How Capturing a Tragic Moment in Time Becomes Timeless<\/b><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>The Pulitzer Prize awards a wide number of journalism categories. Perhaps the most famous\u00a0 would be those for photography. Images resonate more than words. Tragic images even more so. People remember where they were at these moments. Photography bears witness to those moments, including the tragic incidents in each of the following decades.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01940s: <\/b>Perhaps no athlete in history has been as polarizing to American culture as Babe Ruth. More than Brady, Gretzky or Jordan. Babe Ruth defined the sport of baseball. He began as a member of the Boston Red Sox. But we mostly remember him as a New York Yankee.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Nate Fein captured this Pulitzer-winning photo. It shows the moment when Babe Ruth returned to Yankee Stadium for the final time. The stadium would go on to be known as \u201cThe House That Ruth Built.\u201d\u00a0 He had been retired for 13 seasons. Now his health was failing. The Yankees decided to honor him one more time by retiring his number. This gave the fans one last look at the Sultan of Swat. This is one of the more tragic and heart wrenching photos in the history of sports. Ruth would die just two months later.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01960s: <\/b>The John F. Kennedy Assassination rocked the world in 1963. Conspiracy theories be damned. Authorities quickly captured and arrested Lee Harvey Oswald as the man who killed the president. But in a twist of a true crime drama, Jack Ruby, a mobster, shot and killed Oswald less than two days later. Many journalists filmed the scene of Oswald getting his so-called justice.. Photojournalist Bob Jackson captured the brief, but frantic, scene almost by accident.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With no planning and sheer reflexes, Jackson caught the moment. This photo shows in great detail what unfolded. The grimace on Lee Harvey Oswald\u2019s face. The face of one of the officers escorting Oswald shows a look of total shock and disbelief. Jackson caught the dramatic moment with exceptional clarity as Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen. Just a few years after JFK\u2019s assassination, a highly politicized war would threaten peace in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01970s: <\/b>The Kent State shooting was an example of a very tempestuous time in history boiling over into tragedy. Hundreds of student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio were protesting the United States\u2019 involvement in the Vietnam War. The Ohio National Guard was responsible for controlling the crowd. It was attempting to disperse the demonstrators. Through tension-filled confusion, a guardsman open fired on some of the students. Then more and more guardsmen opened fire. Four students died. The event caught national attention and brought more questions about the government attempting to silence people who opposed the war in Vietnam. Buffalo Springfield wrote a song about the shooting, \u201cFor What It\u2019s Worth.\u201d It went on to be a huge hit. John Filo\u2019s image of a student lying on the ground encapsulated the tragedy. It wasn\u2019t malicious murder. But the shooting of fellow citizens felt like an act of terrorism to some.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a01990s: <\/b>The Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 was a horrible act of Domestic Terrorism directed at the United States government. The act itself, however, affected a lot more. Anarchist Timothy McVeigh constructed a truck bomb that blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. The building contained many innocent Americans. Some were government employees. Many were not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The photo of a firefighter carrying a wounded infant captured the real victims of the act of terrorism. The federal building contained a nursery full of young children. The explosion killed six children, including the young girl the firefighter carried.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Charles Porter IV was an amateur photographer not affiliated with any newspaper. Porter was working in a nearby bank building. He grabbed his camera and captured the images that humanize and highlight the victims of this terrible tragedy. The picture shows both heroism on part of the firefighter and tragedy on part of the young child. Baylee Almon, who had just celebrated her first birthday the day before the bombing, died from her injuries. Domestic terrorism was a rather new concept. But it would only increase. Also, there was a newer threat on the minds of Americans: foreign terrorism.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a02000s: <\/b>It can go without saying how much the events of September 11, 2001, changed the world. After American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, it burned alone for 17 minutes. Photojournalist Kelly Guenther of the New York Times caught the moment that United Flight 175 approached the South Tower. This confirmed the fears of a terrorist attack on American soil.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The picture shows a wide shot of Manhattan\u2019s skyline while black smoke billowed out of the North Tower. The photo portrays the airliner as a small speck, in between the Manhattan skyline buildings. It banks just milliseconds before slamming into the South Tower. This is truly the last instant that hundreds of passengers on the plane, and hundreds inside the South Tower, would be alive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How Capturing a Tragic Moment in Time Becomes Timeless \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Pulitzer Prize awards a wide number of journalism categories. Perhaps the most famous\u00a0 would be those for photography. Images resonate more than words. Tragic images even more so. People remember where they were at these moments. Photography bears witness to those moments, including the tragic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8126,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7242\/revisions\/8126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.umpi.edu\/utimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}