Mexican American Pulitzer Photo Vintage Original Pablo Monsivais Fantastic

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176284773365 MEXICAN AMERICAN PULITZER PHOTO VINTAGE ORIGINAL PABLO MONSIVAIS FANTASTIC. A FANTASTIC VINTAGE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH MEASURING 8 X 10 INCHES BY CHICAGO LEGENDARY  PULITZER PRIZE WINNING PHOTOGRAPHER  Pablo Martínez Monsiváis . ONE OF THE GREATEST PHOTOJOURNALISTS ALIVE TODAY.     DELORES CROSS CHICAGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT In 1999 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for team coverage of the impeachment during the Clinton Administration. Pablo has received awards for World Press Photo, The White House News Photographers, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Pablo Martínez Monsiváis is the son of a migrant laborer and the first of his siblings to be born in the United States. He grew up in Chicago’ Mexican-American community of Little Villages, where he was immersed in its particular immigrant experience. After graduating with a degree in photography from Columbia College, he began his career as a summer intern for his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. At the end of the 13-week internship, at the young age of 24, the paper hired him as a staff photojournalist. There he worked on many local stories and covered everything from parades to politics, from food to fashion, to fires, and sports. Since the fall of 1998, Pablo has been a staff photojournalist for the Associated Press’ Washington Bureau, where he primarily covers the office of the President and various administrations. In 1999 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for team coverage of the impeachment during the Clinton Administration. Pablo has received awards for World Press Photo, The White House News Photographers, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Assistant Chief of Bureau for Photography in Washington. Pablo has been an integral part of the AP photo staff for more than two decades. He joined the AP in 1998 as a photographer in Washington, forging a career that has spanned four presidencies and taken him to all 50 states and over 70 countries. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Pablo embedded with the 101st Airborne during deployment into Afghanistan, and in 2003, was part of President George W. Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. He has covered major sporting events including the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup in addition to World Cup Soccer, NCAA and MLS tournaments. With fellow AP photo staff, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for coverage of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and has received awards from World Press Photo, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is a founding member of Iris Photo Collective, with whom he recently received a Knight Foundation grant for projects documenting Haitian and Cuban communities. Prior to the AP, Pablo worked as a staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and was honored as the Alumni of the Year in 2009. He lives in Washington with his wife Jessica and son Luca. As photojournalists for The New York Times and The Associated Press, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers Ozier Muhammad ’72 and Pablo Martínez Monsiváis ’94 have watched history unfold right before their eyes. In his 30-plus year career, which included 22 years at the Times, Muhammad covered everything from the war in Iraq to the Obama campaign, the Haitian earthquake, and the state funeral of Nelson Mandela. In his 19 years at the AP, Martínez Monsiváis has trained his lens on four presidents and is still on the White House beat today. Here, DEMO talks with these two Columbia College Chicago grads about their prolific careers, changing (and often wrangling) technology, and an ever-shifting media landscape. DEMO: You’ve both been working at the highest levels of photojournalism for decades. But you each won the Pulitzer Prize relatively early in your careers. Ozier, your 1985 award was for work you did at Newsday. MUHAMMAD: It was about the famine in Africa, an international reporting prize. I shared it with Josh Friedman and Dennis Bell. The assignment from the foreign desk was to cover the 10th anniversary of the first big famine of 1974. We ended up in Ethiopia and we just happened to be there when the situation was at its worst. We dispatched stories from there for a couple of months. I had to ship [film] by DHL courier ... you know, it was prehistoric times. If you didn’t have an AP device... MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: A transmitter. Over the phone lines. MUHAMMAD: I didn’t have one, so I had to ship [the film] back. When the first dispatch was published, it seemed to stir a hornet’s nest with the rest of the media and also the U.S. and European governments. Because we were so early on that story—that’s why it won the prize. ozier muhammad - 2 Ozier Muhammad, Newsday, 1984—This photo from Ethiopia was part of the "Africa The Desperate Continent" series that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1985. DEMO: Pablo, your AP team won the 1999 Feature Photography prize for its coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment. What was that like? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: Until that point, I hadn’t paid attention to how intense the impeachment was. It was madness. They threw me into a hornet’s nest, and I had literally no idea what was going on. I told people later: You cannot send people blindly into events like this anymore. It’s incredibly competitive here in D.C., for like, inches, for the same photo. But the photo that was entered [for the Pulitzer] was taken my second day on the job. DEMO: That’s the photo of U.S. Representative Bob Livingston and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich walking down the steps of the Capitol? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: Yes. I was shadowing the chief photographer for the AP, and they sent me to the Hill to photograph this event. I brought the photo back and they were like, “Hey, this is a nice photo,” but I didn’t realize it was entered as part of the Pulitzer package. When I heard we won, I was at Jiffy Lube. They gave me a call, and I thought it was a joke, but they were like, “No, you’ve got to come back down to the office.” The whole time, I thought the impeachment was going to be the craziest thing I’d ever seen. No. It just keeps getting nuttier and more intense. But it turns out that I really like political coverage. And every now and then, they still send me to cover sports. DEMO: What have been some of the most memorable moments you’ve had on assignment? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: The means by which we do everything now is speeding up. During the week of the [2016] election, we hear last minute that the president-elect is coming [to the White House] on Thursday to meet Obama. I needed to transmit electronically straight from the Oval Office, which I hadn’t done yet. I had not practiced this whole setup—also, there’s radio frequency blockers throughout the West Wing. I’m not 100 percent sure it’s going to work. I get to the Oval Office, take my spot in the middle, and literally, it’s the first time I’ve actually looked at Donald Trump. I hadn’t covered any of the election. I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s the guy from The Apprentice. I can’t believe this is happening.” You want the photo of them shaking hands. President Obama speaks, and then he offers his handshake, and I take the picture ... and my camera blinks with a green light. That means it’s transmitting. I’m like, “Yesss, it’s going, it’s going!” The whole thing was so surreal.  pablo martinez monsivais - 1 Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands during their first meeting in the oval office. DEMO: Ozier, you must have a few “can’t-believe-that-happened” stories. MUHAMMAD: Oh yeah, there are a few. In 2013, during my waning days at the Times, Nelson Mandela was in the hospital and I was going back and forth between Johannesburg and Pretoria on what we called the “death watch,” to be quite frank. Mandela happened to hold on for several months, but I was there for only one—during his birthday celebration. I went to a Catholic school in Soweto where I photographed children singing songs in tribute. I went to the African National Congress [ANC] office and a few other places. We were nine hours ahead of New York. When I got back to the hotel, I transmitted everything. It was probably almost 1 a.m. when I got it all done. Just as I was about to hit the sack, I get a call from the Times’ foreign desk, asking me to fly to Cape Town immediately for a Saturday profile on Ahmed Kathrada, one of the ANC leaders who had been in prison with Mandela. I was dead tired. Plus you’re driving on the opposite side of the road, and the steering wheel is in the passenger seat, right? I thought, “Now how the hell am I going to get to Cape Town?” I had to transmit the pictures by 8 a.m. South Africa time so that they could make the Saturday paper. I managed to fly in and photograph Kathrada...Then I had to transmit the pictures. It was the first time I used a dongle—basically, a thumb drive with a transmitter in it. I gave it a try, but I just couldn’t connect. I drove a little distance away and I still couldn’t connect. Turns out, it was just that I was so whacked out with fatigue—it was some protocol I didn’t quite hit. I didn’t have my TCP/IP settings right, but I finally figured that out and it made the paper. But it was pretty dicey for sure. DEMO: There have been so many changes in technology, culture, and media platforms over the years you’ve both been working. How do you stay centered? MUHAMMAD: People are more prickly, even hostile, about being photographed in the public sphere. In recent years I’ve kept a copy of the Constitution in my back pocket. I pull it out whenever a cop tells me I’m infringing or that I have to pay someone for their photograph. I’ve said a number of times: When I photographed President Obama, do you think I slipped him a $20 every time? No, that’s not what happens. We do have certain rights. MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: If I learned anything from art school, it’s that you’ve got to evolve ... the tools are always changing. ozier muhammad - 1 Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 1994—Presidential candidate Nelson Mandela appears in the National Soccer Stadium as he campaigns for the presidency of South Africa in Soweto. DEMO: What worries you in this era of “fake news?” MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: When Ozier took his photos in Africa, he was [directly] showing us the work [through verified sources]. Now we’re seeing images from everyone [on social media]. What scares me is that somebody can falsify imagery and people take it for the God’s honest truth. People steal images and use them for their own agenda. They’re not with the AP or the Times. They’re Joe Schmo, but with access to the same ways of disseminating information. I’m no longer just competing with Reuters, I’m competing with a guy with a smartphone. It’s crazy. Accountability is gone. When a photo has the stamp of the AP, there’s a lot of weight to it. But some people don’t understand that. DEMO: Is smartphone culture contributing to public mistrust? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: This past summer I went to Zimbabwe, which is very restrictive. The only way people know the news is by talking with each other via social apps. When the establishment is not letting anybody know what is in the best interest of the people, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are fantastic. It’s a perfect example of when it works well. Here, we have the reverse. During the last election, people literally segmented what they wanted to hear. I don’t know if we can find an even ground. But it’s always been the case—like with newspaper barons. At the turn of the [20th] century, they pushed us into the Spanish-American War to push newspaper sales. I think you can argue both sides. Being aware, knowing the limitations of the tools and what they’re capable of doing, is the priority. MUHAMMAD: I think we’re living in a great period, for many of the same reasons that Pablo articulated. We have all kinds of means of gaining information through social media platforms. I don’t think we have to worry too much about propagandizing when it comes to the mainstream media, like the wire services, the Washington Post, or The New York Times. Their ethics are clear and their staffs are very mindful of abiding by the rules. But one of the things that concerns me is what [influential journalist] Walter Lippmann called “manufacturing consent” about a hundred years ago. This applies mostly to text, the stories that are written—false equivocations and things of that sort, which is where most of the [current] hostility comes from. It doesn’t have as much to do with the medium of photojournalism. pablo martinez monsivais - 2 Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—Barack and Michelle Obama watch the musical performances at the 2016 National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony near the White House. DEMO: What might surprise people about your work? MUHAMMAD: The drudgery ... long waits and early setups. No matter the weather, you must get in place for a highly secured outdoor event upwards of 12 hours beforehand. Also, there are seemingly interminable stakeouts that may not yield anything. I had to wait outside Bernie Madoff’s Upper East Side apartment starting at 6 a.m., until he was to appear for sentencing at a courthouse in lower Manhattan in the afternoon. I never saw him. Madoff might have stayed in a hotel the night before he was sentenced. MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: The White House beat is very competitive and D.C. is stacked with talented photojournalists. If you blink, you will get your clock cleaned. Add deadline and work pressures—but surprisingly, everyone is very professional. None of my competitors are spiteful or malicious. We all tend to look after each other and help each other out. People outside of D.C. frequently comment about how well we all get along and how unusual this is, given what we do and what is at stake. DEMO: Any advice for aspiring photojournalists? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: As a photojournalist, you have content that you need to advertise, distribute, and invoice for. Don’t give anything away for free, especially to another entity that will profit from your hard work. Journalism is a business, and as a photojournalist you have to look at it as one. Also, be—and stay—humble, no matter what you do and how many awards you accumulate throughout your career. This is the only thing people will remember. One of our jobs as photojournalists is to be human. When you get assigned “tragic” events, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, you will be seeing people at the weakest point in their lives. Don’t abuse that. Don’t be an emotionless robot with a camera taking photographs of people because you want to win Picture of the Year. MUHAMMAD: Learn how to shoot, capture, and edit video and sound. Sharpen your writing and interviewing skills. Learn how to gather information. Staff jobs are disappearing— photojournalists of the future will be free agents. Be willing to relocate.  Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martinez Monsivais Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—The Air Force Thunderbirds fly overhead as graduating cadets celebrate at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2017—President Donald Trump at his desk during his first flight on Air Force One. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2009—President Barack Obama, center, salutes an Army carry team during a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. I’m very happy to let you know that Pablo Martinez Monsivais is our new assistant chief of bureau for photography in Washington. This is a well-deserved promotion for Pablo and completes our cross-format leadership team in the bureau. Pmm1 AP Washington Assistant Chief of Bureau for Photography Pablo Martinez Monsivais. (AP Photo) Pablo has been an integral part of the AP photo staff for more than two decades. He joined the AP in 1998 as a photographer in Washington, forging a career that has spanned four presidencies and taken him to all 50 states and over 70 countries. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Pablo embedded with the 101st Airborne during deployment into Afghanistan, and in 2003, was part of President George W. Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. He has covered major sporting events including the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup in addition to World Cup Soccer, NCAA and MLS tournaments. With fellow AP photo staff, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for coverage of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and has received awards from World Press Photo, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is a founding member of Iris Photo Collective, with whom he recently received a Knight Foundation grant for projects documenting Haitian and Cuban communities. Prior to the AP, Pablo worked as a staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and was honored as the Alumni of the Year in 2009. He lives in Washington with his wife Jessica and son Luca. Pablo is a talented photographer, a smart and generous colleague and a natural leader who will make our coverage of the nation’s capital and national politics stronger. Please join me in congratulating Pablo on this new role.   “This is an amazing time to be covering news in Washington, D.C.,” AP Photographer Pablo Martinez Monsivais said.  “Just when I thought I’ve seen it all or done it all, photos like this one happen. I’m just lucky to be part of this.” Monsivais is the Interim Head of Photos for The Associated Press’ Washington bureau. He’s been a photojournalist for over 25 years, 20 of those with the AP. View fullsize Members of the media are reflected in the eye of President Donald Trump as he answers questions on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, before boarding Marine One helicopter April 10, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) How did you get this shot?  I was part of the media pool, which includes print, TV, radio and photo representatives that cover president’s scheduled departure. As we now know, Trump typically uses this opportunity to do Q&As with reporters and will answers questions on the news of the day. How many times have you been in this situation?  Countless times. I have been covering the White House since President Bill Clinton’s administration. What stood out to you about this image? Honestly, I was surprised the photo came out and that you could see everyone (reflected in his eyes). I couldn’t even see the back of my camera to review the image because of the sunlight. When I got into position I realized just how challenging it was going to be getting a usable image because I was shooting up and into the sun. Add to this Trump  moving back and forth while answering questions.  Did you go in to the situation with the idea?  I had no idea. I was more concerned about getting a usable image for the wire. View fullsize President Donald Trump walks over to begin speaking to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, before boarding Marine One helicopter April 10, 2019. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) What’s the biggest challenge in covering the White House beat? Keeping up with all the news that comes out of the White House, and also being ready for all the surprises from this administration. I can honestly say that as a photographer this is the most access I’ve ever had and I’ve had plenty of ‘I can’t believe that just happened’.  So just being ready for what might happen is challenging. What camera settings did you use to get this shot?  Model: Canon EOS-1D X Mark II 100-400 Lens at 400mm ISO: 500 Aperture: 5.6 Shutter: 1/800 GIVE US YOUR SUGGESTIONS & FEEDBACK ABOUT THE SITE Comment suggest We will send you an E-mail every time there is a new article in your favorite section. Sign-Up For ALERTS. RSS TGP Choice View Slide Show  |  Print Article  |  E-mail Article Interview with Hal Buell, Former Head of the Associated Press Photography Service <br><br>by Wayne Yang     Interview with Hal Buell, Former Head of the Associated Press Photography Service by Wayne Yang Recently, TakeGreatPictures.com contributor Wayne E. Yang sat down with Hal Buell, former Head of the Associated Press Photography Service, to discuss the future of photography, journalism as a medium, and Buell's book, Moments:The Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs. Published: July 3, 2006 Article rating: 10.00 Wayne Yang: In Moments, you separate the great Pulitzer photos into technological eras. You were key to digitalization at the Associated Press, both on the archival side and in the way the service’s photography is distributed. Can you talk a little more about the importance of digitalization in photography these days? What’s your opinion on whether it has made photography better or worse? Hal Buell: Digital is just another tool. The essence of photography and the essence of picture journalism has not changed much since the camera and film were invented. What’s changed is the technology of making and distributing a picture. The impact of photojournalism has increased as more people see the pictures that photographers produce, and that was largely a technical issue, not a journalistic issue. [Civil War photographer Matthew] Brady faced the sheer problems of long exposures and having to process on dusty battlefields and so on. Compare that to the digital photographer who in a war situation can flash his pictures. Brady’s photos were never seen, in fact, except in his gallery, whereas now a photographer, thanks to digital, can make a picture in a battlefield and have it everywhere in the world before the battle is over—or shortly thereafter. What technology allows picture journalism to do is to deliver pictures in the timeframe that is unique to journalism. All journalism is really [about] speed of delivery, being au courant, being ‘today’s story today,’ and not ‘today’s story next week.’ What digital has allowed the photographer to do is to deliver those photos with faster and faster capability. Even in Vietnam, pictures were lagging a day, or two days, or three days because the communications out of Vietnam were not very good, even though the journalists in Vietnam had greater access to the war and to journalistic activity than any photographers before or since have had. The journalism was incredible, but the technology for delivering those pictures was shaky at best. And as much as we had wonderful pictures and wonderful stories, how much different it would have been if we had had the digital capabilities we have now in the Vietnam era. But digital is nothing more than a tool. Hal Buell pulitzer prize photographs  Yang: You  have seen a lot of evolution in picture taking during your time, but with all the different changes in technology that we have seen—you talked also about photography’s evolution since Matthew Bradydo you think the quality of images has suffered with this greater immediacy? It seems like people like Brady, or even more recently, the Vietnam era photographers, had more time to think about their picture taking, at least in terms of the distribution anyway. Buell: No, the editorial quality hasn’t suffered. What has suffered, since Vietnam, is access to the stories. In Vietnam, photographers had utter, complete access. A photographer could go out to the airport, and call his [own] shots. All he needed was the pilot of a helicopter to say “yeah, hop aboard, we’re going to Da Nang or we’re going to Cu Chi,” or wherever they were going, and the photographer went along. There was absolutely no restriction of any kindofficial or unofficial restriction on their coverage. Then in the Gulf War, which was the next big one, there was virtually no access to the story. And there is something in between in the current Iraq War, so the pictures from Iraq are better than the pictures from the Gulf. But they still don’t capture the essence of the war in the way that the pictures did from Vietnam. The time to make pictures is the same. I mean, things happen, and you have to make the picture, so the act of making the specific picture doesn’t change much. What changes is the ability to be where the action is and to be where the story is. Yang: Along those lines, it seems that information gatekeepers have become savvier about the power of a lot of the image making… Buell: Yes, I think that an appreciation for picture journalism has grown spectacularly because of the Vietnam coverageand also because the pictures are more relevant because they are more timely. You cannot take the time of delivery out of anything that has to with, certainly with daily picture journalism, and generally speaking with journalism. That’s why television has this immediacy, and newspapers have immediacy minus a couple of clicks, and magazines minus a couple of clicks, and books minus a couple of clicks. Today’s picture seen today, as I said earlier, is better than seeing today’s picture a week from now. At the time it took that much time to deliver a picture—the pictures were still very important, it’s just they have so much more impact when you have a picture in the same timeframe. Yang: In terms of that immediacy, there are some people that argue that those who capture still imagery need to be better at capturing other kinds of media, like audio and video. Where do you fall on that? Buell: Well, I believe that picture journalism in the still world is different than picture journalism in the video world. If you take the time to carefully analyze what you see on the screen of a news program, or even a documentary, what you actually see are still pictures. Yes, they move, but they have the essence of still pictures that are stitched together. So when a video photographer shoots a story, say, if you and I are in the same room, and he’s doing a story on this conversation we’re havinghe shoots a picture of you, which is a mug shot, talking. And he shoots a picture of me, which is a mug shot, talking. And maybe he inserts a picture that we’re talking about. And he takes bits and pieces of that picture. But when he puts it all together, it’s a series of pictures. A still photographer really looks for the essence of the story in one, or two, or three pictures, unless he has a luxury of doing a book or extensive photo essay. But basically a still photographer shooting our conversation would have both of us in the picture with maybe a picture on the wall or on the table, so it would all be in one frame as opposed to separate shots. And I believe that the discipline, what I would call the mechanical discipline, to put all that material together, is different in stills as it is in video, and it’s very hard to do both. Yang: Have they moved closer in any way? In terms of the mindset, one of the things that digital allows the photographer to do is to shoot a little more loose. Obviously, when you go back to the time when photojournalists were using plates—in your book, you talk about the Iwo Jima photos, for instance, and during that era how you literally had maybe half a dozen plates at most during certain assignments. You obviously had to be incredibly disciplined about waiting for those perfect moments. Do you think the mindset has changed, then, in that way, where the still photographer is becoming a little bit more like the video photographer? Buell: I don’t think so. I think the digital era, and even 36-exposure rolls of film, and the Life magazine era, and the early days of 35mm photography, and daily picture journalism, the freedom of getting out of the 4x5 mentality has allowed the still photographer to experiment more. He still is looking for that one great picture, but because he has more shots available, he can do it this way and that way, and he can experiment. He can use a wide lens, he can use a long lens, he can use a medium lens. He can do the closeup. He can work up, down, sideways. So he has an opportunity to be a little, it’s like if you were writing, you would write stream of conscious, if you just write it out, but then you go back and you edit it down. What did Mark Twain say, “sorry my remarks are so long tonight, I didn’t have time to prepare?” So it is now with the still photographers [too]. He can now shoot 20 pictures, but there’s still the essence of one or two that tells the story. But he has an opportunity to make those one of two much better than in the days when he was limited to four or five plates. It is a freer kind of an atmosphere, which leads in the end to better pictures. Sometimes experiments work. So if you have the chance to experiment, you should. Yang: I guess in many ways the professional mindset hasn’t changed, but one of the issues that seems to be troubling a lot of—at least younger photographersis the idea that all of a sudden more people are in the game. Buell: That’s a different issue. Yang: Along those lines, you were talking about war photography, for instance. Obviously, soldiers have been taking pictures since they’ve had access to cameras, but it seems like in this particular war, and maybe I’m wrong about it being new, but there’s a lot more immediacy to their sharing of images, and they’re self-publishing in ways that they haven’t in the past. Buell: The trouble with participatory journalism, and this is where you get into some pretty fierce arguments, you’re right, is that—I have to speak from what I believe to be the way journalists should operate, which may not be in favor right now. I do not believe that journalism gives anyone the right to express a point of view, that is the journalist’s point of view. That’s not the purpose of journalism. The purpose of journalism is to relate factually what happened, or to show factually and as honestly and as fairly as possible what happened, and let the reader make up his mind. I do not believe the ethic or the professional training is available to people in participatory journalism. Those who practice participatory journalism on a regular basis tend to tell the story they want to tell, as opposed to the story that is there to tell. Those can be two very different things. Now, that does not rule out the occasion when someone is on the scene and has a camera and something happens that makes for a great picture. That’s the serendipity factor, and I exclude that from this conversation. I’m talking about the participatory journalist who does it on a regular basis. That’s someone who has a lot of spin, in my mind, and I think that I would rather go with the trained, ethical journalistalthough there are many cases where a trained, ethical journalist can go put spin on a story also. That’s why the idea of what a journalist is is so very, very important. Yang: What do you think of embedded journalists? Buell: I don’t have any heavy quarrel with the embedded journalists if the embedded journalist is the kind of journalist I just described. There is a fear, a belief in some quarters that if a journalist is embedded with a certain unit in the military, that somehow he or she develops some kind of affection or some kind of loyalty to the people that they are covering. Well, you could say that about a writer who covers a beat, who covers city hall, who covers a police beat. They develop friendships and contacts also. The journalist that I’m speaking about, this ideal journalist is one who is able, because of his training, to seek out the essence of the story and photograph it, whether it is supportive or detrimental to the people that he is covering. And I think there are examples of that out of Iraq. There are a lot of photographers who were embedded and who did marvelous jobs of what I call very good journalism. On the other hand, photographers who were not embedded, who were racing from place to place and point to point, spending a lot of time racing up and down the highway, sometimes clicking and getting wonderful and meaningful pictures but sometimes not also putting themselves in considerable dangerthat’s not the way to go either. You’ve got to come out with a story. The idea is not to get killed; the idea is to get a story. Yang: One of the things your book tackles well is the myth of serendipity. A lot of people seem to have the fallacy in their minds that a lot of the great photos are mostly about serendipity. You happen to be in a particular location, so that enabled you to make a great photo. Buell: The wise guys say, “yeah, f16 at 200 and be there.” You know, that’s a smartass, meaningless remark. And I won’t say that some pictures aren’t made that way. But you also come to realize when you look at the pictures that are made, that over and over again you see the same photographers making the really wonderful pictures. And there’s more than “f16 at 200 and being there.” It can be very risky, and it can be very time consuming, and it can be very unproductive. So the photographer has a lot to worry about besides just being there. He has to know what to do once he’s there. We talked about that earlier, the difference between video, and how that’s done, and how stills are done. The photographer has to bring together his experience and his knowledge of the story, the risks that are involved. He has to put all that into the equation, so there’s a lot more than being there. I mean, if that’s all you had to do, a lot more people would be doing it. Yang: What would you say to those journalists who— I think, in this era of 24/7 (in terms of clips like we saw from CNN in North Korea, the photographs from Abu Ghraib, and so on), there’s a feeling among some younger photojournalists that they can’t be everywhere. To compete against this kind of mass-grouping of people throughout the world waiting with their cell phones to capture an image, that are devaluing the picture-taking that they do. Buell: That’s sour grapes. When you look at the pictures that have been made by the so-called amateursyou know of all the Pulitzers, the only one that was made by a true amateur was the Virginia Schau picture of the truck hanging off the bridge. All the other “amateurs” were really people who were advanced amateurs and skilled photographers who chose to work at something else, but they still enjoyed making pictures. So it wasn’t that they weren’t photographers. They were photographers. They just didn’t spend their life working at it. That’s different. Never at any time in history was there anyone who could be everywhere. “I can’t be everywhere.” Of course, you can’t. No one can be everywhere. You’ve got to pick and choose, pal. That’s what life’s about. Yang: You’ve said thatto shift gears a little bit, you’ve said that pairing a good photographer with a good writer is like putting hand in hand, and I’m guessing you’re talking at least partially about your experience in the book Moments as well.  You explained that this was because photographers and writers see things differently. Why do you think it’s so difficult to be good at both kinds of seeing? Buell: Well, I don’t know that it’s so difficult. It’s just that people don’t choose to do it. And in my experience, I have found that, generally speaking, it’s easier to find a photographer who is a fairly decent writer, than a writer who is a fairly decent photographer. Now I can come right back at you and give you 10 examples of writers who are pretty good photographers: Mal Browne, who made the Burning Monk [photo], Peter Arnett, who made marvelous pictures in Vietnam, who’s a great reporter, and I mean there are many reporters who are able to use cameras very effectively. But when you look across the spectrum of journalists, I mean when you take the whole batch, as opposed to those singular exceptions, it is my experience that photographers who can write are easier to find than writers who can photograph. Now, having said that, I suppose the emails will flood in, and I’ll be criticized, but nevertheless, that’s true in my experience. Yang: Is there any reason why you think that happens to be the case? Buell: Well, because a writer sees something happen, and then creates the way to tell it, so he has to master the vocabulary and the grammar. Now photography has a grammar also, but the photographer has a lot less control over the way the picture looks than the writer has over the way the story reads. So a really talented writer can take a nothing story and make it sing, because he knows how to use the language. It’s a lot harder to make a mundane situation and make it into a sparkling picture, though good photographers will make it a better picture than mundane photographers or poor photographers. It’s a case of level, not of brilliance. A good photographer can make an ordinary scene a little more interesting. A writer can take an ordinary story and make it a lot more interesting, because he has control over the expression, as opposed to the photographer who has some control, but nevertheless is still stuck with what’s there. Yang: So in some senses too, it’s almost commercial demand in the sense, writers more often have something to say, even when there isn’t something to say, whereas… Buell: Well, no, I don’t think writers have more to say than photographers. I think writers have the ability to say more; there’s a difference there. Not that the writer is so insightful and brilliant, it’s just that because he uses words, he can choose between five words to say what he wants to say. The photographer has to deal with what’s in front of him. And the writer can stitch those words together in a more entertaining, exciting, elaborate, meaningful way sometimes than a photographer, that’s all. Yang: You mentioned Mal Browne and Peter Arnett as two people who think have talent in both. Are there any other names that come to mind? Buell: Well, Eddie Adams could write pretty well. Horst Faas could write pretty well. Just off the top of my head, there was a guy named John Wheeler who worked for the AP, who was a writer, who was a pretty fair photographer. Yang: Was there something about the fact that they were such excellent photojournalists that enabled them to be so good on the writing front as well? Buell: No, I don’t think so.  I think that some people have an innate visual insight that others don’t have, and given a little practice tend to exploit it a little better than people who don’t have it. They don’t work at it professionally, and they don’t examine all lenses and films and digital and zooms, and all the little specificities that photographers use, but they nevertheless have a basic insight into what makes a picture. It’s just a gift. That’s true of photographers, but photographers, like the writer who learns to use the words, the photographer who has basic instinct and instinctive talent learns to use the tools of the photographer to make his pictures better. Yang: Dirk Halstead talks about how the rise of photo services like Corbis are viewed as a threat by a lot of photojournalists these days. In the whole, I don’t want to use the word ‘scandal,’ but the fuss about Corbis and SygmaCorbis itself said there was much less demand for hard news than soft news, it’s all about lifestyle and celebrities, pictures that have much more of a global interest: this is in their words. And some younger photojournalists have talked about how they have to finance more “worthy projects” on their own. Where do you think photojournalists should be turning for venues…? Buell: First of all, it’s not that the demand for celebrity, which is what you’re talking about, has put down other kinds of news photography. It’s that the demand for celebrity photography has increased. It hasn’t reduced the other demand. People are celebrity nuts these days, and I don’t know if that’s a fad or a trend, but there it is, and there’s the truth of it. And it’s easier for a photographer to make a living shooting celebrities, although it’s very competitive, than it is for a photographer to make a living getting news assignments. And the reason is that most news assignments now are covered by newspapers and wire services who can have wide areas of distribution and who can defray the costs. It’s very difficult for a photographer to go out to Iraq on his or her own, although many have done it, by making arrangements with different publications—they manage to do it, but it’s extremely difficult to do it. There’s no question about that. It’s costly to equip yourself now, it’s very costly. Yang: Along those lines, some people argue that some photojournalists have tried to compensate by trying to make their photographs more commercial, not necessarily focusing on the news orientation. One of the examples that was thrown out were the photographs taken of the most recent Tour de France of Lance Armstrong. There were people that argued that some of the photographs were more appropriate for posters than they were for their photojournalistic value. Buell: I would have to see the specific example that drew that observation, but I will tell you that one of the aspects of what makes a good picture is a poster quality, which I would describe, rather than as a poster quality, the need for simplicity and composition and image, so that the picture communicates very quickly and very easily. Now, I don’t know how that relates to the specific image that you are talking about. Can you describe the picture? Yang: There’s one in particular where Armstrong is in a very steep lean, and he’s out in front with a couple other cyclists right behind him. And there’s emphasis on color. Personally, I don’t think I saw a difference from other historical cycling photos. Buell: Sounds like to me it was a picture of Armstrong winning the race. Yang: So you don’t think of it as any kind of trend? Buell: No, no, I don’t think so. If a picture is made and has a poster quality and someone sells it as a poster, well, god bless him, he made an extra buck. And there are people who will shoot pictures, particularly of celebrities, that are meant to be posters. That’s part of the celebrity world, I mean the celebrity world is phony, come on. Everybody’s got their own agenda including the actors and actresses, the producers and all the rest of them, to put these things together. And a lot of the media, celebrity publications, certain newspapers, particularly the tabloids, buy into that, and play into that. Okay, that’s what they do. And then look at all the entertainment programs, the celebrity programs on TV now. It’s a new market. Yang: You’ve just touched upon, I guess, simplicity is one factor that can make more photos memorable. One thing you talk a lot about in Moments is the iconic power of some of the great photographs. If I’m quoting you correctly from the book, you say a still photograph captures a moment in time. You’ve also talked about the way that photographs elevate moments into historical importance. A couple of the photographs you seem to like to point out are the Eddie Adams photo of the Vietnamese officer and the Joe Rosenthal photo of Iwo Jima, and there are a lot of people who feel that those two images changed sentiment surrounding their particular wars. Can you talk about what it is about still photography, especially as audio and video have become more competitive, what is it about still photography that seems to retain that kind of power? Buell: The problem with video, it’s fleeting, it goes by very quickly. I like to say “it goes in one eye and out the other.” It just goes by quickly. Whereas a still photo, even when it’s used on television, it’s there for X amount of time, whether it be five seconds or ten seconds, it’s a lot longer than the video image that is there, the video image is 1/24 of a second, and it’s on to the next thing. While video has an impact of its own, for reasons I’ll try to describe, it does not last in the mind. Now having said that, there’s nothing more dramatic than having a plane fly into the Twin Towers. But some of those still pictures are pretty good too. Historically speaking, the still photo stops the event, and it gives the individual viewer the time to look at it and study it and see not only the scene, but the pictures within the picture. You take Eddie Adams’ picture, and when you look at the footage, a man comes up, shoots a man, falls, and it is gone.  If you look at Eddie’s picture, you see the pistol, the expression on the man’s face, you see the expression on the face of the shooter, you see the wince of the guards in the background, you see the straight line of the pistol being held out, which is almost bullet-like in its impact, so that, because you see and have the time to see all the elements, you see more than you see in the video image. Now, if the video image is played over and over and over, sometimes you get to see it in some better detail. Even then, it doesn’t have that frozen power that the still image has. And your memory works in still pictures if you think about it, rather than a motion picture. I have a theory, and I have tried it out on neurologists…sometimes they agree and sometimes they say, “Maybe you’re right,” so I can’t say this 100 per cent. But…when you read a story in a paper or a magazine or a book, you read one word at a time, and the word delivers its message along with the other words one at a time. Your brain may be doing other things, too, simultaneously…enjoying a breeze perhaps, a perfume of flowers…whatever. The brain can handle this…especially the one word at a time. But when you look at a still picture you see it all at once. The brain has to work harder to capture all that information and pass it all into your being. The breeze and the perfume get less attention…the brain focuses on the image. The picture for that reason sticks longer in your mind. There is more focus of the intelligence on the picture. The still picture lasts longer. The great icons also tend to be on stories of memorable impact, so that in addition to the inherent power of the picture, you have the inherent power of the event.  