It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, Ival Lawhon was a master artist. His photos spoke volumes. Each and every picture he took gave us insight into a man who knew deep emotion and how to capture it.

I’ve been here at the St. Joseph News-Press long enough to know who wrote what story and who shot what photo at a glance. Like our writers, each of our long-time staff photographers has a different style. I have names for each of them.

Eric Keith is the artist. His mastery of shadow and light makes many of his photos look like impressionistic paintings.

Jessica Stewart is the action photographer. At sporting events she always captures the right moment. And her photos seem to have an old-school classic patina.

I call Todd Weddle the Ahmad Jamal of photographers. Todd masters the use of space in his photos as good as the great jazz pianist uses space between the notes to create atmosphere.

Ival Lawhon was all the above and a storyteller. Each of his photos told a story.

I remember one photo in particular that he shot at a police standoff several years ago. One look at the photo and you could tell everything that had happened. The victim falling out the door. The police moving in to make the arrest. In one shot he captured the whole scene and all the emotion.

My favorite Ival photo is the one of a burning church. In fact, it’s the first photo you see when you step inside the hallway of the News-Press offices. The photo shows firefighters battling an early morning blaze at a South Side church. You can see a cross sitting strong and unwavering on top of the church clearly through all the smoke, fire and steam.

Another favorite Ival photo is of the railroad bridge below 229 on the Missouri River. Ival captured it during an early morning fog and gave an otherworldly quality to it.

I also have one of Ival’s photos in my home. It’s of the sun setting on Downtown after an early evening rain. There’s another photo in my home office that someone took of Ival and me when we worked on the story about the Olympic torch coming to town several years ago.

But I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ival on several assignments. We’ve traveled all over Northwest Missouri together covering everything from tragedies to light-hearted features.

We interviewed a young Iraqi war veteran who lost his arm in battle. We’ve interviewed parents who had lost children in car wrecks. We worked a story on a paranormal team exorcising a St. Joseph haunted house. We ate Kansas City barbecue for a News-Press food feature. We hunted mushrooms for another story.

Ival and his wife, Renee, were good people who loved to bird watch. And if you happened to drop by their North Side home in the morning, they would offer you toast and jam.

Ival, I already miss seeing you charge though the newsroom, photo equipment jostling loudly, looking like a man running from a fire — but you were running to one.

That’s the image I’ll remember.

Alonzo Weston can be reached at alonzow@npgco.com.