Word: likes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...world around him and take pictures of it -- pictures of living history, which means, especially, pictures of human behavior. If he doesn't get a thrill out of that job, if he doesn't wake every morning with excitement and go out with his cameras hanging on him like a gold prospector with his rock hammer in hand, % he's no good. Over the years some photojournalists have said to me, "if they didn't pay me for doing this, I'd do it for them for nothing." I too have felt that way since, more than a half-century...
...brought forth a generation of fierce reformers and a new brigade of muckraking reporters, like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. It was Jacob A. Riis, a New York City newspaper photographer working the police beat, who first recognized how photography could be enlisted in the cause. His job frequently took him through Manhattan's most wretched and dangerous districts, places that the Danish-born Riis knew well from the desperate years after he had arrived in the U.S. in 1870, when he had slept in doorways and picked his dinner from trash bins. In 1887 he came back with...
...conditions of the poor but none so stark or so widely seen. Riis' unflinching pictures of tenement life mark a turning point between the Victorian idea that poverty was an 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...
Within a year came widespread use of the famed Leica, which replaced fragile glass plates with spool-wound 35-mm film. Meanwhile, film was getting "faster," allowing pictures to be taken in almost any light. Thus equipped, the photographer had become, like the modern soldier, a self- contained, highly mobile warrior. His lines of communication were greatly extended in 1935 when the Associated Press inaugurated its first Wirephoto transmission service...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a 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...