Times Photographer Wins Associated Press Honor

Times photographer Alan Hagman was awarded the Associated Press managing editors’ prestigious photo of the year award Friday for his shot of a woman watching a wave rush into her Solimar Beach home during January’s El Nino-driven storms.

Hagman, 34, was presented with the national award, which comes with $1,000, at a ceremony at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

The photo previously won a Times award, a Greater Los Angeles Press Photographers Assn. award and a monthly Associated Press award.

Hagman, who has worked for The Times Ventura County Edition since 1990, was assigned to take pictures at storm-battered Faria Beach.

But his car was hit by a wave on Pacific Coast Highway and knocked into a pile of rocks, flattening a tire.

He hiked to a house at Solimar Beach, where he waited for a tow truck. Although he thought he had lost his assignment, he ended up in the right place at the right time, he said.

“My first thought was, ‘I just trashed my company car and I’m in trouble,’ ” Hagman said. “But I called [Ventura photo editor Larry] Bessel and he said, ‘Don’t worry about the car. We need art.’

“I’d figured it was after high tide, I had missed most of the pictures, and I was worried,” he said. “Then just out of nowhere a wave--a big wave--came over the break wall and into the house.”

Hagman’s photo was on the front page of The Times the next day and eventually ran in newspapers and magazines nationwide and as far away as Australia, France and Italy.

It appeared in so many places, in fact, that the woman shown in the photo, Marilyn Lane, and her husband Ben have received calls from friends and relatives they had not heard from in years.

“It was just a tremendous shot,” said APME President Reid MacCluggage, the editor of a Connecticut newspaper. “It’s one of those that jumps out at you immediately.”

For Hagman, the photo confirmed something his mother had told him long ago:

“Now I always tell people, ‘Whenever something really bad happens, something really good might happen next,’ ” Hagman said. “If my car hadn’t been hit by a wave, I wouldn’t have been there.”