Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
Robert Arana and Kevin Baraniecki (right) work on replacing the outer protective film on top of the structural safety glass pavilions that serve as the head house entrance to SEPTA’s 15th St/City Hall Station in Dilworth Park. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
I was reminded this week that 50 years ago this spring I covered my very first professional game of any kind. I photographed the home opener as the Minnesota Twins played the Chicago White Sox at the old Metropolitan Stadium (now the site of Mall of America).
I used a Nikon Nikkormat — no motor drive — with an 80-200mm f/4 zoom lens. I didn’t even save the photos because they were so bad.
Later on in my career, working for United Press International in bureaus in Detroit, Dallas, Kansas City, and Minneapolis — all American League cities — there would be some summers where I covered almost every single one of a team’s 81 home games.
These days, not so many. And very few athletic competitions of any kind.
(Mine is one of the shadows at the finish line of the last sporting event I covered.)
At the end of each year there are newspaper photo contests and they usually have a portfolio category requiring an entry with a well-rounded selection of news, sports, and features photos. I am always lacking in the “sports.”
So when I do get a sports assignment I like to joke with my editor, “Maybe I can enter and even get a participation medal this year!”
This week the PGA Championship is in town and I am not at the Aronimink Golf Club. I was at the unveiling of a statue honoring the only golfer to ever wear short pants at a major tournament. My colleague Devin Jackson wrote about it. It’s a good story.
Forrest Fezler, a golfer in the 1970s and 80s, went into a porta-potty just before the end of the 1983 U.S. Open and exited to play the 72nd hole in shorts. It was in protest of unfair officiating at the U.S. Open at the Merion Golf Club two years earlier.
Fezler’s two adult children and four grandchildren were at the statue unveiling (he died in 2018) and I enjoyed photographing the ceremony, watching how they interacted with the statue, and waiting as the sun moved, changing the way the light hit it.
And while waiting, I noticed a pair of workers walk out on to the sloping roof of the nearby glass pavilion/subway entrance.
I immediately went to get under them — until other workers fenced off the area. I really wanted to “work” the scene as the two men replaced the old cloudy outer film with totally transparent sheets directly above me, under a clear blue sky. Maybe closing the entrance was to prevent commuters walking down into the subway from quickly looking up — and getting an attack of vertigo.
I know it affected me briefly. I talked with the men later about how they felt about looking straight down with nothing visible beneath them — especially when they started out walking on an almost opaque surface. Does it make you feel a little queasy I asked. “Not really,” one said. Before the other added, “Well, maybe a bit.”
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:
May 4, 2026: The hooves were all that remained of a life-size elk statue — sawed off at the ankles — in historic Harleigh Cemetery in Camden on Tuesday. The bronze elk statues were put up in cemeteries all over the country at the turn of the 20th century in what was called an “Elks Rest,” an area reserved for deceased members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. In many lodges of the fraternal group founded in 1866, members who could not afford a burial were provided space in the “Rest” free of charge. The statue was since recovered and is back in the cemetery’s possession. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
April 27, 2026: What just a week ago was a spring-time canopy of rosy blush blossoms is now a soft carpet of pink petals, on a sidewalk along Wayne Avenue in Germantown.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
April 20, 2026: The water is turned back on in LOVE Park this week, marking another milestone as seasons change in the city. The splash fountain and basin-less main fountain in the park formally known as John F. Kennedy Plaza, was part of the site’s 2018 renovations, that came after the old park was flattened out, removing a traditional fountain and benches and levels that made it so enticing to skateboarders.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
April 13, 2026: Workers set up the stage — with a cooling tower backdrop — for a Gov. Mikie Sherrill event at the PSEG Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lower Alloways Creek, N.J. Sherrill later signed legislation intended to make way for new nuclear energy projects in the Garden State by removing a key permitting hurdle that has created a de facto moratorium on new nuclear power for decades. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
April 6, 2026: Work continues into the night, two floors above street level in Old City.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 30, 2026: New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (third from right) meets with members of the South Jersey business community while her youngest daughter, Marit, waits in lobby (rear). Mom was attending a fireside chat event hosted by the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey in Mount Laurel earlier this month.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 23, 2026: The plowed snow mountain range at a corner of the PATCO Haddonfield station parking lot in mid-March. After the big Jan. 25 and Feb. 23 snow storms the transit agency started a contest to guess exactly when the humongous snow mountain will finally melt. They are offering a $20 Freedom Card to the winners.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 16, 2026: Traffic moving at 45 mph on the Ben Franklin Bridge is photographed using a slow shutter speed from a PATCO commuter train traveling at 40 mph.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 9, 2026: Marcin Danych (left), a friend now living in Chicago, films Mariusz Sliwa, his wife, Magdalena, and their 6-year-old son, Tymek, from Poznan, Poland, next to the Rocky statue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When Mariusz was a boy, his father was “a typical factory worker; he was working a lot, too,” Sliwa said. “He worked seven days a week. Even weekends.” When they had time together at night, they would watch “Rocky,” “playing it over and over, in the VHS.” It was just a part of his childhood, so he wanted his own son to visit Philadelphia to experience it. And to make a video for his dad, who couldn’t make the trip. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
March 2, 2026: Lynasia Allen, a junior horticulture student at W.B. Saul High School is on lunch break at the Convention Center while setting up for the PHS Philadelphia Flower Show before it opened to the public. Her school’s exhibit is titled, “Up-Rooted, Re-Planted.”Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 23, 2026: Glenn Bergman, along with his wife, Dianne Manning, and other bystanders at the President’s House, try to prevent a counter-protester from ripping down notes posted by visitors. The Mount Airy couple had just arrived for the annual Presidents’ Day rally by the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition on the other side of the wall. The confrontation was over in a few minutes when the woman left. Visitors have been taping informal signs to fill the void left by the removal of panels about slavery last month in Independence National Historical Park.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 16, 2026: Which came first: the dirty snowpacked berm of frozen slush or the graffiti? This is one of the larger urban artifacts revealed as the region emerges from weeks of a record snowpack from the Jan. 25 storm.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 9, 2026: Walking through a corrugated metal culvert called the “Duck Tunnel,” a pedestrian navigates the passageway under the SEPTA tracks on the Swarthmore College campus. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
February 2, 2026: A light-as-air Elmo balloon rolls along a sidewalk in Haddonfield, propelled by the wind as heavy snow starts to turn to ice and sleet during Sunday's storm.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
January 26, 2026: The President’s House in Independence National Historical Park hours after all historical exhibits were removed on Thursday in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order in March that the content at national parks that “inappropriately disparage” the United States be reviewed. The site, a reconstructed “ghost” structure titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” (2010), serves as a memorial to the nine people President George Washington enslaved there during the founding of America.Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer
