The strange power of the Pulitzer photos

Commentary

By Eric Newton
The Freedom Forum Online

08.25.00

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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 Prize-winning 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 catalog, 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, start lifelong relationships between photographer and subject.

And, perhaps most important 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 or 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, publicly, 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.