transcript

NARRATION: In May, 1999, a devastating tornado tore up large areas of Kansas and central Oklahoma. The storm killed 46 people; thousand lost their homes. In the hall of a church in Oklahoma City, volunteers collected photographs which had been scattered, sometimes over miles, by the storm. Their hope was to return these treasured possessions to people who had lost almost everything they owned.

Grandma: I don’t know, I had boxes of ’em, and they just all flew away.

Blonde Mother: The back of the house where I kept all my picture albums was sucked away, and the hallway where all our pictures were, everything is gone.

Man: Pictures are more important than all the other stuff we lost, you know, the furniture and all that stuff can be replaced.

British Woman: There was a day when George was three weeks old, and Terry, my husband, was getting ready to go back to work after his leave, and I really would have liked that page out of the album.

George: Is that Dad’s truck?

British Woman: No, Darling, that’s not Daddy’s truck. It looks like it though, doesn’t it.

Woman: I found one!

Man: You’re kidding! You actually found one in all this mess?

Woman: It’s your writing, and it says "Melanie at six months. December 1965." Would that not be...?

Woman 2: Yes, that’s my handwriting.

LEONARD NIMOY, Actor/Photographer: We take photographs and we keep photographs for so many different reasons. And even within the pictures that I have in my office there are a number of reasons for having them. Some are of great emotional memories that I want to preserve. Some happen to be a record of something that I did that I’m proud of and I like to have it around me. And it’s a kind of a proof, I did that, I was there, you know.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: Someone, when I was maybe twelve, thirteen years old, gave me this picture book. The pictures showed us what the rest of the world was to which we aspired. I couldn’t have dreamed had I not seen the pictures. I wouldn’t have known what to dream.

DANIEL CZITROM, Historian: Try to imagine the world today without photographs, it’s really kind of impossible. It would be like a person who was blind from birth, trying to imagine the world out there.

DAVID FRIEND, Vanity Fair: Photographs are on the periphery of our lives as sort of visual undergrowth that we take for granted, but really photographs are a matter of life and death. They’re the pictures that we see on the front page of our newspaper that force us to act and stop this war in this region. They’re the pictures that when we go to the doctor, whether we have an x-ray or a sonogram, that can save our lives literally.

DANIEL CZITROM, Historian: They are one of the things that define the 20th century. The photo that everybody knows, that everybody’s familiar with, that circulates nationally, internationally that seems to define a particular moment.

GAIL BUCKLAND, Photographic Historian: There are many shots that we can’t even imagine living without, they become so fundamental to how we view ourselves and how we view a particular era.

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RAYNA GREEN ON NATIVE AMERICANS

NARRATION: In the early part of the century, Edward Curtis published a 20-volume set of photographs documenting the lives of Native Americans. Most people’s idea of what Indians look like comes from Curtis’s photographs.

RAYNA GREEN, Smithsonian Institution: I’m Rayna Green. I’m Oklahoma Cherokee and German Jewish from Texas and Oklahoma.

Title: RAYNA GREEN

RAYNA GREEN, Smithsonian Institution: I have no pictures in my family album from the turn of the century. Whoever my people were, they took no pictures.

Title: REFLECTIONS ON EDWARD CURTIS

RAYNA GREEN, Smithsonian Institution: Every Indian in North America has a Curtis photograph on their wall at sometime during their lives. Edward Curtis, a great photographer, an extraordinary man, made it his enterprise to photograph the people whom he believed would disappear. And so he set about on this extraordinary enterprise. And he did go all over North America from the northwest coast to Hopi land to the northern plains.

Curtis gave non-Indians an image of a world that they wanted intact. Indians as beautiful, Indians as romantic. He dragged around a trunk full of clothes just in case Indians didn’t look the way he wanted them to look. If they didn’t look right, he fixed it. If he didn’t think they looked glamorous enough in their daily Sioux outfits, he’d drag out the Blackfeet ermine-tailed war bonnets, just to hype it up a little more.

What Curtis did was extraordinary and what he left us with was an amazing legacy, these beautiful pictures of a moment in time that we all wish was true, that last brief shining moment when we looked glorious, when things weren’t shattered.

For me though and I think for a lot of native people those pictures give us a lie, give us a fantasy. I want the real picture of a daily world the way native people were living it, and Curtis can’t give me that.

Frank Matsura photographed hundreds and hundreds of Indian people at the time. He was making pictures of all the things they were, of all the ways they looked. He took pictures of the not-Curtis world. And I want those pictures. I want the reality. I want the past as it was rather than as someone dreamed it into being.

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SOCIAL REFORM

NARRATION: In the first decade of the century, photographs were beginning to enter into many aspects of American life. They came through the mail; pictures appeared in newspapers and magazines. Photography was starting to have an influence not only on how people saw the world, but on what they believed.

TITLE: "With a picture sympathetically interpreted, what a lever we have for social uplift." – Lewis Hine.

