LEESON, David
David Leeson, 2003 in Baghdad.
(Photo by Todd Robberson) Pulitzer-winning photojournalist, former News staffer David Leeson dies at 64 Texas native covered wars, stories closer to home with the same empathy, care David Leeson, a former Dallas Morning News photographer who won aPulitzer Prize for his work covering the Iraq war, died April 16, 2022, of natural causes at his parents’ home in Abilene, Texas.
He was 64.
During his tenure at The News, from 1984 to 2008, Leeson was among the country’s most honored photojournalists, renowned for images that were his own singular vision: profoundly intimate, often provocative and, always, narrative.
“I’ve worked with alot of people on both sides, writers and photographers, and he’s the best storyteller I’ve ever known,” said John Davidson, The News’ former assistant managing editor of visuals.
Leeson’s assignments took him to more than 60 countries, and he regularly risked his life to cover events, such as the Iraq war, that were already riveting the public’s attention. But he also trained his eye on little-noticed conflicts — civil wars in Sudan and Angola, rebellions in Peru and Nicaragua — that he believed should be brought to light. “I used to never think about, ‘Why do you go to these places?’” Leeson said in a 2011 video profile produced by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.
“Why do you risk your life? Why do you expose yourself to images, sensations, smells, sounds, touch, taste, whatever it may be — things that will impact your life forever. And there’s only one answer: It’s a mission, because we know the story needs to be told, and we believe in change. You’re hoping that, by following the truth, pursuing it the best you can, that you might possibly make a difference. It’s actually not just mission, though. It’s about passion.
You put passion and mission together, and you become unstoppable.”
Many of his images have become timeless icons of the events he covered.
He was there, on adark Dallas street in 1986, to capture an image of a 6-year-old homeless girl navigating her way alone from her shelter to her school; that photo was part of a months-long project that earned Leeson the Robert F.
Kennedy Journalism Award, one of two he received.
In 1993, he waded into chestdeep floodwaters in southeast Texas to join acouple, the man holding his grandbaby wrapped in flimsy plastic and the woman grimly gripping the leash of a swimming sheepdog, and the resulting photo was a finalist for a 1994 Pulitzer (the second of three times that he was a finalist). Amid the portfolio that won the 2004 Pulitzer, which he shared with fellow staffer Cheryl Diaz Meyer, was his microcosmic portrait of that unevenly matched war: the two feet, akilter and clad in worn-out civilian shoes, of a dead Iraqi soldier.
That battlefield sight “really spoke to me,” Leeson said in the NPA video, “because I have a belief that everyone has dignity, and that dignity extends even unto death.”
The entirety of Leeson’s work, Davidson said, offers an extraordinary portal into the vastness of human experiences. “He had such a unique vision of the world,” the former editor said. “There was an emotion in his photography. Over the years, Icould look at photos taken by my staff -— and we had a heck of astaff —and Icould pick out his photos 90% of the time.
He looked at the world differently than anybody Iever worked with.”
Born Oct. 18, 1957, in Abilene, Leeson was the son of a banker and a school secretary. His mother, Dolores Leeson, remembers him as an exceptionally bright and sensitive boy who excelled in his studies, and he also showed early daring. In grade school, he suffered severe burns on his leg while weaving through an obstacle course of homemade bonfires, requiring hospitalization and a twomonth recovery.
Leeson was still in grade school when his father put him in charge of the family’s vacation photography.
“His pictures,” his dad, Kirby Leeson, recalled, “were way better than mine.” Leeson’s grandmother gave him the first camera he could call his own. In middle school, he converted a garage supply room into a darkroom, and later, he turned a spare bedroom into a makeshift studio.
Leeson graduated from Cooper High School in 1976, and he pushed through Abilene Christian University in just two years, finishing with a journalism degree.
While still in college, at age 20, he took his first journalism job at The Abilene Reporter-News, where he worked for five years. Then, in 1982, he moved on to The New Orleans Times-Picayune/ States-Item. Two weeks into his new job, he happened to be minutes away from the suburban crash site of Pan Am Flight 759, which killed all 145 people on board. He was among the first on the scene — even before rescue crews, according to his mother — and Time magazine picked up his photos.
During his tenure in New Orleans, he also got his first taste of international assignments and the danger that could go with them.
