this picture tells us nothing about this woman except that she had a press conference in front of a stone building.

Wow, what an insightful, revelatory visual experience. I may have to log off for a bit just to recover. Okay, phew, I'm back.

One more image deserves our attention. The Jan 27,1998 image of the truly terrified Betty Currie and her attorney navigating a media scrum outside of the U.S. courthouse in Washington is the only true moment of the whole mess. It shows the most honest reaction to the scope and intent of the media coverage of the presidential intern interaction. Seeing as it was manufactured by media malfeasance should of course disqualify it from any prize-winning consideration.

The presidential scandal of 1998 was a nonvisual story and if you don't believe that, then ask the Senate, where the only visual entrée for the final scene of this political tragicomic farce was a remote-operated video camera. Nothing a picture editor likes more than eating the dominant Page One photo space with a video still that wasn't generated by a visual journalist actually working on the scene, free to record all that goes on before his or her camera. Maybe, the senators had better visual news judgment than the Pulitzer jurors for Feature Photography at Columbia University. They felt, and perhaps rightly so, that the adnauseam plastering of theirs and witnesses’ faces in the media, this time from the floor of the senate, wouldn't add much to the visual reporting of the story.

Maybe we should ask some of the members who are not seeking re-election if they would sit on future Pulitzer juries?

"It is not the image of [the] Secretary [of State] descending from a plane. It is not cute cats, nor touchdowns, nor nudes; motherhood; arrangements of manufacturers' products. Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach ... In short, it is not a lie - a cliché - somebody else's idea. It is prime vision combined with quality of feeling, no less."

Now Mr. Evans was his usual demanding self in this quote, but the gist of his message is one that we hope would reach the eyes, ears and minds of future Pulitzer photography jurors, if we are to see continued progress in the impact of news photography.

Charles Sheeler, the painter and photographer, excerpted from an undated letter to Beaumont Newhall, stated, ”We are all born with the same equipment, eyes, and if some don't care to use them it is their loss.”
Unless, of course, they are jurors for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography. Then it could be our loss.
Essay © 1999 David A. Cantor.

References:

Aaron Siskind Pleasures and Terrors by Carl Chiarenza. New York Graphic Society. Little, Brown and Company, 1982. (Out of print)

Ansel Adams Letters and Images 1916-1984. Edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman. New York Graphic Society. Little, Brown and Company, 1988.

Focus. Memoirs of a life in photography by Beaumont Newhall. Bullfinch Press. Little, Brown and Company, 1993.

Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities by David J. Krajicek. Columbia University Press, 1998.

Walker Evans by James R. Mellows. Basic Books,1999.