This catalogue records the first major exhibition in the United States of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs,many of which are cited around the world as classics of photojournalism.
This book tells the stories behind the photographs that won America's most prestigious journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize. Great photographs change the way we think.Quiddy and dearly, they say that war is brutal, victory sweet and life is fragile. Great photographs change lives, even the lives of the photographers who take them.
This unique photographic history of 132 pictures includes the Pulitzer winners from 1942 to 2003. Climb with Joe Rosenthal, in 1945, as he hauls his dunky Speed Graphic up Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima to capture the image that defined World War II. Or witness, in 1963, as Robert Jackson's split-second timing catches Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Or what happened in 1972,when Huynh Cong Ut takes a startling shot of a fleeing naked child burned by napalm,a photograph that would bring home the horror of the Vietnam War.
Of course Pulitzer photojournalists recorded the tender moments, the ones that connect us all: Nathaniel Fein's 1948 classic of the retiring Babe Ruth or Scott Shaw's 1987 photo of the rescue of Baby Jessica from a well.
These photographs are magnetic, often disturbingly so, for one simple reason: They capture the moment.CYMA RUBIN produced and directed the Emmyowinning documentary "Moment of Impact: Stories of the Pulitzer Prize Photographs,"among other awarded works. She is president of Business of Entertainment Inc., New York.
ERIC NEWTON was managing editor of the Newseum and was its first news historian. He is director of journalism initiatives for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
INTRODUCTION
THE PULITZER PRIZE PHOTOGRAPHERS
AFTERWORD
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE PHOTOGRAPHERS