2004 Ken Faught

KEN FAUGHT

A visual artist originally from the West Coast, photographer Ken Faught, 53, has spent the past two decades traveling Canada and the world making pictures for the Toronto Star, the country’s largest newspaper. Born in Prince Rupert, B.C. he began his career by venturing with his cameras to Yellowknife and Whitehorse covering the Canadian north for several newspapers before being hired on at the Star.

Ken Faught

Ken Faught

Despite the thrill of overseas assignments, Faught takes great pride in making the most of covering news and other events on his home turf in Toronto. Nominated several times for National Newspaper awards, his favourite assignment was the contribution he made to a spousal abuse investigative series that exposed the failings of Ontario’s criminal justice system. The series won both a National Newspaper Award and the Governor General’s Award for Public Service Journalism, and led to changes in the policing and prosecution of domestic violence cases in the province.

His most recent major assignment was the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece where his work resulted in the award-winning picture of a horse and rider parting company during the cross-country horse competition.

Ken says: “You never know when the picture is going to happen when covering sports — the agony when you miss, the thrill when you capture the moment. Covering an Olympics is a dream job where you are constantly focused on the latter.

“Olympic organizers did an amazing job of getting us to and from all the sporting venues, but there were exceptions. In this case, where I was assigned to cover the cross-country horse competition, a single mini-van was arranged to transport 300 photographers from around the world to places along the multi-kilometre course. Rather than wait hours, I decided to walk and arrived at the water jumps drenched from the 35-degree heat and trapped behind a rope just as the first rider of 88 competitors, Austria’s Raemmi Daemmi, sped by on the course.

“After being let through the rope, I set about trying to see which angle I should take for the second rider. That’s when I glanced around and saw the first rider returning along the course heading for the log jump. I barely had my camera to my eye when he landed unceremoniously between the logs. It was the first frame shot of the day.

If you look closely at the bottom right corner of the picture, you see the blue shirt of an emergency worker rushing to the jump. In the second frame, the horse was completely blocked out of the picture.