Covering the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua, he was taken captive by the rebel group, and “it took several hours for David to convince them that he was not aspy,” his friend and fellow photographer David Kent told The Reporter- News in its news account of Leeson’s death.
Later, covering elections in El Salvador, Leeson was held captive again, this time by FMLN rebels, and he was briefly placed before a firing squad with another photographer.
“I truly believed I would die,” Leeson told fellow photojournalist Dirck Halstead in a 2005 interview that appeared in the online magazine The Digital Journalist. The two photographers were eventually rescued.
In those early days, Leeson went on to say in the interview, he had an attitude that “you have to be prepared to die” on assignment.
But over the years, he said, that changed. “My attitude today is, ‘No, I’m prepared to come back home alive.’ I was so immature when I first started out that every time I went through the emotional and mental exercises of saying, ‘You will not come back home — you will die.’ And Ithought that’s what the assignment takes.”
In 1984, Leeson moved on to The Dallas Morning News, arriving in a city that avidly supported a robust print-media environment.
At the time, The News was in a pitched newspaper war with the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald.
Both papers had the national stature, wealth and manpower to routinely cover global events. At its height, The News’ photography department counted 50 on staff, including 30 photographers; four of the paper’s nine Pulitzers were awarded to its photo staff.
Leeson quickly established himself as “always on top of the heap,” said Ken Geiger, The News’ former director of photography and another Pulitzer recipient. “He was one of the A-list photographers all the time. He was one of the most evocative and informative photographers, not just on The Dallas Morning News staff, but in the country.”
Like every other staff photographer, Leeson was on regular duty for the newspaper’s daily needs, and he consistently brought fresh creativity to even the most routine assignments. “You could send him to anything, and he’d come back, not only with a picture, but a really interesting picture,” said William Snyder, a fellow Pulitzerwinning photographer and a former director of photography for The News. “He was really, really good at making an interesting image out of nothing, and Ienvied that talent, because I’m not that way.”
Leeson also soon set a higher standard for the entire staff with his immersive style of journalism on more in-depth assignments.
Michael Precker, The News’ former Middle East bureau chief, remembers the impact that Leeson had on him during a tense 2½ months when they teamed to cover the unrest swelling against apartheid in South Africa in 1985.
“He inspired me and made my work better,” Precker recalled.
“We went to places that Iprobably wouldn’t have gone to myself, like dicey demonstrations and worker hostels in Soweto at 4o’clock in the morning. Things like that made my reporting so much better.
It’s the hardest, best work I ever did, and it was made immeasurably better by the fact that Iteamed up with David Leeson.”
Both reporter and photographer were arrested on charges of obstructing the police while covering amass protest, and they were in custody for several hours. “It was one cop’s bad decision,”
Precker explained. “We had to hire alawyer, went to court, and they didn’t dismiss charges, so they’re still out there somewhere.” The two were simply relieved they weren’t expelled from the country, Precker added, so they could continue their work.
In 1986, Leeson and News staff writer David Tarrant were given three months to dive deep into the story of homelessness in Dallas; both photographer and writer had an early lesson on what the task would take. “We wanted to start following this family around,”
Tarrant recalled, “and we did the traditional interview with them at the shelter and said, okay, we’ll meet you here tomorrow and just follow you around for a day or two. Overnight, they got into this huge fight and left the homeless shelter. They were gone by the time we showed up in the morning.” Tarrant recalled that Leeson was furious: “He said, ‘I need these moments. Ineed to be with these people. I can’t let them out of my sight.’” The reaction was career-changing for Tarrant, who was 27 at the time and accustomed to regular work hours and a just-the-facts reporting style: “I famously said, ‘Well, I guess I need moments, too.’ For the next six weeks, Tarrant and Leeson lived at the shelter and slept on the floor. Leeson extended his stay for weeks more. “We did the story based, in many ways, on David’s vision,” Tarrant said. “He wanted to show what the stress of living on the streets was like. Irealized I wasn’t going to be writing a news story. I was going to be writing a journey. It blew my mind because I had never written like that before.”
Tarrant recalled that Leeson’s intimate approach to subject matter discomfited some colleagues.
“There were raised eyebrows that he was going in too deep,” Tarrant says, “but for me, Isaw David as having a lot of empathy for his subjects. As a photographer, he needed access. But really, he also needed empathy to understand and capture those moments.
