Portland Magazine
February 21, 2022
The photographer and I stood outside the church with the pastor and his wife, hoping to get the best light for a portrait. The pastor was somewhat new in the rapidly changing neighborhood, and we’d been talking to him for a story in part about gentrification in North Portland and his role and response to the changes affecting his parishioners.
A bus pulled up, sighed, pulled away, and a woman was now standing on the sidewalk. She approached. She was crying.
“Are you church people?” she asked.
The pastor answered affirmatively. She said she’d recently lost her job and her children. She was at a low point. She needed someone to pray for her.
The pastor asked her for her name, bowed his head, held up his hand, and prayed.
Now, reader, I gently want to steer your eye to the photographer. He had to make a split decision. This is something that happens when you go out to capture a story. Sometimes you think you know what you’re there to capture, but then the story unfolds in a different way and you need to figure out in the moment how to respond. What we were seeing was the story unfolding. We were seeing the pastor respond to a neighbor. A staged headshot wouldn’t come close to telling the story that this moment was revealing to us.
But the photographer, seeing the woman’s vulnerability, pulled the camera away from his eye. He took his finger off the shutter. The camera went silent.
The prayer ended. The woman thanked him. She walked away. We all took a deep breath and finished the portraits.
In the car on the way back to UP, the photographer confided, “It was hard not to shoot that. That was the story.”
And in that moment I knew Adam Guggenheim was a storyteller whose principles, integrity, and instincts I could trust.
Since then, we’ve partnered on a bunch of stories—both photography and video—and when he came to me to say he wanted to speak to biology professor Ami Ahern-Rindell about the research she was doing using CRISPR gene-editing technology and the conversations she was starting on campus through an applied ethics grant, I was immediately interested. I didn’t know much about the technology beyond what I’d read in the papers. I knew about its success in trials, treating individuals with Sickle Cell Anemia, and I knew some possible uses of the technology held some pretty big ethical concerns. It seemed like a conversation to lean into. So, I followed his lead, tagged along for a preliminary interview, and realized that there was a story here for us to share with you in our pages. I hope it satisfies the lifelong learner in you. It is definitely a story that required me to respond in both mind and heart.
Thank you, Adam, for leading me to this issue’s cover story (and the challenges therein) and for your stellar work on behalf of Portland magazine.
— Jessica Murphy Moo, Editor
University of Portland
5000 N. Willamette Blvd.,
Portland, Oregon 97203-5798
503.943.8000
This website uses cookies to track information for analytics purposes. You can view the full University of Portland privacy policy for more information.