The reason Joe Rosenthal’s picture was so great was, yes, incredible photography, but also because it came at a time when people were thinking other thoughts about the war. Despite what we say about the Greatest Generation and that wonderful time in World War II, people were getting a little fed up with the war by the Winter of 1945. People understood what was going on in Europe, because we were talking of datelines in Rome and Paris and London, and even Berlin and cities and locations that were part of our own history. In Asia, we talked about Saipan and Eniwetok and Bougainville, places that you couldn’t find on a map, and along comes Iwoand the casualties were staggering, and along comes Iwo Jima, another place on the ocean, you can’t find it on the map, and all these people are being killed, and people are saying stop already. Stop. And along comes this picture that says victory; it says American boys doing the job; it’s working together, all those ideals. It’s the way Americans see themselves. Think about how much that picture had going for it. Think of all that, and of course—and plus it was beautiful photography. You couldn’t make it any better. So, you put all that together, and Eddie’s picture and so did Nick Ut, and Malcolm Browne and “the Burning Monk,” the sheer horror of it, brought the Vietnam War on the front pages. Up until that time, it wasn’t exactly a back alley war, but it wasn’t a major thing. That picture put it on the front pages: it stayed there for ten years. So this is a very visceral impact that photography has, that still photography, that other forms of photography, and other forms of communication do not have. Yang: You’ve mentioned some of the photos that, I guess, you would rank in that category of having that iconic power. Any other ones that stand out? Would you include the Abu Ghraib ones in that category? Buell: Yes, Abu Ghraib has an impact for a different reason, but it has the same impact. It is not good photography, it’s bad photography. Remember when I was talking about the Iwo Jima picture? Its meaning, its impact, its translation, was of American ideals that American believed in themselves. It was a reinforcement of that time and attitudes. Abu Ghraib was just the opposite. It was exactly what Americans do not see in themselves.  They don’t see Americans as doing things like that, but it’s the complete flip side, which means it has just as much impact, because it’s a negative picture as opposed to a positive picture. It doesn’t reduce the impact, because it challenges your basic ideals of yourself. And I think that accounts for its, frankly, what I think will be a lasting value. The My Lai pictures from Vietnam were the same thing. We don’t see ourselves that way. And all of a sudden there it is. It has a very jolting, jerking of the reins kind of an impact on the viewer. Yang: Your book collects a lot of the great Pulitzer Prize winners. You just mentioned the photo of, the name of the photographer escapes my name right now, the little girl running from… Buell: Yeah, Nick Ut [Huynh Cong Út]. Yang: Yes, the Nick Ut photo. Any other photographs you would put in that category of “turning points?” And why would you include them? Buell: Of course, the photos of the Trade Towers being struck. There’s a case there of the classic combination of event in graphic, spectacular, indelible photography, that always will be iconic. An icon is more than a picture of a specific event. An icon sums up what went on before and after. On that same story was Tom Franklin’s photo of the fireman raising the flag.  There’s an interesting concept there. The flag was raised and this takes nothing away from an incredible photograph, but there was an instant comparison to Iwo Jima, and all the strengths of the Iwo Jima picture came to support the same idea that Tom Franklin’s picture had: we will rise, we will prevail, we will overcome, you’re not going to put us down, we’re going to get this flag up, we’re going to be Americans…  So across the generations, one picture supports another picture, and a lot of icons have that kind of  power, they relate back. Or in the case of the Hindenburg explodingthere were several pictures in that period, Jesse Owens winning the four medals at the Olympics, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling , and the Hindenburg, which was the most dramatic of the pictures. They were all spectacular photos, they were also all anti-Nazi, and they combined together to fortify the anti-Nazi feelings that were on the build in the United States at the time, and therefore became icons themselves, particularly Jesse Owens and particularly the Hindenburg. Yang: You talk a  lot about your admiration for the Hindenburg photos. It seems like even if [Murray Becker] had had a digital camera, I’m not sure if he could have captured the moment or moments betterwith the technology he had, and to get off all those photos… Buell: Oh, yeah, remarkable. Murray Becker did a remarkable job. He made four pictures in 46 seconds on a Speed Graphic. Really incredible, professional. That’s a mastery of mechanics. It’s just like an artist who knows exactly how to mix his paints, which is a mechanical thing. But he uses that mechanical thing to create a beautiful painting. Murray used his mastery of the mechanics to get these pictures, it was just stupendous.      Yang: You use this wonderful poetic phrase to talk about what makes photos iconic. You said, in many ways they capture what came before, and what will come after. Otherwise, you’ve said in your book Moments that there are no hard and fast rules on what makes a photograph a Pulitzer, or I guess, by extension an iconic photo, except that they capture a universal moment. Besides this concept of capturing the before and after, can you talk about what makes a photograph universal in your eyes? Buell: Well, I think the essence of it is simplicity. Most of the iconic pictures are extremely simple photographs. They’re not complicated, they communicate their message instantly, even though, as I had said before there are pictures within the picture, the overall image is communicated instantly. What the still image allows is for someone to see more than that first blast of image, the first impact of image, than the cold water in the face effect that a really strong picture has, and allows you to see more, if you look at it you see more. If you look at the Hindenburg, there are people hanging on the roof, people falling down, the boiling fire of the explosion, and tilted angle. There are all sorts of things that communicate to the first blast, and then the details of it. But the icons, generally speaking, have this very strong overall power. Now that’s not true of the Abu Ghraib thing, and I don’t know if we dignify those as being icons. They’re certainly lasting. And they certainly have a before and after effect. “Icon” tends to be very positive, and those pictures are not positive. Yang: Yet at the same time, very obviously, a lot of the photographs that we remember seem to be borne of violence, and, paraphrasing you, I think you said that, unfortunately, it seems history is written more in blood than in moments of beauty. And looking through the photographs, some of the photographs have this quality where you can’t turn away, even though they’re so horrific, what’s depicted in them is so horrific. Buell: It’s a voyeuristic kind of a thing. Yang: Right. Why do you think so many of the, and I guess you’re somewhat loathe to use the word “iconic” for those kinds of photos, but let’s say “memorable” photos, why is it that so many of them are borne of violence? Buell: Well, because violence is very dramatic. I like to tell the story, people say, well, why does news seem too often to have this kind of a negative, violent, harsh, whatever you want to call it. Well, let me tell you a story. It takes me three minutes to get to the train. I leave for work in the morning, and I walk to the train station. And I come home at night, and my wife says, “Well, what kind of a day did you have?” “Well, I went down and I went to the train station, bought my Times, and I went up on the track, and I saw Joe, and I said, ‘hi, how are the wife and kids,’ then I walked down and got on the platform, and the train came in, and a guy fell down between the train tracks, he run over and cut in two, and he got boxed up, and a couple of us went and got into a taxi and they took us down.” That’s not how you tell that story.  “What kind of a day did you have?” “Damn! It was great ! A guy got killed on the platform this morning when I was getting to work this morning!” That’s because it’s different, it’s unusual, it rises out of the routine. And all too often, it’s the violence that rises up out of the routine. Sometimes something will happen in which you will say, “you know I went down to the train station this morning, there was the cutest little girl, she had nice long curls, and she carried a dolly, and she smiled, and it was a pleasant moment.” That happens, and that’s what we call a feature picture, don’t we? That kind of a thing, like the [Bill Beal photo of a] cop talking to the boy that won the Pulitzer Prize? A marvelous vignette. You just don’t see so many of those. You just don’t. And I can’t explain it to you. Let me say this to you, when I was running the AP photo service, I think many times people would bring an issue to me, I used to kid the staff and myself too, “you think I go into my pocket and I have a little book and go to page 23 and it tells me what to do in this set of circumstances?” And the marvelous part of all this is that it is unpredictable, sometimes it’s not describable, sometimes it’s just interesting, because you look at it and say, “wow.” “That’s really interesting.” Well, why is it interesting? You begin to intellectualize it, like you and are doing now. And that’s fine and dandy, and it’s helpful, and it’s useful. But there’s this visceral thing about photography. There’s an electric excitement to photography that you don’t get in many other things.   Yang: Do you think it’s because it’s difficult to recognize those kinds of vignettes, that otherwise seem like everyday moments? When you’re photographing violence the importance of the story in many ways seems obvious. Buell: Do you know John White in Chicago? John White is a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of vignettes. And he just has an eye for that kind of thing. Some photographers have that, and some don’t. Many don’t. It’s a much more difficult kind of journalism to practice on a day to day basis, a lot of times you just stumble into it. Talk about serendipity, that’s where serendipity becomes the governing factor as just one of several factors. But John has a great feel for that, he’s a marvelous photographer. And a very sensitive fellow, and just a beautiful human being.  And it shows in his photography, his personality comes through in his photography. There’s no way you can tell people how to do that, that’s something that’s in their heart and soul. It’s something that comes out in their pictures. Those are things that, you can’t define them, you can’t write them down. If you could, we’d all be doing them. Yang: You noted that Eddie Adams wasn’t particularly happy about the fact, maybe this is exaggerating his sentiment, but he didn’t like the fact that he was known mostly for that one photo of the execution in Vietnam. Dorothea Lange likewise complained that she hated the fact that she was known solely, or largely, for Migrant Mother. Why do you think it is, maybe the answer is too obvious, but why is it that we often remember just one single image from even a lot of the great photographers? Buell: Well, it’s because they are icons, because they have captured attention. Eddie is most proud of his pictures that he calls “Boat of No Smiles,” in which he did a photo story on Vietnamese who were at sea. They couldn’t land their boat anywhere and become citizens of another country; they were trying to escape Vietnam some time after the war. And actually those pictures changed the immigration laws. The Vietnamese were allowed to come into the U.S. in larger numbers. The pictures are marvelous. Eddie was a great photographer.  But the pictures had all the talent that Eddie brought to the scene, plus he felt that they did good. He did stories on a little boy who lived in a bubble, he did stories on kids who suffered from different diseases that were very compelling and made very compelling pictures, and he felt, he would rather have been known for that than for the execution photo, simply because he felt the execution photo didn’t tell the whole story. That morning the deputy of Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief who did the executingwas killed along with his wife and children by the Viet Cong, and the police chief was just not in the mood to think of the niceties. He caught the Viet Cong, and he executed him on the spot. As he walked away, he looked at Eddie and said, “these people killed many of my people and your people too,” and he just kept walking, with the guy dead on the street. Loan was highly respected, by both the Americans and the Vietnamese, he was a man of some intellectual abilities, and a reasonably fair guy, and Eddie felt that he had been unduly persecuted, because he took that picture. One of the problems with photography is that you can’t get all of that into a picture. I don’t know that if you had written a story that day that you would have gotten all that into a story either. Anyway, that’s why Eddie felt the way he did about that photograph.  “Take pictures with the camera of your heart.” “I’m faithful to my purpose, my mission, my assignment, my work, my dreams. I stay focused on what I’m doing and what’s important. And I keep in flight—I spread my wings and do it.” Chicago is a city of hard work and hard working people, blue and white collar. Chicago artists are known for their hard work, prolific output, and search for excellence. The list of legendary artists is long. Many are long dead. Some, like Paul Natkin, Shelley Howard, Victor Skrebneski, and Linda Matlow are still producing work. From June through October 1973 and briefly during the spring of 1974, John H. White, a 28-year-old photographer with the Chicago Daily News, worked for the federal government photographing Chicago, especially the city`s African American community. White took his photographs for the Environmental Protection Agency`s (EPA) DOCUMERICA project. As White reflected recently, he saw his assignment as "an opportunity to capture a slice of life, to capture history." His photographs portray the difficult circumstances faced by many of Chicago`s African American residents in the early 1970s, but they also catch the "spirit, love, zeal, pride, and hopes of the community." Today, John White is a staff photographer with the Chicago Sun-Times. He has won hundreds of awards, and his work has been exhibited and published widely. In 1982 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. John White: Portrait of Black Chicago Part One The captions are John White`s own, written some time after he took his photographs. In some cases White used virtually the same caption for several images. "Sunrise on Lake Michigan with Chicago shown in the background. The city has provided a climate for developing black resources and is considered the black business capital of the United States. There were 8,747 black owned businesses which grossed more than $332 million in 1970 according to the Census. In 1972 black owned financial institutions in Chicago had assets of $254.9 million." "Black sidewalk salesmen arranging their fresh fruits and vegetables on Chicago`s South Side. Many of the city`s black businessmen started small and grew by working hard. Today Chicago is believed to be the black business capital of the United States. Black Enterprise Magazine reported in 1973 that the city had 14 of the top 100 black owned businesses in the country, one more than New York City." "Black products was one of the themes at the annual Black Expo held in Chicago. Also present were black education, talent, a voter registration drive and other aspects of black consciousness. The aim is to make blacks aware of their heritage and capabilities and help them towards a better life." "Empty housing in the ghetto on Chicago`s South Side. Structures such as this have been systematically vacated as a result of fires, vandalism, or failure by owners to provide basic tenant services. Then the vacated buildings, often substantially salvageable, are razed and replaced with high-rise apartments which appeal to few members of the black community and almost none of the area`s previous residents." Chicago ghetto on the South Side. Although the percentage of Chicago blacks making $7,000 or more jumped from 26% to 58% between 1960 and 1970, a large percentage still remained unemployed. The black unemployment rate is generally assumed to be twice that of the national unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics." John White: Portrait of Black Chicago John White: Portrait of Black Chicago Part Two The captions are John White`s own, written some time after he took his photographs. In some cases White used virtually the same caption for several images. "Black youths play basketball at Stateway Gardens` high-rise housing project on Chicago`s South Side. The complex has eight buildings with 1,633 two and three bedroom apartments housing 6,825 persons. They were built under the U.S. Housing Acts of 1949 and 1968. They are managed by the Chicago Housing Authority which is responsible for 41,500 public housing dwellings." May 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13710) "Black youngsters cool off with fire hydrant water on Chicago`s South Side in the Woodlawn community. The kids don`t go to the city beaches and use the fire hydrants to cool off instead. It`s a tradition in the community, comprised of very low income people. The area has high crime and fire records. From 1960 to 1970 the percentage of Chicago blacks with income of $7,000 or more jumped from 26% to 58%." June 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13684) "Young woman soliciting funds for a Chicago organization in a shopping center parking lot. She is one of the nearly 1.2 million black people who make up over a third of the population of Chicago. It is one of the many black faces in this project that portray life in all its seasons. The photos are portraits that reflect pride, love, beauty, hope, struggle, joy, hate, frustration, discontent, worship, and faith. She is a member of her race who is proud of her heritage." August 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13682) "Minority youngsters who have gathered to have their picture taken on Chicago`s South Side during a talent show. Blacks make up over one third of the 3.6 million population in the city. Chicago census figures for 1970 show a significant gap in economic security between blacks and whites. Only 35% of black families earned $10,000 to $25,000 compared to 60% of white families. Of families earning less than $8,000 a total of 50% were black compared to 21% white." August 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13683) "A student at the Westinghouse Industrial Vocation School on Chicago`s West Side. She is one of the nearly 1.2 million black people who make up over a third of the population of Chicago. It is one of the many black faces in this project that portray life in all its seasons. The photos are portraits that reflect pride, love, beauty, hope, struggle, joy, hate, frustration, discontent, worship, and faith. She is a member of her race who is proud of her heritage." May 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13691) "A black man. One of the nearly 1.2 million black people who make up over a third of Chicago`s population. It is one of the many black faces in this project that portray life in all its seasons. The photos are portraits that reflect pride, love, beauty, hope, struggle, joy, hate, frustration, discontent, worship, and faith. In short, portraits of individual human beings who are proud of their heritage." June 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13697) "A black man painting a store front on South Wabash Street. One of the nearly 1.2 million people of his race who make up over a third of Chicago`s population. It is one of the many black faces in this project that portray life in all its seasons. In short, they are portraits of human beings who feel they are individuals and are proud of their heritage. Their faces mirror pride, love, beauty, hope, struggle, joy, hate, frustration, discontent, worship, and faith." July 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13702) Part Three The captions are John White`s own, written some time after he took his photographs. In some cases White used virtually the same caption for several images. "Religious fervor is mirrored on the face of a Black Muslim woman, one of some 10,000 listening to Elijah Muhammad deliver his annual Savior`s Day message in Chicago. The city is headquarters for the Black Muslims. Their $75 million dollar empire includes a mosque, newspaper, university, restaurants, real estate, bank, and variety of retail stores. Muhammad died February 25, 1975." March 1974 (NWDNS-412-DA-13792) " `The Fruit of Islam,` a special group of bodyguards for Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, sits at the bottom of the platform while he delivers his annual Savior`s Day message in Chicago. The city is headquarters for the Black Muslims. Their $75 million dollar empire includes a mosque, newspaper, university, restaurants, real estate, bank, and variety of retail stores. Muhammad died February 25, 1975." March 1974 (NWDNS-412-DA-13794) "The Rev. Jesse Jackson speaks on a radio broadcast from the headquarters of Operation PUSH, [People United to Save Humanity] at its annual convention. One of the aims of the organization is to open the world of business to small black owned businesses. Rev. Jackson is credited for helping to make Chicago the black banking capital in the country. He helped persuade white companies to stop taking profits they earned from black consumers to the white suburbs." July 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13800) "Artist Ron Blackburn painting an outdoor wall mural at the corner of 33rd and Giles Streets in Chicago. He is one of many black artists painting such art. They feel it is a means of sharing art with the people of the ghetto who don`t go to the city`s museums." October 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13776) "Artist who was helping with a wall painting on 33rd and Giles Street in South Side Chicago. He is one of many black artists painting outdoor murals in Chicago. They feel it is a means of sharing art with ghetto people who don`t go to the established museums." October 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13695) "Black bongo player performs at the International Amphitheater in Chicago as part of the annual PUSH [People United to Save Humanity] `Black Expo` in the fall of 1973. The annual event showcases black talent, educational opportunities, stars, art, and products to provide blacks with an awareness of their heritage and capabilities, and help them towards a better life." October 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13860) "Black soul singer Isaac Hayes performs at the International Amphitheater in Chicago as part of the annual PUSH [People United to Save Humanity] `Black Expo` in the fall of 1973. The annual event showcases black talent, educational opportunities, stars, art, and products to provide blacks with an awareness of their heritage and capabilities, and help them towards a better life." October 1973 (NWDNS-412-DA-13855) IT IS WINTER IN NEW ORLEANS, and my mother is dying. As I sit at her bedside, on the verge of being overcome with grief, I try to distract myself with work. I’ve been asked to write about the great Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John H. White: his pictures, his legacy, and his famously unique spirit. My mother has dementia. She and I are alone, except for her cat curled up asleep at her side. But thinking about John White makes me feel like I have company. In this dark moment, my memories of him, like the images he captured with his camera, feel like a gift. I remember the night he touched my life. The Eddie Adams Workshop is an institution in the world of photojournalism: four days for professionals and students to meet, learn, and bond. John White, with his perfect Afro framing his ageless face and smiling eyes, has always been involved, or at least in my fading memory he always has been. I was first invited to the workshop in the 1990s, when images were made on film and digital cameras were slightly smaller than a Smart car. At the time, I was an eager 20-something photo intern at the Los Angeles Times. John White was there, as was Gordon Parks, the legendary black photographer and filmmaker, both in the role of professional instructors. I was one of 100 young photographers hoping to learn from them. Williams-Ali.jpg A crowd of 10,000 cheers Elijah Muhammad at his annual Savior’s Day Message in Chicago, 1974. I recall other young photographers of color, but as far as I can remember, I was the only black participant apart from faculty members like White and Parks. Even then, this was becoming a familiar experience. I’d find myself thinking: I must do more. I must be the best. Sign up for CJR's daily email Email address White, of course, came up in an even less diverse era. A preacher’s son from Lexington, North Carolina, he was born in 1945, when the idea of a black photojournalist barely existed. A teacher once told him he’d grow up to be a garbage man. As the story goes, White’s father told him it was fine to be a garbage man “as long as he was the one driving the truck.” He was taught to work hard and take pride in that work, whatever it was.   