When he said, ‘I need moments,’ he meant, Ineed to see what this life is. Ineed to see when they feel pain, when they feel angry, when they feel happiness.”
With the homelessness assignment, Leeson unintentionally took his empathy to an extreme degree, wearing himself down and contracting encephalitis, which put him in the hospital for several days. That sort of self-sacrifice for the sake of astory was arecurring theme in his career.
In 1995, he suffered another calamity when he joined News staff writer Mark McDonald on assignment at the tail end of the Bosnian war. The two were profiling a Sarajevo marathon runner who was training for the 1996 Olympics, and Leeson took what he thought was the perfect spot to shoot his subject in action: the open hatchback of the pair’s rundown rented Volkswagen. McDonald was at the wheel, creeping up a hillside road, when he heard a thunk in the back. Leeson had fallen out, face down, into the road. McDonald came to aquick halt, got out and found the photographer bleeding profusely from a head wound.
“The poor runner didn’t know what was going on,” McDonald recalled, “and I said, ‘We gotta go down to the hospital and get you stitched up.’ Leeson said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ There was blood all over his cameras. Oh, it was terrible.
He insisted on getting right back into the same position in the car and continuing to shoot this guy.
And then we did go to the hospital, and he got stitched up.”
McDonald added, with a chuckle, “The pictures, of course, were beautiful.”
On another occasion, McDonald experienced Leeson’s capacity for risk-taking when the photographer insisted the two visit Sarajevo’s infamous “Sniper Alley.” “There were still snipers around, and he wanted to drive down this street just to say he did,” McDonald recalled.
“And brainiac that I was, I went with him.” Still, McDonald, who has since covered several more war zones, said he never considered Leeson to be reckless, or even fearless: “I think he probably had a little bit of fear, but he didn’t betray how he was feeling —not to me anyway.”
Diaz Meyer gained valuable insight into Leeson’s attitude toward fear when she came to her more seasoned colleague for advice after she drew her first war assignment, covering Afghanistan in 2001. “He asked me if I was scared,” Diaz Meyer recalled. “Well, I didn’t know to be scared, and Isaid, ‘No, should Ibe?’ And he gave me this look.” From Leeson, she said, she learned that day the importance of fear. “That’s what keeps you safe,” she said. “You have to keep your eyes open. You have to be incredibly diligent and aware of your surroundings.
As brave as David was, as insanely courageous as he was, he also knew to have fear. And yet he still persisted.”
Two years later, she and Leeson were tapped to be embedded in military units during the Iraq war.
Initially, Leeson was resistant to going. After bringing back horrific scenes from the Sudan war three years before, he thought he was ready to leave that part of his career behind, and he’d already turned down an Afghanistan assignment.
At the time, he was in the midst of reinventing himself as a videographer, pioneering the role of video in newspaper coverage and teaching the skills to other News photographers. As he mulled the Iraq offer, he reached out to family and close friends, seeking counsel. “And to my surprise, everyone said I should go,” Leeson recalled in his 2005 interview for The Digital Journalist. “They had seen a young photographer grow through the years, and they knew that Ihad the skills to do it. They knew if anybody could go out there and tell this story, Icould do it. And Iknew it, too, deep down.
Iknew that this could well be my story because I’ve worked so hard to get to that place. Here it is: Your chance to use all that experience, all those tough knocks you’ve had over the years, all those close calls, and put them to practice.”
Leeson ultimately came to Geiger, the director of photography, and said he would go if he could also shoot video, and Geiger agreed. Fellow Pulitzer winner Snyder remains in awe today that Leeson was able to accomplish so much with both still and liveaction coverage in a war setting.
Snyder said he has compared the footage of War Stories, the Leeson-produced documentary that came out of Iraq, to Leeson’s photo work, and he was astonished by how many of the same scenes were recorded on both pieces of equipment. “So he was doing both pretty much simultaneously,”
Snyder said, “which is really difficult to do, and he did it at areally high level.” (War Stories went on to win a National Headliners award, a national Edward R.
