.: interview :

Pédra. A Reporter without Borders
INTERVIEW WITH RUSS MELCHER, photographer, Escueillens, France, 3 July 2006
by Villi Hermann

Jean-Pierre was just like me, he was probably about my age, I was 26 at the time, I guess Jean-Pierre was 27, 28, he was a young photographer, we were in competition, I was an independent, he worked for Paris Match, sometimes I sold my pictures to Match, sometimes I didn't, what was rather interesting is that we had done several stories in the last month before in Belgium and what happened was we always came back on the same plane, we never went up on the same plane, because I don't know why, but that was, but we always came back… And, as I guess you see the football players when they come off the stadium, we sat around and told stories, you got this, I got that, did you see this, did you see that.
It was two professionals talking about what you do and it was over, you couldn't redo it, so there was no problem of holding back, you had no secrets, and it was a very, how would you say, psychological moment because you were dealing with a man who had done exactly what you had done, had the same fears or the same problems you did, looking for probably the same answers, or at least the same pictures you were.
There's an awful lot of luck into this thing, the people who come out the best make their own luck as we always say but I still I think its luck, and you have to have an eye and you also must be very opinionated, people think that good journalism is being neutral, there's no such thing as neutral, all human beings feel things, they are for things, they are against things and only if you get that into your pictures do your pictures say anything, pictures that don't say anything aren't even gonna get run, you don't see them. So therefore you've gotta be opinionated and those pictures have gonna be, and Jean-Pierre was very good at that. That's why he got all these kind of things.

© Imagofilm Lugano