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MY NAME IS MUD
by Mark Hertzberg
Director of Photography
Racine (WI) Journal Times
I've been vilified in yet another letter to the editor because of what is now the most controversial one-column photo I've ever taken.
Racine's Fourth of July parade is the state's largest. It's a fun, annual party which takes more than three hours to pass a spectator at any given point. The late Sen. Bill Proxmire marched in it every year.
One of the major industries
in town is a tractor company, and they always have tractors in the parade.
I was riding my bike along the parade route (to be in the parade with our
bike club) when I saw a broken down tractor on a side street, with four people
trying to fix it. It had lost fuel pressure.
| I got a visually interesting photo of one of the mechanics seemingly being swallowed up under the hood, and we ran the photo, with a caption explaining that the tractor never made it to the parade | 
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My name is m-u-d at the company now, with employees and their friends castigating me for ridiculing a local industry.
I told the plant manager, who called me, that I had not intended to ridicule anyone or the company, that companies make mistakes, and that we put our mistakes out in the open every time we run a correction. He then told me that he used to work for a competitor and that their local paper never would have printed a photo like that, one that he thinks just tells customers to buy another brand of tractor.
The letters to the editor and the people who call me ask what constructive reason I could have had to print a photo that put a major local industry in a bad light. Obviously they are very close to their work, so I mostly just listen, knowing the futility of going into too much detail about how we do our jobs, a process which sometimes includes showing negatives as well as positives.
I've got thick skin, but I was really stunned by the backlash from what I saw as a simple slice of life photo.
Mark Hertzberg