There was such violence, fear, and crime, but the exposure of images became a light that only photography could create.”   I’d heard of White before the Eddie Adams workshop. I knew he worked for the Chicago Sun-Times, where he’d won the Pulitzer for feature photography in 1982. I also knew he’d won his Prize for a collection of pictures taken over the course of a year, a rarity among photographers, who are usually honored for a single image or a photo essay or story, which involve a collection of related images. Indeed, John White is the only photojournalist in the last 100 years who has won a Pulitzer in either of the photography categories with a portfolio of one year’s work. He is also one of only six black photojournalists who have won individual Prizes. White’s winning portfolio captures his powerful and consistent vision: simple, straightforward images; beautiful use of light; muscular composition; and subversive, meaningful moments. It contains images of daily life in Chicago, from the whimsical—a dinosaur skeleton having its teeth brushed and a penguin frolicking—to a touching and sweet image of two little girls playing a single violin. Young ballerinas leap and float. A National Guard citizen-soldier trains hard. A child plays in a dilapidated hallway at the notorious Cabrini-Green public housing complex. Williams-fountain.jpg Girls play in the flow of a fire hydrant in the Woodlawn Community on Chicago’s South Side, 1973. One cold autumn night, on a bus back to the Eddie Adams farm after a trip to town, I spied an empty seat next to White and grabbed it. We quickly fell into a hushed, intimate conversation, and he asked me a question I’ll never forget: “Are you a black photographer or a photographer who happens to be black?” I remember tears welling in my eyes, and hoping that he couldn’t tell. Even back then, it was a question I asked myself often, an exercise in the emotional complexity of being black in America. I don’t recall what I said, or whether I said anything at all. White’s question reminded me of the “double-consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois describes in The Souls of Black Folk. Being black in America, Du Bois writes, means living with a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” When I was an intern at the Times, there was only one black photographer on staff and a few photo editors of color. I sometimes felt that my race was more important than my skills. Shortly after I started there, a white reporter asked me to work with her on a story involving black teenagers in south LA. I gladly agreed and shared some of my ideas, but she told me she wasn’t looking for ideas. I want you to come with me because I know you’ll be able to calm these kids down, she said, more or less. So I went along and calmed the kids down so that she could talk to them. I made a couple decent frames, but on that story, my dreadlocks and persona were what mattered. Williams-tall.jpg Abandoned housing pockmarks Chicago’s South Side; buildings are left vacant after fires, vandalism, or owners’ failure to provide basic services, 1973. Is John White a black photographer or a photographer who happens to be black? The answer is complicated. I can only imagine looking at a newspaper today and experiencing as powerful a body of work as White’s, with an earnest visual stream of consciousness that is tightly edited and that explores a city and its people through various moods that span what it means to be alive. As then-Sun-Times Executive Vice President and Editor Ralph Otwell wrote in his 1982 letter accompanying White’s Pulitzer portfolio, his work was “as big as life itself.” In one of White’s pictures, we travel beneath Chicago and walk the line with a worker in a subway tunnel, in awe at what men and women have created to move us to and fro. His photograph of a preemie struggling to live forces me to stare, silently offer a prayer of thanks, and then smile as I think about my little Papi at day care. We go to jail and watch a nun minister to a captive flock. I think and feel. Those of us who believe in a higher power sense the presence of God within the picture of a baptism in the churning waters of Lake Michigan. I continue to feel. This is life. John White reminds us that we are alive. But there’s something else in these pictures, too, something troubling. We take a journey through the gritty, graffiti-covered world of Cabrini-Green. We feel the pressure of poverty; the history of redlining in Chicago is evident, the plight of black folk clear. Though we don’t see gangs, we feel their presence. We walk the beat with cops, and feel the intensity of their assignment, as well as concern for the young people they arrest. Yet even here, the strength of the spirit cannot be denied. Amid the poverty, there is pride—even joy. “Photography took the handcuffs off of that place,” White told me recently. “The children could smile again, play again because of the power of journalism. There was such violence, fear, and crime, but the exposure of images became a light that only photography could create.” One of these photos has become iconic. It captures children smiling and playing in front of a monolithic tower at Cabrini-Green. Though the building looms over him, the boy at the center of the frame is larger than life. His joy is infectious, impossible to ignore. Young black men are often viewed as threats, but this boy is palpably innocent. White chose to celebrate a black child. I believe this was an artistic decision, not a political one, but it carries a deeper social meaning. Williams-housing.jpg I imagine White must have felt an added responsibility as a black photographer in Cabrini. Not to right a wrong, but to do right by the people he was photographing, as opposed to just making a good picture. In my own life, it’s moments like these when I’ve felt like a black photographer, rather than a photographer who happens to be black. You look at this world with a historical perspective, and try to give a voice to the voiceless. It’s not just an assignment or a job. It’s a sacred responsibility. It hurts to admit that John White’s Pulitzer is much larger than the pictures for which he won. It cannot be separated from the social implications of his being black, in a field where concerns about the lack of diversity are as pressing now as ever. Take the city I call home, New Orleans, which is more than 60 percent black, with a growing Latino community and a substantial Asian population. Yet the photo staffs of our mainstream newspapers and wire services do not begin to reflect the community’s diversity. John White didn’t dwell on the negative. When the Sun-Times laid him off in 2013, along with the rest of its photo staff, he responded with grace. “I light candles, I don’t curse the darkness,” he told The New York Times. “Even now, my colleagues are cursing the darkness. I’m lighting the candles. And I give wings to dreams, I ain’t breaking no wings. I’m not clipping any wings. Make a difference in the world. One light. One day. One image.” My mother died on a Saturday in January. It was automatic to think of White as I mourned her. He is a deeply spiritual man, and something I read recently has taken me deeper into my meditation on his importance in my life. “I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell,” Du Bois wrote in his essay “Credo.” “I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.” Am I a black photographer or a photographer who happens to be black? I can answer White’s question now. Within my double-consciousness, I am both.   Williams-sidebar.jpg IN 1997, the Los Angeles Times assigned photographer Clarence Williams to document the lives of children growing up with drug-addicted parents. Williams spent days and nights with addicts and their kids, capturing images of a mother shooting up heroin near her 3-year-old daughter and the son of a speed addict digging through a dumpster for clothes. Williams-pulitzer.jpg An image from Williams’s Pulitzer-winning series. One afternoon, Williams was hanging out with a female speed addict. She liked to get high and clean frenetically, “like a crazy person,” Williams recalls. In a drug-induced fugue, she deposited her infant daughter on a blanket on the floor and started vacuuming. Through his camera lens, Williams saw the baby grab for the vacuum cleaner cord and bring it to her mouth. “I had no desire to take a picture of a child electrocuting herself,” he says. He put down his camera and picked up the baby. “I believe there are times when we’re in the world and we have a journalist’s hat on, and there are times when you have to take the journalist’s hat off and put on your human hat. That was a time when I had to put on my human hat.” ohn H. White (*1945) is a renowned American photojournalist. His photography documents everyday lives and political events in American cities, particularly Chicago. He was a staff photographer on the Chicago Sun-Times for 35 years, and won a Pulitzer prize in 1982. Our exhibition concentrates on photographs depicting life for families living in Chicago housing projects in the 1980s.   The controversial dissolution of the Sun-Times photography department earlier this year stirred up much debate regarding the significance of photojournalism. We are therefore particularly pleased to present this exhibition of works by one of the world’s most influential photojournalists as a testament to the enduring importance of this occupation. A couple months back, Donald Winslow, the editor of the National Press Photographers Association's News Photographer magazine, emailed me asking if I would be able to photograph a "renowned" Chicago photographer for the April 2012 issue. My first thought was, "I hope he means John H. White." Several weeks later, he confirmed, that indeed, he was looking for me to hang out with John a bit for a cover story honoring John on the 30th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize. After running the idea past my photo chief, I was given the green light. Before I go on about my time with John, I want to first give some context. Back in 1986, shortly after graduating from Ripon College, I was trying to break into the world of newspaper photography. At the time, I had absolutely no experience and not a soul was responding to the resumes that I had sent out to almost every newspaper in the Midwest. Then one day, Erv Gebhard of the Milwaukee Journal called and asked if I would like to come up to Wisconsin and show him my work. I tightened up my portfolio of ill-composed sports photos shot from the stands, artsy silhouettes and reflections and a photo story on public sculpture in Chicago that didn't have one human in it and headed north. After looking at my work, Gebhard kindly said that I had a good eye, but, that I needed to get some experience. He said that I should either get a job at a small paper or go back to school and take some photo classes. As I headed out the door, he told me to give John H. White a call. He said John taught a photojournalism class at Chicago's Columbia College and his tutelage might be exactly what I needed to get on the right track. The next morning, I called John to inquire about how I would go about taking his class. After discussing my photo background or lack thereof, John told me that I would first have to take Photo I and Darkroom I before I could enroll in his class. Halfway through those introductory classes at Columbia, I was offered a part time job at The Daily Calumet, a community newspaper that covered Chicago's southeast side and south suburbs. I promptly stopped going to school and began learning my craft on the job. In hindsight, I wonder what trajectory my career would have taken if I had hung around Columbia long enough to be taught my John. But when I really think about it, I have been taught by John everday of the past 26 years. Working in the same city as John, seeing his images in the Sun-Times and occasionally shooting side by side with him has improved my skills as a photographer, however, more importantly, watching his work ethic, the way he treats his fellow man and his uplifting presence has shown me a golden example of how to live life. The photos that I am sharing here are from three visits with John right before and on Easter. The whole time was magical, although, photographing John at the Sun-Times' office was extremely awkward. The high point of the assignment, and maybe of my entire career, was Easter morning. I arrived at John's South side residence before dawn. I was awestruck and humbled as I entered his home and witnessed his life's work covering the walls. John is a private man and I felt extremely honored to be allowed into his world. As John finished getting ready, I walked around, mouth agape, soaking in the experience. In short time we were off to the lakefront where John tries to begin each day at sunrise, where in his words he "recharges his batteries" and spends a "moment with God". After documenting John's ritual of half prayer half photography, I took a break to stand with John, arm around his shoulder and his around mine, facing the rising sun, soaking in this glorious scene. John then took time to pray for me, my family and to thank God for letting us share this time together. I didn't want that moment to end. John likes to say that he sometimes is given "assignments from God". Well, I can honestly say that my time spent with John H. White was a gift. I can never give back to John everything that he has given me, but, I definitely can pay it forward and try to live my life like John lives his. God bless you John H. White. Keep in flight! Whether you know it or not, there's a good chance you've admired the work of John White. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo-journalist who's captured iconic images of Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali, just to name a few. He spent decades with the Chicago Sun-Times – until the paper laid off all of its photography staff in 2013. White is set to talk about his work at Middlebury College on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., and he joined VPR by phone from Chicago to talk about his career. On getting into photography "I actually was chewing bubblegum in school, which you don't do. And it was Bazooka bubble gum and in the bubblegum wrapper said for 50 cents and ten wrappers, you can get a camera. So, my grandmother gave me 50 cents. I ordered that camera, and it was my first camera, when I was 13 years old. "My father is a minister, and so everywhere we would go, people would take photographs of the preacher family and things like that, and I always had this sense of what people were looking at, and watching people ... This thing of observing people. It was simpler for me to click a shutter and capture a moment. At this point, John White holds a camera up to the microphone and snaps a picture, creating that unmistakable sound of a lens shutter. "Oh yes, I have my Nikon, and then I have the camera of my heart. The absence of a camera would be ... I mean, it's an extension and it's an extension of my ... I have to have the camera because I look at myself as a visual servant." Muhammad-Ali-John-H-White-courtesy-Middlebury.jpg Credit John H. White / Courtesy Middlebury College Muhammad Ali, 1978, Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. On being a "visual servant to God" "The camera is sort of a conduit between the heart beat of humanity. I know that when I capture a moment, that every individual on earth can read that, can understand the language of that. And so I can communicate with everybody. "I remember an interview President Obama did last year, and a student asked, 'Mr. President, if you had any power in the world, what would that power be?' And he said, 'To speak all the languages of the world.' And I can't wait to have a conversation with the president and say, 'Mr. President, I do that every day.' ... And somebody young, old rich, poor, educated, uneducated, can read the language of photography." aim-of-fame-john-h-white-courtesy-middlebury.JPG Credit John H. White / Courtesy Middlebury College Aim of Fame. On choosing a favorite photograph "I just love photographs. And they change. There are some that mean much to me because of what it meant to the people. And in my Pulitzer Prize portfolio, there's a picture of a dinosaur, at the museum, being maintained. And I attended a kindergarten graduation. And this little boy was the top speaker there and I was so proud of him and I went up to him I said, 'I'm very proud of you, and you're going to do great. So what you want to be when you grow up?' And he said, 'Mister, I want to be like the man and take pictures of dinosaurs.' "And so that touched me, because he saw my photograph and did a study on my work and he wanted to be like John White, so to speak. So that, to me, is just as important as covering the pope, or any major event. It's the one-on-one, heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye, with ordinary people." "I'm the conduit" "The pictures take themselves ... I'm just sort of the mirror. I'm the the conduit. I remember, one meaningful moment for instance is [Nelson] Mandela being in this house for the first time after being released from prison in Soweto. And I saw him, you know, I'm in the kitchen and he's coming out of the bedroom, with his jacket, putting it on, and I just saw that smile, this gentle giant, this kindness, and I took the picture. Nelson-Mandela-John-White-courtesy-Middlebury.jpg Credit John H. White / Courtesy Middlebury College Nelson Mandela returns home to Soweto, February 15, 1990. "I captured that moment. But, in moments like that, it's not me. You know, I'm there, I sense the spirit of connectedness. And so, I don't take the picture, the spirit takes it, so to speak." On the role of photojournalists in a world awash with smartphones "You know, I think it's true that there are a lot of photographers. But quality photographs, quality moments – a lot of photographs out there, but not a lot of moments. Not a lot of intimate moments. pure-joy-john-h-white-courtesy-middlebury.JPG Credit John H. White / Courtesy Middlebury College Pure Joy. "I mean, you when I was coming to the studio, I saw two people standing, getting ready to take a selfie. And I said, 'May I take the picture for you?' And they were going to take it against this wall that, the window that was overpowering the light, which wouldn't work. Anyway, I took two images with their phone, and they just really loved it. "So I think that people are clickers. You know, they click. And there's no soul to it, there's no feeling to it. It's content, which is cool. You look at the magazines and newspapers that are doing great things, and there's moments there. There's moments there, and those will always be. And you can't do that with a clicker."  ” Photo: Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune John H. White is a Chicago legend. He started work at the former Chicago Daily News and moved to the Chicago Sun Times in 1978. In 1973-74 the Environmental Protection Agency asked Mr. White to photograph Chicago’s African American life for its DOCUMERICA project. Mr. White was selected as one of fifty African American photographers for the book, “Songs of My People”, documenting African American life. Mr. White taught at Northwestern and Columbia College. John H. White received the Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism in 1982 for consistent excellence in a wide range of topics. He also won three National Headliner Awards, was awarded the Chicago Press Photographer Association Photographer of the Year five times, and was the first photographer inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame. He also received the Chicago Medal of Merit. Mr. White is an artist, teacher, mentor, deeply spiritual man, and one of the nicest people in the news business you will ever meet. I had the opportunity to meet Mr. White at a photography seminar held at Calumet Photo. We discussed the reportage of violence in Chicago for a few minutes. His lecture was informative, but you could feel there was an element of love in what he was saying. He is a man who truly loves his craft. The Chicago Sun Times saw fit to reward John H. White’s long career with them by laying him off with all their other photographers. John H. White will not disappear, whine, or complain. Mr. White has something missing in too many people, artists and non-artists alike. Mr. White has a work ethic. It is part and parcel of his moral code. Mr. White will continue to produce excellence. We will continue to benefit from his work. Another great photographer, Gordon Parks, described freedom as, “Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the imagination, and then making the new horizons.”  John H. White is now free to pursue an even higher plane of artistic creation.

