James P. Brochin
My beliefs, my camera, and some film. These were the weapons of my good intentions. My camera, my intentions, stopped no man from falling, nor did they aid him after he had fallen. It could be said that "photographs be damned, for they bind no wounds." Yet, I reasoned, if my photographs could cause compassionate horror in the viewer, they might also prod the conscience in the viewer into taking action…
...and each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the pictures might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future -- causing them caution and remembrance and realization.
Know that these people of the pictures were my family - no matter how often they reflected the tortured features of another race. Accident of birth, accident of place -- the bloody, dying child I held momentarily while the life -- fluid seeped through my shirt and burned my heart -- that child was my child.
-W. Eugene Smith
Picture these:
A Life Magazine article features staff photographer Margaret Bourke White in an article called "Life's Bourke-White Goes Bombing."
A 1967 Life Magazine cover story called "To Keep a Village Free" features a photograph of a boy on crutches and a US soldier walking away from the camera.
A helmeted soldier holds an infant in his arms, who is naked and caked with mud or blood. The child's chest is sunken and the skull appears lopsided.
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This baby was found with a head under a rock. Its head was lopsided and its eyes were masses of pus. Unfortunately, it was alive. We hoped that it would die.
-W. Eugene Smith
An Asian man is pointing a revolver at the temple of a prisoner. The prisoner is about to be executed, or more accurately, murdered, by Eddie Adams.
Screaming children are running towards the camera. One, a girl, is naked, and holding her arms away from her. Behind them are soldiers, and farther in the background billows dark smoke, by
Soldiers in formal military dress are bending over a flag draped casket in the cargo hold of a passenger jet. Above, solemn faces of passengers look out.
