Sadness

Got some bad news this morning.

First, the back story. This year is City Paper's 25th anniversary and to commemorate this, Patrick and I are, in the 25 weeks leading up to our anniversary issue, going through the archives year-by-year and telling the paper's story through bylines, headlines, etc. in a regular feature called Paper Trail.

Each week, we spend a few hours with a year's worth of bound volumes and note the big stories, important staffers who debuted, and choose one cover from that issue to print in the paper.

A couple of weeks ago in the 1991 installment we proudly noted that a young photographer named Mpozi (Mshale) Tolbert (that's him, above, in a photo we ran in 1997 in an ancillary publication called Earshot), a teenager at the time, had made his debut in the paper. Mpozi was already an established figure in the offices by the time I showed up in 1995. As an intern, I remember seeing this hulking, 6-foot 6-inch dreadlocked man pop into the office now and again to chat with Margit Detweiler and Neil Gladstone. He was a giant man, but always incredibly kind. He was the kind of guy you couldn't help but like, be drawn to. As a freelance photographer, he wasn't in the office all the time, or regularly. But whenever he did, it was like an event. "Mpozi's here," the vibe in the officed seemed to suggest. If Mpozi was here, it meant there was something going on that we should take notice of. He was plugged in, and his vision as a photographer was such that if he'd shot something, or wanted to shoot something, you'd better damn well pay attention. His photography was such that he really got into the lives of his subjects. There was an empathy in the celluloid. He was magic.

So last week we received a letter to the editor from Mpozi thanking us for being mentioned in Paper Trail. We'd received a letter a couple of weeks prior from Miguel Gonzalez thanking us for his mention as well. As we found out, there's something of an e-mail list of former CP staffers out there chattering about who gets nods in the column and who does not. Well, any and all feedback is smiled upon, but it was especially nice to get a nod from Mpozi (his message is replicated in the first link of this post).

So it was a horrible shock to learn that this wonderful man -- strong, peaceful, brilliant, artist -- had fallen, let alone that it had happened so young. He'd been working at his desk at the Indianapolis Star when he collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. A cause of death has not been determined yet, but when someone young like this passes suddenly, your first inclination is to think something was wrong with his heart. Which is just not something you could ever say about Mpozi.

I didn't know the man well, but I knew him well enough to say that his loss is huge. My condolences go out to his family, and anyone whose life he touched with his work or his generosity.