It was a most compelling picture of grief. Marbles of sweat, tears and stalactites of saliva, coated the young student’s face, epitomising the much-too-familar story of grief occasioned by yet another collision of motor vehicles on the island’s North Coast.

This time the victim was her friend, a 15-year-old student – Chinelle Bent – of the Holland High School in Trelawny.

And when the Observer West’s news team of Mark Cummings, Senior reporter and Alan Lewin, photographer, arrived on the scene the grief had not even begun to subside.

“It was like landing in the middle of a real live nightmare. The girl was crying as if her heart was literally broken, as if it would come through her mouth. I found myself walking up to her and snapping the shot at close range,” said photographer Alan Lewin who joined the staff of the Jamaica Observer’s Western Bureau earlier this year in March. At the time he expressed a burning desire to become the Observer’s premier photo journalist. He got off to a slippery start – literally – as one of his earliest assignments to cover Britain’s Prince Charles’ visit to Jamaica ended in embarassment.

“I was really trying to impress… I wanted to capture a picture of Prince Charles shaking hands with our chairman, Gordon Butch Stewart, but as I ran over, I slipped in my new shoes and fell flat on my forehead. Everybody rushed to my attention, but I thought I would die of shame,” he said.

Eventually things got smoother for him as he navigated his way through a culture of new personalities within a working environment that bore little resemblance to the one he had been used to at the Western Mirror community newspaper run by veteran journalist Lloyd B Smith. “I didn’t understand some of them and they didn’t understand me …at first. But I think we’re all on a bit of surer footing now. I go for the simple, the ordinary and I’m not used to a lot of posturing. That’s what people like (or dislike) about me, but I think I am flexible enough to facilitate those whose personalities are not necessariy compatible with mine,” he said last week .

The rest is history.

The initial disappointment of being told that his entry entitled ‘Tragedy’ had not made the final list compiled by the Press Association of Jamaica’s judges was replaced weeks later by the very welcome news that he had in fact won the Errol Harvey award for Human Interest photography.

“This is a good thing for the west, very inspiring and it makes us all feel good, I know I’ll be looking at entering next year,” several of his colleagues agreed last week.