John H. White: Driver

Here's what we learned from John H. White:

That although great photography is the result of skill and circumstance, strength of character plays a part, too. "When I was nine years old, a teacher told us what we would probably grow up to be," John H. White says, "and because I was slow in math, she said I'd end up working on a garbage truck. All the other kids laughed. I went home crying, and my dad asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he got all six of us kids together and said, 'I'll never tell you what to be in life, but I will tell you to be your best and look for the best in others.' Then he said to me, 'And Johnny, if you work on a garbage truck, fine...just be sure you're the one driving the truck.' I may have been very young, but it was a turning point."

That he's been a photojournalist for over 30 years, and is currently a staff photographer at the Chicago Sun-Times , the paper he joined in 1978. In 1982, he received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography and has won three first place National Headliner Awards. He was the first photographer inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame and has been the Chicago Press Photographer Association's Photographer of the Year a record five times. In 1999, he received the city's highest honor, the Chicago Medal of Merit.

That after all his years as a photojournalist, he still strives to have "the rookie's spirit and the pro's eye." The spirit comes naturally: "I believe in embracing each gift we get, and I get one each day." The eye is guided by a sense of responsibility: "The camera is this great tool, this wonderful passport, that allows me to go out there and be the eyes for others."

That he got his first camera at 13 and his first assignment at fourteen. "Our church had burned down," John has said, "and my father had me take pictures after that and during the whole construction stage. Maybe that's why I do picture stories now, because I started that way."

That for the entire year of 2001, John pursued a long dreamed-of self-assignment: to take one photo each day of a moment that meant something special to him. For the project, he used the Lite-Touch camera he always carries with him. "I'm never without that little camera. It's been my third eye. I use it as a visual notebook, and I've always wanted to do that every day for a year—to take out that notebook and record a special moment."

That the project was challenging, but not really difficult. Challenging because "my favorite thing to do is stories, I love stories, and to capture only one moment each day was a challenge. Yet it was simple because it was a moment that captured me." He ended up with 365 slices of life; one year and all those precious memories captured in a total of less than five seconds. Some were images of things he saw on the job, but most were taken during private and personal moments. (The last four photos you see here are from the self-assignment.)

That the project, which John calls "Glimpses of My Journey," was inspired by and dedicated to his mother, Ruby Mae Leverett White, and it was made all the more poignant by her death in March of 2001. "For one month, in October of 2000, I practiced for the assignment, and the very first frame, on October 1st, was of my mother, and it was taken at her birthplace. When I showed her the proof sheet from that month of practice, she saw a photo of a tree I'd made, which to me just showed off some fall color, but she said that it was a picture of how nature represents aging. Then she saw a picture of children at Halloween, and she talked about what that picture would mean to the children years from now and what it would mean to generations to come."

That practicing for a month was a good idea. "I made a couple of mistakes that I couldn't make on the project. One of the mistakes was on the third or fourth day of the month's practice. I was on the 50th floor of a high rise in Chicago taking photographs on a balcony, and a tiny bird landed on the balcony. I took pictures of the people there and then I realized I couldn't do that. I'd taken two frames of them, trying to make them feel good, using the camera devoted to the project. Making that mistake was good for me because I learned that if you're limited to one frame a day, you've got to have discipline."

That his assignments for the newspaper range from sports to spot news. "I cover everything," John says. "As in life: birth to death and all the things in between. And I like that. I don't want to be limited to doing just one thing."

That he's not without ambition. "When I'm out shooting and people ask me where the pictures are going to be, I say, ’I shoot for page one.' "

That he lives by three words: faith, focus, flight. "I'm faithful to my purpose, my mission, my assignment, my work, my dreams. I stay focused on what I'm doing and what's important. And I keep in flight—I spread my wings and do it."

And that when John says good-bye to you, his parting words are "Keep in flight."

In the Bag

For John's news photography the camera is the D1. For his projects away from the paper it's an F5, F100 or his treasured F4. And, of course, his constant companion and visual notebook is a Lite-Touch point and shoot.

"The lens I use every day is the 35-70mm Zoom-Nikkor," John says. His 70-210mm zoom, the 105mm and the 300mm also get a share of the work, but if he were to be limited to one lens it would be a 35mm—"it's the one most comfortable to my eye."