NARRATION: Writers had been describing the sufferings of the poor since before the time of Dickens. But no one thought of using photographs to advocate social change. Soon after it became possible to print photographs in books, Jacob Riis included pictures in his influential work on housing reform.

Riis’s work inspired Lewis Hine, a teacher who first picked up a camera as an educational tool. In 1906, he was hired by the National Child Labor Committee. They hoped that photographs might lend powerful support to their campaign to make child labor illegal.

NAOMI ROSENBLUM, Author: Hine and the National Child Labor Committee set out to educate the American middle class public about the need for legislation. Hine’s purpose was to show that children who worked so hard would be used up, would not provide America with an intelligent working class.

NARRATION: Hine assembled his pictures into exhibitions and slide shows, which criss-crossed the country. His photographs reached a huge audience - people who had never seen these kinds of images before. They were both moved and outraged.

"Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures," Hine wrote. "Well, so are the rest of us. But we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past."

MARVIN HEIFERMAN, Curator/Writer: Lewis Hine is probably one of the first people who realizes that what you see in a photographic image has extraordinary power and it’s got power way beyond logic and way beyond language. There were certain kinds of things that you could see in those pictures that would go right to your heart instead of to your head.

NARRATION: The photographs and the campaign led to state, and ultimately federal legislation outlawing child labor. Hine had made photography an essential tool in the struggle for social change.

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TITLE: WORLD WAR I

In 1917, the United States entered World War One. The war did have its enthusiastic supporters, but much of the country remained to be convinced. A large percentage of the population was isolationist, and believed that it was senseless for Americans to die in this distant European conflict.

Just one week after America’s declaration of war, President Wilson established the country’s first propaganda agency. It would unleash a massive media campaign to rally the country to the cause. The camera, tightly controlled, became an important weapon of war.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: In the first world war, American any photography of the troops was designed only to raise their morale, or to raise the morale of the folks at home. It was the government's attitude, I think correctly, that photographs depicting anything disgusting might slow down enlistments, as well as annoy the home front.

NARRATION: Photographers were kept away from the front lines, and most images of combat were either posed, or taken very far from the action. Government censorship was total. In a war in which over ten million people were slaughtered, no newspaper or magazine was ever permitted to show a photograph of a dead American soldier.

DOROTHY OSBORNE, 101 years old: We heard a great deal about the trenches. I haven’t thought of it really until you brought it up, the fact that we didn’t see pictures and pictures of dead soldiers. I don’t remember seeing many photographs of death, no I don’t.

JOHN SZARKOWSKI, The Museum of Modern Art (Emeritus): Well it was an appalling war. I mean, In terms of human sacrifice and idiocy, it was surely a much more horrible war, at least from the point of view of the armies that were engaged, than the Second War. I mean, repeatedly back and forth for the same one hundred yards of territory year in and year out, killing millions of men on the same narrow strips of ground. You know, you don’t want that kind of thing reported in your daily paper while the war is going on.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: The argument is always made against the actual showing of photographs showing real life. That it would bother the relatives, and that's quite true. Yeah. My position is that I want to bother the relatives. You see, because I think war is a really appalling business, and I think it's everybody's business to know how appalling it is.

NARRATION: The actual horrors of war, although censored at the time, had in fact been photographed.

In the 1930’s, as hostilities were again building up in Europe, these photographs were published by America’s antiwar lobby. Right up until the moment that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, they bolstered the country’s determination to avoid foreign wars. The pictures showed the truth – that modern warfare was anything but glorious.

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PHOTOGRAPHY PROGRAM TWO

Introduction to Visual Sources

VICKI GOLDBERG, Author, critic: One of the things that happens throughout this century is that people are beginning to depend more and more on visual sources. I don’t know that many people thought about it a lot, but photographs are coming more and more into their lives. It became a language that everybody knew they could speak.

MARVIN HEIFERMAN, Curator/Writer: Photographic images changed everybody’s understanding about you know not only what the world looked like but what news was.

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: Photography has a certain selective nature that will take an instant and maybe lift it up out of the ordinary, and therefore make bumps in history that you wouldn’t find if it were not for photography.

JERRY DELLA FEMINA, Advertiser: ...That moment in time when that Spanish, Civil War soldier is shot and bends back. Can you ever erase that image from your mind? Can anyone ever say, alright I saw it, I don’t have to see it again? I don’t remember?

DANIEL CZITROM, Historian: By 1930, people really think that the photograph is the most trustworthy source of information. It’s the thing they want most. It’s the thing they believe in most. There’s no question that most ordinary Americans have been socialized in a way that says that seeing is believing, and the photograph is the most accurate way to see.

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TITLE: LIFE

(8) NARRATOR: On November 23, 1936, a new magazine appeared on news stands. Publisher Henry Luce gave Americans something they had never seen before -- a glossy, large-format news magazine which used photographs to tell its stories. Never one to think small, Luce called the magazine quite simply, Life.

