Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Within a decade, the professional glow had faded. Television, a latent threat to the press since its first practical demonstration in 1929, had undercut the prosperity of the picture magazines: Look vanished in 1971; LIFE suspended publication in 1972. Tensions erupted between editors -- text oriented, even at picture magazines -- and some of the more deeply committed photojournalists over what to cover and how. Eugene Smith, one of the masters of the LIFE photo-essay, broke away from the magazine in 1954 to seek, in his view, more profound forms of expression. He spent nearly 20 years in obscure poverty composing...
Photojournalism was at war with itself over its essence. Studies of the battlefield were replaced by reflections on life-style: the camera discovered suburbia. In the view of dissidents like Smith, however, news photography had vitiated itself through overproduction. Continuous wire-service transmission and the conservatism of the postwar picture press had covered the world with images leached of their expressiveness and meaning. As Smith put it, "we are deluged with photography at its worst -- until the drone of superficiality threatens to numb our sensitivity to image...
From top, left to right: (c) 1963 Bob Jackson, Sam Shere -- UPI/Bettmann, Bob Landry -- LIFE, NEIL ARMSTRONG -- NASA, JOE ROSENTHAL -- AP, ALFRED EISENSTAEDT -- LIFE, ED CLARK -- LIFE, DAVID BURNETT -- CONTACT PRESS IMAGES, J.R. EYERMAN -- LIFE, DOROTHEA LANGE -- THE OAKLAND MUSEUM, THE CITY OF OAKLAND, JOSEPH LOUW -- LIFE...