Word: mind
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...19th century mind, with its penchant for the scientific and the mechanical, the camera was the supreme mechanism, a trap for facts. Capable of capturing high detail, operated with a minimum of human intervention, it seemed from the first to have a special purchase on the truth. William Henry Fox Talbot, the Englishman who was one of photography's inventors, was merely summing up what would become the judgment of the day when he called his new process the "pencil of nature...
...pictures have been piling up for 150 years. Battlefields, floods, summit conferences, auto accidents, congratulatory handshakes, game-winning touchdowns. Most scenes vanish quickly into the newspaper morgue. A few, however, linger in the mind's eye. Of the billions of metal sheets, glass plates, celluloid spools and other light-sensitive surfaces exposed to history in the name of publishing, only a handful of images have themselves become part of history. These form a sort of shared visual heritage for the human race, a treasury of significant memories. Every educated person should be familiar with them, just...
...great photographs have lives of their own, but they can be as false as dreams. Somehow the mind knows that and sorts out the matter, and permits itself to enjoy the pictures without getting sunk in the really mysterious business that they involve...
Still, a puritan conscience recoils a little from the sheer power of photographs. They have lingering about them the ghost of the golden calf -- the bright object too much admired, without God's abstract difficulties. Great photographs bring the mind alive. Photographs are magic things that traffic in mystery. They float on the surface, and they have a strange life in the depths of the mind. They bear watching...
There are hundreds of unforgettable news pictures. Some record great events, others the small but resonant ones. in our view these ten -- images of war and peace, love and hate, poverty and triumph -- are the ones indelibly pressed upon the mind and heart...