Westport native Spencer Platt reflects on recent Pulitzer Prize

It was an image much closer to home though that recently won him the Pulitzer Prize. He was one of five photojournalists on Getty’s team to win for breaking news photography for their collection of “riveting photos of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

“It’s an honor, it really is,” Platt, a Staples grad, said during a program at the Westport Library on Wednesday.

The photo is of a man in a red jacket and Trump hat, holding an American flag and looking sideways directly into Platt’s camera from behind a gas mask. The crowd surrounding him is blurred showing some of the chaos of the day.

“I didn’t think in a million years this would happen,” Platt said of the riot.

Platt had covered part of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency and had always seen some control to the rallies, never devolving like they did on Jan. 6, 2021.

That day he was covering a rally elsewhere in Washington D.C., and ran to the Capitol when it started, getting past scaffolding already set up for the inauguration to get close.

“It’s one of those things where when you’re in the heart of it, you don’t really know what’s happening,” he said. It wasn’t until he got back to his hotel that night that he learned protestors had gotten inside the Capitol and people had died.

Platt was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021 for his team coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. He won the World Press Photo of the Year in 2006 for his image of a group of Lebanese in a red convertible mini cooper in Beirut shortly after a bombing.

“It’s kind of the beauty of chaos,” he said of that 2006 image and why it might have won.

Platt said war photos can become cliche and he likes to look for the mulitudes of elements that might pique a viewer’s curiosity and draw them in. In this case, a juxtaposition of wealth and culture with a background of destruction.

“A good news photo needs to be complicated,” he said.

He’s no stranger to having his work travel the globe. His image of the World Trade Center engulfed in flames on 9/11 appeared everywhere. He had heard the first plane come in over the radio and his wife Erica Sashin — also a Staples grad — suggested he go check it out.

Platt, admittedly somewhat begrudgingly, grabbed his camera and headed out to the Brooklyn Bridge, forgetting his other camera and wallet at home. He could tell from the atmosphere that it wasn’t just a commercial plane that crashed.

He had raised his camera to his eye for just a few moments when the second plane hit. He said he didn’t see the explosion, just felt the heat.

He recalled how he and Tyler Hicks, a fellow Staples grad who won a Pulitzer Prize for his photos in 2014, went down to the scene in the days after and covered the events following the terrorist attack.

Platt is based in New York City where he lives with Sashin and their daughter. It means he does a lot of assignments around the city, though he’ll also hop on his motorcycle to cover other stories. He got his start working for newspapers after graduating from Clark University before joining Getty in 2001.

With Getty, he’s been able to travel the world, including covering humanitarian aid in Africa — a place he really wants to go back to.

“They kind of get left out the headlines, out of the papers unless some catastrophe happens,” Platt said.

Platt was also able to cover the Tour de France about seven or eight years ago, spending a month on the back of a motorcycle photographing the cyclists as they raced through the course. He brought his news eye to it, fascinated by the chaos around it like doctors stitching cyclists up as they pedaled, and focusing more on the scenes around the event than just on the athletes themselves. As a cyclist, he considers it a high point in his career.

Most recently, he went to Buffalo, N.Y., in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a Tops grocery store where 10 people were killed and three others injured. He then photographed the funeral of Roberta Drury, the youngest of the victims, in Syracuse, N.Y.

“It’s devastating,” Platt said.

He said there is a large team from Getty in Texas now, not even two weeks later, following the recent school shooting in Uvalde, but he didn’t ask to go.

“I feel like we’re at the end of our tether with what the media can do,” Platt said, adding the shootings are happening with such frequency that he can almost expect another vigil will happen in a week.

In his profession, Platt sees a lot of difficult experiences and death. To be in this business, he said you have to be able to turn your emotions off and put a wall up between you and the assignment.

You also have to remind yourself why you’re there, he said.

“You’re the eyes, you’re the ears for millions of people who can’t be there,” Platt said.

And those long rides on his motorcycle to get to the assignments help, serving as part of the journey. On his way from Buffalo to Syracuse, he traveled through small farm towns and past Little League games where people waved.

“You have to remind yourself of the goodness, the decency of what’s out there,” he said.

While Platt said it’s important to cover what’s happening overseas, like in Ukraine, he wants to continue to focus his lens on America.

“There’s so many issues in America right now, whether it be opioids, guns, race,” he said. “It needs coverage.”