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YFZ Revisited – April 8, 2008 – Law Enforcement on the YFZ

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Law enforcement from local, state, and federal agencies had set up a base at the FLDS temple.

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A guy with a camera was at the top of the temple steps…

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…and you can see the door which was breached.

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I saw these guys from afar, seated against the wall. I thought they may have been detainees but they’re just cops eating dinner.

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Here’s the chow line. And here is something that’s never been reported. I just noticed it while editing through the aerial photographs…

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This guy in the yellow shirt, it looks like his dinner blew away and he had to reach down and grab it. Then, at the end there, he drops something else. Breaking news!

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Here are police at the main entrance to the ranch on county road 300.

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Posted in Photojournalism, Polygamy

YFZ Revisited – April 8, 2008 – Overflight

We had been told that the airspace over the YFZ Ranch was shut down for another week, meaning that we wouldn’t be able to get any aerial shots until then. Since we had no expectation that the FLDS would ever allow us onto their most private of property, shots from the air were the only way we could see the place and try understand the situation. I got a sudden call late on April 8th from another photographer, telling me that there was a guy with a small helicopter giving people flights over the ranch. The airspace had unexpectedly opened. I ran to the car and hurried over to Eldorado before the sun went down.

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The first thing you notice is the massive scale of the YFZ Ranch. The amount of labor it must have taken to build this place…

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Notice that the garden areas are built up on about three feet of topsoil that was trucked in and put down over the natural rocky ground.

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It’s like a small town, with its own maintenance facilities, etc.

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A new guard tower was under construction. Here’s the view of the guard tower looking up the only road in or out.

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YFZ Revisited – April 6, 2008 – Media and Diversity

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There were a lot more cameras and reporters at today’s press conference at Eldorado High School. Marleigh Meisner of Texas CPS confirmed a total of 159 children and 60 adults removed from the FLDS YFZ Ranch to this point.

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We drive over by the Civic Center where a crew working for Oprah is interviewing Shannon Price of the Diversity Foundation, which helps teens leaving the FLDS sect (above), and Carolyn Jessop, the bestselling author and ex-FLDS member (below). Jessop is the ex-wife of Merrill Jessop, the overseer of the YFZ Ranch.

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They say they’ve been brought in by Texas authorities to help provide cultural understanding and to facilitate communication with the FLDS. It seems unlikely that Jessop and Price would receive any welcome from the FLDS here in Texas, considering their positions against Warren Jeffs’ fundamentalist church.

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I photograph Shannon’s badge to make sure I spell her name right. I send in a photo with her name correct, but something else wrong. I heard Shannon say that she had family roots in the Short Creek community and in my caption I mistakenly called her a former FLDS member.

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Carolyn expressed hope in the possibility of seeing some of the children (from sister-wives) that she left behind when she took her own eight children and left the community.

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I don’t know if that meeting ever occurred, though it seems doubtful Jessop would receive any welcome under these conditions.

There seemed to be this prevailing thought among the people involved in the raid, especially CPS. That is that once the women were safely off the ranch and out of the control of the FLDS men, they would be happy to leave the group for the outside world. As far as we know, not one person caught up in the raid has left the group. They all went back.

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Posted in Photojournalism, Polygamy

YFZ Revisited – April 6, 2008 Busload

As you have now figured out, these YFZ revisited posts are not about posting a portfolio, or the best photographs from the events of last April. These posts are mostly about exposition through putting out a lot of photographs. It’s a loose edit, and there are reasons for that.

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We got to town and saw several buses parked at the county seat. Since the civic center was too barricaded for photographs, we followed three buses to the First Baptist Church.

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Looking at various photos of the food being loaded, it looks a little better than the first night. In this and other photos I see broccoli, bananas, oranges, various juices, oatmeal, and only one box of potato chips.

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The first people begin to come out to get on the bus.

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I try to photograph everyone. Here are some of them.

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At one point they walk out a few people behind two sheets. Looking at the entire set of photographs now, these are the people who were behind the sheet:

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The sheet stayed out near the entrance to the buses, blocking the shot for photographers on the other side.

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At left in this one (below) is Eldorado Mayor John Nikolauk:

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As the buses drove off we got in front of them for this shot…

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…and then followed them down the highway…

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…with no idea where they were headed.

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Posted in Photojournalism, Polygamy

YFZ Revisited – April 5, 2008 Temple Breached

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We are at the police roadblock on county road 300. It’s late afternoon. They still won’t let us anywhere near the ranch. We are miles from even the gate, let alone the action. Before there had been just two troopers manning this roadblock. Now there are more. And they are multiplying. Every minute it seems another patrol car pulls up and parks. The officers get out and start chatting, telling jokes, and whatever else men do.

