Looks like I'll be joining the class after all :) So here's my assignment. Like Yote, I think I have a soft spot for photojournalism. To me, a good photograph is one that you will never forget, no matter how badly you may want to. The photos that move me tell stories, without needing a word to explain them. These are photos that I've seen at various points in my life, and they've etched themselves into my mind. I think about them a lot -- they keep coming back to me.
My first photograph is a Pulitzer Prize winning image by Kevin Carter.
Here is the story about this photo:
In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to an emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl. The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said this of Carter: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
What happened to the little girl is unknown -- but after being criticized for not helping her, Kevin Carter committed suicide. A portion of his suicide note read, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners..."
To me, there's a surprising little thing in this photo... The girl is wearing a necklace. That adds to the "shock value" of it.
My second photo is entitled "The Falling Man". The photo was taken by Richard Drew at 9:41:15 a.m. on September 11, 2001. This is one of the "jumpers" from the first World Trade Center tower. This photo was published once in a newspaper on September 12, 2001, but the public was outraged. It has never been published again.
Again, this is such a moving photo. I will never be able to forget it. This one photo spawned a book, and later a documentary film. The purpose of the book and film was to identify who this man was. They eventually did figure out his identity -- he was a man that worked in the restaurant at the top of the tower. In spite of the subject matter, this photo conveys such calm and peace. The calm and peace that the man is exhibiting is such a stark contrast to the horror and tragedy of that day. This picture is very misleading, as it is only one in a serious of several dozen that were taken of the same man falling. In the remaining photographs, he appears flailing around, distressed, grabbing at the air. This one photo stands out from the rest of the series in that it is a betrayal of the true happenings of that sequence of photos, and of the day itself. You can't help but feel emotional when you see this picture. This picture makes us all human.
My last entry is a group of photos, all Hubble telescope images.
Nothing that man creates could possibly compete with the beauty and wonder of nature. The shapes are perfect. The colors are perfect. The contrast is perfect. Nothing could make these images better than they already are. These images really put things into perspective for me, about what matters.