“The Photo” launches Tyler doctor’s career with the Associated Press

by Jimmy Isaac

“The Photo,” as he calls it, began Lieberman’s career as an Associated Press independent contract contributor for the past nine years. He snaps his camera throughout the world on his own time, sometimes flooding the syndicated news market with his images.

Dr. Lieberman in Alaska

TYLER — When Dr. Scott Lieberman’s now iconic image of the space shuttle Columbia exploding over Texas splashed across major newspapers and Time Magazine, many professional photojournalists were quick to dismiss his opportunistic photo as circumstantial luck.

The photo – a seemingly streaming starburst across a blue February 1, 2003 sky – gave the world its first images of the shuttle explosion that killed seven crew members. Within a year, an estimated 2.4 billion people had seen Lieberman’s photo, which garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

"Challenger Night"

In a recent visit with Piney Woods Live, the 50-year-old Tyler cardiologist chuckled as he recalled hearing photojournalists’ grumblings: “‘Oh well, this was just a random guy who caught a picture,’” or, “’Too bad a real photographer didn’t take this picture.’”

During a recent visit and cruise in Alaska, he captured the image of a whale breaching the sea’s surface. By the time he reached Anchorage, the photo was above the fold on the local newspaper’s front page that day, he said.

"Whale" – Photographed in Alaska

“The people on the ship just thought that was so cool,” Lieberman remembered. “I would kind of view that as selling ice to the Eskimos, to sell a picture of a whale to the Anchorage paper.”

Many of his Alaskan images involve glaciers – either felling trees in a dense forest or breaking apart in large chunks and falling into bodies of water. Using his phone, Lieberman flips through those pictures and others that he has taken over the years, from lightning strikes over Tyler, or looking down over Tyler from a helicopter, or of the Texas Stadium implosion from atop the bell tower of nearby University of Dallas. He has a collection of celebrity shots, from Sarah Palin to Miranda Lambert, Howie Mandel and Gladys Knight, mostly because he photographs many performances at the University of Texas at Tyler’s Cowan Center.

"Texas Stadium Implosion"

Like most photographers, he has thousands of images. Unlike most amateur photographers, Lieberman’s images are published around the world in newspapers and magazines and online.

His space program images generally receive play in major publications despite competing, in a sense, with hundreds of photojournalists. The reason for his success may stem from how he acquired the images.

On one occasion, he was among about 150 photojournalists at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, La., waiting to photograph a 747 carrying the shuttle Discovery. The plane and shuttle landed before daybreak in December 2008, and photographers clicked perhaps thousands of images of its landing and eventual takeoff, but after the 747 reentered the skies, the photographers and television news crews packed up and headed to their vehicles.

"Moon Set"

Lieberman, seeing that the 747 and shuttle took off to the west, realized that they would have to turn toward the southeast to reach Cape Canaveral, Fla. He took out two long lenses and prepared to capture the plane and shuttle flying in the orange morning sunrise skies. Several other photojournalists noticed.

“They had their shot. That was the picture, and they were getting up and going,” Lieberman said. “They started looking around and began to realize that the shot was going to happen, and some of them started getting their equipment out to try to get the image.”

It was too late. Despite the thousands of images taken that morning – including those taken of the plane and shuttle’s landing in Florida later that morning – most media publications ran the Associated Press syndication of Lieberman’s shot because it was unique, he told us.

“The good [photojournalists] know how to get [the iconic shot], but some of them don’t have the time. They are also under a deadline and very often they have very specific marching orders. They need a picture of Person X talking in front of Sign Y, and that’s it. They have a story that they’re doing that requires that, and that’s their job,” Lieberman said. “Fortunately, for me, it’s not a job. They’ve given me a lot of liberty to sort of go and collect images, such as a glacier knocking down trees. If you know where the glacier is, you go to the place in the forest.”

"FB Landing Day"

Before his photojournalism career took off in 2003, Lieberman had already found his way into media. On May 9, 1987, he was working at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s medical office and was among several doctors on the tarmac awaiting Air Force One, which was transporting President George H.W. Bush who was going to take a helicopter to the funeral of CIA leader Bill Casey. As they waited, word arrived that a chartered plane bound for New York City had crashed near Warsaw, Poland. Relatives of the victims began arriving at a Kennedy airport terminal with one person experiencing chest pains, Lieberman said. Both events were the top two stories on the major TV networks, and footage or Lieberman was used in both stories – one awaiting Air Force One, the other of him helping push the stretcher of the chest pain victim to an ambulance – one awaiting Air Force One, the other of him helping push the stretcher of the chest pain victim to an ambulance.

“So yeah, my 15 minutes [of fame] have run a few times over,” he joked.

And on September 11, 2001, he was at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., when the terrorist attacks of that day led federal authorities to shut down all air travel. An Associated Press reporter searching for quotes from travelers stumbled upon Lieberman, and his statement was replayed in hundreds of newspapers.

“I guess we’re at war now. We just need to figure out with who,” Lieberman told the reporter as he awaited a ride back to Tyler. “I think this is worse than Pearl Harbor. It brings a whole new meaning to ‘Day of Infamy.”’

“I never found out who the reporter was,” Lieberman told Piney Woods Live. “She was going around getting quotes of people at DFW. She took my quote, and I thought about it for a few seconds when she asked me what I thought it meant. That quote got widely distributed and used a lot.”

Lieberman and his family moved to Tyler from New York in 1993 to join Cardiovascular Associates of East Texas. After several years on West Fifth Street, the firm a couple months ago moved to a larger, more modern facility in the Green Acres Shopping Center on Troup Highway.

"Rollover"

Among his favorite images, Lieberman said, is of an inverted flight on a P-51 Mustang, a fighter-bomber used during World War II, the Korean War and other 20th Century conflicts. He shot photos with the camera in his right hand while flying the aircraft with his left hand, pinning his elbow against the canopy to steady the 13 shots he took, he said.

More than 300 of his images are available for view on his Facebook page. Along with his photos, Lieberman is also an enthusiastic supporter of the arts in East Texas, and he acknowledges that the beneficiaries of wealthy area industries such as energy and medicine have resulted in a substantial wealth of art housed in this region.

“So much money flowed through here in the 1930s - two billion barrels of oil flowed from the East Texas Oil Field. If you look at Tyler, and Longview, for that matter, you really have communities that are proportionally cultured for their size,” Lieberman said, noting the advent of large shows, acts and celebrities at the Cowan Center and LeTourneau University’s S.E. Belcher Chapel and Performance Center, along with expansion at the Tyler Museum of Art. “Where the money has flowed out of the oil pit, there has been a lot of sponsorship for art. You’ve got very large medical communities in Tyler. They tend to travel and tend to acquire when they travel, so there is an awful lot of art that has been brought back to East Texas. A lot of it is more accessible than in a place like New York. It is hard to get to the theater in New York and a whole lot more expensive. The galleries [in New York] are amazing, but they are also very hard to get to and very crowded. East Texas has a lot better exposure to the arts and artists than in a place like New York City.”

Lieberman added, “One of the advantages of a small mid-size city with tremendous assets and the ability to spend some of them on the arts… The bottom line is arts are a luxury, and they are something that communities with excess can afford to do.”