Last Memorial Day weekend, a team of New York Times photographers and reporters fanned out through Chicago to document how that city’s violence had affected people and neighborhoods. New York Times staff photographer Todd Heisler describes how he and his colleagues sought to portray the story in new ways.
Joshua Lott had just finished covering a news conference at Chicago Police Headquarters, where police officials announced the arrest of more than 100 gang members. Officials hoped this sweep would make a dent in the wave of gun violence that has plagued the city. As Mr. Lott was filing his photos at a nearby Starbucks, a woman ordered her coffee and walked out the door. Within seconds, she was mortally wounded by a stray bullet.
This was the third person he had seen shot this year.
Chicago is going through yet another grim season of gun violence. While this sprawling city of 2.7 million people who live in dozens of neighborhoods is diverse, it is also segregated. That reality is alarmingly reflected by the victims of gun violence, with most bloodletting concentrated on the West and South Sides. The North Side, which I called home for many years, is mostly unaffected by the violence, save for a few pockets. Most neighborhoods see no shootings at all.
Mr. Lott, a Chicago native, has been covering crime in the city for The New York Times over the past year, working with the paper’s local reporting staff. As things have unfortunately kept getting worse, coverage has expanded.
The paper set out to cover intensively the many shootings over the Memorial Day weekend, a notoriously violent time in the city. The logistics were complicated: A month earlier, the Chicago bureau staff spent a weekend gathering preliminary data. As we headed into the holiday weekend, we had a dispatcher who listened to scanners 24 hours a day and communicated with the team of reporters and photographers via Slack. We also each listened to the scanners constantly.
Mr. Lott, Alex Wroblewski, Sam Hodgson, Whitney Curtis and I worked round-the-clock on 12-hour shifts. Mr. Lott and Mr. Wroblewski, who both live in Chicago and have documented this story extensively, worked more or less from dusk to dawn. We put one photographer on the West Side and one on the South Side. About a dozen reporters worked overlapping nine-hour shifts.
The challenge was that we were not necessarily covering new ground. The local news media have relentlessly chronicled this story, staffing overnight teams indefinitely to document this tragic cycle of violence. Photographers like Carlos Javier Ortiz and Jon Lowenstein have devoted years to exploring the complicated social aspects in communities affected by gun violence. Our goal was to cover the news, but with an added obligation to search for subtleties, to stop at scenes we might normally just drive past because they lacked visual drama. Or to visit places where shots rang out but no one — fortunately — was hit. To explore the rhythm of events that occur repeatedly, yet are all different in their own nuanced ways.
And it was equally important to follow up with victims and families, and to document daily life in the city.
There is a ranch home on the Far South Side where, if you kneel down and lean into the bedroom wall, you can peer through a bullet hole and see Julia Rhoden’s grandchildren playing in the front yard. Early on Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend, she was sitting on her bed watching television. Her husband, Calvin, was sitting outside when someone walked up and opened fire, missing him entirely but peppering the concrete, screen door and awning with bullets. One of those bullets ripped through the bedroom wall and lodged in Ms. Rhoden’s back. When I met her on Sunday, she had just been released from the hospital and was cooking dinner for her family. Blood still seeped through her bandage and shirt.
Loud noises make her uneasy now.
As I drove away and turned the corner, I was startled to see children galloping by on horseback. Just two blocks from the Rhoden home, Rashad Branscomb, who owns the horses and keeps them in a nearby suburb, was having a family picnic. He was unaware of the Rhoden shooting, but immediately rattled off two other nearby addresses where there has been gang activity.
“We are trying to get them out of here.” said Mr. Branscomb, who grew up in Englewood, where a lot of the shooting is taking place.
For me, it was a small sign of hope for a city I still consider home.
“Chicago is an extremely beautiful city,” Mr. Lott said. “So I hope we can figure out a solution to curb crime. Everyone deserves a right to live, especially the kids.”
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