Murrow Award and a regional Emmy Award for best television documentary, one of two regional Emmys that Leeson received.) Leeson was embedded for several weeks with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division as it battled its way to Baghdad. Back home, Geiger eagerly watched for the images that Leeson and Diaz Meyer were transmitting each day. “They were just obviously head and shoulders above the rest of the visual reporting,” Geiger said. “Most of the images coming out of the war were from embeds, and Iwas looking at everything every day. So I would compare instantly what David and Cheryl were giving The Morning News to what the rest of the world was giving. That’s when I went into full gear, sharing their stuff. When you look at what we shared on the wires and what ran in other newspapers, it was amazing how many front-page images David and Cheryl had.”
Diaz Meyer didn’t get to see Leeson’s work until she returned to Dallas, and even she was astounded by the risks he took: “I told him on many occasions, oh my God, Ican’t believe you did that shot. I knew exactly what that took. I was in those same vehicles, and you’re trying to brace yourself and you’re holding thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, trying to make sure they don’t get banged up so they can continue to work —plus, getting out there and doing it when you know you could be shot at.
There were many times when I knew he made the shots from a position of being fully exposed.”
In The Digital Journalist interview, Leeson explained that he felt compelled to risk his life because the soldiers around him were risking theirs, and he watched some of them die. “You’re experiencing the same things they are, taking as much heat as they are,” he said. “I stood up at times Ididn’t need to stand up because I believed that I should. I mean, if they’re taking fire, Ishould take it, too. I’m here with you. My life isn’t worth more. Ican’t sit down behind armor and hide. I mean, a 19-yearold kid dies, how do you deal with that? I’d almost rather say, ‘Take me, God. I’m 46. I’ve lived already.
I’ve had great experiences.’ But a 19-year-old kid who doesn’t make it home — it was really hard.”
Leeson and Diaz Meyer were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in a May 24, 2004, ceremony in New York, but in the 2005 interview, he said he received an even greater honor than his profession’s highest award: his embed unit’s regimental colors. “It was out of the blue,” he said. “It was the first time in the regiment’s history that a civilian received the colors. They are normally given just to commanding officers when they leave their command.
As Ilook back and think about this honor, it symbolizes my role in Iraq. Ihad arole that was a greater role than being a photojournalist. It was just being a human being, being a citizen of this country. It was about caring about people. It’s sort of what we do all the time. Ihope we do.”
Iraq was Leeson’s final foray into awar zone, and he spent the next few years continuing to concentrate on video work. By 2008, media-industry forces had significantly diminished The News staff, and at age 50, Leeson decided to accept a buyout offer along with scores of other co-workers. “I never anticipated such things could be so painful,” he said in a2008 interview for the National Press Photographers Association newsletter.
He shared with the NPPA aletter he wrote to a friend that described his helplessness as he watched his profession decline. “I realized that no one has placed aname or aface or emotion on these traumatic events in our industry,” he wrote.
“I think that voice needs to be heard. What echoed in my mind was that the trauma could have been avoided. As I told my father, ‘The best thing management did was to hire people like me and my colleagues. The worst thing they did was to not listen to them.’”
In the final years of his life, Leeson established himself as a freelance videographer and photographer, creating media for both commercial and nonprofit uses.
He always took the time to offer advice and guidance to the many photography students and young photographers who sought him out. And he took the opportunity to more fully explore his artistic passions, creating a series of searing photographic self-portraits.
Married and divorced twice, he split his time between the Dallas area and Abilene over the past three years, and he had recently decided to permanently relocate to his hometown, where he especially enjoyed spending time with his two young granddaughters.
His mother recalled the tenderness that she witnessed in her son three weeks ago when his 11-yearold granddaughter brought him an in-progress science project. “She wanted Granddaddy David to help her,” Dolores Leeson recalled. “So they were in the kitchen, and David took pictures of her doing all this. Then whenever it was time
for her to make her little showing at the school, David took and clipped all the pictures, and she had pictures showing every stage of what she did.”
They were, she believes, the last photographs he took.
Leeson is survived by his parents, Kirby and Dolores Leeson; his sister, Deborah Leeson; his five children, Lauren, David, James, Gabriel and Quinn; and his six grandchildren.
An interment was held April 30 at Elmwood Memorial Park in Abilene, and an outdoor memorial service followed.
The family asks that memorial gifts be made to the David Leeson Fund for Excellence in Journalism at Abilene Christian University online at bit.ly/dleeson or by mailing acheck toACU Box 29132, Abilene, TX 79699.