DAVID FRIEND, Vanity Fair: It was the biggest mass market hit in the history of publishing going back to Gutenberg. Nothing that ever had been published was as big an immediate sell out and it just took over. Why? Because it spoke in a language that everybody could understand. Pictures.

RICHARD STOLLEY, Life Magazine: It is very hard... I mean we’re so inundated with images now that it is almost impossible to comprehend how little of that existed when Life came out. There’d maybe be a picture on the front page of the newspaper, a few magazines would run pictures, nothing arrived in your home and opened up the world to you. This is precisely what Life did. The success of Life, the impact it had I’m sure surprised the absolute hell out of the people who launched it. I mean, I think Luce knew he was on to something.

(9a) NARRATOR: Henry Luce always had a fascination with what he called "picture magic". To introduce his new magazine to the world, he wrote an essay which described the many powers of photography. "To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed..."

MARVIN HEIFERMAN, Curator/Writer: You turn the pages of life magazine and there’s politics and there’s fashion and there’s movies and there’s advertising and there’s cars and there’s food and there’s homes and there’s tragedy and there’s happiness and if you think about what that was like in 1936 during the Depression as people are just trying to understand what’s going on in this country, it’s amazing.

(9b) NARRATOR: Life perfected the format of the photo essay. The photographs, selected and arranged on the page, would tell the story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

BARBARA BAKER BURROWS, Life Magazine When you're finished with that photo essay you should pretty much know what that story is all about without even having read a word in a text piece or a caption. There was the "Career Girl," Leonard McCombe’s "Career Girl." People hadn’t seen stories like that, actually published pictures of people’s ordinary lives.

DANIEL CZITROM. Historian: One of the reasons I think that people get hooked on Life is a sense that they are bringing these extraordinary images to any American citizen. Any given American, no matter where he or she lived, no matter what their class was, no matter what they did for a living, they all could essentially share in this experience and that experience of course is defined by still photographs.

JERRY DELLA FEMINA, Advertiser: Life told us about a world that many of us didn’t have. I grew up in the Italian section of Brooklyn. I did not speak English until I went to school. A magazine like Life Magazine which somehow came into this Italian household, I don’t know why, but I guess someone said, I think we should learn how to be Americans, and Life Magazine was this great, great lesson about what the other world, the outside world was all about. You know, it’s so amazing, I can’t remember what I ate this afternoon. I can remember what I saw in Life Magazine.

Title: MARION CHADWICK GROWS UP - 1922-1955

NARRATION: In a special feature, Life printed snapshots of Marion Chadwick and her father at the beach -- one photograph a year, for over a quarter of a century.

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Title: THE FSA

PICTURING HARD TIMES

NARRATOR: The Great Depression. In Washington, Roosevelt attempted to deal with the economic crisis proposing a multitude of new government programs. He knew he would need the support of Congress and the general public.

As part of the Farm Security Administration, the government established an organization unique in peace time, a propaganda agency that would use the power of photographs to sell Roosevelts programs. Roy Stryker, an economist from Columbia University was chosen to run this new agency.

JOHN MORRIS, Author/Picture Editor: Roy Stryker never took a picture in his life. But he was a great talent scout and he brought together a team of photographers, some of whom had become legends in the history of photography, like Dorthea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Walker Evans. Stryker was dedicated to telling the story of America the way it was as he put it, "our job was to introduce America to Americans."

[MONTAGE OF PHOTOGRAPHS]

JACK DELANO, : I think the photographs that I did for Farm Security and what we all did I think is an expression of our feeling that we were living in a great country but that the country was in great trouble, and also that the people who were most troubled in those times were also the people who were part of its greatness.

EDWIN ROSSKAM: It was a politically naive period, and all of us who went to Washington at that time, had some crazy idea that what we could do could alter the course of history.

DR. NAOMI ROSENBLUM, Author : I’ve read any number of times about how there was dust in the food and dust on the table and dust in the bed and in the clothes, but until you actually see a good photograph such as Arthur Rothstein’s of the people walking from the house to the dust cellar, you don’t get a sense of the immensity of the occurrence. Somehow the photograph sums this all up in a different way, you get a sense of it that’s sort of visceral instead of just intellectual.

NARRATOR: Over six years, FSA photographers took a quarter of a million photographs. They were made available free of charge and were widely used in newspapers, magazines, exhibits and books. At the time, the pictures helped sell Roosevelt’s programs, but for later generations they have become a national treasure. Frozen in this archive is a critical moment of American history. Today, when we think of the Depression, we see these faces, the suffering and the sadness as well as their implicit message -- as bad as things were, America would endure...

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Title: GORDON PARKS ON ELLA WATSON

NARRATION: In the early 1940s a young photographer, Gordon Parks, got a call to come to Washington, with the success of the FSA, its role was being expanded. Roy Stryker believed that photographs could be used to combat racial discrimination. He began by showing Parks how things really worked on the streets of the nation's capital.

