Word: photographics
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...veteran examines a 20-year-old photograph of his graduating class. "The guy on my left is dead now," he notes. "So is the guy on my right. The three of us didn't fare too well in Viet Nam. I came out the best." He points with the hook that serves as his right hand...
...site, scientists around the world were immediately intrigued. The reports told of remarkable archaeological treasures, including royal tombs heaped with gold jewelry of exquisite quality. But reliable information about the site was virtually impossible to obtain. The Iraqis refused to grant visas to the press or let any outsiders photograph the jewelry...
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...
...Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief of Saigon, firing his snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait of America...
...same time, there were critics and photographers asking whether the power of pictures dwindled as their numbers rose -- whether, as the practice of concerned photography wore on, its impact wore off, so that only the most sensational images registered on the brain. Now that every kind of grief has been presented to the camera from every angle, pictures of misery remind us of other pictures of misery. Then, unexpectedly, comes a scene of one man blocking a line of tanks in Beijing, and once again a photograph sends shivers down the spine...