The short film A Glimpse of Life: The Pulitzer Photographs focuses on photography and what an impact it can have. The pictures shown have all won Pulitzer Prize, which is one of the biggest honors as a journalist. The film talks to the photographers of historic pictures and gets their point of view on how they got the shot, why photojournalism is so important, and how it is a calling.
Photojournalism is a very hard profession, because the photojournalists have to take pictures of heartbreaking and tragic sites. Not everybody can handle that, along with the hate that could come along with a certain picture.
“You rage inside at the helplessness. To try to deal with it, you seek out elements of humanity and courage.” Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Guzy said.
The power of a photo is unlike any other. A picture chosen for a Pulitzer truly has to capture a historic, important, or very emotional moment in time. A still moment in time can touch people. One very powerful picture was taken by Stanley Forman. This picture is from the Boston Fire in 1976. The picture is in black and white, and it shows an African-American women and a young child falling to the ground after a fire escape collapses beneath them. The little girl was okay, but the woman passed away that night.
One very important picture in American history was taken in 1945. This picture is also in black and white, and it is showing a group of soldiers putting up an American flag in Iwo Jima, Japan that was taken by Joe Rosenthal. Another very important picture in American history was taken by the New York Times staff after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Another winner was taken in 1995 by Carol Guzy in Haiti. The picture showed a young Haitian child laughing.
Another very powerful and important picture was taken in 1964 by Robert Jackson. After the assassination of JFK, the police arrested the suspected killer Lee Harvey Oswald. While the police were escorting him, Jack Ruby came out and shot him in the gut, and the picture is capturing that exact moment. There are also some very powerful pictures from the Colombia mudslide in 1986 taken by Carol Guzy and Michel duCille. One picture shows somebody whose body is completely submerged in mud, and the only part of their body you can see is their arm.
Even though these pictures are hard to look at and harder to take, it is very important for photojournalists to get these pictures so people in the future can understand what happened. It also helps people from other parts of the world in the time period that the event is happening understand.