GORDON PARKS, Photographer/Writer: So Roy Stryker asked me a few questions and said, what are you really know about the city? And I told him, and he said, hmmm, he said well I’m going to give you an assignment. Your first assignment. Put your camera on a shelf. I want you to go to Julius Garfinkle’s store, buy yourself a top coat. There’s a restaurant directly across the street. And then there’s a motion picture house down in the same block. So to make the story short, each one of them gave me short shrift. I didn’t get a coat at the department store. When I went to the restaurant, the man said, don’t you know Negroes have to eat on the other side in the back? You can’t come in this side. You have to get your food in to the back. And, of course, I didn’t even get in the movie house. That’s the way it was. So I was astounded. And I went back and Roy saw me walk in and he smiled. And he said, well how did it go? And I says, well I think you know how it went. He said, yeah. What are you going to do about it? I said, I don’t know. What do I do about it? He said, well, what’d you bring your camera down here for? Just like that. I said, oh. So, he left and the only person left in the building was a black woman, a char woman, who was sweeping the floor and mopping. So I introduced myself, she told me her name was Ella Watson, and I asked her if I could photograph her. Photograph me like this? I said yes. I really thought of Grant Wood’s picture American Gothic. I put a broom in one hand, and a mop in the other. And told her to look directly into the camera. Well, that picture has become the best known picture of all of my work. I showed it to Stryker three mornings later. He said, well, you’re getting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. Said this is a government agency and that picture is an indictment against America and I realize from the reactions of people that the camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination. Against poverty. Against racism...

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WORLD WAR TWO

NARRATION: In the early 1940s, the photograph had completed its conquest of America. After the success of LIFE, the news stands were overflowing with picture magazines. Wire services were now sending pictures instantly around the world not only on telephones lines but via radio waves. 35 millimeter cameras and fast lenses made it possible to capture life in action. With these technical innovations, photography had immense power to shape public opinion. All this potential came together on December 7, 1941.

[NEWS CLIP Pearl Harbor]

NARRATION: The war would be a fought on many fronts -- an astounding global story which both the military and the press were determined to record in pictures. LIFE Magazine and former FSA photographers were rushed to the front lines. It soon became a world-wide tragedy of unimaginable proportions, but ironically, World War II was a photographer’s dream.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Military cameramen moved in as always with the troops to bring home the pictured facts, the hell of jungle warfare, the dawn of landing day on some corral beach.

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Title: WORLD WAR TWO - FIVE PHOTOGRAPHS

1 - DEMONIZING THE ENEMY

NARRATION: "Public opinion wins wars," wrote General Eisenhower.

FILM NARRATOR: Thus, at last, the double face of Nippon showed itself in its true...

NARRATION: To win World War II it wasn’t enough to tell the American public what they were fighting for, it was necessary to drive home what they were fighting against. The Japanese, with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, were singled out as objects of particular hatred.

RM: Well, the Japanese soon became Japs, not just in LIFE but in the press in general. The worst, the most tragic thing that happened was the evacuation of what eventually became about 100,000 Japanese-American residents of the west coast to the interior. There was racism, both conscious and unconscious in the treatment of the Japanese.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: If you can understand that then you can understand the dimension of the war that seldom surfaces today, that kind of intense hatred that was necessary to fight it.

NARRATOR: To modern eyes, of all the many pictures coming out of World War II, this is one of the strangest and the most telling.

Life Magazine printed it as their ‘Picture of the Week’ with the following caption: "When he said goodbye to Natalie Nickerson, her handsome Navy lieutenant promised her -- a Jap."

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: She was his girlfriend, apparently, and a very respectable girl who went to church and led her high school class and that sort of thing. And here she was present at this bizarre and gruesome exhibit of this Japanese soldier’s skull well that sort of thing was commonplace. It became a real service problem as what to do with these cleansed bones of former Japanese soldiers as gifts and souvenirs. My point is, this never happened with the German corpses. They were never boiled down to get their bones to send home. Never! Germans were white people. And I think this ought to be talked about in exactly those terms, because it’s been forgotten. We didn’t lock up people with German names. We locked up people with Japanese names, so although they were American citizens, they were very close to, it seemed, to what used to be called niggers in this country, and that should never be forgotten either, and the fact that they were not quite suggested a very special brand of alien offensiveness, and consequently to take the flesh off their dead bones and then mail those bones home as nice souvenirs for the people in Iowa and so on, didn’t bother people at all. They thought it quite appropriate. You can learn a lot about Americans in the Second World War from that one photograph I would say.

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Title: 2 - THE PIN-UP

NARRATOR: World War II produced many famous photographs, but one of the most famous was not of guns or tanks, but of a young woman’s back.

Her name was Betty Grable, and at the height of the war, 50,000 servicemen a month were asking for this picture. 20th Century Fox made a movie to capitalize on the fame of the photograph. They called it Pin-Up Girl.

(MOVIE CLIP)

MAN: Laurie.

BETTY: Oh, hello. Here’s the last one. That’s all fellows.