John H. White (born 1945 in Lexington, North Carolina) is an American photojournalist, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Contents 1 Early life 2 Photo career 3 Notes 4 External links Early life When John H. White was nine years old, a teacher told him that he would grow up to work on a garbage truck because he was slow in math. At home, his father told him to grow up to be his best, to look for the best in others, and if he were to work on a garbage truck, fine—just be sure he's the driver. White has said that this was a turning point in his life.[2] Photo career White's father also played a pivotal role in his photography. At age 14, White's church burned down and his father asked him to take photos of the destruction and reconstruction. White now credits this first assignment with his focus on photo stories. After working for the Chicago Daily News, White joined the staff of the Chicago Sun Times in 1978 and worked there until May 2013.[3] White also teaches photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago, and formerly taught at Northwestern University. In 1973 and 1974 White worked for the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project photographing Chicago and its African American community. White's photographs show the difficulties facing residents as well as their spirit and pride. Street scene on 47th Street White was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism in 1982 for his "consistently excellent work on a variety of subjects." He was selected as a photographer for the 1990 project Songs of My People.[4] White has also won three National Headliner Awards, was the first photographer inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, was awarded the Chicago Press Photographer Association's Photographer of the Year award five times, and, in 1999, received the Chicago Medal of Merit. Hal Buell, the former head of the Associated Press Photography Service, noted that White is one of the best photographers at capturing the everyday vignette.[5] White has published a book about Cardinal Bernardin, but he has yet to publish a book of his work outside the religious realm. White has said that he lives by three words: faith, focus, flight. "I'm faithful to my purpose, my mission, my assignment, my work, my dreams. I stay focused on what I'm doing and what's important. And I keep in flight—I spread my wings and do it."[6] The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography is one of the American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of feature photography in black and white or color, which may consist of a photograph or photographs, a sequence or an album. The Feature Photography prize was inaugurated in 1968 when the single Pulitzer Prize for Photography was replaced by the Feature prize and "Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography", renamed for "Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography" in 2000. Winners and citations One Feature Photography Pulitzer has been awarded annually from 1968 without exception.[1] 1968: Toshio Sakai, United Press International, "for his Vietnam War combat photograph, 'Dreams of Better Times'." 1969: Moneta Sleet Jr. of Ebony, "for his photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow and child, taken at Dr. King's funeral." 1970: Dallas Kinney, Palm Beach Post (Florida), "for his portfolio of pictures of Florida migrant workers, 'Migration to Misery'." 1971: Jack Dykinga, Chicago Sun-Times, "for his dramatic and sensitive photographs at the Lincoln and Dixon State Schools for the Retarded in Illinois." 1972: David Hume Kennerly, United Press International, "for his dramatic photographs of the Vietnam War in 1971." 1973: Brian Lanker, Topeka Capital-Journal, "for his sequence on child birth, as exemplified by his photograph, 'Moment of Life'." 1974: Slava Veder, Associated Press, "for his picture Burst of Joy, which illustrated the return of an American prisoner of war from captivity in North Vietnam." 1975: Matthew Lewis, Washington Post, "for his photographs in color and black and white." 1976: Photographic staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, "for a comprehensive pictorial report on busing in Louisville's schools." 1977: Robin Hood, Chattanooga News-Free Press, "for his photograph of a disabled veteran and his child at an Armed Forces Day parade." 1978: J. Ross Baughman, Associated Press, "for three photographs from guerrilla areas in Rhodesia." 1979: Staff photographers of the Boston Herald American, "for photographic coverage of the blizzard of 1978." 1980: Erwin H. Hagler, Dallas Times Herald, "for a series on the Western cowboy." 1981: Taro Yamasaki, Detroit Free Press, "for his photographs of Jackson State Prison, Michigan." 1982: John H. White, Chicago Sun-Times, "for consistently excellent work on a variety of subjects." 1983: James B. Dickman, Dallas Times Herald, "for his telling photographs of life and death in El Salvador." 1984: Anthony Suau, The Denver Post, "for a series of photographs which depict the tragic effects of starvation in Ethiopia and for a single photograph of a woman at her husband's gravesite on Memorial Day." 1985: Stan Grossfeld, Boston Globe, "for his series of photographs of the famine in Ethiopia and for his pictures of illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexico border." 1986: Tom Gralish, The Philadelphia Inquirer, "for his series of photographs of Philadelphia's homeless." 1987: David C. Peterson, Des Moines Register, "for his photographs depicting the shattered dreams of American farmers." 1988: Michel du Cille, Miami Herald, "for photographs portraying the decay and subsequent rehabilitation of a housing project overrun by the drug crack." 1989: Manny Crisostomo, Detroit Free Press, "for his series of photographs depicting student life at Southwestern High School in Detroit." 1990: David C. Turnley, Detroit Free Press, "for photographs of the political uprisings in China and Eastern Europe." 1991: William Snyder, The Dallas Morning News, "for his photographs of ill and orphaned children living in subhuman conditions in Romania." 1992: John Kaplan, Block Newspapers, Toledo, Ohio, "for his photographs depicting the diverse lifestyles of seven 21-year-olds across the United States." 1993: Staff of Associated Press, "for its portfolio of images drawn from the 1992 presidential campaign." 1994: Kevin Carter, a free-lance photographer, "for a picture first published in The New York Times of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center while a vulture waited nearby." 1995: Staff of Associated Press, "for its portfolio of photographs chronicling the horror and devastation in Rwanda."[2] 1996: Stephanie Welsh, "a free-lancer, for her shocking sequence of photos, published by Newhouse News Service, of a female genital cutting rite in Kenya."[3] 1997: Alexander Zemlianichenko, Associated Press, "for his photograph of Russian President Boris Yeltsin dancing at a rock concert during his campaign for re-election. This was originally nominated in the Spot News Photography section, but was moved by the board to Feature Photography."[4] 1998: Clarence Williams, Los Angeles Times, "for his powerful images documenting the plight of young children with parents addicted to alcohol and drugs."[5] 1999: Staff of Associated Press, "for its striking collection of photographs of the key players and events stemming from President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the ensuing impeachment hearings."[6] 2000: Carol Guzy, Michael Williamson and Lucian Perkins, Washington Post, "for their intimate and poignant images depicting the plight of the Kosovo refugees."[7] 2001: Matt Rainey, Star-Ledger (New Jersey), "for his emotional photographs that illustrate the care and recovery of two students critically burned in a dormitory fire at Seton Hall University."[8] 2002: The New York Times staff, "for its photographs chronicling the pain and the perseverance of people enduring protracted conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan."[9] 2003: Don Bartletti, Los Angeles Times, "for his memorable portrayal of how undocumented Central American youths, often facing deadly danger, travel north to the United States."[10] 2004: Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, "for her cohesive, behind-the-scenes look at the effects of civil war in Liberia, with special attention to innocent citizens caught in the conflict."[11] 2005: Deanne Fitzmaurice, San Francisco Chronicle, "for her sensitive photo essay on an Oakland hospital's effort to mend an Iraqi boy nearly killed by an explosion."[12] 2006: Todd Heisler of Rocky Mountain News, "for his haunting, behind-the-scenes look at funerals for Colorado Marines who return from Iraq in caskets."[13] 2007: Renée C. Byer of The Sacramento Bee, "for her intimate portrayal of a single mother and her young son as he loses his battle with cancer."[14] 2008: Preston Gannaway of the Concord Monitor, "for her intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness."[15] 2009: Damon Winter of The New York Times, "for his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign."[16] 2010: Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post, "for his intimate portrait of a teenager who joins the Army at the height of insurgent violence in Iraq, poignantly searching for meaning and manhood."[17] 2011: Barbara Davidson of Los Angeles Times, "For her intimate story of innocent victims trapped in the city’s crossfire of deadly gang violence."[18][19][20] 2012: Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post "for his compassionate chronicle of an honorably discharged veteran, home from Iraq and struggling with a severe case of post-traumatic stress, images that enable viewers to better grasp a national issue".[21][22][23] 2013: Javier Manzano "for his extraordinary picture, distributed by Agence France-Presse, of two Syrian rebel soldiers tensely guarding their position as beams of light stream through bullet holes in a nearby metal wall".[24] 2014: Josh Haner of The New York Times, "for his stirring portraits of the painful rehabilitation of a man badly injured in the Boston Marathon bombings".[25][26] 2015: Daniel Berehulak, freelance photographer, The New York Times "for his gripping, courageous photographs of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa."[27][28][29] 2016: Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe "for the raw and revealing photographic story of a boy who strives to find his footing after abuse by those he trusted."[30] 2017: E. Jason Wambsgans of Chicago Tribune "for a superb portrayal of a 10-year-old boy and his mother striving to put the boy’s life back together after he survived a shooting in Chicago."[31][32][33] 2018: Danish Siddiqui of Reuters "for shocking photographs that exposed the world to the violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar."[34][35] 2019: Lorenzo Tugnoli of The Washington Post "for brilliant photo storytelling of the tragic famine in Yemen, shown through images in which beauty and composure are intertwined with devastation. (Moved by the jury from Breaking News Photography, where it was originally entered.)"[36] 2020: Associated Press photographers Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand "for striking images captured during a communications blackout in Kashmir depicting life in the contested territory as India stripped it of its semi-autonomy."[37] The Pulitzer Prize (/ˈpʊlɪtsər/[1]) is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher and is administered by Columbia University.[2] Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US$15,000 cash award (raised from $10,000 in 2017).[3] The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.[4][5] Contents 1 Entry and prize consideration 1.1 Difference between entrants and nominated finalists 2 History 3 Recipients 4 Categories 4.1 Changes to categories 5 Board 6 Controversies 7 Criticism and studies 8 See also 9 References 9.1 Citations 9.2 General sources 10 External links Entry and prize consideration The Pulitzer Prize does not automatically consider all applicable works in the media, but only those that have specifically been entered. (There is a $75 entry fee, for each desired entry category.) Entries must fit in at least one of the specific prize categories, and cannot simply gain entrance for being literary or musical. Works can also be entered only in a maximum of two categories, regardless of their properties.[6] Each year, 102 jurors are selected by the Pulitzer Prize Board to serve on 20 separate juries for the 21 award categories; one jury makes recommendations for both photography awards. Most juries consist of five members, except for those for Public Service, Investigative Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, Feature Writing and Commentary categories, which have seven members; however, all book juries have at least three members.[2] For each award category, a jury makes three nominations. The board selects the winner by majority vote from the nominations or bypasses the nominations and selects a different entry following a 75 percent majority vote. The board can also vote to issue no award. The board and journalism jurors are not paid for their work; however, the jurors in letters, music, and drama receive a $2,000 honorarium for the year, and each chair receives $2,500.[2] Difference between entrants and nominated finalists Anyone whose work has been submitted is called an entrant. The jury selects a group of nominated finalists and announces them, together with the winner for each category. However, some journalists and authors who were only submitted, but not nominated as finalists, still claim to be Pulitzer nominees in promotional material. The Pulitzer board has cautioned entrants against claiming to be nominees. The Pulitzer Prize website's Frequently Asked Questions section describes their policy as follows: "Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided. Since 1980, when we began to announce nominated finalists, we have used the term 'nominee' for entrants who became finalists. We discourage someone saying he or she was 'nominated' for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us."[7] Bill Dedman of NBC News, the recipient of the 1989 investigative reporting prize, pointed out in 2012 that financial journalist Betty Liu was described as "Pulitzer Prize–Nominated" in her Bloomberg Television advertising and the jacket of her book, while National Review writer Jonah Goldberg made similar claims of "Pulitzer nomination" to promote his books. Dedman wrote, "To call that submission a Pulitzer 'nomination' is like saying that Adam Sandler is an Oscar nominee if Columbia Pictures enters That's My Boy in the Academy Awards. Many readers realize that the Oscars don't work that way—the studios don't pick the nominees. It's just a way of slipping 'Academy Awards' into a bio. The Pulitzers also don't work that way, but fewer people know that."[8] Nominally, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service is awarded only to news organizations, not individuals. In rare instances, contributors to the entry are singled out in the citation in a manner analogous to individual winners.[9][10] Journalism awards may be awarded to individuals or newspapers or newspaper staffs; infrequently, staff Prize citations also distinguish the work of prominent contributors.[11] History The Pulitzer Prize certificate of Mihajlo Pupin, which used a recycled Columbia diploma Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer gave money in his will to Columbia University to launch a journalism school and establish the Pulitzer Prize. It allocated $250,000 to the prize and scholarships.[12] He specified "four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one in education, and four traveling scholarships."[2] After his death on October 29, 1911, the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded June 4, 1917 (they are now announced in April). The Chicago Tribune under the control of Colonel Robert R. McCormick felt that the Pulitzer Prize was nothing more than a 'mutual admiration society' and not to be taken seriously; the paper refused to compete for the prize during McCormick's tenure up until 1961.[13][14] Until 1975, the prizes were overseen by the trustees of Columbia University. Recipients Main category: Pulitzer Prize winners Main article: List of multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Categories Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prizes (medal).png Joseph Pulitzer Columbia UniversityPulitzers by yearWinners Journalism Reporting Breaking NewsInvestigativeExplanatoryLocalNationalInternationalAudio Writing FeatureEditorial Photography Breaking NewsFeature Other CommentaryCriticismEditorial CartooningPublic Service Former Beat ReportingCorrespondencePhotographyReporting LettersDramaMusic Biography / AutobiographyFictionGeneral NonfictionHistoryPoetryDramaMusic Special Citations and Awards vte Awards are made in categories relating to journalism, arts, letters and fiction. Reports and photographs by United States–based newspapers, magazines and news organizations (including news websites) that "[publish] regularly"[15] are eligible for the journalism prize. Beginning in 2007, "an assortment of online elements will be permitted in all journalism categories except for the competition's two photography categories, which will continue to restrict entries to still images."[16] In December 2008, it was announced that for the first time content published in online-only news sources would be considered.[17] Although certain winners with magazine affiliations (most notably Moneta Sleet, Jr.) were allowed to enter the competition due to eligible partnerships or concurrent publication of their work in newspapers, the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board and the Pulitzer Prize Board historically resisted the admission of magazines into the competition, resulting in the formation of the National Magazine Awards at the Columbia Journalism School in 1966. In 2015, magazines were allowed to enter for the first time in two categories (Investigative Reporting and Feature Writing). By 2016, this provision had expanded to three additional categories (International Reporting, Criticism and Editorial Cartooning).[18] That year, Kathryn Schulz (Feature Writing) and Emily Nussbaum (Criticism) of The New Yorker became the first magazine affiliates to receive the prize under the expanded eligibility criterion.[19] In October 2016, magazine eligibility was extended to all journalism categories.[20] Hitherto confined to the local reporting of breaking news, the Breaking News Reporting category was expanded to encompass all domestic breaking news events in 2017.[21] Definitions of Pulitzer Prize categories as presented in the December 2017 Plan of Award:[22] Public Service – for a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper, magazine or news site through the use of its journalistic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual material. Often thought of as the grand prize, and mentioned first in listings of the journalism prizes, the Public Service award is only given to the winning news organization. Alone among the Pulitzer Prizes, it is awarded in the form of a gold medal. Breaking News Reporting – for a distinguished example of local, state or national reporting of breaking news that, as quickly as possible, captures events accurately as they occur, and, as time passes, illuminates, provides context and expands upon the initial coverage. Investigative Reporting – for a distinguished example of investigative reporting, using any available journalistic tool. Explanatory Reporting – for a distinguished example of explanatory reporting that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear presentation, using any available journalistic tool. Local Reporting – for a distinguished example of reporting on significant issues of local concern, demonstrating originality and community expertise, using any available journalistic tool.[16] National Reporting – for a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, using any available journalistic tool. International Reporting – for a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, using any available journalistic tool. Feature Writing – for distinguished feature writing giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision, using any available journalistic tool. Commentary – for distinguished commentary, using any available journalistic tool. Criticism – for distinguished criticism, using any available journalistic tool. Editorial Writing – for distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction, using any available journalistic tool. Editorial Cartooning – for a distinguished cartoon or portfolio of cartoons, characterized by originality, editorial effectiveness, quality of drawing and pictorial effect, published as a still drawing, animation or both. Breaking News Photography, previously called Spot News Photography – for a distinguished example of breaking news photography in black and white or color, which may consist of a photograph or photographs. Feature Photography – for a distinguished example of feature photography in black and white or color, which may consist of a photograph or photographs. There are six categories in letters and drama: Fiction – for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. Drama – for a distinguished play by an American playwright, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life. History – for a distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States. Biography or Autobiography – for a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author. Poetry – for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American poet. General Non-Fiction – for a distinguished and appropriately documented book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category. In 2020, the Audio Reporting category was added. The first prize in this category was awarded to "The Out Crowd", an episode of the public radio program This American Life. In the second year, the Pulitzer was awarded for the NPR podcast No Compromise.[citation needed] There is one prize given for music: Pulitzer Prize for Music – for distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year. There have been dozens of Special Citations and Awards: more than ten each in Arts, Journalism, and Letters, and five for Pulitzer Prize service, most recently to Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. in 1987. In addition to the prizes, Pulitzer Travelling Fellowships are awarded to four outstanding students of the Graduate School of Journalism as selected by the faculty. Changes to categories Over the years, awards have been discontinued either because the field of the award has been expanded to encompass other areas; the award has been renamed because the common terminology changed; or the award has become obsolete, such as the prizes for telegraphic reporting. An example of a writing field that has been expanded was the former Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (awarded 1918–1947), which has been changed to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which also includes short stories, novellas, novelettes, and poetry, as well as novels. The Chicago Sun-Times is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the Chicago Tribune. The modern paper grew out of the 1948 merger of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Daily Times. Journalists at the paper have received eight Pulitzer prizes, mostly in the 1970s; one recipient was film critic Roger Ebert (1975), who worked at the paper from 1967 until his death in 2013. Ownership of the paper has changed hands numerous times, including twice in the late 2010s. Contents 1 History 1.1 The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s 1.2 The 1970s 1.3 The 1980s 1.4 The 1990s 1.5 The 2000s 1.6 The 2010s 1.7 The 2020s 2 Awards and notable stories 3 Staff 4 Early Edition 5 Gallery 5.1 Logos 6 References 7 External links History The Chicago Sun-Times claims to be the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city. That claim is based on the 1844 founding of the Chicago Daily Journal,[4] which was also the first newspaper to publish the rumor, now believed false, that a cow owned by Catherine O'Leary was responsible for the Chicago fire.[5] The Evening Journal, whose West Side building at 17–19 S. Canal was undamaged, gave the Chicago Tribune a temporary home until it could rebuild.[6] Though the assets of the Journal were sold to the Chicago Daily News in 1929, its last owner Samuel Emory Thomason also immediately launched the tabloid Chicago Daily Illustrated Times.[4] The modern paper grew out of the 1948 merger of the Chicago Sun, founded by Marshall Field III on December 4, 1941, and the Chicago Daily Times (which had dropped the "Illustrated" from its title). The newspaper was owned by Field Enterprises, controlled by the Marshall Field family, which acquired the afternoon Chicago Daily News in 1959 and launched WFLD television in 1966. When the Daily News ended its run in 1978, much of its staff, including Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mike Royko, were moved to the Sun-Times. During the Field period, the newspaper had a populist, progressive character that leaned Democratic but was independent of the city's Democratic establishment. Although the graphic style was urban tabloid, the paper was well regarded for journalistic quality and did not rely on sensational front-page stories. It typically ran articles from The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times wire service. The 1940s, 1950s and 1960s This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Among the most prominent members of the newspaper's staff was cartoonist Jacob Burck, who was hired by the Chicago Times in 1938, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 and continued with the paper after it became the Sun-Times, drawing nearly 10,000 cartoons over a 44-year career. The advice column "Ask Ann Landers" debuted in 1943. Ann Landers was the pseudonym of staff writer Ruth Crowley, who answered readers' letters until 1955. Eppie Lederer, sister of "Dear Abby" columnist Abigail van Buren, assumed the role thereafter as Ann Landers. "Kup's Column", written by Irv Kupcinet, also made its first appearance in 1943. Jack Olsen joined the Sun-Times as editor-in-chief in 1954, before moving on to Time and Sports Illustrated magazines and authoring true-crime books. Hired as literary editor in 1955 was Hoke Norris, who also covered the civil-rights movement for the Sun-Times. Jerome Holtzman became a member of the Chicago Sun sports department after first being a copy boy for the Daily News in the 1940s. He and Edgar Munzel, another longtime sportswriter for the paper, both would end up honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Famed for his World War II exploits, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin made the Sun-Times his home base in 1962. The following year, Mauldin drew one of his most renowned illustrations, depicting a mourning statue of Abraham Lincoln after the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Two years out of college, Roger Ebert became a staff writer in 1966, and a year later was named Sun-Times's film critic. He continued in this role for the remainder of his life. The 1970s In 1975, a new sports editor at the Sun-Times, Lewis Grizzard, spiked some columns written by sportswriter Lacy J. Banks and took away a column Banks had been writing, prompting Banks to tell a friend at the Chicago Defender that Grizzard was a racist.