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Why the build-up, I wonder. Someone says it’s just a shift change. I won’t pay it much attention then.

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An ambulance goes up toward the YFZ Ranch, still sealed off with a large police presence searching the place. Now a fire engine goes up, too. I’m not paying any of this much attention, snapping a frame or two just in case. But then I overhear a voice on the police radio that says something like, “You’re going to enter the temple?” Next a bunch of the troopers get in their cars and speed up the road toward the ranch.

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I shoot the frame above just as it’s almost too late to show the line of cars going up the road. Only later will I realize that this build-up of force wasn’t a shift change. It was part of the operation to breach the FLDS temple.

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We go back up to the parking lot by the Catholic Church, which is the best vantage point for the temple. And the photo above makes it look a lot closer than it is. That photo was only possible with a super telephoto 600mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter on it. For the photo-geeks, the total millimeters of lens for this shot (including 1.3 sensor crop): 1,092mm. Crazy. That temple is miles away.

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Now a helicopter starts buzzing around. The sun is down and the light is disappearing.

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We’re hearing that the helicopter is for any emergency medical transport that might be necessary in the stand-off over the search of the temple. A local reporter hints that the temple might be rigged with explosives that will be set off once the police go in. We will find out later that instead of preparing for a murderous martyrdom, the FLDS men are ringing the temple singing hymns and crying as the first fundamentalist mormon temple is, in their view, destroyed.

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Now it is black out and the helicopter is still buzzing around. We hear it and see its flashing red lights. The temple is lit up, a brilliant white edifice way out in the black night. After tonight the temple will not be lit. Not after the police climb the walls and breach the doors. Not after outsiders enter the sect’s holiest building and search it for signs of child abuse. From now on the temple will now remain dark at night. The light has been extinguished.

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Posted in Photojournalism, Polygamy

YFZ Revisited – April 5, 2008 Eldorado

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This photo of FLDS women and children playing on the playground behind the First Baptist Church in Eldorado looks somewhat plain today, but it was a coup on April 5th. It was our second exclusive catch in as many days. We knew they were back there and circled the block spotting all the police cruisers. I thought Brooke was going to circle the block for the photo so I was surprised when she pulled to a stop. I fired seven frames in under a second with a 300mm before the police bore down on us in quick fashion.

The officer who stopped us had a loose tongue. He told us that someone had stopped a vehicle driven by Warren Jeffs, Jr., earlier in the day. Everywhere we went for the rest of the day, we looked for a vehicle matching the description the cop gave us.

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Later we met Jimmy and Katdaddy, two real Texas characters. My caption from that day reads, Katdaddy says he’s glad that Texas Child Protective Services has removed children from the FLDS YFZ “Yearning for Zion” Ranch just outside of town, after allegations of child abuse.

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YFZ Revisited – April 5, 2008 Press Conference

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Just so you get the idea of what it looked like, this is the first CPS press conference. It was held at the Eldorado High School and helmed by CPS spokesperson Marleigh Meisner. At this point the media on-site was a very small group. Meisner told us that 183 people had been removed from the YFZ Ranch, 137 of them children. I remember that seemed like a big number, though it would soon be eclipsed.

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YFZ Revisited – April 5, 2008 – Bus to Civic Center

I’m finally making progress editing my photographs from the April raid on the FLDS YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, Texas. Looking through the photos for the first time since I shot them, I’m noticing things that I hadn’t before. I’ll post more of those kinds of things later. This post is all about scrambling, trying to find something worthwhile and coming up short.

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We rise early and head to a roadblock manned by Texas troopers. After I photograph the roadblock I start photographing other things that catch my eye: an old mattress, a sun-bleached skull, and a kid stuck trying to get through a fence. Omens? Signs of what’s going on? Or just the way this part of Texas looks?

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We wait five hours for something to happen and finally a bus comes out from the ranch. I shoot photos of the bus, and there’s at least one FLDS woman/girl on board.

We, along with several other media vehicles, follow the police-escorted bus to the local civic center, one of the temporary shelters set up by CPS. The civic center is the more secure location, barricaded off from traffic. We all park across the highway from the civic center and photograph the scene.

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CPS workers line up in what I’m guessing was an attempt to shield any FLDS from our cameras. I’m shooting with a 600mm lens and a 1.4 teleconverter, right through some kind of fence. The shot is horrible but so far it’s all we’ve got for today so we are all trying to get something out of it.

We see a pair of young FLDS women, at least one with a baby. The girl in the pink dress is loaded into the white car and driven off. For the rest of the photos, click through this gallery:

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YFZ Revisited – April 4, 2008

Just minutes after I photographed the food I noticed that a bus had pulled up down the street. Even in the dark I could see the heads of children on the bus.