(END OF CLIP)

NARRATOR: With high heels, her bathing suit, and her big ‘come hither’ smile, Betty Grable's photograph was everywhere. A fighter plane was named "Pin-Up Girl" and had her picture painted on its fuselage. She billed herself as the daughter of a truck driver and took her role as icon seriously. "I’ve got to be an enlisted man’s girl," she said. "Just like this has got to be an enlisted man’s war."

GRABLE SINGING: 'Do I love my pin-up girl...'

NARRATION: The war created a fad for pin-ups of all kinds. On barrack walls, in decals, in soldier’s wallets. Life Magazine published a set of pictures of beautiful women and then conducted a poll among the troops. "Which one of these girls would you most like to have pneumonia with?" "The girl you’d most like to bail out with?" "The girl you’d most like to take out for a chicken dinner?" An army publication put it simply. "We’re not only fighting for the four freedoms, we’re fighting for the priceless privilege of making love to American women."

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Title: 3 D-DAY

(ARCHIVE CLIP)

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: This is the day for which free people long have waited. This is D-Day.

NARRATOR: For years it had been in the planning. The return of allied forces to France. The ultimate crushing of Germany and the end of the war in Europe. Every magazine and newspaper editor in the country knew that D-Day would be their biggest story. Life Magazine sent John Morris to London in late 1943. His instructions were simple: get us the first pictures of the invasion.

JM: By June 1944, I had a team of six war correspondent photographers and my job was to get them assigned to various spots for the great story of the invasion, which involved a million men.

NARRATOR: To cover the actual landing, Morris sent Robert Capa. Capa had photographed the Spanish Civil War, the desert battle across North Africa and the invasion of Italy. If anyone could capture the events of D-Day on film, it would be Robert Capa.

[ARCHIVE CLIP D-DAY LANDING]

JM: When Capa’s film came in, we were desperate because we had to make a final deadline of nine AM Thursday morning for shipment to Life. Up until that moment the whole world didn’t know what D-Day actually looked like. So we were really pressed for time. Capa’s film came in, it came to me in the early evening with a note from him saying, 'John, the action is all in these four rolls of 35-millimeter film.' And I ordered the darkroom to rush processing as fast as possible. I said, give me contact prints, I needed to edit. And the young lad in the darkroom put the film in the drying cabinet and closed the doors and there was too much heat. And because we were in such a hurry, the films ruined. And on three rolls of the four there was no image discernible at all, but on the fourth roll, fortunately, I found 11 frames that could be printed. And those are the pictures that will live forever.

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Title: 4 - IWO JIMA

[MOVIE CLIP]

SOLDIER: There she goes.

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: One of the great photo icons of all time, possibly the greatest, is a picture that Joe Rosenthal made of the flag raising on Iwo Jima on top of Mt. Suribachi.

It had been a bloody, bloody course, and then along comes this picture that says victory. The night it was made, it was flown to Guam and the next day was transmitted to the U.S. So it was in the U.S. within a day and a half of the time it was made, and transmitted to newspapers and the picture was played on the front pages everywhere. And it became an instant icon.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: That photograph is especially interesting I think because it could be said to mark the impact of the New Deal upon the way we understood the war. We understood the war as an almost magical force for uniting people in this country, and for effacing differences and that is what that photograph taken just as a piece of symbolism is about

NARRATION: One picture. And in that brief moment, Rosenthal’s camera seemed to capture the soul of a nation.

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Title: 5 - EVIDENCE

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: There are certain pictures that change our lives. Now, I don’t mean pictures of events that change our lives, but I mean pictures themselves that change our lives. And Auschwitz and other concentration camp photos are in that category.

NARRATOR: People had read descriptions of the concentration camps, but they seemed exaggerated -- unbelievable. Eyewitnesses had been met with suspicion. The possibility that a whole people had been exterminated was unthinkable, and then, these images -- visual proof of the enormity of the Nazi crimes.

Even Margaret Bourke-White, the experienced combat photographer, could not fathom what she was seeing: "Using the camera was almost a relief," she wrote, "it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me. I kept telling myself that I’d believe it when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. But later, when I developed the negatives, I could not bring myself to look at the films."

Like the holocaust they documented, the photographs mark a turning point in human consciousness. The world would never be the same.

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FAMILY OF MAN

NARRATOR: On January 24th, 1955 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City presented an exhibition called "The Family of Man." Organized by photographer Edward Steichen, it was a fusion of carefully selected photographs and captions, all to support the concept -- mankind is one. It included five hundred photographs, from sixty-eight countries around the world. It featured groups of related pictures that moved the viewer from images of lovers meeting, to pictures of marriage, to birth, and finally to universal concerns of food and shelter.

DR. NAOMI ROSENBLUM, Author: For one thing it came after this terrible war and the aftermath of the war in which societies were really disrupted. It made the point that people everywhere had the same needs and same desires, that families were families wherever they existed, no matter what the people dressed like and what their surroundings looked like. It appealed to people on a just very human level.

