It began like any other campaign rally — one that photographer Evan Vucci had covered a hundred times before for the Associated Press.
Former President Donald Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, greeted his supporters and started his speech.
Then, in a flash, it was chaos.
“Over my left shoulder. I heard some pops, and I knew right away it was gunfire,” Vucci said of Saturday’s assassination attempt. “At that moment, I trained my lens on the stage, and I saw the Secret Service agents coming in and covering (Trump) up. From there, I just went into work mode, and I just started doing my job.”
While many at the rally took cover, Vucci and other photojournalists leapt into action.
The Secret Service rushes the stage immediately after the shooting. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Trump is helped into an SUV and taken away from the rally. (Evan Vucci/AP)
“It’s all instinct at that point,” said Vucci, the AP’s chief Washington photographer. “You’re not thinking about anything else other than like, ‘I have to make this photograph.’ It’s the curse of the still photographers: I can’t go back and recreate this. I have to get it now.”
Vucci was in the buffer area right in front of the stage when the gunshots rang out. His first thought wasn’t for his own safety but rather documenting the moment taking place in front of him. There are no second chances to capture history through a camera lens.
“I’m trying to get the best angle to see where I can get a view of the president,” he recalled. “And then in my mind I start thinking, ‘OK, how is he going to get out of here? Where they going to take him? What are they going to do?’ He eventually stands up, and I knew that they were going to take him off the other side of the stage, so I sprinted to the other side of the stage.”
Vucci photographed the Secret Service agents helping Trump up and taking him away to safety.
“As he stands up, he looks at the crowd and he starts pumping his fist,” Vucci said. “In my viewfinder, I can see the blood on the side of his face. And I think that was the moment that a lot of people are sharing.”
Doug Mills has been covering presidents for more than 40 years now. The New York Times photographer had never experienced anything like he did on Saturday.
“It was so fast and so chaotic and frightening as hell,” he said.
Before the shooting, Mills had been moving around the stage, getting different angles of Trump before settling just below the podium and looking up. Then he heard the gunshots, which he thought might have been a motorcycle or maybe a tractor backfiring.
It was from this vantage point that Mills would capture one of the most famous photos of the shooting.
It just took him a while to realize it.
Long after Trump had been whisked away to safety, Mills was going through his photos and sending them back to his editors at the Times.
He knew his photos had documented the moment that Trump was hit by a bullet — you could easily see, over a series of images, Trump grimacing and then reaching at his right ear.
But editor Jennifer Mosbrucker informed him that he had caught something else.
“Jen called me back five minutes later and said, ‘You won’t believe this,’ ” Mills said. “I thought I’d (messed) it up. That was my first thought. And she said, ‘There’s an actual picture of a bullet behind his head.’ I was like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘You were at such a high shutter speed that it captured it.’ ”
She told Mills that an FBI ballistics specialist looked at the photo and called it a “one-in-a-million” shot.
Trump flinches after being hit in the ear by a bullet. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)
Trump reaches for his injured ear. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)
Anna Moneymaker, a Getty Images photographer, was with Vucci and Mills and thought the gunshots were fireworks at first.
“But then when the crowd started screaming and some of the wranglers started to tell us to get down with this look of shock and confusion on their faces, I just thought it was surreal,” she said.
Her breathing became heavy and her head started spinning, but she kept her finger on the shutter and managed to get a photo that became one of the day’s most memorable.
“I moved to get to where I was on stage right and saw all these agents on top of (Trump) — and then I saw his face through the agents’ legs,” she said. “I did not know how bad he had been hit, so I just wanted to see him and make images to see how he was. I saw blood going down his face. I made a few overexposed frames before getting my settings correct, and then the agents started to raise him off the ground once the gunfire had stopped.”
Mills, Moneymaker and Vucci all talked about how important it was to stay focused on their job in the middle of the madness.
Vucci covered Iraq and Afghanistan in the early part of his career and has been in combat situations before. He said his experience helped him stay calm while everything was unfolding. He, like his colleagues, focused on the basics.
“I’m looking through the viewfinder and I’m thinking, ‘OK, what’s my light? Where’s the composition?’ I’m telling myself, ‘Slow down, slow down, frame, compose’ — all the things that photographers tell themselves,” he said. “It’s so important in that moment not to just slam on the motor drive just to hope you can get something. You’ve got to continue to make photos. You’re not taking photos. You’re making them.”
When Trump was shot, Moneymaker remembers cursing under her breath and saying “oh my God, oh my God.” But she didn’t freeze up.
“I really just wanted to document history and get the picture,” she said. “I was a little nervous. Like what am I gonna have to show for this? So I just kept on clicking my shutter. In between expletives, I just said, ‘Keep on making pictures.’ ”
Mills tried to remember what he learned from Ron Edmonds, a former colleague at the Associated Press who photographed Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981.
“I always talked to him about what the situation was when he photographed Reagan being shot, and not flinching and not looking away and just staying focused on what’s in front of you,” Mills said.
Running on just a couple of hours of sleep on Sunday, he took a moment to reflect on what he had experienced in Butler.
“It was horrific. It was scary as hell in hindsight — probably did not make the most wise decision for my safety. But I was doing my job,” he said.
It was a sentiment echoed by his fellow photographers.
“I’m just glad that everything was in focus and I did the job that I was supposed to do,” Vucci said.
