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©Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters
The call came in around 5:30 am from Reuters senior picture editor Hyungwon Kang awakening me from a deep sleep recovering after a long weekend of Space Shuttle Endeavour coverage on the streets of Los Angeles for Reuters. The instructions were to get to the home of Lloyd Shapley as soon as possible, the UCLA professor had been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for economics and I needed to make a picture as soon as possible. I tried calling Mr Shapley, but it went straight to voicemail. It was still dark outside when I arrived, and AP photographer Reed Saxon pulled up about a minute later. We walked up the driveway and rang the doorbell. After about a minute, an obviously fresh out of bed Mr Shapley opened the door. We both congratulated him and told him that he won the 2012 economics Nobel prize! Incredibly it was apparent he had no idea about this and it took him a few seconds to process the information. He's 89, still half asleep and hard of hearing so I showed him the message on my iPhone showing that he had won the Nobel Prize. "I won the Nobel Prize" he said smiling as the reality sunk in. His hair was a wild mess, and we wanted to make dignified images of this brilliant man, so Reed lent him his comb before we started to make some photographs. |
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| ©Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters |
But then, he was on the phone with a reporter for the next ten minutes or so happily chatting away with a reporter, no problem though because when Prof. Shapley hung up the phone, the dawn light was hitting his porch so we could make some nice photos before I rushed to file the pictures as quickly as possible.
My adrenaline was flowing from this amazing experience, I had just broken the news to genius that he won the Nobel Prize. Priceless
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| ©Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters |
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| ©Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters |
