Kevin Green
NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY
Longview News-Journal

Kevin Green won a Best of Cox award with a photo he "didn't want to take."

A plane crash had killed two popular high school girls and their fathers. Assigned to cover back-to-back funerals, Green was conspicuous in the parking lot of the funeral home, borne down with his camera gear. As they arrived, friends of the deceased jeered Green and members of a TV camera crew who also were there, Green recalled.

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"It was the last place I wanted to be that day," he said.

But there was a story to be told.

So he waited and endured. There were more taunts and gestures from the crowd as it departed. Green stood his ground until he got his shot. "His shot" turned out to be that of four members of the girls' high school drill team, in tears as they walked from the service, alongside a hearse. The four Bobcat Belles even were walking in step.

"The only way to show that it was a funeral was to show the hearse," Green said. "I could tell the students were part of the drill team. They were all dressed the same."

"Telling the story" is why Green picks up his camera every day.

"Anybody can take a picture with a camera, but not everybody can tell a story," Green said.

A family friend introduced him to photography.

"He said if you go buy this camera, I'll give you a lens," Green, a Longview native, said. "I did and he did."

That same friend had whetted Green's photographic appetite with books about photography. Later, a chief photographer served as Green's mentor.

After more than a decade's affiliation with the Longview News-Journal as freelancer, part-timer and full-timer, Green said he can't imagine doing anything else.