When gunshots rang out at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, four photojournalists were there to capture the now-iconic images etched in the American collective memory.
Evan Vucci of the Associated Press captured a photo of a defiant Trump raising his fist in the air with an American flag waving behind him.
Anna Moneymaker of Getty Images captured this tight, sober image of Trump lying on the stage, surrounded by Secret Service agents as blood streamed down his face.
The Washington Post’s Jabin Botsford captured the haunting image of the former president’s shoe left on stage after the attack.
And Doug Mills of the New York Times took this remarkable photo showing a bullet whizzing past the former president’s head.
The four photojournalists said they knew they were dangerously close to the line of fire when they heard the gunshots Saturday, but their professional instincts took over.
“Here to do a job”
Vucci, the AP’s chief photographer in Washington, said the event began like any of the thousands of political campaign rallies he has covered during his more than two-decade career.
“I heard several shots over my left shoulder and I knew right away they were gunshots,” Vucci recalled. “I went to work. I looked through my viewfinder and saw the Secret Service agents coming in to cover the president. I ran toward the scene, grabbed my wide-angle lens and started taking pictures.”
Mills and Moneymaker had the same reaction,
“I’m here to do a job,” said Moneymaker, who joined Getty Images in 2021. “All of a sudden, the story is happening. You just have to keep making pictures.”
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ but I was like, ‘Anna, keep taking pictures. Get the settings right,'” she said. “I put it on auto and kept going.”
Mills said he had never experienced anything like it in his 40 years of covering American politics.
“He went down and I was like, ‘Oh my God, he got shot,’ because everyone was yelling, ‘Down, down, down, active shooter, active shooter!’” he said. “I get chills saying it now because, you know, it’s still very vivid.”
In addition to the footage, Botsford was also able to capture video of the moment while wearing Ran-Ban Meta smart glasses that take short videos, which he told the Washington Post he “somehow” thought to activate.
“It was really scary,” he told the Post. “Nobody knew what was happening. The president fell to the ground, and I was going to take a picture of it, even though the staff was telling me, ‘You need to get down on the ground.’”
“I’m still trying to process all of this,” he said.
Capturing the Moment Trump Was Shot
Mills said that as he arrived backstage, he began frantically transmitting photos to his editor in New York when he realized he might have captured the moment Trump was shot.
He called his editor and asked her to look at the images carefully.
“She called me back about five minutes later and said, ‘You won’t believe your eyes.’ I thought, ‘What?’ I thought I missed something,” he said. “And she said, ‘No, no, you filmed the bullet that went through his head.’”
Mills said he happened to have his finger on the shutter at the time, with the speed set to 1/8,000th of a second.
“A forensic expert told me it was between a one in a million and a one in five million chance of doing that, because they tried to do that, simulate that, and it’s very difficult to catch a bullet flying like that,” he said.
“I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it,” he said. “What happened was, again, a great stroke of luck.”
A long history of “amazing photojournalism”
Their images will join others that have captured some of the darkest days in U.S. history, such as Bill Eppridge’s famous photo of a waiter helping Robert F. Kennedy moments after the presidential candidate was assassinated in 1968, and Associated Press photographer Ron Edmonds’ images of President Ronald Reagan being rushed to his motorcade after he was shot in 1981.
Mills credits Edmonds, a former colleague and longtime mentor, with helping him refine his instincts.
“He was always coming in, he wasn’t leaving,” Mills said. “Luckily, I didn’t blink like Ron did. None of my co-workers blinked. Everybody rushed to get the news.”
Moneymaker said she considers Mills, Vucci and Botsford her mentors and being with them Saturday helped keep her going.
“I’m in a lot of company with people who are all very brave and so I think at that point I just tried to hold on and make them proud,” she said.
Vucci said he had yet to fully realize what happened Saturday or the impact of his photo, but he was proud of their collective work.
“We have a long line of exceptional photojournalists,” he said. “And I’m glad that at this point it was my turn to hold the helm. I was able to hold the helm.”
