{"id":132,"date":"2012-03-30T18:32:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T18:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2012-04-01T04:59:02","modified_gmt":"2012-04-01T04:59:02","slug":"photos-that-made-history-and-make-you-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Photos That Made History and Make You Remember"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why did this magazine jump out at me amid all the splashy come-on covers on the rack as I killed a few minutes in Walgreen’s\u00a0recently? Perhaps because it was the classiest\u00a0cover by far, with several images adorning it, including a pure Camelot shot of debonair John F. Kennedy, at a speech podium, pointing across a crowd, with wife Jackie gazing\u00a0adoringly at him. Photo by Tony Baldasaro<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Juxtaposed to this on the cover is an unforgettable shot of 11 skyscraper construction workers perched precariously on an I-beam, 800 feet above the streets of New York. Though often attributed to Lewis Hine, the famous photo is by Charles Ebbets, who took it on September 29, 1932 amid The Great Depression. The guys sit chatting, munching and lighting each other’s cigarettes at the 69th floor level of the RCA building site. A thick steel cable rises diagonally, crisscrossed in the distance by the\u00a0faint parameters of Central Park,\u00a0amid a foggy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Manhattan cityscape below. These details\u00a0 superbly offset the row of relaxed and heedless laborers.<\/p>\n

I mean, there you are, dangling your tootsies\u00a0over 800 feet of thin air. It shows how extreme working conditions like this can become commonplace\u00a0when men, who are facing harsh economic realities, may have no choice but to accommodate such improbable environments. It’s also so damn American, so devil may care, so fearlessly quotidian.<\/p>\n

A third image on this cover shows New York firemen raising the flag amid the cathedral-like ruins of the twin towers on 9\/11.<\/p>\n

By now you understand why the magazine, published by TIME, is titled 100 Greatest Images: History’s Most Influential Photographs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen most of the images in this, which would seem to preclude my buying it. But once I sat down with it, those familiar images and the new ones simply compelled me to accept them into my possession.\u00a0Confederate Dead at Hagerstown Road<\/em> by Alexander Gardner reveals piles of bodies lying in awkward, mute configurations, as a dirt trail and a crude wooden fence stretch off into the distance. It\u2019s in the tradition of the great Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, but was taken by a Confederate soldier.<\/p>\n

Another unforgettable shot places the underlying purpose of that war on center stage. You see The\u00a0Lynching Of Shipp And Smith<\/em> from 1932. Two young black men hang from a tree like\u00a0Billie Holiday’s proverbial strange fruit, as white people in the foreground snicker\u00a0and peer at the camera. One\u00a0man, sporting a Hitler mustache, glares at you while pointing his finger up at the hanging victims, as if to say, \u201cThey deserved it, and so will any others of their kind.\u201d Absolutely no one appears disturbed by the horrible carnage hanging above\u00a0their heads. Photo (below) by Laurence Beiter\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then there’s the still-astonishing image of\u00a0the Hindenburg, crashing in 1937. The German\u00a0zeppelin suddenly explodes spectacularly in Lakehurst New Jersey. If you\u2019ve seen the film footage of this tragedy, which killed 35 passengers and crew, the blimp\u00a0 completely collapses within seconds,\u00a0reduced to a flattened pile of flames. It brings to mind such other imagination-stretching\u00a0transportation fantasies\u00a0such as\u00a0The Titanic, and the peculiar fascination people have with such larger-than-life vehicles of extravagant\u00a0\u00a0means.<\/p>\n

One more example of that, a shot of the oddly bending smoke trail of the space shuttle The Challenger, as it\u00a0explodes a mere 73 seconds\u00a0after lift off in 1973, killing six astronauts and Christa McAuliffe, a\u00a0 37-year-old schoolteacher chosen by NASA to represent space exploration’s educational value . I was watching this live on TV and didn’t really comprehend what I was seeing, until\u00a0several minutes later when the telecast comments explained things as best they could at that inexplicable moment in history.<\/p>\n

age and see Adolf Hitler\u00a0in his full Nazi regalia,\u00a0climbing a staircase, surrounded by swastika banners held by\u00a0soldiers, with\u00a0thousands in the background ready, for one of his vitrolic\u00a0and bizarrely\u00a0charismatic hate speeches.<\/p>\n

Turn the page once more and find a\u00a0photo\u00a0of a great African-American sprinter Jesse Owens, standing on the podium after winning\u00a0one of his four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics, which was infamous for Hitler\u00a0propagandizing on the racial superiority of the so-called Aryan race. the chief Nazi propaganda henchman, Joseph Goebbels, commented, “Without these members of the black race \u2013 these auxiliary helpers \u2013 a German would’ve won the broad jump.\u201d African-Americans equated to “auxiliary helpers,” a curious and surprisingly delicate euphemism.<\/p>\n

What else caught my eye?<\/p>\n

— Refugees crawling across a huge\u00a0steel bridge\u00a0like so many ants, slowly and laboriously striving for freedom. This\u00a0is Communist Korea in 1950.<\/p>\n

—\u00a0The agony of\u00a0Roger Bannister’s breathless stride at the finishing tape as he breaks the four-minute-mile barrier in 1954, the first person ever to do so.<\/p>\n

— \u00a0Ronald Haeberle\u2019s photo of the My Lai\u00a0massacre in 1968, which recalls the recent massacre in Afghanistan. Once again,\u00a0American military murder citizens in cold blood.\u00a0Here, the sprawling bodies also recall the dead Confederates, but this is in grimy color.<\/p>\n

— One of the most shocking pictures\u00a0is titled A Vulture Stalks Starving Child<\/em> by Kevin Carter,\u00a0documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan. The title says it all: the bird of prey sits patiently watching a suffering little girl, who\u00a0crouches helplessly\u00a0with their bloated belly and oversized head resting on the dirt. Carter struggled with the reality of the moment —\u00a0 the question of what he should properly be doing. Even though he chased the bird away after taking this shot, Carter became increasingly depressed, the magazine reports, and took his own life in 1994, only weeks after his picture was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It’s on page 108.<\/p>\n

— One of the most beautiful photographs documents tragedy on a large scale: Floodwaters Submerge New Orleans <\/em>by Smiley Pool shows sprawling sepia tones engulfing the rooftops of numerous New Orleans\u00a0homes\u00a0from an aerial view. All you can see amid the muddy water are rooftops (like so many board pieces on a monopoly game board) and treetops.<\/p>\n

Yet it’s a gorgeous visual configuration in its minimalist way. That’s just a sampling of this remarkable magazine. You’ll find plenty of famous\u00a0shots you’d hope to find and\u00a0more images of scenes and events you had\u00a0heard about, but now\u00a0will likely never forget, because of how these photos burn themselves into one’s consciousness.<\/p>\n

TIME and again,\u00a0remind you of what strange bedfellows horror and beauty make.<\/p>\n

— Kevin Lynch<\/p>\n

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Why did this magazine jump out at me amid all the splashy come-on covers on the rack as I killed a few minutes in Walgreen’s\u00a0recently? Perhaps because it was the classiest\u00a0cover by far, with several images adorning it, including a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-28","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}