NARRATION: Critics attacked the show as simplistic, but for the vast general public, the exhibit was a profound revelation. It toured the country and then the world, bringing many people into museums for the first time in their lives. A book was published based on the exhibit and it brought the pictures to millions more. In all, the "Family of Man" became the most widely seen collection of images in the history of photography.

THOMAS HURWITZ, Cinematographer : I don’t remember when the "Family of Man" came into my consciousness, but it’s effect on me was extraordinary. It was a collection of the single most powerful images that I had ever seen, certainly to that date, and probably ever have seen together. These extraordinary pictures celebrated a humanism saying that all people were alike under the skin, but yet in their differences they express the beauty of what it is to be human. The couple making love. Obviously in the middle of sex. Although all you see are the shoulders, was what I hoped passion would be. The father teaching the son how to hunt in Bechuanaland was something about fatherhood, something about what I wanted to be as a father, but then there were photographs that just to me said things that were so big about the world. I mean the Cartier-Bresson photographs especially the one of the women looking off across the field of stones in Kashmir. The Doisneau picture of the lovers by the Seine. They were icons. They stood for meaning that kept building and building and building. And it told us that the human heart was beautiful. And the human heart was shared by everyone who is human.

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Title: THE EMMETT TILL GENERATION

NARRATION: In August, 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy, visiting Mississippi from Chicago, was accused of whistling at a white woman. He was bludgeoned to death and his body was thrown into a nearby river.

In a South where violent racism was commonplace, Emmett Till’s murder may have gone un-noticed, except for this photograph. Published only in the black press, it showed his young face beaten beyond recognition.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: It was awful.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: Awful.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: It was horrific. He looked like an old man.

DORIE LADNER, Brookings Institution: And I would go to bed every night, frightened to death, nearly frightened to death...

DORIE LADNER, Social Worler: We were scared.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: Because we were the same age as he, and we didn’t know whether or not they would come and get us.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: And we also saw pictures in the newspapers and especially in the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, of the assailants...

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: Laughing.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: In the court room laughing.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: A picture is worth a thousand words.

JOYCE Ladner, Brookings Institution: They’re seared in your brain.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: Yeah, and they remain there, and Emmett Till’s face is still in my mind today. I can see it. It’s there. And it will never leave.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: I think my generation of black southerners who became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s was the Emmett Till generation, because down to a person, all my friends saw that picture at about the same age as I or a year or two older, and they were enraged and felt powerless at the same time and vowed as I did that one day they were going to get even. They were going to do something about it.

EXTRO

NARRATION: Photography was growing up with the century. In the coming years, it would confront the television age, and soon the digital age.

Every aspect of American life was about to go through profound changes. The camera would be there, to document, to shock, to motivate and to transform...

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PHOTOGRAPHY PROGRAM THREE

HAROLD EVANS, New York Daily News, US News and World Report : The thing which has always fascinated me has been the enduring power of the still image, because we’re all very movie conscious today, we watch television, we’re used to swift cut, jump cuts and there’s absolutely brilliant work being done. And yet, and yet...the still image has this fantastic power of surviving and making an impact.

DIRCK HALSTEAD, Time Inc. Contract Photographer: You know if I mention World War II to you, right away you think of either Capa’s picture on the beach at D-Day or you think of Joe Rosenthal’s picture. Everybody’s mind thinks that way. So the still image is still the way we catalog life’s history in our minds.

GRAHAM NASH, Artist/Musician: I think the frozenness of the image, representing exactly what it was that was going on is more powerful than seeing a movie of it. When you capture a tremendously brilliant image, you have frozen the very essence of what it was that was going on. And it only gives you this much of a slice of what was going on, but it was the right slice.

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: You see the still picture, it’s there and you look at it, and you study it, and then you see it again some other place. You see it in the newspaper, you see it in a magazine, so you not only have the first impact, but then there’s the second impact and the third impact, and pretty soon, that picture is just imbedded in your mind as fully and as completely as it can be.

SERIES TITLE: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY A CENTURY OF IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPHY TRANSFORMED 1960-1999

CIVIL RIGHTS

DANNY LYON, Photographer/Filmmaker: This was the summer of '63. All across the South, the South was on fire. It was really the peak of the Civil Rights movement and some people have said that I photographed the golden age of the Civil Rights movement.

TITLE: GETTING THE STORY OUT

DANNY LYON, Photogrpaher/Filmmaker: I wanted to make photographs, and I wanted to make photographs of that because it was just a compelling subject. I went to Albany, Georgia. I soon found movement headquarters and ran into James Foreman, and he said, "you got a camera?" He said, "go into the courthouse. They got a big water cooler for white people and a little one, a little bowl for black people," he says, "go take a picture of that." Things like that existed all over the South. There must have been thousands, thousands! You know, all these segregation signs, and so few people took these pictures, you know.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: The initials SNCC stood for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was formed by a group of students from across the South who had come together to integrate public facilities. Lunch counters, busses.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: Many of them went on the freedom rides into Mississippi and they were arrested and sent to Parchman State Penitentiary. So when they got out of prison, some of them stayed on in Mississippi to organize for voter registration.