(Photo by Todd Robberson) Pulitzer-winning photojournalist, former News staffer David Leeson dies at 64 Texas native covered wars, stories closer to home with the same empathy, care David Leeson, a former Dallas Morning News photographer who won aPulitzer Prize for his work covering the Iraq war, died April 16, 2022, of natural causes at his parents’ home in Abilene, Texas.
He was 64.
During his tenure at The News, from 1984 to 2008, Leeson was among the country’s most honored photojournalists, renowned for images that were his own singular vision: profoundly intimate, often provocative and, always, narrative.
“I’ve worked with alot of people on both sides, writers and photographers, and he’s the best storyteller I’ve ever known,” said John Davidson, The News’ former assistant managing editor of visuals.
Leeson’s assignments took him to more than 60 countries, and he regularly risked his life to cover events, such as the Iraq war, that were already riveting the public’s attention. But he also trained his eye on little-noticed conflicts — civil wars in Sudan and Angola, rebellions in Peru and Nicaragua — that he believed should be brought to light. “I used to never think about, ‘Why do you go to these places?’” Leeson said in a 2011 video profile produced by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.
“Why do you risk your life? Why do you expose yourself to images, sensations, smells, sounds, touch, taste, whatever it may be — things that will impact your life forever. And there’s only one answer: It’s a mission, because we know the story needs to be told, and we believe in change. You’re hoping that, by following the truth, pursuing it the best you can, that you might possibly make a difference. It’s actually not just mission, though. It’s about passion.
You put passion and mission together, and you become unstoppable.”
Many of his images have become timeless icons of the events he covered.
He was there, on adark Dallas street in 1986, to capture an image of a 6-year-old homeless girl navigating her way alone from her shelter to her school; that photo was part of a months-long project that earned Leeson the Robert F.
Kennedy Journalism Award, one of two he received.
In 1993, he waded into chestdeep floodwaters in southeast Texas to join acouple, the man holding his grandbaby wrapped in flimsy plastic and the woman grimly gripping the leash of a swimming sheepdog, and the resulting photo was a finalist for a 1994 Pulitzer (the second of three times that he was a finalist). Amid the portfolio that won the 2004 Pulitzer, which he shared with fellow staffer Cheryl Diaz Meyer, was his microcosmic portrait of that unevenly matched war: the two feet, akilter and clad in worn-out civilian shoes, of a dead Iraqi soldier.
That battlefield sight “really spoke to me,” Leeson said in the NPA video, “because I have a belief that everyone has dignity, and that dignity extends even unto death.”
The entirety of Leeson’s work, Davidson said, offers an extraordinary portal into the vastness of human experiences. “He had such a unique vision of the world,” the former editor said. “There was an emotion in his photography. Over the years, Icould look at photos taken by my staff -— and we had a heck of astaff —and Icould pick out his photos 90% of the time.
He looked at the world differently than anybody Iever worked with.”
Born Oct. 18, 1957, in Abilene, Leeson was the son of a banker and a school secretary. His mother, Dolores Leeson, remembers him as an exceptionally bright and sensitive boy who excelled in his studies, and he also showed early daring. In grade school, he suffered severe burns on his leg while weaving through an obstacle course of homemade bonfires, requiring hospitalization and a twomonth recovery.
Leeson was still in grade school when his father put him in charge of the family’s vacation photography.
“His pictures,” his dad, Kirby Leeson, recalled, “were way better than mine.” Leeson’s grandmother gave him the first camera he could call his own. In middle school, he converted a garage supply room into a darkroom, and later, he turned a spare bedroom into a makeshift studio.
Leeson graduated from Cooper High School in 1976, and he pushed through Abilene Christian University in just two years, finishing with a journalism degree.
While still in college, at age 20, he took his first journalism job at The Abilene Reporter-News, where he worked for five years. Then, in 1982, he moved on to The New Orleans Times-Picayune/ States-Item. Two weeks into his new job, he happened to be minutes away from the suburban crash site of Pan Am Flight 759, which killed all 145 people on board. He was among the first on the scene — even before rescue crews, according to his mother — and Time magazine picked up his photos.
During his tenure in New Orleans, he also got his first taste of international assignments and the danger that could go with them.
