An Image from Oklahoma City

David Allen

For the past thirty-one years, I have worked as a free-lance sports and commercial photographer based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Growing up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, I learned about the world of photography from my father, who traveled everywhere for the Phillips Petroleum Company and brought back pictures that he had taken with his simple camera. While serving in the U.S. Navy, I bought my first camera, a Pentax Spotmatic, and I was hooked on the field. On April 19, 1995, my focus changed at once and permanently—from taking sports shots to covering events related to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building and its aftermath. I must have learned on the fly to take pictures in a photojournalistic style. One of the images that I took early on involved a rescue worker, Anthony "Skip" Fernandez III from Miami, Florida, and his golden retriever, Aspen. To explain how that picture came to be taken, I feel that it is best to go back to April 19, 1995, and write a little about that day and the week that followed.	1
On April 19, 1995, at 9:02 a.m., when a bomb inside a Ryder rental truck exploded, life as I knew it changed forever. That morning, I was at work at a retail camera store as usual. Since I had just arrived, I was chatting with a couple of co-workers at our downstairs counter when our building, located about two miles northwest of the Murrah Building, started shaking from the shock wave of the explosion. Both of the doors started shaking, and the motion did not let up for what seemed like five to ten seconds. None of our windows blew in, and later I thought to myself that we were lucky.	2
Photographers in Oklahoma City and others from throughout the United States who descended on our city began to show the world what had happened. On April 19, the only pictures I took were a series of photos of the building around 1:30 p.m. I wanted to see what the building looked like after the explosion. On that particular day, having nothing previously scheduled and no idea what the day would bring, I had left my equipment at home. As a result, during my lunch hour I had to go home and get the photo equipment I needed. In retrospect, there have been times when I wished I had grabbed a camera and film from work and gone downtown right away. (Later I spoke with people who had been in that area; all they could talk about was the carnage they had seen.) But I did not go downtown that morning, and I now have no regrets about that.	3
I had an idea for a good vantage point; I positioned myself on the southeast side of a six-story parking garage across the street directly south of St. Anthony Hospital. Using a 300 mm telephoto lens, I was able to make ten good photographs of the Murrah Building, from an angle that, I felt, not too many others had used. When I returned to work after taking the pictures, I found my wife, Debbie, waiting to borrow my car so that she could get home. Her car was parked in a parking garage on Sixth Street just north of the Journal Record Building, located just north of the Murrah Building. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had seized that very parking garage as part of a federal crime scene. When the Ryder truck exploded in front of the Murrah Building, debris went north over the Journal Record Building, some landing on its roof, some in the nearby parking garage that my wife used.	4
Map of downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, before the bombing on April 19, 1995.   . . . There are about 2399 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.