John Filo

John Paul Filo (; born August 21, 1948) is an American photographer whose picture of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio wailing in grief while kneeling over the dead body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Age 21 at the time, Filo was both a photojournalism student at Kent State University, and staffer of the Valley Daily News, which became the Valley News Dispatch and later a satellite paper for the Greensburg Tribune-Review.

Biography After winning the Pulitzer Prize while working for the Valley Daily News (a Gannett paper) of the Pittsburgh suburb of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, he continued his career in photojournalism, rapidly finding work at the Associated Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and as a picture editor at the Baltimore Evening Sun. He eventually rose to a picture editing job at the weekly news magazine Newsweek, and became head of photography for CBS.

Taking the picture

The Kent State shooting by members of the Ohio National Guard occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio on May 4, 1970, and resulted in the deaths of four students. At the time John Filo was in the university student photography lab when the shots rang out. He quickly ran outside and below recalls what happened:

To take the picture Filo used a Nikkormat camera with Tri-X film and most of the exposures were 1/500 between 5.6 and f 8 depending on whether the sun was behind a cloud or not. Numerous publications, including Time (Nov. 6, 1972, p. 23; Jan. 7, 1980, p. 45) and People (May 2, 1977, p. 37; April 30, 1990, p. 117), have used the altered image without knowing it.

Meeting with Mary Ann Vecchio In 1995, Filo met Mary Ann Vecchio for the first time, when both were scheduled to appear at an Emerson College conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the shootings.

The two met again on the Kent State University campus, at the 39th commemoration in May 2009, where they both spoke.