Last Updated: August 18, 2000
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Photography
Winning photos convey humanity
In a show of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos, the common
theme is that photojournalism expresses all of life’s experiences, from
tragic to joyful
By Eric Newton
I’m sitting with New York film producer Cyma Rubin in her office across
the street from the Empire State Building, surrounded by piles and piles
of photographs, all winners of the Pulitzer Prize.
We’re working on the first major U.S. exhibit of the Pulitzer photos.
In one corner, U.S. soldiers symbolically win World War II by raising a
flag over Iwo Jima; in another, two young free spirits run through a Chicago
housing project.
What in the world, I wonder, do these pictures have in common? They
don’t pretend to be a complete look at history — the photography Pulitzers
have been given only since 1942. They are not the century’s most popular
photos, they are only those from newspapers that chose to enter the contest.
Many of them show blood-and-guts, but not all. They certainly do not cover
all the wars of the second half of the 20th century.
So what do they have in common? Rubin, who has been working with these
pictures for years and is co-editing the exhibit catalogue, talks about
how each of them has a life of its own.
It’s true. Even the worst of them (and some are better than others)
has a strange power, a force that can carry human emotions across the barriers
of language, time and place.
What these photographs have in common is their ability to reach people,
to get through, to communicate, to move individual viewers or entire societies.
They reach past the outer layers into the gut of our humanity to grab
us. Quickly and clearly, they say war is brutal, or victory sweet, or children
innocent, or life fragile — and they say it equally to men and women of
different classes and cultures.
This simple fact, that photos attract us like magnets, is behind one
of the most important media developments of the century: the rise of the
image. The simple truth is that we get more news today through pictures
than ever before.
So what is this magic, exactly? In 1952, the great French photographer
Henri Bresson said a great photo is great when it depicts a “decisive moment.”
Nearly 50 years later, sitting there in that office in New York, Rubin
calls it the “moment of impact.”
Our title for the show: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the
Moment. Though photographic tools have evolved from the clunky 4x5 Speed
Graphic to the sleek infinity of digital color, the goals of great photography
remain remarkably unchanged. Capture the moment. Tell the story. Move people.
It is not too much to say that great photos change lives. When Eddie
Adams takes a picture of a police chief executing a prisoner in Saigon,
the photograph follows the man around the rest of his life — unfairly,
Adams believes. When Joe Rosenthal captures the flag-raising over Iwo Jima,
it immortalizes the American servicemen.
We don’t talk about it much, but great pictures also can change the
lives of the photographers who take them. They can bring pride, grief,
guilt, joy and nightmares, and in the case of Adams and many others, starting
lifelong relationships between photographer and subject.
And, perhaps most importantly of all, the very best pictures change
us, the way we think about racism at home or a famine halfway around the
world, the way we think about the miracle of birth, the pain of war, the
joy of a family reunited, the sorrow of a loved one lost.
Joseph Pulitzer knew this. Even before it could print photos, the front
page of his New York World boasted huge illustrations of news events. “Circulation,”
he noted, “grew by the thousands.”
It’s important, I think, to ask why so many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
photographs show wars and pain and violence. Is this the fault of the sensationalistic
media, glorifying gore by awarding it prizes? I don’t think so, and I think
we should say so, publically, more often. The photographers don’t start
those wars. And they are not the ones who so eagerly and readily consume
the news of war or disaster or death. We, society, people do all that.
The grist from which photojournalism is made is nothing less than the
world we create for ourselves every day.
When photojournalists go to a battle or a blizzard, they go for us.
They are there because we would like to know what’s going on, but don’t
want to be there ourselves.
They are our eyes, and when they do it well, when they capture the moment,
they help us see the unseen, know the unknown and feel the things that
connect us all.
Newton is news historian of the Newseum.
