The Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer who captured the image of an injured, defiant Donald Trump waving his fist to a sea of supporters on Saturday after an apparent assassination attempt knew he had one task: to keep his camera on his subject.
“It’s a moment in history that you have to document, right?” Evan Vucci told The Daily Beast by phone late Saturday, hours after he captured the shocking images. “Being a photographer, you have to, have to be there. I can’t write about it later. I can’t go back in time and get a redo. So you have to do your job.”
Vucci was one of the pool photographers on duty during Trump’s late-day rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, one he perceived as a normal rally—not unlike those he’d covered before. Until, over his left shoulder, he heard gunshots.
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“From there, I trained my lens on former President Trump,” Vucci said.
Thoughts of his safety? Didn’t concern him. Thoughts of his surroundings? Irrelevant at that moment. All he cared about, he said, was what the conditions were to document history.
“What’s going to happen next? What do I need to do? Where do I need to be? What is the light? What is the composition? So those are the things that starts to go through your head,” he said. “It’s very much in the mindset where you’re just now doing your job.”
Videos captured Vucci racing toward the right side of the stage seconds after the shooting, as he believed it best to follow where the Secret Service agents were likely to escort Trump off the platform.
“They stand them up, and then he starts pumping his fists to the crowd,” Vucci said. “At that point you’re just making sure that your composition is good and you’re making the images that you need to make.”
Vucci’s photos took the nation by storm, documenting a bloodied former president a week before he was set to secure the Republican nomination. His photos, along with those of peers such as New York Times veteran photographer Doug Mills and Getty Images’ Anna Moneymaker, lit up all forms of news broadcasts and social media, a dark convergence of the virality of the digital age with the grim occasion of an assassination attempt on a U.S. leader.
History has trained Vucci for such a moment, teaching him the patience and calm nature needed to remain steady when a scene takes a sharp, potentially violent turn. An AP photographer for about 21 years, he won a Pulitzer in 2021 for his breaking news coverage of the 2020 racial justice protests in Washington, D.C. after George Floyd’s death, and he has covered wars, Washington, and almost everything in between.
Vucci was also known for capturing the face of the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President George W. Bush—though not Bush ducking to avoid the shoe, a moment he’s still frustrated by. “Bush ducking the shoe I never got because I was on the shoe thrower,” he said. “You just want to do the best you can so people can look back on it and be like, ‘Yeah, that was a moment in history.’ And here we are.”
Vucci wasn’t bothered by the rising conversation around his photos’ political significance, which pundits online noted how the striking shot of a bloodied Trump displaying strength—literally, in clenching his fist— could help tilt the election in his favor.
“I shoot politics for a living, man. Every single photo I take people are going to argue about,” Vucci said with a laugh. “I spend my life around a very highly polarized part of our society, so no matter what I do, people are gonna hate it. People are gonna love it. Listen, as long as everyone hates me equally, I’m doing the job.”
That responsibility guided Vucci through the harrowing moments on Saturday, producing photos that will help drive political discourse through the election and be imprinted in the minds of Americans—and likely history books—for generations.
“I’m glad I didn’t let anyone down. I got a standard to hold,” Vucci said. “I got into journalism to, you know—the idea is to inform the American public, and I hope that they can look at the photos and they can see what I saw that day.”
