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The Human Connection in Photos

Bob Pearson calls it the human connection. Whether he’s shooting wildlife recovery efforts from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, space shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral or NBA basketball games in San Antonio, Pearson is always on the lookout for those recognizable moments of humanity that will make his photographs memorable. 

“Wherever you are, you’re looking for eye contact, emotion, something people can relate to,” says Pearson, a veteran news and sports photographer whose pictures have been reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the world. “There are always these little moments of real human reaction, and that’s what you strive for in a news photograph, I think.

“You might be photographing a guy standing on a podium, and most of it is staged. But if a reporter asks a question that surprises him or makes him angry, those are the moments when you can see that he’s human.”

These days Pearson works as a freelancer from his Texas home, but for more than 20 years he was a staff photographer for the Agence France-Presse wire service, or AFP. Eventually he became the service’s chief photographer for North and South America and then director of photography for North America.

It might be easier to talk about what Pearson hasn’t covered than what he has. “I covered the presidential elections in Brazil. I’ve gone out with troops in Central America on training practices and covered a lot of their activities. That was fun. You’re seeing new countryside but you’re not in high-risk situations.”

Other assignments were riskier. “I was one of the first photographers in Kuwait City when it was liberated. I spent untold months and weeks in Haiti from 1985 to 1994, covering that story. I was there in 1994 from two days after the end of the World Cup [in the United States] around July 7, until the invasion. I stayed there a long time after the U.S. invaded Haiti.

“But I had a lot of fun covering sports, too, both the Winter and Summer Olympics. I did the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, Italy in 1990 and the U.S. [in 1994]; I met a lot of great people on those trips.”