Viola Davison looks at an old picture of herself.
Photo: Pat Davison
Love through the Lens.
by Jason Smith
Patrick Davison’s mother used to carry him around like a suitcase. When he was four, Patrick broke his leg so badly that he had to wear a body cast from his armpits to his toes. So his mother Viola, who had five other kids to manage, put a handle on Patrick’s cast.
Years later, when Viola developed Alzheimer’s, Pat Davison relocated to be closer to her. “Mom had seen me through a lot of hard times thirty years before,” Davison says, “and now she needed someone. So I found a job in Denver, packed up, and left my wife and kids to sell our house in Dallas.”
Then Davison did what he always does: he took pictures. He’s not a physician. He couldn’t make his mother’s brain well again. He’s a photojournalist. And though he didn’t set out to document Viola’s decline, he realized that his pictures might somehow help other families deal with the disease. So after Viola passed away, Davison told her story with pictures and his words. He called it Undying Love, a son’s meditation on his mother’s death. You can watch it and listen to it online. And it will break your heart.
Viola and her daughter, Cindy. When Pat Davison and his sisters had to move Viola from her home to an assisted living facility, Davison wrote in his journal, “Does she hear the door locking behind us? Is this betrayal?” But even with Alzheimer’s, Davison says, Viola “could sense that we were upset, and she would soothe us.” Photo: Pat Davison
Davison is soft-spoken and unassuming, but earnest. “Everything that you cover as a journalist doesn’t have to change the world,” he says. “Everything doesn’t have to be an earth-shaking issue.” Introduce your readers to their community, he tells his students. Sure, report on the issues, but try to show people things they wouldn’t otherwise know or see. Try to make people’s lives a little richer.
Go up, for example, in a Blue Angels F-18. Or go show how commercial development might be washing away the boardwalk culture of blue-collar Carolina Beach. Tell the story of Vukani, a squatter camp in South Africa, where people are being wiped out by poverty and AIDS. Work with groups of students on summer-long multimedia projects about Galicia, Chile, or South Africa. Davison did all these. He also covered the Columbine High School shootings as part of a Rocky Mountain News team that won a Pulitzer Prize.
But Davison says photojournalists don’t have to jet all over the world or be dropped into war zones. Instead, they can look at what’s happening in the United States and in the world, and bring it home. “For example, with the immigration issues that are going on right now, photojournalists should be figuring out visual ways to tell that story locally—and not just the protests, because that’s the obvious thing. They should be trying to find people in the community who are experiencing it, and getting their stories,” he says.
“That’s one great thing about photojournalism: you can evoke emotion from people through photographs. People really relate. We’re such a visual society that people are a lot more visually sophisticated than they think they are.”
Viola with her granddaughters, Mariko (left) and Hanna. Photo: Pat Davison
After the fall of Life and other big photojournalism magazines, people started wondering if photojournalism was dead. “But I think it’s pretty commonly accepted now that photojournalism is definitely not dying,” Davison says. “It’s just not as sexy right now as some of the other forms of media.” That’s partly because small and affordable digital cameras and digital video cameras, blogs, and citizen journalism are putting the reporting power into the hands of the average Joe. As our bits and bytes run rampant, we can all become stringers of sorts.
That’s a good thing, Davison says, but it means that photojournalists can’t just shoot pictures anymore. They need to learn how to tell stories using audio, too, and maybe even video. Newspapers like slideshows because they have a relatively long shelf-life. And papers can use them to cover local events in greater depth.
“The great thing about multimedia is that the level of content that you can deliver is so much richer—it has so many different levels compared to broadcast television or print journalism,” Davison says. “You can have audio, you can have 3-D animated infographics, you can have multiple photos, you can have video. And you put the control into the users’ hands, so that they can digest the stuff the way they want to.”
As more people look to the web for their news—Davison requires his students to read the newspaper, but they all want to read it online—publishers are realizing that they have to offer more than a newspaper. They have to become a news source. Give people a compelling reason to visit your site, and they will.
Don’t count print out just yet, though. The Rocky Mountain News printed Undying Love as a twenty-page special section. “The day it was published, the phones started ringing off the hook, and the e-mails started pouring in,” Davison says. The paper ran two full pages of letters to the editor. Davison still gets e-mails and letters about it. (One person wrote to say that Davison had been a vulture. To his own mother.)
But Davison always felt like Undying Love was something he had to create. “Alzheimer’s is so prevalent that almost everyone knows someone who’s been touched by it,” he says. “I wanted to be able to communicate what it’s like to somebody who’s at the beginning stages of going through it with a parent. Yes, it is terrible, but there’s a lot of value in spending that time, and a lot of value left in that person’s life.
“She was a great mother and a great woman, but she didn’t have a huge role in this world during this life. So her dying could be just another leaf blowing in the wind, if you allow me to wax poetic. It could just be meaningful to the family, and have no reach beyond that. And I’ve spent my whole career communicating with people, and trying to reach people. So I felt like her life could actually have some sort of a reach beyond our family. And it has, and it still does.
“Honestly, I knew my mom well enough to know that if she had been in her right mind, she would have said, ‘If I am going to pass away from this disease, if I can do anything to help raise awareness, to make people donate for research or to make people write their congressman trying to get money allocated for research, then, heck yeah. Do it.’ She would have been all for it.” Davison gave Undying Love to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, which used it to raise $135,000.
Viola eventually had to move to a nursing home. Davison wrote in his journal, “She seems like an airship, scuttling baggage at each stop, straining against the pull of this world, straining to soar heavenward.” Photo: Pat Davison
There’s a scene at the beginning of Undying Love that comes from an old home movie of Viola next to a swimming pool. She’s wearing a thick white rubber swim cap and a white bathing suit with a floral print. She half-crouches in a diver’s pose. She holds it, longer than she might need to. The dive is ordinary, a little self-conscious. Viola swims a few strokes, then stops. She says something we can’t hear, gives a little wave, and splashes a smile, and it hits you: she could be your mother. She could be anyone’s mother.
“She and I were a team when I was back in that body cast,” Davison says. “And I felt like we were a team again, and that we could tell her story.” Photo: Pat Davison
Davison is assistant professor of journalism and a winner of the 2006 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.