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It was really dark, but I had a fast 50/1.4 lens that would let me shoot without flash. I quickly snapped the photo above as a test frame to check my exposure. The women and children walked to the First Baptist Church and I clicked off twenty quick frames in the dark.

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That photo ended up being used all over the place. Looking through all twenty frames, I see that some of the children noticed me and others appeared not to. Here are more frames, some of which have never been published before:

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I wrote this about the technical aspect of shooting the photo on the blog back in April:

A few notes about the photo, which I feel captures an historic moment in the FLDS story. First, there had to be some sensitivity in the taking of the photograph. Luckily, I brought along a 50/1.4 lens so that I wouldn’t need to use flash. Popping a flash at children who were just taken from their parents and homes would not have been compassionate. Like a good backpacker, I wanted to leave a minimal footprint. So I shot available light, something like 1/30th at f1.4 at ISO 800. Maybe when I’m actually awake I’ll actually tone and sharpen it for you, but it’s been a long day.

Back then I also wrote a bit about how the volunteers (and knowing more now, CPS) didn’t want me there and definitely didn’t want any photographs taken. But we were standing on a public sidewalk so there was little they could do.

Immediately after shooting this sequence I walked across the street to the car and began sending photos back to the office, just ahead of deadline. Then I went back to look for more photo possibilities. You can see how the doors to this room of the church have vertical slit windows. I could see the occasional FLDS woman through these windows but before I got a shot off a short-haired woman with light-colored pants (she’s in the last two photos above) approached me with several other locals. One was the mayor of Eldorado. They were very angry at my presence.

The mayor asked who I was and what I was doing there. I told him. The woman asked if I had taken any photos. I said yes. Around this point an officer led me off to the side away from the group and told me that while he knew I had every right to photograph from the sidewalk, these locals were really pissed off that I was there and if I stayed much longer, he wouldn’t be able to guarantee my safety.

We evaluated the situation and decided to leave, knowing we had the shot (which would run across the entire width of the next day’s front page) and knowing we would be back early in the morning. I wrote this back then about us leaving:

Some of the volunteers at the church clearly didn’t want me taking photographs. They were good people looking out for the FLDS, who are very private people. I can understand their feelings. But this is an important story. I try to work with the same compassion they were feeling for the children. Once we had the photo, we left. In the morning we’ll go back and hopefully it will be more obvious that while we’re serious journalists, we’re not “THE MEDIA.”

My perception has changed substantially from what I wrote then. While there were privacy expectations (as there would be in any child-protective action), the story of the YFZ Raid was heavily media-managed from the start. In some cases they were following official policy and/or state law, but Texas officials would limit access to the photography of this story nearly every step of the way.

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Revisiting the YFZ Raid

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For months I have been putting off the task of editing my photos from Texas’ raid on the FLDS Yearning For Zion (YFZ) ranch in Eldorado. I just couldn’t bring myself to look again. To this day, over 100 gigabytes of my photographs from four months of work have not had a proper edit. I backed them up several times for safekeeping and let them sit.

The prospect of going through these photographs is daunting on so many levels. For one, I feel a huge responsibility to history. But the real reason I’d been avoiding the edit is that covering the raid took a huge toll on me emotionally. And this next sentence isn’t any opinion on whether the raid was right or wrong, or whether polygamy is right or wrong, or whether the FLDS are right or wrong:

The raid on the YFZ Ranch, the removal of 460+ children and all that came after was very painful for all involved. Whatever side you’re on (if you think the children were rightfully removed due to abuse or if you think they were wrongfully removed due to persecution), this was a tragic event to witness. Seeing families broken up, for justified or unjustified reasons, has shaken me. It was tough.

I opened up the first folder of images this morning. They were pictures from the first day, just a few dozen photographs taken late the night we arrived in Eldorado. It can’t be that bad, I thought, only thirty-two images to look through.

I was wrong.

I only got halfway through before I couldn’t go any further. Once I saw that iconic photograph of the young FLDS women and children walking through the dark, carrying bundles and babies toward the First Baptist Church, the emotions swelled up and I could not continue. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

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The first eleven photos seem mundane but they have turned out to be quite interesting now that we know what happened. They show two volunteers (who, I should note, did not want to be photographed) unloading groceries and diapers for the FLDS children being brought to the church-turned-shelter.

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That first night, I didn’t realize that FLDS children from YFZ didn’t eat the food that modern American eats: processed foods, potato chips, etc. They eat almost a completely organic, mostly vegetarian diet.

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Only days later would stories emerge of the children getting sick in shelters, their bodies having to adjust from their all-natural diets to the modern food provided by the state in the shelters.

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Texas officials claimed they would provide a healthier environment for the children than what they had at home on the YFZ Ranch, and then handed out bags of Doritos.

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Posted in Photojournalism, Polygamy