Alumni Profile
Painting a Thousand Words
He was part of three
Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times photo teams, but it was a picture for USC’s El Rodeo yearbook that first taught Boris Yaro a bittersweet lesson about the photojournalist’s lot in life. Yearbook readers never got the full impact of his 1963 photograph, taken the day after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
“I was walking back from the library,” Yaro recalls, “and there, laying in the cobblestone street, was a copy of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner [with the headline] ‘Kennedy Killed in Dallas.’ Looking up, I saw the USC flag at half-mast. I took a picture showing the newspaper and the flag [in the same frame]. It helped me feel a little better about the incident, since I was able to do something with the strength of that image.”
The yearbook editors printed the photo. However, they cropped it as a vertical – showing just the length of the flagpole with no newspaper. “This taught me that editors are not your friends,” Yaro says.
Before being hired full-time by the Los Angeles Times in 1966, Yaro freelanced for the Times and the Associated Press while also working as a photographer at USC for El Rodeo and the Daily Trojan. “For me, photography is a natural thing,” he says. “That's my life, and it's always been my life.”
During his five years as a part-time telecommunications student at USC, he balanced the academic world with the cold, hard reality of L.A. street life. “Sometimes it was weird because I would spend half the night chasing fire engines and police cars,” he says. “Then I would go to school in the daytime and listen to students talk about whether a V-neck sweater was the thing to wear.”
Yaro’s three-decade career at the Los Angeles Times was marked by historic and dramatic assignments – notably the Watts riots in 1965, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 and 1994’s Northridge earthquake. Shortly before his retirement from the Times in August, the 63-year-old Yaro was honored with a 40-picture exhibition of his work at Cal State Northridge. For the veteran photojournalist – who continues to freelance and enjoys dabbling in today’s digital technology – capturing the images of time has remained his life’s work.
“I hide behind my camera,” he says. “Even though the event may be horrific, it's still a journal of that particular day and all the things that happen with it.”
Painting a Thousand Words
He was part of three
 |
“I was walking back from the library,” Yaro recalls, “and there, laying in the cobblestone street, was a copy of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner [with the headline] ‘Kennedy Killed in Dallas.’ Looking up, I saw the USC flag at half-mast. I took a picture showing the newspaper and the flag [in the same frame]. It helped me feel a little better about the incident, since I was able to do something with the strength of that image.”The yearbook editors printed the photo. However, they cropped it as a vertical – showing just the length of the flagpole with no newspaper. “This taught me that editors are not your friends,” Yaro says.Before being hired full-time by the Los Angeles Times in 1966, Yaro freelanced for the Times and the Associated Press while also working as a photographer at USC for El Rodeo and the Daily Trojan. “For me, photography is a natural thing,” he says. “That's my life, and it's always been my life.” Boris Yaro’s dramatic photo of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. |
During his five years as a part-time telecommunications student at USC, he balanced the academic world with the cold, hard reality of L.A. street life. “Sometimes it was weird because I would spend half the night chasing fire engines and police cars,” he says. “Then I would go to school in the daytime and listen to students talk about whether a V-neck sweater was the thing to wear.”Yaro’s three-decade career at the Los Angeles Times was marked by historic and dramatic assignments – notably the Watts riots in 1965, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 and 1994’s Northridge earthquake. Shortly before his retirement from the Times in August, the 63-year-old Yaro was honored with a 40-picture exhibition of his work at Cal State Northridge. For the veteran photojournalist – who continues to freelance and enjoys dabbling in today’s digital technology – capturing the images of time has remained his life’s work.
“I hide behind my camera,” he says. “Even though the event may be horrific, it's still a journal of that particular day and all the things that happen with it.”– Scott Rivers
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Boris Yaro
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