It was very, very difficult to continue because the local police and all the towns had almost crushed us. They were closing in like...

They murdered people, they beat people, arrest was about the least harmful thing to occur.

DANNY LYON, Photographer/Filmmaker: There were terrible beatings, brutalities. We flew to a black hospital. I said, I didn’t know there were black hospitals. I mean, there were wounded people on the floor, people with broken noses, lacerated breasts, real horror scene you know. It was one of the most brutal, police attacks in the civil rights movement. It wasn’t covered by anyone.

The civil rights movement had been raging, and I’m talking raging for years before that occurred. Otherwise, there is no way that a that a white boy from Queens, 20 years old, could have gone down to these places and been the only photographer there.

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: We had no friends in the local media. Our story hadn't been told.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: They weren't covering us.

DANNY LYON, Photographer/Filmmaker: The Civil Rights Movement didn’t become a big media subject until Birmingham.

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: We heard about various things going on down there and suddenly we see police turning police dogs loose on a crowd in Birmingham, and the stories take on a new extra dimension of reality that they did not have without the visual documentation. The use of dogs in that situation just turned public opinion dramatically against the authorities in the South.

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: If you had not seen those water hosed being put on the people...

JOYCE LADNER, Brookings Institution: ...on the children especially...

DORIE LADNER, Social Worker: ...you would have no idea as to what was happening. And seeing the water hoses knocking people down, I mean, can you imagine how the world felt when you saw this...

DAN CZITROM, Historian: Those photographs circulated internationally at a time when the United States was really trying to make a pitch for the emerging nations of Asia and Africa to ally with the United States. They had a big problem with the wide reprinting of these photographs of police dogs in Birmingham or freedom riders being attacked. That was the moment when the growing civil rights struggle and the tensions around it began to have implications for American foreign policy, implications that were worldwide and I don’t think that came from television, I don’t think that came from the movies, that came from still photographic pictures.

RAYMOND M. BROWN, Trial Lawyer, Court TV Anchor: Horrors perpetrated before World War II were far worse. I mean, lynchings were, if not an everyday occurrence, an every month occurrence around America. But those photographs weren't whisked around the world by UPI, and AP and Reuters’, pre-war. And they were not part of a panoply of protest against the moral underpinnings of segregation. And so, when they were linked to a movement and propelled around the world and around the country, so that people of goodwill could have to move out of denial, and it wasn't just foreigners, it was Americans and white Americans in the South, like the people of The Atlanta Constitution said, "We don't want to be associated with this. We don't think we can engage in intellectual and other kinds of commerce around the world when we are painted with this." And it forced some change.

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VIETNAM

DAVID FRIEND, Vanity Fair: For certain subjects, still photography is the most powerful medium, and I think war is one of those subjects.

PHOTOS FROM VIETNAM

HAL BUELL, Former Photo Editor, AP: You know, it's a common wisdom to believe that television had a great impact on the American psyche during the Vietnam war -- the visuals of television. I disagree with that. I think that pictures, still pictures, had a much greater impact on American readers than the television did. No war will ever be covered the way the Vietnam war was covered. There was no censorship in Vietnam of any kind, photographers had greater access to that war then they did either Korea or World War II. And it was that intimacy with the war that came through that has not come through in any other war photography before or since.

TITLE: VIETNAM: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

1 Quang Duc

MALCOLM BROWNE, The New York Times: It was the night of June 10, 1963, I had a call from Tic Quang Duc saying, Mr. Brown, come out to such and such a pagoda tomorrow at six in the morning, something really important will happen.

And I could tell instantly that something very unusual was afoot because of the huge crowd of Buddhist monks and nuns who had gathered in this pagoda, many of them weeping. Two young monks brought out a plastic gerry can of gasoline, and poured it over the old monk, stepped back. Tic Quang Duc then lighted a match that he had in his lap and set fire to himself.

With a vivid imagination one can, one can think of what it would look like, to see a monk burning to death, but the actual image there, sort of in the flesh, has a different impact. I was stunned, a cold sweat had broken out on my head and I could, you know, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I kept my attention focused on the exposures and focusing and mechanics of picture taking, because it was horrifying. I had never seen, anything, anything to approach it.

The New York Times wouldn't print it because they regarded it as such an offensive photograph, that it was not suitable for a breakfast newspaper for families, but most other newspapers did print it and President Kennedy saw it the following morning and Ambassador Lodge was about to go out to Saigon, told me later that, Kennedy had pointed to this picture of mine and said, this just won't do, it's time to get rid of the Diem regime.

