Photographer at the Las Vegas Shooting Shares POV
David Becker is a Getty photographer whose assignment - to cover the Las Vegas country music festival Route 91 Harvest - landed him in the middle of Sunday night's mass shooting.
In a series of harrowing interviews, Becker's given his account of the evening. As someone on assignment to photograph the night's closing act, Jason Aldean, Becker told Time he was at the media tent filing his photographs when he started hearing a "popping" noise: "A security guy said it was just 'firecrackers' so I went back to work. The second time I heard the popping sounds somebody said to me, 'it was just speakers or sound equipment,' and again I went back into the media tent and continued to file."
He continued to take photos, still thinking the growing panic was due to an equipment malfunction: "It would stop and then more shots, then a lull and then more shots. I could hear people yelling at them to shut off the lights, to be quiet. People were cowering, they were very fearful for their lives. This was at a time before I had looked at any of the photographs and I still didn’t know exactly what was happening."
It was only later in the evening, when he noticed that one of his photos included a woman with blood running down her legs, when he started to register what had happened: "I started looking at my photographs and what I was seeing was just unbelievable. I could see people covered in blood and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is real'."
Becker later expanded on his experience with the Washington Post, sharing:
"When I stop and think, it’s hard to comprehend what I witnessed. I was on autopilot, just doing my job capturing what was happening, which I think is important. Impactful images like these tell a story, they move people to think twice about doing anything like this.
I’ve been doing this work for many years and it is instinct to photograph first and ask questions later. It probably seems irrational to just walk out and take pictures of people running for cover, but that is second nature for a photojournalist."
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