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Photojournalists are not going to win the Pulitzer Prize for being the best in a competition. The Pulitzer is awarded to photojournalists who happen to be in the right place at the right time.
All who have won a Pulitzer did not go out thinking that they were going to be shooting a prize-winning picture. It is not something that can be hunted for. For a photo to win the prize, it must make the observer react to it. The photo must feel powerful.
Every American can recognize the winner taken on Iwo Jima in 1945. The photo taken shows four American soldiers raising an American flag on a war-torn landscape. The flag is not all the way up and is on a fixed position on the pole. The picture feels powerful: as if you’re watching four brothers lift a symbol of freedom in dark times.
The picture called “Saigon Execution 1969” takes place on city streets. There are buildings on the right side of the road and a single car traveling on the road in the background. Two men are the focus of the picture. A man on the left is holding a gun to the head of a man on the right. The man on the right looks frightened. It’s the exact moment before the man was executed. At the time this was something that had never been captured. You can feel the anguish in the man about to die. The other man holding the gun is very relaxed and composed. It feels like he’s done this act before and has grown comfortable doing it.
The Pulitzer winner taken from the Boston school busing protest 1977 shows protesters and counter protesters. On the right, a black man is being forcefully removed from the area. On the counter protester side, a white man is holding an American flag in a reverse grip. He appears to be stepping forward getting ready to use the flag as a weapon against the man being removed. The picture captures the hateful expression on the flag holder’s face. In the background it looks as if there are other white people cheering on the treatment of the black man.
One prize winner was taken during the 1985 Olympics and you see an American athlete in a pants and jacket uniform. On the back he has the USA acronym embroidered on the shoulders. The man is reaching up into a crowd that is congratulating him. In his right hand he holds the ceremonial torch used to light the large fire that signals the official start of the games. The stands in which the fans are seated are elevated. The American Flag decorating the wall separates them from the competitors.
In the 1990s, during the fall of the Berlin Wall, the winner shows a group of people who are tearing down the thick concrete wall covered in graffiti. A man in a black jacket is using a hammer and chisel to chip away at the wall. The wall was built in Germany in response to the thousands of East Germans fleeing to the West. It separated east from west during the Cold War and was built by Germany’s Communist Party. The wall embodied that there was no escape from communist rule, and the tearing down of the wall was a historic victory for western values.
Seeing these pictures and hearing the passionate statements about them from the photojournalists who took them shows how powerful a career journalism is. Journalists are going out into the world and telling the stories of people and places that readers would not be aware of otherwise. For these journalists, it wasn’t just a job. It’s a way of life. Their calling is to make sure that people are informed about the great events that took place in our time. It’s a way to communicate with other people about the workings of the world. They take what they observe and share it with the rest of the world to share their sense of awe and amazement.
