- Courtesy of Newseum
- Sample pages from The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the Moment
Like many professionals, journalists have a clearer understanding of their own virtues than the public does. Press photographers, for instance, tend to be quick-witted and daring, yet the laity have a way of dismissing them as pushy voyeurs. Movies like to show photographers as a rabid mob—the gauntlet that must be run by decent people falsely accused.
In 2005 an AP photographer benefited from another misunderstanding. “Insurgents in Baghdad thought Muhammed Muheisen worked for a local Arabic newspaper when he photographed an Iraqi man celebrating atop a burning U.S. Humvee,” the book tells us. “‘If they knew that I worked for AP, they would have killed me for being a spy,’ he said.”
The AP’s Greg Marinovich came across a gunfight between hostile factions in Soweto, South Africa, in 1990. A Zulu man was stoned, stabbed, and set on fire. His attackers ordered Marinovich to stop taking pictures. “I’ll stop taking pictures when you stop killing him,” Marinovich replied.
I know what you’re thinking: it’s one thing to defy common decency and another to defy blood-drunk Somali gunmen. It sure is. What I’m saying here is that photography is the job of witness and photographers have a sense of entitlement sufficient to get the job done—just as all professions do. In the right light we all shine, and The Pulitzer Prize Photographs is the right light. We all see ourselves in the right light more easily than anyone else does.
