VALHALLA, NY. Three-day old newborn premature baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Westchester Medical Center University Hospital in Valhalla, NY on Wednesday, April 13, 2005. © CHET GORDON / THE IMAGE WORKS
I’ve been meaning to write about this image for a quite a while now. This image has sold numerous times and continues to sell to this day. It was made during a simple assignment when I was a freelancer for the NY Daily News back in 2005. Real simple. If memory serves, this child was born to a Westchester County, NY woman who at 21 years old or so, already had two or three children at home. Be escorted into the hospital’s Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with the PR rep, meet mom and make a few frames of mom and then the baby. I think we even had mom holding her new baby for the “Tee-Vee” cameras too. I could only make a few frames with bounce flash in the ward, as the lights were kept dim for the other preemies in their incubators and such. That’s what I remember about the assignment 5 years ago…
Cut to today: When I’d received another royalty check a few weeks ago from my editorial agency, The Image Works, I got to thinking about exactly how much money this image has earned in editorial resales. After corresponding with one of the research editors at the agency, I was quite pleased to learn that the image has sold 8 times so far to clients such as Houghton & Miflin (textbook publishers) and Allyn & Bacon (textbook and professional book publishers)
Chet Gordon resides in the lower Hudson Valley region of New York. A photojournalist for more than 25 years, he recently worked as Westchester Magazine's first photo editor, and previously was a staff photographer at four NYC metro area newspapers. He was also a photo editor at the NY Daily News for 5 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, International Herald-Tribune, USA Today, MailOnline (UK), Army Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Popular Photography magazines, among others. He is a career member of the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPPA), and a former board member of the NY Press Photographer’s Association (NYPPA). He served honorably as a U.S. Marine in the mid-1980's, including 2+ years stationed on Okinawa, Japan, and throughout Southeast Asia. A longtime volunteer and travel enthusiast, he accompanies several humanitarian aid clients on their international disaster relief and medical missions. Since 1997, he's worked in several African countries, the Middle East, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, as well as Afghanistan, Haiti, the Russian Federation, and Thailand. He routinely mentors young photographers looking to break into the industry and vacations in Bermuda and Kenya.
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