Among some of the most striking...
The boy in the back is 15. He has a gun and hostage. Shot by the Boston Traveler, a long-lost
publication, in 1947, around the first time the prize was awarded. The boy was evading police, who had tried to talk to him about a previous robbery. He shot and wounded an officer during the incident. The hostage was freed after an officer clobbered the teenaged gunman from behind.
Shot in 1957 by the Washington Daily News — another decreased publication. (You'll notice a sad trend here.) The event was a Chinese Merchants Association parade and the iconic image shows a D.C. cop asking a child — who is entranced with a Chinese dancing dragon — to step back. The photo is supposed to conjure memories of childhood innocence.
A family greeting a missing father and husband at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., in 1973. By the Associated Press. He had been missing for six years, after his plane was shot down over Hanoi. This photo brought tears to my eyes. I especially was fascinated with the girl running toward him with her arms outstretched. She looks about 14 or 15. She would have been about 8 or 9 when her dad disappeared.
Court-ordered public school integration in Louisville, Ky. Top photo shows white parents protesting. Bottom photo shows a cop on a school bus, escorting kids to a white school. The photo staff of a paper then known as The Courier-Journal & Louisville Times (it's now called the Louisville Courier-Journal) submitted a handful of pictures documenting the turbulent era and won the Pulitzer in feature photography in 1976. Yes. That's 1976, a whopping 12 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed.
El Salvador civil war in 1984, as shot by the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald. Those are government forces dragging the body of an accused rebel after a gun battle between the military and rebels.
Horrifying images from Ethiopia. Shot in 1983 by a photographer with the Denver Post. Which is another theme I noticed while viewing this work: Back in the salad days, you didn't have to work for the New York Times if you wanted to document a global story. There was money and time for journalists to travel and wake the world up to news outside the boundaries of the paper's circulation area.
Wasn't Reagan in charge in 1985? Migrants crossing the Rio Grande in the area of Brownsvile, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. Shot by the Boston Globe.
Another Ethiopia famine photo. The photographer, with the Boston Globe, said she'll never forget the sound of children who starve to death. They sound like cats wailing. This photo is iconic, in my opinion, because they look like the Madonna and Christ Child.
By the time I had viewed the images from late 1970s/early 1980s, I had become depressed by wretched humanity. I wished I had two days to visit the museum because it was a little much to take in the images over one day. As I proceeded through the 1980s, I began to skip some photos. I just couldn't take it. So narcissistic of me. I'm peering at others' lives, voyeuristically, really. Gazing from a place of privilege. Witnessing their deaths without really having to witness. So then the guilt set in. How dare I say they make me depressed when I didn't have to taste or touch or smell or feel — and worse, remember. That mother, if she's still alive, lived a life I cannot even stomach to look at. What is wrong with me? Why was I born here and she there? Where is God and what does He want me to do with this?
Another theme I noticed with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos is that the newspapers gave the staff lots of time to work on projects. For instance, when in this photo taken in 1987 — part of a collection on Southwestern High in Detroit — the Detroit Daily News management gave the photographer 40 weeks at the high school. Nowadays, we produce twice or three times as much work in less time. These days, by the way, Detroit Daily News is only printed three days a week because it became too expensive to print and distribute the paper seven days a week after the economic collapse in that city. The staffs of both Detroit papers have been gutted.
Another iconic picture. Shot in 1989 by the Detroit Free Press in Germany. Prize awarded the following year.
To end on a happy note. This photo is studied and discussed in media ethics courses in universities across the country. The child was starving, the vulture was betting on the child's death and the New York Times photographer shot it instead of intervening. Journalists were told not to touch starving people in the Sudan because of disease. But after the photo ran worldwide, people were outraged that he didn't pick up the child. He took his life a year after receiving the 1994 Pulitzer Prize.
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