Word: greates
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brief time of peace, photojournalism waged war against privacy. A decisive weapon appeared in 1924: the Ermanox, a miniature glass-plate camera with a wide-aperture lens. The camera could operate in dim light and without great intrusion. Erich Salomon, a German with a talent for discretion, stalked diplomatic salons and private railway cars with his tripod-held model. In the U.S., a New York Daily News photographer, Tom Howard, strapped a miniature camera to his ankle and violated the mystery of Ruth Snyder's electrocution...
...name of publishing, only a handful of images have themselves become part of history. These form a sort of shared visual heritage for the human race, a treasury of significant memories. Every educated person should be familiar with them, just as he or she would know the great achievements of painting, sculpture or music. And every person, educated or not, should be moved by these journalistic images, just as he or she would be by the masterpieces...
...great photographs have lives of their own, but they can be as false as dreams. Somehow the mind knows that and sorts out the matter, and permits itself to enjoy the pictures without getting sunk in the really mysterious business that they involve...
Still, a puritan conscience recoils a little from the sheer power of photographs. They have lingering about them the ghost of the golden calf -- the bright object too much admired, without God's abstract difficulties. Great photographs bring the mind alive. Photographs are magic things that traffic in mystery. They float on the surface, and they have a strange life in the depths of the mind. They bear watching...
...dawn of the 1950s, the photojournalist was monarch of all he surveyed. No medium other than photojournalism challenged the status of the great picture magazines like LIFE and Look. The best photojournalists who survived World War II and then Korea were acknowledged giants. The 1947 founding of the photographers' cooperative Magnum had established the principle that picture takers should own the rights to their work. (Previously, rights had belonged to whoever commissioned a project.) Photojournalism could even claim a | theoretical foundation, as in Henri Cartier-Bresson's idea of the photographer as instant organizer of reality...