2 GENERAL NGUYEN NGOC LOAN

VICKI GOLDBERG, Author, critic: When Eddie Adams' picture of General Loan executing a suspect on the street of Saigon, appeared first on television and the next morning in the front pages of the paper, people were stunned, because they had never before seen this moment of death. We'd had this accumulation of demonstrations, and deaths and burning hooches, and television footage, and suddenly it all came down to a policeman executing suspect. At that very moment the bullet was entering this man's brain. He was dying in front of our eyes. And it struck home in some terrible fierce way. And became symbolic of everything that had happened in that long war.

3 Phan Thi Kim Phuc

HAROLD EVANS, New York Daily News, US News and World Report: The famous photograph of a young Vietnamese girl running down the road after having been napalmed by the American Army. Now you can say words, a young girl was badly burned yesterday, and actually suffered severe wounds, so on and so on. And you're kind of shocked by that. Say she was screaming, she was anguished. You can get some idea. But what you can't get is the emotional force. And actually the reenforcing and corroborative element also in the photograph of that girl coming towards you. Because she was photographed head on. And so you are seeing her, you were there, you were on that road.

4 Mary Ann Vecchio

GRAHAM NASH, Artist/Musician: A perfect example of a photograph that changes the way you feel about a certain situation was the John Filo photograph of the murdered student at Kent State. It happened May 4, 1970. The students at Kent State were doing what they thought they had the American right to do, which was to protest governmental action. And they were slaughtered for it by the National Guard. Four of them died. This photograph shows a girl leaning over the prostrate body of one of the slain students with her arms out questioning, what the hell just happened here? Neil Young saw the image, had his guitar, went off into the woods and came back an hour later with a song called "Ohio". Written from absolute anger that we would do this to our students. So that was a great image that reached deeply into your emotional soul and showed you what had happened.

BARBARA BAKER BURROWS, Life Magazine: During the Vietnam war, we covered the war endlessly, week after week after week and we decided, you know what we should do, why don't we run just the faces of a week's dead. Just the faces...

[THE PHOTOGRAPHS - ONE WEEK'S DEAD]

BARBARA BAKER BURROWS, Life Magazine: And the entire nation mourned those soldiers. You know, you could hear it on the news, you could be inundated with it. But until you saw those faces, that's what brought it home to everyone. And I think that's what changed everyone's mind...

[MONTAGE: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ANTI WAR DEMONSTRATIONS & END OF WAR HEADLINES.]

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GULF WAR

[CNN GULF WAR FOOTAGE]

CNN ANNOUNCER: ...was hit after a night long bombing campaign against Baghdad.

DAVID TURNLEY, Photojournalist: Well, the Gulf War was really, by far, the most sophisticated marketing scheme I'd ever run against, in terms of government censorship of images.

TITLE: CONTROLLING THE IMAGE

DAVID TURNLEY, Photojournalist: And it was first exercised in Grenada, and then in Panama, and by the time they got to the Gulf War they were really good at it.

DS: The government policy toward the press or media in the Gulf War was appalling. The whole sense that America is getting the straight story -- the sacrifice, the bloodshed, the heroism, that was just a sham, in the Gulf War. We got what the government wanted us to get.

PAUL FUSSELL, Author: It had learned from the Vietnam War how powerful photographs of war can be. And they didn't want to risk, that sort of, diversion, let's call it, or complication of its mission, at that point.

DAVID TURNLEY, Photojournalist: When I arrived in the Gulf, the press corps was presented with, really sort of the following option: if you want to work in the theater of war you have to join a press pool. And the rules of the press pool are the following, that you will be attached to a public affairs officer, and as photographers, it was essentially very clearly delineated that we could not photograph casualties of war, and this was a frightening dynamic. I could see pretty clearly I wasn't going to be able to do my work. And I essentially went AWOL, at that point. I left this unit, because it made no sense to me, to work under those conditions. While I had been on the border, I discovered an elite MASH unit, which is what put me in a position to then be on a Blackhawk helicopter on the last day of the war in which I made a photograph which become very memorable. The photograph is a moment depicting the medics just having placed this body bag in the helicopter, and the soldier on the left of the frame understanding for the first time that this was his best friend who had been killed.

RM: It was a remarkable picture. Turnley found it on the desk of the censor, and it would never have been sent out. It would never even have been taken except for the fact that David managed to evade the minder who was given him.

DAVID TURNLEY, Photojournalist: And my worse fear was realized when I got back to the rear two days after the war was over to find out that the picture editors had never received my film. So I went to the public affairs people and said, let's be straight with each other. You're denying these young guys their due right to be heroes. They did risk their lives and this photograph's gonna show that. And if people are going to send their brothers, and their sons, and their children, and their relatives to war they should at least know what the reality of war is.

MICHAEL DEAVER, Former Reagan Aide: I don't know, I think it's very dangerous for a free society to have all the information distilled and packaged by our government, and given to us. Do we know to this day who we killed, in Iraq? I don't think so. If bringing war into the living room means that, that we as a people will say we don't want to do it that way anymore, we want to figure out other ways to solve these conflicts, then I would say, photography and television has done us a great service.

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created: spring 2005; lasted updated: 8/15/2007