[7] After the friend wrote a story about it, Grizzard fired Banks. With that, the editorial employees union intervened, a federal arbitrator ruled for Banks, and 13 months later he got his job back.[7] A 25-part series on the Mirage Tavern, a saloon on Wells Street bought and operated by the Sun-Times in 1977, exposed a pattern of civic corruption and bribery, as city officials were investigated and photographed without their knowledge. The articles received considerable publicity and acclaim, but a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize met resistance from some who believed the Mirage series represented a form of entrapment.[citation needed] In March 1978, the venerable afternoon publication the Chicago Daily News, sister paper of the Sun-Times, went out of business. The two newspapers shared the same ownership and office building. James F. Hoge, Jr., editor and publisher of the Daily News, assumed the same positions at the Sun-Times, which also retained a number of the Daily News's editorial personnel.[citation needed] The 1980s In 1980, the Sun-Times hired syndicated TV columnist Gary Deeb away from the rival Chicago Tribune.[8] Deeb then left the Sun-Times in the spring of 1983 to try his hand at TV. He joined Chicago's WLS-TV in September 1983.[9] In July 1981, prominent Sun-Times investigative reporter Pam Zekman, who had been part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team with the Chicago Tribune in 1976, announced she was leaving the Sun-Times to join WBBM-TV in Chicago in August 1981 as chief of its new investigative unit. "Salary wasn't a factor," she told the Tribune. "The station showed a commitment to investigative journalism. It was something I wanted to try."[10] Pete Souza left the Sun-Times in 1983 to become official White House photographer for President Ronald Reagan until his second term's end in 1989. Souza returned to that position to be the official photographer for President Barack Obama.[11][12] Baseball writer Jerome Holtzman defected from the Sun-Times to the Tribune in late 1981, while Mike Downey also left Sun-Times sports in September 1981 to be a columnist at the Detroit Free Press.[citation needed] In January 1984, noted Sun-Times business reporter James Warren quit to join the rival Chicago Tribune. He became the Tribune's Washington bureau chief and later its managing editor for features.[citation needed] In 1984, Field Enterprises co-owners, half-brothers Marshall Field V and Ted Field, sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and the paper's style changed abruptly to mirror that of its suitemate, the New York Post. Its front pages tended more to the sensational, while its political stance shifted markedly to the right. This was in the era that the Chicago Tribune had begun softening its traditionally staunchly Republican editorial line, blurring the city's clear division between the two newspapers' politics. This shift was made all but official when Mike Royko defected to the Tribune.[13] Roger Ebert later reflected on the incident with disdain, stating in his blog,[14] On the first day of Murdoch's ownership, he walked into the newsroom and we all gathered around and he recited the usual blather and rolled up his shirtsleeves and started to lay out a new front page. Well, he was a real newspaperman, give him that. He threw out every meticulous detail of the beautiful design, ordered up big, garish headlines, and gave big play to a story about a North Shore rabbi accused of holding a sex slave. The story turned out to be fatally flawed, but so what? It sold papers. Well, actually, it didn't sell papers. There were hundreds of cancellations. Soon our precious page 3 was defaced by a daily Wingo girl, a pinup in a bikini promoting a cash giveaway. The Sun-Times, which had been placing above the Tribune in lists of the 10 best U.S. newspapers, never took that great step it was poised for. Murdoch sold the paper in 1986 (to buy its former sister television station WFLD to launch the Fox network) for $145 million in cash in a leveraged buyout to an investor group led by the paper's publisher, Robert E. Page, and the New York investment firm Adler & Shaykin.[15] In 1984, Roger Simon, who had been a Sun-Times columnist for a decade, quit to join The Baltimore Sun, where he worked until 1995.[16][17] Simon quit the paper because of Murdoch's purchase of it.[17][18] Beginning in October 1984, Simon's columns from Baltimore began appearing in the rival Chicago Tribune.[19] In December 1986, the Sun-Times hired high-profile gossip columnist Michael Sneed away from the rival Chicago Tribune, where she had been co-authoring the Tribune's own "Inc." gossip column with Kathy O'Malley. On December 3, 1986, O'Malley led off the Tribune's "Inc." column with the heading "The Last to Know Dept." and writing, "Dontcha just hate it when you write a gossip column and people think you know all the news about what's going on and your partner gets a new job and your column still has her name on it on the very same day that her new employer announces that she's going to work for him? Yeah, INC. just hates it when that happens."[20] In February 1987, the popular syndicated advice column "Ask Ann Landers" (commonly known as the "Ann Landers" column and written at that point by Eppie Lederer) left the Sun-Times after 31 years to jump to the rival Chicago Tribune, effective March 15, 1987.[21] The move sparked a nationwide hunt for a new advice columnist for the Sun-Times. After more than 12,000 responses from people aged 4 to 85, the paper ultimately hired two: Jeffrey Zaslow, then a 28-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter, and Diane Crowley, a 47-year-old lawyer, teacher and daughter of Ruth Crowley, who had been the original Ann Landers columnist from 1943 until 1955.[22] Crowley left to return to the practice of law in 1993 and the paper decided not to renew Zaslow's contract in 2001.[23] By the summer of 1988, Page and Adler & Shaykin managing partner Leonard P. Shaykin had developed a conflict, and in August 1988, Page resigned as publisher and president and sold his interest in the paper to his fellow investors.[24] The 1990s In mid-1991, veteran crime reporter Art Petacque, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, left the paper. Almost ten years later, Dennis Britton, who had been the paper's editor at the time of Petacque's retirement, told the Chicago Reader that Petacque's departure, which was described at the time as a retirement, was involuntary. "I had problems with some of the ways Art pursued his job," Britton told the Reader.[25] In September 1992, Bill Zwecker joined the Sun-Times as a gossip columnist from the troubled Lerner Newspapers suburban weekly newspaper chain, where he had written the "VIPeople" column.[26] In September 1992, Sun-Times sports clerk Peter Anding was arrested in the Sun-Times' newsroom and held without bond after confessing to using his position to set up sexual encounters for male high school athletes.[27] Anding was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and possession of child pornography. In September 1993, Anding pleaded guilty to arranging and videotaping sexual encounters with several teenage boys and fondling others. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.[28] In 1993, the Sun-Times fired photographer Bob Black without severance for dozens of unauthorized uses of the company's Federal Express account and outside photo lab, going back more than three years and costing the company more than $1,400.[29] In February 1994, however, Black rejoined the paper's payroll after an arbitrator agreed with the paper's union that dismissal was too severe a penalty.[30] At the same time, the arbitrator declined to award Black back pay.[citation needed] In 1993, longtime Sun-Times reporter Larry Weintraub retired after 35 years at the paper.[31] Weintraub had been best known for his "Weintraub's World" column, in which he worked a job and wrote about the experience.[31] Weintraub died in 2001 at age 69.[31] In February 1994, the Adler & Shaykin investor group sold the Sun-Times to Hollinger Inc. for about $180 million.[32] Hollinger was controlled, indirectly, by Canadian-born businessman Conrad Black. After Black and his associate David Radler were indicted for skimming money from Hollinger International, through retaining noncompete payments from the sale of Hollinger newspapers, they were removed from the board, and Hollinger International was renamed the Sun-Times Media Group.[citation needed] In 1994, noted reporter M.W. Newman retired from the Sun-Times around the age of 77.[33] Newman, who died of lung cancer in 2001, had been with the Sun-Times since the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978 and had focused his efforts on urban reporting.[33] Among other things, Newman had been known for coining the term "Big John" to describe the John Hancock Center and the expression "Fortress Illini" for the concrete structures and plazas at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[33] On March 23, 1995, the Sun-Times announced that beginning April 2, 1995, veteran Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander would join the paper and write four columns a week.[34][35] On March 24, 1995, the Sun-Times published an editorial by Mark Hornung, then the Sun-Times' editorial page editor, that plagiarized a Washington Post editorial that had appeared in that paper the day before.[36] Hornung attributed the plagiarism to writer's block, deadline pressures and the demands of other duties.[37] He resigned as editorial page editor, but remained with the paper, shifting to its business side and working first as director of distribution and then as vice president of circulation.[38] In 2002, Hornung became president and publisher of Midwest Suburban Publishing, which was a company owned by then-Sun Times parent company Hollinger International.[39] In June 2004, Hollinger International placed Hornung on administrative leave just two weeks after Hollinger revealed that the paper's sales figures had been inflated for several years.[40] Hornung resigned from the company four days later.[41] On May 17, 1995, the Sun-Times' food section published a bogus letter from a reader[42] named "Olga Fokyercelf" that Chicago Tribune columnist (and former Sun-Times columnist) Mike Royko called "an imaginative prank" in a column.[43] In that same column, Royko criticized the paper's food writer, who edited the readers' column at the time, Olivia Wu, for not following better quality control. The Wall Street Journal then criticized Royko with an article of its own, titled, "Has a Curmudgeon Turned Into a Bully? Some Now Think So...Picking on a Food Writer."[44] Although the Sun-Times began hiring a freelancer to edit the space and look for double entendres,[45] another one made it into the same column on July 26, 1995, when the section published a letter from a "Phil McCraken."[46] "This one was a little more subtle," a reporter outside the food department told the Chicago Reader.[45] Chuck Neubauer in the former Chicago Sun-Times newsroom, 1998 In 1998, the Sun-Times demoted longtime TV critic Lon Grahnke, shifting him to covering education.[47] Grahnke, who died in 2006 at age 56 of Alzheimer's disease, remained with the paper until 2001, when he retired following an extended medical leave.[48] The 2000s In 2000, the Sun-Times new editors, Michael Cooke and John Cruickshank, tapped longtime staff reporter Mark Brown, who had considered himself an investigative reporter, to write a column that would anchor page two of the paper.[49] In 2000, longtime investigative reporter Charles Nicodemus retired from the paper at age 69 and[50]died in 2008 at age 77.[51] In 2001, Sun-Times investigative reporter Chuck Neubauer quit the paper to join the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau.[52] Neubauer and Brown had initiated the investigation into U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski that uncovered a variety of misdeeds that ultimately had led to Rostenkowski's indictment, conviction and imprisonment.[53] In April 2001, Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey quit to join the administration of then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley as Daley's deputy mayoral chief of staff, responsible for downtown planning, rewriting the city's zoning code and affordable housing issues.[54] In April 2001, longtime Sun-Times horse-racing writer Dave Feldman died at age 85 while still on the payroll.[55][56] In 2002, with Kuczmarski & Associates, the Chicago Sun-Times co-founded the Chicago Innovation Awards.[citation needed] In May 2002, Sun-Times editors Joycelyn Winnecke and Bill Adee, who were then husband and wife, both quit on the same day to join the rival Chicago Tribune. Winnecke had been the Sun-Times managing editor, and she left for a new post, associate managing editor for national news, while Adee, who had been the Sun-Times sports editor for nine years, became the Tribune's sports editor/news.[57] In October 2003, famed Sun-Times gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet began including the name of his longtime assistant of nearly 34 years, Stella Foster, as the coauthor of his column. After Kupcinet died the following month at age 91, the Sun-Times kept Foster on and gave her the sole byline on the column, which became known as "Stella's Column." Foster retired from the newspaper in 2012.[citation needed] In 2004, the Sun-Times was censured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations for misrepresenting its circulation figures.[58] In February 2004, longtime Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal died at his home in Hinsdale, Illinois, at age 54, of an apparent suicide.[59][60][61] In August 2004, longtime Chicago broadcast journalist Carol Marin began writing regular columns in the Sun-Times, mostly on political issues.[62] In March 2005, the Chicago Tribune hired away television critic Phil Rosenthal to become its media columnist.[63] He eventually was replaced as TV critic by Doug Elfman.[citation needed] On September 28, 2005, Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member Neil Steinberg was arrested in his home in Northbrook, Illinois and charged with domestic battery and with interfering with the reporting of domestic battery.[64] With that, Steinberg, who had been at the Sun-Times since 1987, entered a treatment facility for alcohol abuse.[64] On November 23, 2005, Cook County prosecutors dropped the charges against Steinberg after his wife said she no longer feared for her safety.[65] On November 28, 2005, Steinberg returned to the Sun-Times' pages after going through a 28-day rehabilitation program at a nearby hospital, and he gave readers his version of the events that led to his arrest: "I got drunk and slapped my wife during an argument."[66] Steinberg also reported that he and his wife were "on the mend," and that he was working toward sobriety.[66] In the spring of 2006, a variety of longtime Sun-Times writers and columnists took buyouts, including sports columnist Ron Rapoport, sports reporter Joe Goddard, society and gardening columnist Mary Cameron Frey, book editor Henry Kisor, page designer Roy Moody and photographer Bob Black.[67] Classical music critic Wynne Delacoma also took a buyout, and left the paper later.[67] In August 2006, the Sun-Times fired longtime Chicago Cubs beat writer Mike Kiley.[68] Then-Sun-Times sports editor Stu Courtney told the Tribune that the dismissal of Kiley, who had joined the Sun-Times from the Tribune in 1996, was a "personnel matter I can't comment on." The Tribune's Teddy Greenstein called Kiley "a fierce competitor."[68] In February 2007, noted Sun-Times columnist Debra Pickett quit upon returning from maternity leave.[69] The reasons for her departure were differences with her editors over where her column appeared and the sorts of assignments being handed to her.[70] On July 10, 2007, newly appointed Editorial Page Editor Cheryl Reed announced: "We [the Chicago Sun-Times editorial page] are returning to our liberal, working-class roots, a position that pits us squarely opposite the Chicago Tribune—that Republican, George Bush—touting paper over on moneyed Michigan Avenue."[71] In January 2008, the Sun-Times underwent two rounds of layoffs. In its first round, the Sun-Times fired editorial board members Michael Gillis, Michelle Stevens and Lloyd Sachs, along with Sunday editor Marcia Frellick and assistant managing editor Avis Weathersbee.[72] On February 4, 2008, Editorial Page Editor Cheryl Reed resigned saying in a front-page Chicago Tribune story that she was "deeply troubled" that the paper's presidential primary endorsements of Barack Obama and John McCain were subjected to "wholesale rewrites" by editorial board outsiders.[73] Cyrus Freidheim Jr., in his role as Sun-Times publisher, issued a statement reassuring staff that the endorsements didn't change and that the rewrites only "deepened and strengthened the messages."[73] Later that month, the Sun-Times underwent more staff reductions, laying off columnist Esther Cepeda, religion reporter Susan Hogan/Albach, TV critic Doug Elfman, real estate editor Sally Duros,[74] and onetime editor Garry Steckles, while giving buyouts to assistant city editors Robert C. Herguth and Nancy Moffett, environmental reporter Jim Ritter, copy editors Chris Whitehead and Bob Mutter, editorial columnist Steve Huntley (who remained with the paper as a freelance columnist), and special Barack Obama correspondent Jennifer Hunter.[75] Also taking a buyout was longtime health and technology reporter Howard Wolinsky.[76] Two other staffers, business editor Dan Miller and deputy metro editor Phyllis Gilchrist, resigned.[75] Reporter Kara Spak initially was reported to have been laid off, but she wound up staying with the paper.[citation needed] In August 2008, high-profile sports columnist Jay Mariotti resigned from the Sun-Times after concluding that the future of sports journalism was online.[77][78][79] In October 2008, the Sun-Times gave buyouts to noted TV/radio writer Robert Feder (a blogger with Time Out Chicago and then an independent writer on Chicago media) and longtime auto writer Dan Jedlicka.[80] The paper also laid off two members of its editorial board: Teresa Puente and Deborah Douglas.[80] In November 2008, the Sun-Times dropped its "Quick Takes" column, which Sun-Times columnist Zay N. Smith had written since 1995.[81] Smith wrote the column from home, and the Sun-Times discontinued the column and informed Smith that it needed him back in the newsroom as a general assignment reporter.[81] The paper's union complained, noting that Smith had permanent physical disabilities that made it difficult for him to be mobile.[81] Smith later left the paper.[citation needed] In March 2009, sports columnist Greg Couch left the Sun-Times after 12 years to join AOL Sports.[82] On March 31, 2009, the newspaper filed for bankruptcy protection.[83] On October 9, 2009 the Sun Times unions agreed to concessions paving the way for Jim Tyree to buy the newspaper and its 50 suburban newspapers. Of the $25 million purchase price, $5 million was in cash, with the other $20 million to help pay off past debts.[84] In November 2009, Sun-Times sports editor Stu Courtney quit to join the rival Chicago Tribune's Chicago Breaking Sports website.[85] In December 2009, the Sun-Times hired sports columnist Rick Morrissey away from the rival Chicago Tribune.[86] The 2010s In April 2010, longtime Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis resigned from the paper to join the faculty of Columbia College Chicago and to begin blogging at Vocalo.org.[87] In June 2010, the Sun-Times laid off a group of editorial employees, including longtime sports media columnist Jim O'Donnell and features writer Delia O'Hara.[88] In October 2010, the Sun-Times laid off longtime sports columnist Carol Slezak, who by that point had shifted to feature reporting.[89] At the end of June 2010, longtime Sun-Times sportswriter Len Ziehm, who covered many sports but largely focused on golf, retired after 41 years at the paper.[90][91] Sun-Times Media group chairman James C. Tyree died under sudden circumstances in March 2011. Jeremy Halbreich, chief executive, said that Tyree's will be greatly missed and that his death will make no changes in the media company's strategy.[92] Also in March 2011, the Sun-Times laid off six editorial reporters and writers: high school sports reporter Steve Tucker, reporter Misha Davenport, general assignment reporter Cheryl Jackson, media and marketing columnist Lewis Lazare, feature writer Celeste Busk and sportswriter John Jackson.[93][94] In May 2011, the Sun-Times laid off real estate writer Bill Cunniff, features reporter Jeff Johnson and gaming writer John Grochowski, along with graphic designer Char Searl.[95] In June 2011, the Sun-Times fired longtime TV critic Paige Wiser after she admitted to fabricating portions of a review of a Glee Live! In Concert! performance.[96] She admitted to attending much of the concert but leaving early to tend to her children. The paper eventually tapped longtime travel writer Lori Rackl to replace Wiser as TV critic.[97] The Sun-Times announced in July 2011 that it would close its printing plant on Ashland Avenue in Chicago—eliminating 400 printing jobs—and would outsource the printing of the newspaper to the rival Chicago Tribune.[98] The move was estimated to save $10 million a year. The Sun-Times already had been distributed by the Tribune since 2007.[98] In August 2011, the Sun-Times laid off three more reporters and writers: sportswriter Mike Mulligan, "Quick Hits" sports columnist Elliott Harris and photographer Keith Hale.[99] In September 2011, the Sun-Times fired longtime restaurant reviewer (and freelancer) Pat Bruno.[100][101] In October 2011, the Sun-Times discontinued the longtime comic strip Drabble (syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Association), which the paper had run since the strip's inception in 1979. The comic strip was the victim of a reduced page size.[102] At the end of May 2013, the publication's photography department was dissolved as part of a restructuring that involves the use of freelance photographers and non-photographer journalists to provide visual content.[103] Under the terms of a settlement with the paper's union, the Sun-Times reinstated four of those photographers as multimedia journalists in March 2014: Rich Chapman, Brian Jackson, Al Podgorski and Michael Schmidt.[104] In March 2014, pop culture reporter Dave Hoekstra left the Sun-Times in a buyout after 29 years with the paper.[104] Concurrent with Hoekstra's departure, the company also laid off two Sun-Times editorial assistants, two editors at the SouthtownStar, a community editor at the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana and a weekend editor/designer at the company's west suburban newspaper group.[citation needed] In March 2016, Shia Kapos signed on to bring her Taking Names column to the Sun-Times. She had been writing the gossip column since 2007 for Crain's Business.[105] On July 13, 2017, it was reported that a consortium consisting of private investors and the Chicago Federation of Labor led by businessman and former Chicago alderman Edwin Eisendrath through his company ST Acquisition Holdings, had acquired the paper and its parent company, Sun-Times Media Group, from then-owner Wrapports, beating out Chicago-based publishing company Tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing Company) for ownership.[106][107] In March 2019, a new ownership group took over and took control of the Sun-Times from the previous union ownership. The group, Sun-Times Investment Holdings LLC, is backed by prominent Chicago investors Michael Sacks and Rocky Wirtz.[1] The 2020s In September 2021, the Sun-Times and Chicago Public Media, owners of the city's NPR affiliate WBEZ, announced that they had signed a non-binding agreement to allow Chicago Public Media to acquire the paper.[108] Awards and notable stories Journalists at the Sun-Times have won eight Pulitzer Prizes. 1970: Tom Fitzpatrick, General Reporting[109] 1971: Jack Dykinga, Feature Photography[110] 1973: Ron Powers, Criticism[111] 1974: Art Petacque, Hugh Hough, General Reporting[112] 1975: Roger Ebert, Criticism[113] 1982: John H. White, Feature Photography[114] 1989: Jack Higgins, Editorial Cartooning[115] 2011: Frank Main, Mark Konkol and John J. Kim, Local Reporting[116] Doug Moench was nominated for a Chicago Newspaper Guild Award in 1972 for his stream-of-consciousness story on violence in the Chicago subway system. In 1978, the newspaper conducted the Mirage Tavern investigation, in which undercover reporters operated a bar and caught city officials taking bribes on camera.[117] In January 2004, after a six-month investigation written by Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir, the paper broke the story of the Hired Truck Program scandal. After a Sun-Times article by Michael Sneed erroneously identified the perpetrator of the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre as an unnamed Chinese national, the People's Republic of China criticized the Chicago Sun-Times for publishing what it called "irresponsible reports."