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Photos of the Year 2000
Sunday, December 31, 2000
Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
The music of "Sugar" was still floating down to the graveside services when local musician Lee Robinson bowed his head in a last silent tribute to a great musician who had passed on. Stanley Turrentine died at 66, a day before completing a week-long engagement at New York's famous Blue Note.
The Pittsburgh native's funeral was held in the Hill District at Macedonia Baptist Church. Robinson was among four local tenor saxophonists performing "Amazing Grace" as an opening processional entered the church, but the family had requested no photography inside. I had hoped for a moving moment from the services and decided that I would have to follow along to the graveside services in Allegheny Cemetery. I saw Robinson, with whom I had talked earlier, position himself with his sax on a hillside above the crowd around the grave. After a rendition of taps, Robinson played Turrentine's famous 1970 song "Sugar." I shot a handful of pictures of him playing and just a couple of him bowed. It was among the last of many photos that day, but as often is the case, it was the defining one for this story.
John Heller, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
A Saturday night photog's nightmare: Another SEEN assignment, more of the same. But then, for just that most fleeting of moments, a real picture appears and a real purdy one, too. It's from the annual Pittsburgh Ballet Nutcracker Ball, where Kate Garrett and other students from the ballet school performed in the lobby of the Westin William Penn hotel.
Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
Point Park College students Janeen Connor (far left), Mike Thrustlic (back left), Ruth Gamble (front, white shirt), Rasheed Clark (back right) and Tanya Obernyer (right) performed an improvisational act as a warm-up for their performance in the HIV Prevention Theatre Demonstration Project, part of the Pittsburgh Association for the Arts and Education Therapy week.
Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
I first met Johnny Dollar by chance, as I was leaving Conneaut Lake Park in northwestern Pennsylvania. I was there on another assignment, and while I was walking out of the park, a man entering stopped me. Seeing my cameras, he said, "You must be from the press," and whipped out a scrapbook of his life as a performer. Johnny was on his way to sing at the park, and you just had to listen to his stories. Then about four years later, I got assigned to photograph him.
He was suing the Walt Disney Co., claiming the movie "Toy Story" was based on his idea. Now Johnny Wellington -- he goes by several performing names -- he welcomed me into his Ambridge home. I set up lights in his gold-patterned wallpapered living room and told him to sing for me. I bobbed and weaved with him as my strobes flashed, matching his rhythms -- Johnny said he wished he had a videotape of my "performance" of photographing him.
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