Photographs are an older and seemingly more limited medium than moving images, but a single, silent shot - like that of the drowned Salvadoran father and daughter - can make news once remote or open-ended feel urgent and personal. By hitalie.
FILE - In this June 5, 1989, file photo, a Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing's Changan Boulevard in Tiananmen Square. The man, calling for an end to the recent violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators, was pulled away by bystanders, and the tanks continued on their way.
In a world of unremitting information and video-driven chaos, the still photograph is an older and perhaps seemingly limited medium. But a solitary, silent shot can make remote news feel urgent and personal. “Images have a way of piercing through indifference and unlocking empathy and shame that can be catalytic drivers of policy,” Suzanne Nossel, CEO of the literary and human rights organization PEN America, said in an email Wednesday.
“It’s that unique way of bringing something to a scale we can comprehend,” Lubell says. “Photos give you the space and time to really think about something.” The Life magazine picture by John Filo from 1970 of a teen-age girl looking up in horror as she knelt by a classmate shot by the National Guard was so jarring that James Michener shaped his book “Kent State” around it, and Neil Young wrote the protest song “Ohio,” which he and bandmates David Crosby, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills recorded and released within days.
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