In the Darkroom
By Amanda D’Costa
“I went out with a reporter, I don’t know if we knew the boy had cancer or not, I can’t recall…he was in the lounge room playing and I remember it was just after Easter and I thought he was eating an Easter egg. But he wasn’t. This was the tumour growing out of his mouth. And it was huge. I couldn’t take a picture of him front on, so I took a picture of him hugging his mother with his arms around her…”
John pauses a lot in the recollection of this particular assignment. I mistake his pauses for an attempt to grasp some elusive thread of memory. But when he resumes again, his words come out fragmented and his voice is a few decibels lower.
I wasn’t expecting the tears; they come out of nowhere. John has grandchildren. I see traces of them in the back seat of his old Mitsubishi Magna. It has a booster seat and is littered with after school crumbs. Perhaps this is why it hurts him to talk about the boy.
“Poor little kid” he utters through a quivering mouth. “He died, shortly after”.
We share a silence in which I do not know what to do. John is old and wise and oozes this calm, cool charisma. He is strong minded and with a passion for photography that is so deeply rooted. He is accomplished, among the best in his field. And he is now crying in front of me. Crying is something I do and I have always thought it to be a bit of a juvenile thing that I hate to succumb to. But seeing this grown man crying in front of me makes me see, these aren’t tears, this is just raw emotion. And I assume suppression of such emotion is part of the job requirement.
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Later on, I wonder —is suppression what makes media-kind — journalists, reporters, newspaper editors and press photographers— such a detached crew? I assume they have to maintain a certain amount of distance in order to tell a story as it is without the short sight of their own interjections. Perhaps, I ponder, the detachment level fails to come back down to zero, even at the end of the day when the job is done and they come back home to their families.
The thought disturbs me slightly because I want to be one of them. Someone like John, influential within the media industry. But I don’t want to suppress.
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When speaking to John Casamento, conversation always stems from his career: how he started out in press photography, how he made a name for himself in the industry, the stories that have made a profound impact on himself and in turn, the impact his career has made on his family. It seems to be what defines him and this is unsurprising as he landed a job at The Sun newspaper at only sixteen, the start of one’s most formative years. He matured with a camera in hand.
I didn’t expect John to be as liberal with words as he was. In the wake of arranging an interview I only spoke to his wife Maria. John seemed an elusive subject. But I recognised something of my own nature in John— that for him, conversing is an activity better shared face to face. Perhaps this is because showing not telling a story via photographs all these years has led to a need to talk that is contradictory to his pictorial profession. Once he starts the stories flow steadily, gushing under pressure from the small hole I have broken in the dam wall.
For what John doesn’t say, his wife Maria makes up for. They are different. John is quiet and contemplative. Maria is bouncy, whole-hearted and loud. As a translator, she is a talker by nature and by profession. She keeps her own little voice recorder next to mine throughout the time I am speaking with John.
“John always tells these little anecdotes that I’ve never even heard before”. She is seizing the opportunity of my purpose to harvest his stories for their grand-children.
In ’77 John spoke to magazine Australian Photography after winning the title ‘Press Photographer of the Year’ and said, “Family and social life may suffer because of the irregular hours”.
So I was determined to hear Maria’s perspective on her husband’s career. I sensed a bit of darkness there.
‘It’s been very tough on the kids and me. It was not a good family existence” she says. Maria tells me of a time her grown son told her he wished his dad had had more time to play footy with him at the park. Later on she jokingly adds, “If I wasn’t a good catholic woman, I would’ve divorced him”.
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Their shared faith is ground on which both John and Maria stand shoulder to shoulder. I suspect it has been what has kept their family united through the hardest years. In ’86, John worked alongside the Vatican photographer accompanying Pope John Paul II on his visit to Australia. He recalls having a picture taken of himself with the Pope. After the picture was taken John thought he had better say something to the pontiff before returning to his spot at the back of the plane. So with his children back home in mind John asked the Pope if he had a message to pass on to them.
“I was hoping he would say something Maria and I would tell them, you know, ‘Love one another’, ‘Obey your parents’, that sort of thing…but he just thought for a second, threw out his arms and said ‘Give them a hug and a kiss from me’. And I remember thinking …‘That’s not what I wanted to hear!’ ”.
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John is a good man. There is no simpler way to say it. He is earnest and conscientious and hard working. But there is one aspect of John that renders him better than the other good men in my books.
“I’ve never had a glass of beer in my life…grog’s never attracted me for some reason. We had a pub across the road. It was the drinking space for all the reporters and photographers... I think in the 36 years I was at the The Sun I’d been there about six times — for a lemon squash!”
It is odd that he has never tasted beer. It’s even stranger, he admits, that he is Italian but doesn’t drink wine. This knowledge about John just adds to his industrious nature. I don’t suppose there was ever a day he arrived hung-over at work. A few times during the interview he mentions in passing the stupidity of people who drink and drive. Later he tells me a story which validates this judgement.
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A young girl had been driving home. Her car was hit from the rear by a group of drunken boys and she crashed. John was sent to photograph the scene with a reporter but just as he was about to leave, he was approached by the police. The coroner’s photographer hadn’t yet arrived and the scene had to soon be cleared so John was asked to take the photographs needed and have them sent to the police. He obliged. He took the pictures of the car; from the back and the sides and eventually, he had to take a close up from the front.’
“And all I saw at the wheel was this charred body… just a black mass”.
I don’t know if he has done this intentionally, but the tone in which he speaks, the words he chooses and his manner of their deliverance makes me sick in the pit of my stomach. The effect of his words is such that I swear to myself that I will never drink drive. I find myself retelling this story to my friends subconsciously willing them to reach the same conclusion I did.
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A particular quote from John’s 1977 interview stays with me: “The good press photographer has to be more than a photographer. He must also be an artist, journalist, historian and technician.”
Yes, it is easy to define John as all those things. It is a remarkable thing, to be doing the same job you started at sixteen, 53 years later. But in praising his accomplishments, his awards, his travels, it is easy to lose sight of everything else he also is.
John is such a genuine man with such a strong moral compass. He is a loving husband. Maria vouches for that. He is a proud father and a nurturing grand-father. John wanted to be a teacher but when he threw himself blindly into press photography, he found himself being taught, accompanying senior photographers on assignments, watching, learning, waiting his turn. It took the boy four years to progress from being the dark room messenger boy to making the cut and being put on the photographic team at The Sun.
“And I stayed there for the next thousand years, loving every moment of it. Every day was a new day and I would think,‘Where will I go today, who will I meet?’ ”