Newspaper photographers prefer to avoid being part of the story they’re shooting, but sometimes fate intervenes.
That happened to Business in Vancouver’s Chung Chow during an otherwise routine assignment on June 14 around 3:30 p.m., across Westminster Highway from the Richmond Public Market.
As Chow prepared to photograph Kenny Chiu, the former Steveston-Richmond East Conservative member of Parliament, a middle-aged woman wearing a baseball cap and blue denim shirt arrived with groceries at her parked car. Chow decided to wait until she was finished, assuming that she would not want to be in the background of the shot.
“Once she closed the trunk, I saw her go to start walking towards the side of the car. I started with my camera, focusing in and composing Kenny,” Chow recalled. “There was a shouting match and I turned around in time to see the aggressor try to run the lady with the bike, charged at her with it, yelling and swinging. Kenny rushed in and stood between them. I was in a bit of a shock.”
The woman with the bicycle, wearing a grey hoodie, appeared to attack Chiu, so Chow stood between Chiu and her.
“I sort of forgot my job,” Chow said.
As the women shouted in Cantonese, Chiu said he discerned that the one with the bicycle was a labourer who had a workplace feud with the other woman.
“The cyclist said the driver had cost her significantly, dearly, something to do with an iPad and so the problem is the way she expressed her frustration and the anger,” Chiu said.
“I kept yelling at her, ‘This is no way of resolving your issue, this is no way of solving any dispute that you have. She may have done something to you, but hitting her, using your bicycle to ram her, it's not the way in Canada’!”
A Richmond RCMP officer arrived, intervened and took statements from the two women and Chow and Chiu.
Chiu said the woman with the bicycle had scraped one of her fingers when she dropped the bicycle. He later discovered a blood splatter on his shirt, but came away from the incident more concerned about both women and “the difficult lives new immigrants are living under."
According to Richmond RCMP public information officer Cpl. Dennis Hwang, “one of the persons involved was apprehended under the Mental Health Act.”
Chow, a professional photographer for more than 30 years, said a few other harrowing incidents come to mind.
Last year, he was shooting a crowd waiting for a bus during an assignment about the hustle and bustle of Vancouver’s Broadway and Commercial intersection. A woman, apparently unaware that photographers are free to shoot in public in Canada, decided to stand in front of Chow’s lens and not leave. Chow retreated to a nearby Starbucks and she eventually gave up.
“I just went back to what I was doing,” he said.
In the late 1990s, while on assignment in Chinatown for a Vancouver community newspaper, a butcher chased him with a meat cleaver.
Chow said the man was paranoid and wrongly assumed he worked for the Xinhua News Agency, “which everyone knows is the Chinese government's spy agency, pretending to be a news agency.”
