Word: flashing
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...monastic, medieval arcana. This time Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse and Hellzapoppin. What do all of these things have to do with one another? Eco's teasing answer: maybe everything, maybe nothing...
...evil to be condemned and the reformer's conviction that it was a condition to be remedied. Riis, like Mathew Brady, had a team of photographers (and like Brady, took credit for their work). Shooting in gloomy alleys and sunless rooming houses, he and his colleagues became pioneers of flash-lit photography -- a delicate undertaking in those days when the newly invented magnesium flash powder had to be poured into an open pan and then ignited with a flaming bang. "Twice I set fire to the house with my apparatus," Riis later recorded calmly, "and once to myself...
...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...
...were formed on a sheet of glass that had to be coated with an emulsion just before the exposure, then developed at once. Action shots were ruled out by the lengthy exposure times, several seconds or more. And while history might be made at night, photographs almost never were. Flash powder did not come into use until the 1880s...
...journalism -- the kind done with words -- is the first draft of history, what is photojournalism? Is it the first impression of history, the first graphic flash? Yes, but it is also (and this is the disturbing thing) history's lasting visual impression. The service that the pictures perform is splendid, and so powerful as to seem preternatural. But sometimes the power they possess is more than they deserve...