing up — all white supremacists. Then the pickups trucks showed up with piles of tiki torches in the back and they all started passing them out and lighting them.
And the whole time in my head I’m going ‘holy shit. Holy shit.’ It’s surreal. It was really surreal.
When they started marching through the campus, there was a moment when they were marching between a building and a parking garage, and they all started going ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,’ and it started echoing.
It was terrifying. I mean, I’m a big white man, which a shaved head and a big beard, so I blended in — but I was terrified. I was more terrified there than I was in Iraq.
There is something about being around pure hatred that is terrifying. In Iraq my life was on the line, and I could be killed any moment, but I can understand a lot of why these people are fighting. If an armed force came into the United States I would do the same damn thing.
But the hatred that they had was just terrifying.
Towards the end, there were a small amount of counter-protestors that had surrounded the statue — not the main one, but another one on campus — and marchers surrounded them. There are these crazy, heroic protestors that are standing in the face of this hatred.
I’m down in the crowd and I get to the middle and I’m between the groups, and I turn and see Peter — the guy in the white shirt — and they’re looking at the protestors and yelling at the top of their lungs, these chants.
“You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”
And then a switch was flipped and the fighting started. I thought somebody was gonna die. I thought somebody was going to die because there were no cops — there were zero cops. When the cops finally did show up it was like four or five of them.
I thought somebody was gonna get stabbed. There were lit tiki torch canisters being thrown at people. I thought somebody was gonna get lit on fire.
Then the pepper spray came out. The counter-protestors started pepper spraying the marchers, and that’s when I got out and I went back to my car, and I just started sending images.
The next morning I woke up, and that one image was everywhere.
Do you remember taking that shot? Do you remember focusing in on him?
Oh yeah, I remember focusing in on him.
Why did you pick him?
He was there. I don’t go searching to make an image. In situations like that I can tell when people are putting on a show for the camera. So I will stand there and I’ll wait to see if someone’s body language changes, and he was ignoring me.
His friend next to him was kind of looking at me. I have a picture of him looking at the camera and smiling. But yeah, I took the picture and then shit went off the rails.
What’s your feeling about the image?
Initially, it wasn’t my favorite picture. Visually I thought there were stronger images. But there’s the passion in that one picture.
It’s kinda tough. It’s an image that I’d say I’m most proud of, but it’s not my favorite. It’s not an image I’m going to put on my business card [laughing].
He’s wearing a white polo shirt, and if you didn’t know anything about these white supremacist groups, you wouldn’t know that the triangle on his shirt is a symbol for one of the groups.
I can say I’m proud of it because it made a difference. It’s really interesting when you do something that goes around the world.
In a sense, you make your living covering shitty situations. Do you ever feel guilt about that?
Sure, I’ve been called a vulture. But I don’t do this to get famous, and I don’t do this to make money.
The vast majority of photojournalists don’t do it for the money and don’t do it for the name recognition.
We do it because we care. We do it because we are empathetic people. You have to be empathetic to do this job well.
When I’m at these situations, I feel the emotions.
After the car attack in Charlottesville, when I finished sending the pictures, I sat in my car and cried. I cried when I covered the pulse nightclub shooting.
I choose these stories because I want to shine a light on what’s going on. It sucks that a large portion of it is pain and tragedy and sorrow, but sometimes that’s what we need to see. We can’t just sweep that under the rug.
I want to do happy stories. Those are stories I do on my own, because they’re important to me, and to my own sanity.
Can you talk a bit more about how compassion influences your work?
When it comes to journalistic pictures, what matter most is the emotion, the moment that happens in the picture. All of that technical stuff, the exposure, the framing, all that kind of stuff: you can throw that out the window if you can capture the right moment.
Part of it is reading people’s emotions and waiting for that moment, predicting what’s gonna happen. If you’re not empathetic you’re not going to be able to do that.
We have to be connected to these moments in some way emotionally, I think, to document them properly.
Are there parallels between what you photographed on deployments and what you’ve been covering post-military?
Yeah, there have been moments like in Baltimore. I was dodging rocks, dodging rubber bullets, hiding behind stairs and cars. I got injured in Baltimore. A rock the size of a softball flew out of nowhere and smashed into my shoulder. I was lucky it wasn’t two inches to the right where my head was or it would have killed me.
I kept shooting though [laughing]— I couldn’t lift my arm more than a quarter of the way up, but I kept shooting.
Many thanks to Sam for speaking with us. All images courtesy of Sam Corum. You can see more of Sam’s work here at his website:
