Word: american
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fully understand recent history is like trying to size up a building with your nose pressed to it. It's a fruitless task. And yet recently, quite a few influential people have being trying. Sniffing away at this month's "Panama debacle," they have arrived at premature judgments of American involvement, or lack thereof...
...with those bursts of flash, Riis literally brought light into some of the darkest corners of American life. In the process, he discovered another of what would become one of the most characteristic missions of the camera. It could be pointed at misery. The trap for facts could be the trumpet of justice...
...American Civil War forced the curtain higher. When the fighting began in 1861, Mathew Brady was the country's best-known photographer, an early specimen of the celebrity portraitist and a frank businessman whose New York City studio was located not far from P.T. Barnum's museum. Brady kept a second studio in Washington, and when the First Battle of Bull Run broke out just 25 miles from the capital, he rushed toward the lines with two vanloads of equipment. Amid the scramble of the Union retreat, all the plates from that first day's work were lost...
...Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait of America's moral disgrace. Freudians spend years trying to call up the primal image-memories, turned to trauma, that distort a neurotic patient's psyche...
Photojournalism's future depends upon access too. During the past decade, places long closed to the lens have opened up. Some American courtrooms admitted cameras for the first time. So did a few long-sealed precincts of life in the Soviet Union. But there were other spots where, at various times, the lens was met by an official hand raised to cover it: The Iran-Iraq war, the West Bank, the black townships of South Africa and the killing ground of Tiananmen Square. News photographers were banned from the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Soviet bombers fractured Afghan villages away from...