Photojournalist Melvin Grier covered Greater Cincinnati and beyond for 33 years for The Cincinnati and Kentucky Post, retiring when The Post closed in 2007. Growing up in Cincinnati’s West End, he served in the Air Force, where a photography award led to his post-service career. From 1974 to 2007, his assignments for The Post took him to all corners of the metro region, and to a half-dozen different countries.
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Melvin Grier
Since his retirement, he has stayed active in photography, with exhibitions, a book, and as a board member since 2012 of
FotoFocus, the biennial event that celebrates photography and its ability to capture the human experience. Last year, the University of Cincinnati Press published
It Was Always About the Work: A Photojournalist’s Memoir, which includes nearly 100 of his photographs. With FotoFocus now in full swing at
more than 80 venues around the region, we asked Grier to select 10 of his favorite photos over the years and to share the stories behind them.
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Checkers
Two men passing the time playing checkers outdoors at the Laurel Homes housing project in the West End caught Grier's eye on a day when he took a bus from his home in Avondale to downtown to look for things to photograph. It was shot before he began his career at the paper, while he was honing his photography skills. "I never considerd photography a hobby," he says. "I always had a purpose. My purpose was to prove I could do this." This photograph happened quickly. "I just walked up and shot it," he says.
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Red Hat
This richly colored photo was shot in a studio on Sixth Street downtown as a freelance assignment for NIP Magazine. NIP (News, Information, Photographs) was published in Cincinnati for a regional Black audience, and featured profiles, fashion, rankings of historically black colleges and news about local businesses. Fashion photography always appealed to Grier, and he did some of that later at The Post with Mary Linn White, the longtime reporter who covered fashion, books, and society. "I always liked flowers in pictures too," says Grier, a lifelong gardener.
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Mayor Jerry Springer
Perhaps the most amazing comeback in Cincinnati political history belongs to Gerald Norman Springer. After being elected to City Council in 1971, he resigned in 1974 after a prostitution scandal. But he ran again in 1975 and won by a landslide. In 1977, he was chosen by his council colleagues to serve as mayor. Grier captured a beaming Springer on his first day in the mayor's chair.
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The Bodyguard
A trip to Kenya and then to neighboring Somalia to cover a Cincinnati charity's mission to deliver medical supplies to the African nations resulted in this photo. Local protection was a must for Westerners traveling through Somalia. Grier started riding in the back of the pickup with the armed guards and saw the juxtaposition of the neatly creased blue pants, the sandaled foot, and the threatening AK-47. "It just had a really interesting composition," he says. When another guard saw Grier trying to take the photo as the pickup bounced along the rough road, he grabbed him by the belt to steady him for the shot. It was Grier's second trip to Africa, and one of several assignments in different countries, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and El Salvador.
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The Painter
Early in his career at The Post, Melvin was walking to an assignment downtown when he happened upon this scene on Broadway Street, just a few blocks from the paper's offices. Balanced on one foot, stretching with brush in hand, and hanging on in case of disaster, the experienced painter presents a lively composition and possibly a question in viewers' minds: what happened next?
Always on the lookout for compelling scenes of people to photograph, Grier stopped to shoot the worker, who was too focused on hanging on to be aware that he was the subject. Grier was still getting his footing as a professional photojournalist, and capturing this image was a confidence booster. "This was a photograph that maybe convinced me I did belong," he says.
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Horses and Tractor
The Post staffed a bureau in Clermont County for many years, and for the photographers based at the paper's downtown headquarters "going out to the county" was a regular assignment. On this day, as he often did, Grier stopped on his way to another shoot when he saw this scene. Two farmers bedeviled by a broken-down tractor had hitched the machine to a pair of horses to get it moving. "It was too perfect," Grier says. This was an example of "wild art," photos that the shooter just happened to see and capture out in the wild.
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One by One
An assignment to shoot photos for a story on Lincoln Heights and its history resulted in this photo of children at Lincoln Heights Elementary lining up to go back in school after recess. The plan was to pjotograph kids at recess with the GE plant in neighboring Evendale (which, unlike Lincoln Heights, prospered from GE's wealth) in the background. But recess was over when he arrived. With a 400mm telephoto lens in hand, "I thought, 'Well, I'll just shoot the kids standing there," Grier says. In the next day's paper, the photo was published cropped in half by a hurried editor on deadline. It's reproduced here as originally taken. The photo has been used for a poster advertising a retrospective of Grier's work at the Weston Art Gallery.
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Red Beach, Vietnam
U.S. Marines first came ashore in Vietnam in 1965 at this beach. Grier and then city editor Mike Philipps, a Vietnam veteran, traveled to the country in the early 2000s to produce a series of stories about returning to the country two-plus decades after the war ended. Red Beach (now called Xuan Thieu) was more peaceful on their return, and Grier saw this shot, but the sun's reflection off the water mde it difficult to see the image through the camera lens. "I did what we commonly call a Hail Mary," he says. He held the camera above his head and aimed. Just as he did, the wind blew the young women's tunic, bringing motion to the image.
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El Salvador Rally
Grier and a reporter from Post's parent company E.W. Scripps traveled to El Salvador in the early '80s to cover the presidential election between Roberto D'Aubuisson and Jose Napoleon Duarte in a country torn by civil war. A political rally in a small town drew a big crowd, and a man who climbed a tree for a better view.
A fellow Post photographer loaned Grier his bulletproof vest for the trip (why he owned one was never asked). But the armor was confiscated by authorities at the El Salvador airport. On the way back, he tried to retrieve the vest from the airport police. During the negotiation, shots rang out at the airport. "I said, 'That's OK, keep the vest,' and we got the hell out of there," he says.
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Urban Ninjas
Many of Grier's favorite photos are scenes he happened to see while on the way to a newspaper assignment or somewhere else. Waiting in a parking lot for a reporter to show up for an assignment in Cincinnati's West End, Grier encountered these masked boys. "I said, 'What are you guys supposed to be?' They said, 'We're ninjas.' I said OK and took their picture." Grier was familiar with the West End neighborhood, having grown up on Lincoln Park Drive (now Ezzard Charles Drive).