Covering the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua, he was taken captive by the rebel group, and “it took several hours for David to convince them that he was not aspy,” his friend and fellow photographer David Kent told The Reporter- News in its news account of Leeson’s death.
Later, covering elections in El Salvador, Leeson was held captive again, this time by FMLN rebels, and he was briefly placed before a firing squad with another photographer.
“I truly believed I would die,” Leeson told fellow photojournalist Dirck Halstead in a 2005 interview that appeared in the online magazine The Digital Journalist. The two photographers were eventually rescued.
In those early days, Leeson went on to say in the interview, he had an attitude that “you have to be prepared to die” on assignment.
But over the years, he said, that changed. “My attitude today is, ‘No, I’m prepared to come back home alive.’ I was so immature when I first started out that every time I went through the emotional and mental exercises of saying, ‘You will not come back home — you will die.’ And Ithought that’s what the assignment takes.”
In 1984, Leeson moved on to The Dallas Morning News, arriving in a city that avidly supported a robust print-media environment.
At the time, The News was in a pitched newspaper war with the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald.
Both papers had the national stature, wealth and manpower to routinely cover global events. At its height, The News’ photography department counted 50 on staff, including 30 photographers; four of the paper’s nine Pulitzers were awarded to its photo staff.
Leeson quickly established himself as “always on top of the heap,” said Ken Geiger, The News’ former director of photography and another Pulitzer recipient. “He was one of the A-list photographers all the time. He was one of the most evocative and informative photographers, not just on The Dallas Morning News staff, but in the country.”
Like every other staff photographer, Leeson was on regular duty for the newspaper’s daily needs, and he consistently brought fresh creativity to even the most routine assignments. “You could send him to anything, and he’d come back, not only with a picture, but a really interesting picture,” said William Snyder, a fellow Pulitzerwinning photographer and a former director of photography for The News. “He was really, really good at making an interesting image out of nothing, and Ienvied that talent, because I’m not that way.”
Leeson also soon set a higher standard for the entire staff with his immersive style of journalism on more in-depth assignments.
Michael Precker, The News’ former Middle East bureau chief, remembers the impact that Leeson had on him during a tense 2½ months when they teamed to cover the unrest swelling against apartheid in South Africa in 1985.
“He inspired me and made my work better,” Precker recalled.
“We went to places that Iprobably wouldn’t have gone to myself, like dicey demonstrations and worker hostels in Soweto at 4o’clock in the morning. Things like that made my reporting so much better.
It’s the hardest, best work I ever did, and it was made immeasurably better by the fact that Iteamed up with David Leeson.”
Both reporter and photographer were arrested on charges of obstructing the police while covering amass protest, and they were in custody for several hours. “It was one cop’s bad decision,”
Precker explained. “We had to hire alawyer, went to court, and they didn’t dismiss charges, so they’re still out there somewhere.” The two were simply relieved they weren’t expelled from the country, Precker added, so they could continue their work.
In 1986, Leeson and News staff writer David Tarrant were given three months to dive deep into the story of homelessness in Dallas; both photographer and writer had an early lesson on what the task would take. “We wanted to start following this family around,”
Tarrant recalled, “and we did the traditional interview with them at the shelter and said, okay, we’ll meet you here tomorrow and just follow you around for a day or two. Overnight, they got into this huge fight and left the homeless shelter. They were gone by the time we showed up in the morning.” Tarrant recalled that Leeson was furious: “He said, ‘I need these moments. Ineed to be with these people. I can’t let them out of my sight.’” The reaction was career-changing for Tarrant, who was 27 at the time and accustomed to regular work hours and a just-the-facts reporting style: “I famously said, ‘Well, I guess I need moments, too.’ For the next six weeks, Tarrant and Leeson lived at the shelter and slept on the floor. Leeson extended his stay for weeks more. “We did the story based, in many ways, on David’s vision,” Tarrant said. “He wanted to show what the stress of living on the streets was like. Irealized I wasn’t going to be writing a news story. I was going to be writing a journey. It blew my mind because I had never written like that before.”
Tarrant recalled that Leeson’s intimate approach to subject matter discomfited some colleagues.
“There were raised eyebrows that he was going in too deep,” Tarrant says, “but for me, Isaw David as having a lot of empathy for his subjects. As a photographer, he needed access. But really, he also needed empathy to understand and capture those moments.
