Moments Trapped in Amber

Trapped .
Picture This

“As a group, news photographers are not the gentlest of people. The work is hard and physically demanding, and the opportunities for pictures is fleeting. A picture exists in only a cat-wink of time and is lost forever to the photographer who is distracted for just that instant. Or is blocked by a pompous politician or by an aggressive colleague. Expletives can follow these incidents.

“Photographers who document newsworthy events are also a remarkable group of people. They stop history for a microsecond of time and hold it up for us to see and to remember and learn from. They do this work despite threat to life and limb, and they enjoy doing it. Most would do nothing else.”

“Words are the tools of someone who sees something and then describes it. Pictures ... describe something that actually happened.”

—Hal Buell, photographer and former chief of photographers for The Associated Press. From his book, MOMENTS The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs—A Visual Chronicle of Our Time (2010)

• Slideshow of 2008 Winner, Todd Heisler, The Rocky Mountain News, “Final Salute.”
• Collection of Pulitzer Photo Winners, The Newseum.
• 2010 Pulitzer winner in Feature Photography, Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post.
• The Pulitzer Prizes, by category.

Image: A wounded Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai, lay before a Burmese soldier yesterday in Yangon, Myanmar, as troops attacked protesters. Mr. Nagai later died. 2008 Breaking News Photo Pulitzer Winner by Adrees Latif, Reuters, September 28, 2007

• Editorial Comment: They’re worth more than 1,000 words, I’d say.



• PeezPix: PeezPix prints and notecards for sale.





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