“Everything has a story about it. You just have to be able to see it” Pulitzer Prize winner, Jerry Gay, says. How right he is. Since the invention of the camera, photographs have helped humanity capture moments in time–for all of time. Unlike people, not all moments are created equal. Some pictures can speak to us: they can show us powerful moments in human history. Most often, this is a moment that is “a front seat to history” as Pulitzer Prize photojournalist John White puts it.
A Pulitzer Prize winning photo can be mundane. It can be exciting. It can be terrifying, horrifying, wonderful. Browsing through old winners, all these types of photos are visible. All of the photos show something both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. They are small slices of reality trapped on a paper, or a computer screen, to be seen for the rest of eternity.
Skeeter Hagler won the Pulitzer for his series of photos showing the daily life of cowboys. Three men sprawled out in the bed of a pick-up. Peppered with rust and scratch marks, the pick-up looks just as worn-out and hard-working as the men. They’re all napping, trying to get as comfortable as they can–legs crossed, heads resting on hands. There are cowboy hats proudly on display–one on a sleeping head, the other tossed lazily onto a boot. The noonday-shadow of the truck shows that this is just a siesta before they all get right back to work.
Why is this picture, something so normal, part of a Pulitzer winning series? It’s hard for people to empathize with others when we have no connection to them. Carol Guzy remembers “Someone once told me that empathy was not imagining how you would feel in a particular situation, but actually feeling what the other person is feeling.” Looking at Hagler’s cowboy photo, we can feel what these tuckered-out cowboys are feeling. Nearly everyone has wanted to “take 10” and drop to the ground, catching a quick catnap. It’s easy to put ourselves in their boots and feel what they feel, because we’ve all been there.
The photo helps us do that. The photo helps us feel what others are feeling. We can walk through that door to Narnia, to be somewhere other than our own reality for a moment. Sometimes we don’t allow that to happen. Other times we are overwhelmed by that step into another world. Often, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. Sometimes the words can add context to a photo, turning it from a still image into a living and breathing thing. This can be for emotions we’ve all felt, or even for emotions we all wish to feel–or dread.
The girl died. She was neck deep in water, clouded by mud and debris. Her mother stood nearby, and a man held her wrist, leaning on a wooden plank stuck in the mud. Her own wrist hung limply, covered in a white powder. It hadn’t even gotten wet. Someone was feeding a rope into the water. Maybe to help the girl, maybe not. The girl looked upward at the camera, eyes bloodshot. She wasn’t visibly upset. She was resigned. She was in the water for 72 hours. And then she died.
The context of the photo makes it even more powerful. We know that we’re watching the last hours or minutes of another human being. Her gaze up at the camera is one of the last things she will ever do–and she’s looking right at us. It is powerful.
This photo won the Pulitzer because it makes you feel those emotions. Just reading the text on a piece of paper won’t do that for you. You need to see the photo that connects with some primal part of your brain.
It stirs emotion inside of us, and as Guzy says, “You rage inside at the helplessness. To try to deal with it, you seek out elements of humanity and courage.” Pull that girl up! Get her out of the water and let her mother hug her! Why can’t they save her, she’s right there! Those are the thoughts running through the viewer’s head. But you can’t, she’s dead. It’s just a picture of the past, a glimpse into another world.
The finality to photos, the single moment, is part of what makes them so powerful to us, part of the reason why a photo is given the Pulitzer Prize. It’s not just a pretty picture. “It’s not a photography contest. It’s about telling some of the biggest stories of the year” as William Snyder, also a Pulitzer winner, puts it. The picture of the girl trapped in the water isn’t for a photography contest.
Just telling the biggest story of the year also isn’t what makes a Pulitzer photo. The photos need to connect. Here is a black and white photo of children playing outside. They wear dark clothing and have scarves wrapped around their heads. Each of them has a hula-hoop, and they laugh as they try to spin them around. Stan Grossfeld’s picture could be ordinary children playing outside on an ordinary day. But it isn’t. The Lebanese Civil War rages when the photo was taken, and the children are finding joy in a normal setting. “Everyone has a story” says John White. “And we sing their song. If we don’t do it—if the journalist doesn’t do it—who’s going to do it?” The picture helps tell us that story. The viewer can’t be there in person. But the journalist and his photo help bring that world to us. It tells us the story of other people in a way that we can feel, and it resonates with us.
It is trying to tell a “big story.” Always, stories involve individual human lives: lives that can be changed forever at the drop of a hat. All people understand that it takes just a single moment for their lives to be changed forever. A photo, especially a Pulitzer photo, often shows us those moment. It forces us to look at one of these moments, where for some people, every aspect of their lives was changed forever.
We know that there was a time before the photo, there is a time after. But that single instant is captured in a picture, and while we look at it, we exist in that world alone. The ability to bring that one moment alive to us, the view, is what makes a Pulitzer Prize photo. We live the moment every time we see the photo, and we feel emotions that we wouldn’t–unless we had looked at the photo.
