Word: photographs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Anyone in the wrong place at the right time can create a noteworthy photograph. The technology of picture taking is now so foolproof that it routinely trumps the artistry of professionals in breaking news. The most articulate images from the July 7 bombings in London were shot by passengers with cell phones. The torturers at Abu Ghraib recorded their own crimes with cheap digital devices and created some of the first icons of the 21st century. In the introduction to his refreshingly broad-minded book Witness: The World's Greatest News Photographers, Reuel Golden acknowledges these challenges for photojournalists...
...floodwaters rose in New Orleans last week, a group called Columbia Christians for Life announced that it had discerned God's purpose in the storm: the destruction of the five abortion clinics in the city. The proof was a radar photograph showing that the hurricane "looks like a fetus facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation." A photo of a 6-week fetus was helpfully provided for comparison. At the other end of the political spectrum, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was blaming the hurricane on ... Haley Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi...
...because pictures are easier to understand than maps, satellites are changing the game. Since buying Keyhole last fall, Google has launched Google Earth, which offers searchable satellite views of the planet. A9.com Amazon's search subsidiary, sent trucks around 22 U.S. cities with digital cameras linked to laptops to photograph every street. So far it has 35 million pictures, which will be overlaid on maps. Microsoft is combining the approaches from the air--its Virtual Earth project is flying planes over cities to take pictures. The aim is to have views from all directions so users can circle buildings onscreen...
...supplementing those acts of courage, there were many others who took frightful risks to help turn Churchill's tide. All over the islands, natives buried any resentment of their colonial masters to serve and die with them. The enduring image of the New Guinea campaign is the photograph opposite, taken by New Zealander George Silk. It shows Private Whittington being led to a field hospital by one of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, Orokaiva villager Raphael Oembari, on Christmas Day, 1942. The Australian Department of Information, which employed Silk as a combat photographer, suppressed the photo as potentially damaging to morale...
...decades on, Silk's photograph has lost none of its power, although knowledge of the war's outcome perhaps dulls our understanding of official concerns about its publication. Where now we see resilience, courage, tenderness and indomitable spirit, at the desperate height of the war few would have read in it the signs of an Allied victory. Whittington, like so many of his young comrades, did not return from New Guinea. We owe him, and all of them, a moment of reflection, and a silent prayer of thanks...