Earlier this year, Tampa Bay Times photographer Eve Edelheit took this photo of Melissa Lyttle in front of a mural at the Wynwood Walls exhibition in Miami.
By KARLANA JUNE
NNB Student Reporter
When authorities discovered her in July 2005, the little girl was living in a tiny room in a filth-filled house in Plant City. Her swollen diaper was leaking down her legs. She was emaciated, covered with sores and lice, and unable to speak. She was almost 7.
The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) put two of its finest on the story. Reporter Lane DeGregory and photographer Melissa Lyttle began the five-month process of piecing together the powerful story of a feral child and the remarkable couple who adopted her.
The article was titled “The Girl in the Window” and ran in the Times on July 31, 2008. The photos Lyttle took captured the essence of a child who didn’t know how to live as a human. In 2009 the project won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a first-place award for best published picture story from the National Press Photographers Association.
Lyttle’s pivotal role in that project typifies her 14-year career as a photojournalist. She has won a slew of prestigious awards. She has established herself as a mentor to countless photographers around the county. And over a decade at the Times, she forged what she calls “an enduring and extraordinary partnership” with DeGregory.
“Lane writes like a photographer sees,” said Lyttle, 37.
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On a Tuesday this summer, Lyttle spent a busy morning in the Times newsroom.
Outside her cubicle was a single color photograph of a baby lying next to a dog, cuddling. On the back wall, a Society of Professional Journalists plaque rested next to a paper fan adorned with a picture of a man who looked like Jesus.
“You are probably wondering why I have this fan,” Lyttle said.
She picked it up and waved it. “This is the ‘hot Jesus,’” she said with a laugh.
Lyttle and DeGregory did a story earlier in the year, titled “Easter Every Day,” on the Holy Land Experience, an amusement park mecca for Christians in Orlando. There were several Jesus look-alikes, but one named Lester had ripped jeans and a white T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The two journalists deemed him the “hot Jesus” and decided to bring home a box of fans for colleagues.
Lyttle grew up in Jacksonville and attended community college with dreams of becoming a veterinarian. She needed an elective that was far removed from the dense academic material she was taking for prerequisites. A darkroom photography class sounded appealing.
“It woke something up in me,” Lyttle said. “Photos really force you to be outside your head.”
She decided she wanted to be a photographer, not a veterinarian. So she passed up a full soccer scholarship to Auburn University and transferred to the University of Florida.
After graduating from UF with a degree in journalism, Lyttle landed a job in Fort Lauderdale at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where she stayed for 4 1/2 years. She got restless there and began looking for other opportunities.
For years Lyttle had followed the work of Jamie Francis, an award-winning photojournalist at the St. Petersburg Times.
“You see who is doing the work and you want to emulate them,” Lyttle said.
In January 2005, she got a call from the Times offering her Francis’ position. He had just left for the Portland Oregonian.
She had arrived.
For nearly 10 years, Lyttle specialized in documentary projects, news and portrait photography at the Times. Her work was recognized by United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, Pictures of the Year International, the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism, the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, the Southern Short Course, and the Alexia Foundation.
She is the founder of an online photo community called “A Photo a Day,” which started in 2001 with a daily email exchange between Lyttle and a photographer friend and has grown to more than 2,500 members worldwide. She also mentors younger photographers on Twitter via hashtag #dearyoungphotographer.
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Lyttle excused herself and turned toward her laptop to choose a photo for the Times Tumblr blog. She was responsible for picking a picture daily from a queue where her colleagues dump their favorite images from the day before. It is called, for now, One Compelling Image. The purpose of the photo blog is to bring more traffic to the Times website.
A large part of Lyttle’s day was spent in the newsroom, hunkered over her laptop doing research on stories or going to meetings. On Tuesday mornings, she attended a meeting of the enterprise team, a specialized group of journalists who focus on stories that often take more than a year to report and write. Some of the team’s work appears in the Floridian, a monthly supplement. At the Tuesday meetings, the team throws around story ideas.
Lyttle wants to go back to Haiti. January 2015 will mark the fifth anniversary of the devastating earthquake that brought the tiny country to its knees. She was one of the Times journalists who covered the disaster in 2010. She wants to explore how the people with disabilities and mental illness are coping five years later. She talks about the children fitted with prosthetics; are they getting new limbs as they grow? Are the mentally ill living in better conditions than they were before?
Lyttle has traveled around the country and to many parts of the world, capturing images, telling stories through the lens of her camera.
She and DeGregory worked together for nearly a decade.
“At this point we’re such a good team that we are totally in sync with where we need to be when… so she [DeGregory] can hear things best and I can see them best,” Lyttle said this summer. ”If she tells me I should really go see something, I trust it’s going to make a good photo.”
In September, that partnership ended. Lyttle left the paper to move on to her next challenge.
“This wasn’t how I pictured my career at the TBTimes ending. My heart hurts for the newspaper industry … took the buyout, Lyttle announced on her Twitter feed Sept. 24. “I love(d) being a newspaper photographer and I love(d) telling stories in my community. I don’t intend to stop doing either (for long).”