Color Run: it’s a war out there

There’s a fine line sometimes between the appearance of joy and terror. Take this shot; looks like war photography, right?

TWAM 20 Feb 2016

There’s a fine line sometimes between the appearance of joy and terror in a photo.

Take this shot of the party after a Color Run, where dyed cornflour is being chucked around in an ecstasy of selfies. Kind of looks like war photography, doesn’t it? The flying debris, the confusion, the gritted teeth. A few of them surrendering; the rest shooting like mad.

Perhaps that’s no coincidence: Reuters snapper Jason Reed has seen his fair share of combat. At 24 he was covering the civil war in Sri Lanka, crossing the front lines with rolls of film smuggled in his underwear; two years later he was in Afghanistan getting shelled by the Taliban. In 2014, his dramatic shots of Sydney’s Lindt café hostages fleeing into the arms of police snipers went around the world.

Reed, 46, knew the only place to be at the Color Run was right in the thick of it – “if you aren’t close enough, the pictures won’t be good enough” – and he had the foresight to wrap his camera in plastic, for a lot of coloured powder gets thrown at this 5km fun run. The commercial event, inspired by India’s Holi festival, has gone global since launching in 2011, fuelled by social media and the selfie generation.

Reed, for one, is bemused by the selfie phenomenon. Perhaps he’s old school. After a “typical suburban upbringing” in Sydney he joined Reuters as a teenage copy boy and worked his way up to a decade-long tenure as the agency’s White House photographer. On the wall at home in Cronulla is a photo of his private audience with Barack Obama during Reed’s final flight on Air Force One – taken by someone else. He doesn’t do selfies, you see; he puts the camera down to drink in the big experiences. “Otherwise, is it really living in the moment?