When he said, ‘I need moments,’ he meant, Ineed to see what this life is. Ineed to see when they feel pain, when they feel angry, when they feel happiness.”
With the homelessness assignment, Leeson unintentionally took his empathy to an extreme degree, wearing himself down and contracting encephalitis, which put him in the hospital for several days. That sort of self-sacrifice for the sake of astory was arecurring theme in his career.
In 1995, he suffered another calamity when he joined News staff writer Mark McDonald on assignment at the tail end of the Bosnian war. The two were profiling a Sarajevo marathon runner who was training for the 1996 Olympics, and Leeson took what he thought was the perfect spot to shoot his subject in action: the open hatchback of the pair’s rundown rented Volkswagen. McDonald was at the wheel, creeping up a hillside road, when he heard a thunk in the back. Leeson had fallen out, face down, into the road. McDonald came to aquick halt, got out and found the photographer bleeding profusely from a head wound.
“The poor runner didn’t know what was going on,” McDonald recalled, “and I said, ‘We gotta go down to the hospital and get you stitched up.’ Leeson said, ‘No, no, no, no.’ There was blood all over his cameras. Oh, it was terrible.
He insisted on getting right back into the same position in the car and continuing to shoot this guy.
And then we did go to the hospital, and he got stitched up.”
McDonald added, with a chuckle, “The pictures, of course, were beautiful.”
On another occasion, McDonald experienced Leeson’s capacity for risk-taking when the photographer insisted the two visit Sarajevo’s infamous “Sniper Alley.” “There were still snipers around, and he wanted to drive down this street just to say he did,” McDonald recalled.
“And brainiac that I was, I went with him.” Still, McDonald, who has since covered several more war zones, said he never considered Leeson to be reckless, or even fearless: “I think he probably had a little bit of fear, but he didn’t betray how he was feeling —not to me anyway.”
Diaz Meyer gained valuable insight into Leeson’s attitude toward fear when she came to her more seasoned colleague for advice after she drew her first war assignment, covering Afghanistan in 2001. “He asked me if I was scared,” Diaz Meyer recalled. “Well, I didn’t know to be scared, and Isaid, ‘No, should Ibe?’ And he gave me this look.” From Leeson, she said, she learned that day the importance of fear. “That’s what keeps you safe,” she said. “You have to keep your eyes open. You have to be incredibly diligent and aware of your surroundings.
As brave as David was, as insanely courageous as he was, he also knew to have fear. And yet he still persisted.”
Two years later, she and Leeson were tapped to be embedded in military units during the Iraq war.
Initially, Leeson was resistant to going. After bringing back horrific scenes from the Sudan war three years before, he thought he was ready to leave that part of his career behind, and he’d already turned down an Afghanistan assignment.
At the time, he was in the midst of reinventing himself as a videographer, pioneering the role of video in newspaper coverage and teaching the skills to other News photographers. As he mulled the Iraq offer, he reached out to family and close friends, seeking counsel. “And to my surprise, everyone said I should go,” Leeson recalled in his 2005 interview for The Digital Journalist. “They had seen a young photographer grow through the years, and they knew that Ihad the skills to do it. They knew if anybody could go out there and tell this story, Icould do it. And Iknew it, too, deep down.
Iknew that this could well be my story because I’ve worked so hard to get to that place. Here it is: Your chance to use all that experience, all those tough knocks you’ve had over the years, all those close calls, and put them to practice.”
Leeson ultimately came to Geiger, the director of photography, and said he would go if he could also shoot video, and Geiger agreed. Fellow Pulitzer winner Snyder remains in awe today that Leeson was able to accomplish so much with both still and liveaction coverage in a war setting.
Snyder said he has compared the footage of War Stories, the Leeson-produced documentary that came out of Iraq, to Leeson’s photo work, and he was astonished by how many of the same scenes were recorded on both pieces of equipment. “So he was doing both pretty much simultaneously,”
Snyder said, “which is really difficult to do, and he did it at areally high level.” (War Stories went on to win a National Headliners award, a national Edward R.
