Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...newspapers and magazines. But the development of news photography is also the story of how cameras became smaller and film more sensitive, so that journalists could capture the look of the factory, the dance hall, the dictator's study, the sharecropper's cabin and other venues of daily life. These are all here, the momentous and the mundane alike...
...friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
...that is what photography is up to, then the onion of the world is being peeled away, layer by layer -- lenses like black holes gobbling up life's emanations. Mere images proliferate, while history pares down to a phosphorescence of itself...
...critic Susan Sontag has pointed out, is an elegiac, nostalgic phenomenon. No one photographs the future. The instants that the photographer freezes are ever the past, ever receding. They have about them the brilliance or instancy of their moment but also the cello sound of loss that life makes when going irrecoverably away and lodging at last in the dreamworks...
...which holds that the act of observing a physical event inevitably changes it. War is merciless, bloody, and by definition it occurs outside the orbit of due process. Loan's Viet Cong did not have a trial. He did have a photographer. The photographer's picture took on a life of its own and changed history...