A Spectator

Occasionally, I surprise myself. Sometimes a paper that I wrote off-the-cuff ends up being published in an academic journal, maybe an offhand remark made as a joke at a board meeting spirals into a major event… today, the surprise is a little more public in nature. The Columbia Spectator is Columbia University‘s daily newspaper and is read fairly widely in the student body.

I originally applied to be a columnist. I like to think of myself as a writer, even though my writing is, on the whole, pretty terrible (if people want to read it, that’s their problem). For whatever reason, I was adjudged to be unsuitable as a columnist but somewhere in the conversation it came up that I might like to try my hand at photography. Being similarly devoid of any talent as a photographer, I decided to give it a go (everyone knows the real burden of these decisions always rests on the very talented). My first shoot was a press conference about the opposition to the rezoning of 125th Street in Harlem.

This morning, I got the shock of my life when I picked up a copy of the spec (I like to read the sports section – so many different and creative ways of saying “we suck at sports”) to find my photo on the front page. Click on the photo below for a larger version.