Murrow Award and a regional Emmy Award for best television documentary, one of two regional Emmys that Leeson received.) Leeson was embedded for several weeks with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division as it battled its way to Baghdad. Back home, Geiger eagerly watched for the images that Leeson and Diaz Meyer were transmitting each day. “They were just obviously head and shoulders above the rest of the visual reporting,” Geiger said. “Most of the images coming out of the war were from embeds, and Iwas looking at everything every day. So I would compare instantly what David and Cheryl were giving The Morning News to what the rest of the world was giving. That’s when I went into full gear, sharing their stuff. When you look at what we shared on the wires and what ran in other newspapers, it was amazing how many front-page images David and Cheryl had.”
Diaz Meyer didn’t get to see Leeson’s work until she returned to Dallas, and even she was astounded by the risks he took: “I told him on many occasions, oh my God, Ican’t believe you did that shot. I knew exactly what that took. I was in those same vehicles, and you’re trying to brace yourself and you’re holding thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, trying to make sure they don’t get banged up so they can continue to work —plus, getting out there and doing it when you know you could be shot at.
There were many times when I knew he made the shots from a position of being fully exposed.”
In The Digital Journalist interview, Leeson explained that he felt compelled to risk his life because the soldiers around him were risking theirs, and he watched some of them die. “You’re experiencing the same things they are, taking as much heat as they are,” he said. “I stood up at times Ididn’t need to stand up because I believed that I should. I mean, if they’re taking fire, Ishould take it, too. I’m here with you. My life isn’t worth more. Ican’t sit down behind armor and hide. I mean, a 19-yearold kid dies, how do you deal with that? I’d almost rather say, ‘Take me, God. I’m 46. I’ve lived already.
I’ve had great experiences.’ But a 19-year-old kid who doesn’t make it home — it was really hard.”
Leeson and Diaz Meyer were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in a May 24, 2004, ceremony in New York, but in the 2005 interview, he said he received an even greater honor than his profession’s highest award: his embed unit’s regimental colors. “It was out of the blue,” he said. “It was the first time in the regiment’s history that a civilian received the colors. They are normally given just to commanding officers when they leave their command.
As Ilook back and think about this honor, it symbolizes my role in Iraq. Ihad arole that was a greater role than being a photojournalist. It was just being a human being, being a citizen of this country. It was about caring about people. It’s sort of what we do all the time. Ihope we do.”
Iraq was Leeson’s final foray into awar zone, and he spent the next few years continuing to concentrate on video work. By 2008, media-industry forces had significantly diminished The News staff, and at age 50, Leeson decided to accept a buyout offer along with scores of other co-workers. “I never anticipated such things could be so painful,” he said in a2008 interview for the National Press Photographers Association newsletter.
He shared with the NPPA aletter he wrote to a friend that described his helplessness as he watched his profession decline. “I realized that no one has placed aname or aface or emotion on these traumatic events in our industry,” he wrote.
“I think that voice needs to be heard. What echoed in my mind was that the trauma could have been avoided. As I told my father, ‘The best thing management did was to hire people like me and my colleagues. The worst thing they did was to not listen to them.’”
In the final years of his life, Leeson established himself as a freelance videographer and photographer, creating media for both commercial and nonprofit uses.
He always took the time to offer advice and guidance to the many photography students and young photographers who sought him out. And he took the opportunity to more fully explore his artistic passions, creating a series of searing photographic self-portraits.
Married and divorced twice, he split his time between the Dallas area and Abilene over the past three years, and he had recently decided to permanently relocate to his hometown, where he especially enjoyed spending time with his two young granddaughters.
His mother recalled the tenderness that she witnessed in her son three weeks ago when his 11-yearold granddaughter brought him an in-progress science project. “She wanted Granddaddy David to help her,” Dolores Leeson recalled. “So they were in the kitchen, and David took pictures of her doing all this. Then whenever it was time
for her to make her little showing at the school, David took and clipped all the pictures, and she had pictures showing every stage of what she did.”
They were, she believes, the last photographs he took.
Leeson is survived by his parents, Kirby and Dolores Leeson; his sister, Deborah Leeson; his five children, Lauren, David, James, Gabriel and Quinn; and his six grandchildren.
An interment was held April 30 at Elmwood Memorial Park in Abilene, and an outdoor memorial service followed.
The family asks that memorial gifts be made to the David Leeson Fund for Excellence in Journalism at Abilene Christian University online at bit.ly/dleeson or by mailing acheck toACU Box 29132, Abilene, TX 79699.