Word: public
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hine worked for nearly a decade taking pictures of child laborers, sometimes gulling suspicious mill owners into thinking he was there to photograph their machinery, all the while keeping one hand in his pocket for clandestine note taking. He saw his pictures as evidence, "photographic proof" that would move public opinion to demand laws to remove children from factories. His data would be the grime written upon their young faces; his evidence would be the weariness in their eyes...
...shouldn't it serve as the pencil of history too? If faces and flowers could inscribe themselves on the photographic plate, why not battles, ribbon- cutting ceremonies and earthquakes? By 1839, when the invention of photography was made public, a number of illustrated periodicals were already flourishing. But it would require time and a series of technological advances before they could take advantage of the possibilities that the new kind of picture making offered...
Think of time as a small stream scattered with flowers and flowing relentlessly past. Pick up a petal. Examine it, savor it, press it away between the pages of private memory. That's photography. Its birth was announced in 1839, when the French Academy made public Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre's new process for fixing images on a metal plate and, a few months later, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot broke the news of his own separate process. Since then, photography has been the best way of making time stand still...
...idea catches something of the superstition (sometimes justified, if you think about it) and the spooky metaphysics that go ghosting around photography. Taking pictures is a transaction that snatches instants away from time and imprisons them in rectangles. These rectangles become a collective public memory and an image-world that is located usually on the verge of tears, often on the edge of a moral mess...
...lens was met by an official hand raised to cover it: The Iran-Iraq war, the West Bank, the black townships of South Africa and the killing ground of Tiananmen Square. News photographers were banned from the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Soviet bombers fractured Afghan villages away from public view...