[118] The newspaper later silently withdrew the story without making any apologies or excuses.[citation needed] Staff The Sun-Times' best-known writer was film critic Roger Ebert, who died in April, 2013.[119] Chicago columnist Mike Royko, previously of the defunct Chicago Daily News, came to the paper in 1978 but left for the Chicago Tribune in 1984 when the Sun-Times was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Irv Kupcinet's daily column was a fixture from 1943 until his death in 2003. It was also the home base of famed cartoonist Bill Mauldin from 1962–91, as well as advice columnist Ann Landers and the Washington veteran Robert Novak for many years. Lisa Myers, the Senior Investigative Correspondent for NBC News, was the publication's Washington correspondent from 1977 to 1979.[120] Author Charles Dickinson worked as a copy editor for the publication from 1983-1989.[citation needed] The newspaper gave a start in journalism to columnist Bob Greene, while other notable writers such as Mary Mitchell, Richard Roeper, Gary Houston, Michael Sneed, Mark Brown, Neil Steinberg, sportswriters Rick Telander and Rick Morrissey, theater critic Hedy Weiss, Carol Marin, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Frank Main and Mark Konkol, and technology expert Andy Ihnatko have written for the Sun-Times. As of October 2013, Lynn Sweet is the Washington Bureau Chief and Pulitzer Prize-winner Jack Higgins is the publication's editorial cartoonist.[121][122][123] John Cruickshank became the publisher in 2003 after David Radler, and on September 19, 2007, announced he was resigning to head the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news division.[124][125] On May 30, 2013, the Sun-Times laid off the vast majority of its photography staff as part of a change in its structure, opting instead to use photos and video shot by reporters, as well as content from freelancers, instead. Two staff photographers remained after the restructure: Rich Hein was named Photo Editor and Jessica Koscielniak, who was hired in January 2013, became the newspapers' only multimedia reporter.[citation needed] Among those photographers who were laid off was Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John White.[126] In an official statement, the newspaper explained: "The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and are focused on bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements."[103] Early Edition The paper was featured in the CBS show Early Edition, where the lead character mysteriously receives each Chicago Sun-Times newspaper the day before it is actually published.[citation needed] Gallery Former Chicago Sun-Times headquarters, located in the River North Point building at 350 North Orleans Street   Former Chicago Sun-Times headquarters, demolished in 2004 to make way for the Trump Tower   Former Chicago Sun-Times headquarters with Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower   Former Sun Times and Daily News headquarters   Viewed from Michigan Avenue Bridge with 330 North Wabash Logos 2003   2007   2011   2015   2016–2018   2019 The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper in the midwestern United States, published between 1875 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.[1] Contents 1 History 1.1 Independent newspaper 1.2 Knight Newspapers and Field Enterprises 2 Pulitzer Prizes 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links History Daily News Building The Daily News was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty in 1875 and began publishing on December 23. Byron Andrews, fresh out of Hobart College, was one of the first reporters. The paper aimed for a mass readership in contrast to its primary competitor, the Chicago Tribune, which appealed to the city's elites. The Daily News was Chicago's first penny paper, and the city's most widely read newspaper in the late nineteenth century.[2] Victor Lawson bought the Chicago Daily News in 1876 and became its business manager. Stone remained involved as an editor and later bought back an ownership stake, but Lawson took over full ownership again in 1888.[3] Independent newspaper During his long tenure at the Daily News, Victor Lawson pioneered many areas of reporting, opening one of the first foreign bureaus among U.S. newspapers in 1898. In 1912, the Daily News became one of a cooperative of four newspapers, including the New York Globe, The Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Bulletin, to form the Associated Newspapers syndicate. In 1922, Lawson started one of the first columns devoted to radio. He also introduced many innovations to business operations including advances in newspaper promotion, classified advertising, and syndication of news stories, serials, and comics.[4] Editor A. B. Blair 1915 Victor Lawson died in August 1925, leaving no instructions in his will regarding the disposition of the Daily News. Walter A. Strong, who was Lawson's business manager, spent the rest of the year raising the capital he needed to buy the Daily News. The Chicago Daily News Corporation, of which Strong was the major stockholder, bought the newspaper for $13.5 million – the highest price paid for a newspaper up to that time.[5] Strong was the president and publisher of the Chicago Daily News Corporation from December 1925 until his death in May 1931. As Lawson's business manager, Strong partnered with the Fair Department Store to create a new radio station. Strong asked Judith C. Waller to run the new station. When Waller protested that she didn't know anything about running a station. Strong replied "neither do I, but come down and we'll find out."[6] Waller was hired in February 1922 and went on to have a long and distinguished career in broadcasting. What would become WMAQ had its inaugural broadcast April 12, 1922. That same year, the rival Chicago Tribune began to experiment with radio news at Westinghouse-owned KYW. In 1924 the Tribune briefly took over station WJAZ, changing its call letters to WGN, then purchased station WDAP outright and permanently transferred the WGN call letters to this second station.[7] The Daily News would eventually take full ownership of the station and absorb shared band rival WQJ, which was jointly owned by the Calumet Baking Powder Company and the Rainbo Gardens ballroom.[8][9] WMAQ would pioneer many firsts in radio—one of them the first complete Chicago Cubs season broadcast on radio in 1925, hosted by sportswriter-turned-sportscaster Hal Totten.[10] In April 1930, WMAQ was organized as a subsidiary corporation with Walter Strong as its chairman of the board, and Judith Waller as vice president and station manager.[11] On August 2, 1929, it was announced that the Chicago Daily Journal was consolidating with the Daily News, and the Journal published its final issue on August 21.[12] By the late 1920s, it was apparent to Walter Strong that his newspaper and broadcast operations needed more space. He acquired the air rights over the railroad tracks that ran along the west side of the Chicago River. He commissioned architects Holabird & Root to design a modern building over the tracks that would have newspaper production facilities and radio studios. The 26-floor Chicago Daily News Building opened in 1929. It featured a large plaza with a fountain dedicated to Strong's mentor, Victor Lawson, and a mural by John W. Norton depicting the newspaper production process.[13] The Art Deco structure became a Chicago landmark, and stands today under the name Riverside Plaza. In 1930, the radio station obtained a license for an experimental television station, W9XAP, but had already begun transmitting from it just prior to its being granted.[14][15] Working with Sears Roebuck stores by providing them with the receivers, those present at the stores were able to see Bill Hay, (the announcer for Amos 'n' Andy), present a variety show from the Daily News Building, on August 27, 1930.[16][17] Ulises Armand Sanabria was the television pioneer behind this and other early Chicago television experiments. In 1931 The Daily News sold WMAQ to NBC.[18] In its heyday as an independent newspaper from the 1930s to 1950s the Daily News was widely syndicated and boasted a first-class foreign news service.[19] It became known for its distinctive, aggressive writing style which 1920s editor Henry Justin Smith likened to a daily novel. This style became the hallmark of the newspaper: "For generations", as Wayne Klatt puts it in Chicago Journalism: A History, "newspeople had been encouraged to write on the order of Charles Dickens, but the Daily News was instructing its staff to present facts in cogent short paragraphs, which forced rivals to do the same."[20] In the 1950s, city editor Clement Quirk Lane (whose son John would become Walter Cronkite's executive producer) issued a memo to the staff that has become something of a memorial of the paper's house style, a copy of which can be found on Lane's entry. Knight Newspapers and Field Enterprises Sun-Times and Daily News headquarters After a long period of ownership by Knight Newspapers (later Knight Ridder), the paper was acquired in 1959 by Field Enterprises, owned by heirs of the former owner of the Marshall Field and Company department store chain. Field already owned the morning Chicago Sun-Times, and the Daily News moved into the Sun-Times' building on North Wabash Avenue. A few years later Mike Royko became the paper's lead columnist, and quickly rose to local and national prominence. However, the Field years were mostly a period of decline for the newspaper, partly due to management decisions but also due to demographic changes; the circulation of afternoon dailies generally declined with the rise of television, and downtown newspapers suffered as readers moved to the suburbs. In 1977 the Daily News was redesigned and added features intended to increase its appeal to younger readers, but the changes did not reverse the paper's continuing decline in circulation. The Chicago Daily News published its last edition on Saturday, March 4, 1978.[1] As reported in The Wall Street Journal, later in 1978, Lloyd H Weston, president, editor and publisher of Addison Leader Newspapers, Inc., a group of weekly tabloids in the west and northwest suburbs—obtained rights to the Chicago Daily News trademark. Under a new corporation, CDN Publishing Co., Inc., based in DuPage County, Weston published a number of special editions of the Chicago Daily News, including one celebrating the Chicago Auto Show. The following year, a Rosemont-based group headed by former Illinois governor Richard B. Ogilvie contracted to purchase CDN Publishing, with the expressed intention of publishing the Chicago Daily News as a weekend edition beginning that August. Weston hosted a party celebrating the signing of the contract with Ogilvie at the iconic Pump Room in the Ambassador Chicago Hotel. The gala was attended by hundreds of the city's well-known names in politics, publishing. broadcasting and advertising. The next day, Ogilvie reneged on the deal. The check he signed as payment to Weston bounced. And his corporation filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Weston's last edition of the Chicago Daily News featured extensive photo coverage of the October 4, 1979, visit to Chicago of Pope John Paul II. In 1984, Weston sold his rights to the Chicago Daily News trademark to Rupert Murdoch, who, at the time, was owner and publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times. The headquarters of the Daily News and Sun-Times was located at 401 North Wabash before the building was demolished. It is now the site of Trump International Hotel and Tower. Pulitzer Prizes The Chicago Daily News was awarded the Pulitzer Prize thirteen times. 1925 Reporting 1929 Correspondence 1933 Correspondence 1938 Editorial Cartooning 1943 Reporting 1947 Editorial Cartooning 1950 Meritorious Public Service 1951 International Reporting 1957 Meritorious Public Service 1963 Meritorious Public Service 1969 Editorial Cartooning 1970 National Reporting 1972 Commentary The Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire full-time photography staff Thursday, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, in a move that the newspaper's management said resulted from a need to shift toward more online video. The union representing many of the laid-off photographers plans to file a bad-faith bargaining charge with the National Labor Relations Board, a union leader said. The Sun-Times Media company didn't immediately comment on how many jobs were affected, but the national Newspaper Guild issued a statement saying 28 employees lost their jobs. The layoffs included photographers and editors at the Sun-Times' sister publications in the suburbs. "I'm still in shock. I'm not angry right now. Maybe I will be later," said Steve Buyansky, a laid-off photo editor for three of the group's suburban newspapers. Buyansky said about 30 photographers and photo editors were called to a mandatory meeting Thursday morning where Sun-Times editor Jim Kirk "talked for about 20 seconds" telling them the layoffs were a tough decision. Buyansky said Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun-Times photographer John H White was in the room and was among those who were laid off. "It's sad," said Buyansky, speaking from the Billy Goat tavern, a long-time watering hole for Chicago journalists, where about 10 laid-off photographers congregated after the meeting. "The Sun-Times had an amazing photo staff." White took a well-known photo of now-imprisoned governor Rod Blagojevich leaving his home through a back alley, one day after he was arrested on federal corruption charges. The photo caught Blagojevich as he passed a bright yellow sign warning about rats. "It captured everything that Rod Blagojevich and the state of Illinois exudes. It's a great photo because there's such great humor in it," said laid-off Sun-Times photo assignment editor Dom Najolia, who marked his 33rd year at the paper earlier this month. Chicago is one of few US cities to still have competing newspapers. The Sun-Times, a tabloid, competes with the Chicago Tribune. Chicago Newspaper Guild executive director Craig Rosenbaum said an unfair labor practice charge will be filed in reaction to the company's announcement. The union is negotiating a new contract and the company told the union at the bargaining table recently that no layoffs of photographers were planned, Rosenbaum said. Sun-Times Media released a statement Thursday to the Associated Press confirming the move: "Today, the Chicago Sun-Times has had to make the very difficult decision to eliminate the position of full-time photographer, as part of a multimedia staffing restructure." The statement noted that the "business is changing rapidly" and audiences are "seeking more video content with their news." Like most major newspapers, the Sun-Times has been hard hit by the technological shift that has cause more people to rely on their personal computers and mobile devices to stay informed. As more readers have embraced digital alternatives, so have advertisers in a move that has been steadily siphoning away newspaper publishers' biggest source of revenue. The Chicago Sun-Times ended September 2012 with a paid circulation of 263,292, according to the most recent statement filed with the Alliance for Audited Media. That contrasted with circulation of about 341,448 at the same time in 2006. Including satellite editions that operate under other names, the Sun-Times' circulation totaled 432,451 in September 2012.
White, John H. (Chicago photographer). (b. Lexington, NC, 1945; active Chicago, IL, 2013)   Bibliography and Exhibitions MONOGRAPHS AND SOLO EXHIBITIONS: Kennedy, Eugene and JOHN H. WHITE (photos). This Man Bernardin. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1996. xi, 180 pp., maps, portraits. Biography. 4to (29 cm.), cloth, d.j. WHITE, JOHN H. (Photos). The Final Journey of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, 1928-1996. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1997. 74 pp. Text by White, Raymond E. Goedert, and other close colleagues. Newly published photographs that chronicle the last months of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's life and ministry. Includes Monsignor Kenneth Velo's Funeral Mass homily. 4to (29 cm.). GENERAL BOOKS AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS: ATLANTA (GA). Atlanta College of Art Gallery. Songs of My People: African Americans: A Self-Portrait. June 26-August 9, 1991; Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992. xiii, 209 pp. exhibit. cat. of 150 works by over 50 African American photographers; intro. by Gordon Parks. Eric Easter, D. Michael Cheers, and Dudley M. Brooks, eds. This was a photographic project initiated by the editors, not the usual historical compilation. Included: Jules Allen, Howard Bingham, Bob Black, D. Michael Cheers, Michel DuCille, James V. Evers, Roland L. Freeman, Ronald L. Griemans, C.W. Griffin, Keith Hadley, Durell Hall, Jr., Chester Higgins, Jason Miccolo Johnson, David C. Lee, Matthew Lewis, Kirk McKoy, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Ozier Muhammad, Marilyn Nance, Eli Reed, Morris Richardson II, Jeffery Allan Salter, Coreen Simpson Lester Sloan, D. Stevens, Bruce Talamon, Dixie D. Vereen, John H. White, Keith Williams, et al. [Traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1992; Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia, April-May 1992; California Afro-American Museum, May 1992 -- at which eight photographs by D Stevens and others related to the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were added. A second small tour of 60 photographs traveled to: Museum of the City of New York; the DuSable Museum, Chicago; the Uffizi, Florence, Italy, and other international venues.] [Reviews: Renee Lucas Wayne, "An African-American Self-Portrait in Photos," Philadelphia Daily News, April 17, 1992; Shauna Snow, "Redressing the Balance - Photography: 'Songs of My People' is Designed to Contribute Toward Understanding ... and Healing the City." Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1992; Charles Hagen. "Review/Photography: 'Songs of My People,' A Black Self-Portrait." NYT, October 9, 1992; "Unfinished Songs: Three Exhibitions at Philadelphia's Afro-American Museum" The Crisis, October, 1992; long description, but with many names of photographers misspelled.] Note: the photographs from the exhibition were donated to the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri. 4to (30.5 x 25.4 cm.; 12 x 10.2 in.), black pictorial boards, pictorial dust jacket. First ed. Chicago (IL). Negro Digest. The Art Scene. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., Inc., 1970. Unattrib. article. In: Negro Digest Vol. 19, no. 3 (January 1970):80-82, cover illus. photo of sculpture by Ramon Price. In a rare burst of enthusiasm for the visual arts, this issue devoted over two pages to mention of the Studio Museum show "14 Black Artists from Boston" and mention of two exhibitions at he South Side Community Art Center: a solo show by Garrett Whyte and a group exhibition "Black Expressions 1969" with photos of two of the winners Ramon Price (sculpture), John H. White (photography), jurors Leroy Winbush, Lerone Bennett, Jr. and Harold Bradley, plus photos of others attending the opening Richard Hunt and Clarence Tolbert. CHICAGO (IL). South Side Community Art Center. Black Expressions 1969. 1969. Group exhibition and competition open to Chicago-area artists. Prizewinners included: Jeff Donaldson (painting), Ramon Price (sculpture), John White (photography), and Barbara Jones (printmaking). The award-winning works became the property of the South Side Center. [Mention with photos in: Negro Digest Vol. 19, no. 3 (April 1970):81-2.] CHICAGO (IL). South Side Community Art Center. Through the Eyes of Blackness. 1973. Group photo exhibition by four Chicago photojournalists. Featured Howard Simmons, John H. White (Daily News), Ovie Carter (Chicago Tribune), and Bob Black (Sun-Times.) Organized by Howard Simmons. EASTER, ERIC, D. MICHAEL CHEERS and DUDLEY M. BROOKS, eds. Songs of My People: African Americans: A Self-Portrait. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1992. 208 pp., 152 photographic illus. Introduction by Gordon Parks. Essays by Sylvester Monroe, Paula Giddings, Nelson George and Joyce Ladner. Includes photographs by Michelle Agins, Jules Allen, Anthony Barboza, Conrad Barclay, Howard Bingham, Bob Black, Geary G. Broadnax, Dudley Brooks, Ron Caesar, D. Michael Cheers, George Chinsee, Jacques Chinet, Roland L. Freeman, Vince Frye, Mark Gail, T. Ortega Gaines, C.W. Griffin, Keith Hadley, Durell Hall, Jr., Craig Herndon, Chester Higgins, Fred Hutcherson, Jason Miccolo Johnson, David Lee, Matthew Lewis, Roy Lewis, Kirk McKoy, Odell Mitchell, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Ozier Muhammad, Marilyn Nance, Eli Reed, Jeffery Allan Salter, Coreen Simpson, Lester Sloan, D. Stevens, Bruce Talamon, Dixie D. Vereen, Kenneth Walker, Riccardo Watson, John H. White, Keith Williams, Pat West, and other leading Black photojournalists. [The exhibition traveled to 23 U.S. cities and 7 countries in Europe. 4to, cloth, d.j. First ed. GATES, HENRY LOUIS and EVELYN BROOKS HIGGINBOTHAM, eds. African American National Biography. 2009. Originally published in 8 volumes, the set has grown to 12 vollumes with the addition of 1000 new entries. Also available as online database of biographies, accessible only to paid subscribers (well-endowed institutions and research libraries.) As per update of February 2, 2009, the following artists were included in the 8-volume set, plus addenda. A very poor showing for such an important reference work. Hopefully there are many more artists in the new entries: Jesse Aaron, Julien Abele (architect), John H. Adams, Jr., Ron Adams, Salimah Ali, James Latimer Allen, Charles H. Alston, Amalia Amaki, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, William E. Artis, Herman "Kofi" Bailey, Walter T. Bailey (architect), James Presley Ball, Edward M. Bannister, Anthony Barboza, Ernie Barnes, Richmond Barthé, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cornelius Marion Battey, Romare Bearden, Phoebe Beasley, Arthur Bedou, Mary A. Bell, Cuesta Ray Benberry, John Biggers, Camille Billops, Howard Bingham, Alpha Blackburn, Robert H. Blackburn, Walter Scott Blackburn, Melvin R. Bolden, David Bustill Bowser, Wallace Branch, Barbara Brandon, Grafton Tyler Brown, Richard Lonsdale Brown, Barbara Bullock, Selma Hortense Burke, Calvin Burnett, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, John Bush, Elmer Simms Campbell, Elizabeth Catlett, David C. Chandler, Jr., Raven Chanticleer, Ed Clark, Allen Eugene Cole, Robert H. Colescott, Eldzier Cortor, Ernest T. Crichlow, Michael Cummings, Dave the Potter [David Drake], Griffith J. Davis, Thomas Day, Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, Thornton Dial, Sr., Joseph Eldridge Dodd, Jeff Donaldson, Aaron Douglas, Sam Doyle, David Clyde Driskell, Robert S. Duncanson, Ed Dwight (listed as military, not as artist); Mel Edwards, Minnie Jones Evans, William McNight Farrow, Elton Fax, Daniel Freeman, Meta Warrick Fuller, Reginald Gammon, King Daniel Ganaway, the Goodridge Brothers, Rex Goreleigh, Tyree Guyton, James Hampton, Della Brown Taylor (Hardman), Edwin Augustus Harleston, Charles "Teenie" Harris, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bessie Harvey, Isaac Scott Hathaway, Palmer Hayden, Nestor Hernandez, George Joseph Herriman, Varnette Honeywood, Walter Hood, Richard L. Hunster, Richard Hunt, Clementine Hunter, Bill Hutson, Joshua Johnson, Sargent Claude Johnson, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Ann Keesee, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Edmonia Lewis, Samella Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Jules Lion, Edward Love, Estella Conwill Majozo, Ellen Littlejohn, Kerry James Marshall, Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, Richard Mayhew, Carolyn Mazloomi, Aaron Vincent McGruder, Robert H. McNeill, Scipio Moorhead, Archibald H. Motley, Jr., Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack), Lorraine O'Grady, Jackie Ormes, Joe Overstreet, Carl Owens, Gordon Parks, Sr., Gordon Parks, Jr., C. Edgar Patience, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper, Rose Piper, Horace Pippin, William Sidney Pittman, Stephanie Pogue, Prentiss Herman Polk (as Prentice), James Amos Porter, Harriet Powers, Elizabeth Prophet, Martin Puryear, Patrick Henry Reason, Michael Richards, Arthur Rose, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Augusta Savage, Joyce J. Scott, Addison Scurlock, George Scurlock, Willie Brown Seals, Charles Sebree, Joe Selby, Lorna Simpson, Norma Merrick Sklarek, Clarissa Sligh, Albert Alexander Smith, Damballah Smith, Marvin and Morgan Smith, Maurice B. Sorrell, Simon Sparrow, Rozzell Sykes, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Alma Thomas, J.J. Thomas, Robert Louis (Bob) Thompson, Mildred Jean Thompson, Dox Thrash, William Tolliver, Bill Traylor, Leo F. Twiggs, James Augustus Joseph Vanderzee, Kara Walker, William Onikwa Wallace, Laura Wheeler Waring, Augustus Washington, James W. Washington, Jr., Carrie Mae Weems, James Lesesne Wells, Charles White, John H. White, Jack Whitten, Carla Williams, Daniel S. Williams, Paul Revere Williams (architect), Deborah Willis, Ed Wilson, Ellis Wilson, Fred Wilson, John Woodrow Wilson, Ernest C. Withers, Beulah Ecton Woodard, Hale Aspacio Woodruff. RUBIN, CYMA and ERIC NEWTON, eds. Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs. Arlington, VA; Freedom Forum, 2000. 208 pp., 85 b&w and 37 color illus., brief biogs. of photographers. Includes: Moneta J. Sleet, Jr., Matthew Lewis, John H. White, Michel DuCille (1986 and 1988), Clarence J. Williams, III. Covers 1942-1999. [Reprinted by Norton with update thru 2001.] Also a traveling exhibition with same title. 4to (11.9 x 9 in.), wraps. First ed. WILLIS, DEBORAH, ed. Black Photographers: 1940-1988, An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1989. 483 pp., over 350 illus. The most comprehensive list of Black photographers to date, with brief biographical entries on many artists and a few bibliographical entries on approximately half of the hundreds of names. Photographers included in Willis's earlier book, Black Photographers 1840-1940, receive only a brief notation here. An indispensable reference work. Artists discussed include: Salimah Ali, Omobowale Ayorinde, J. Edward Bailey, III, Anthony Barboza, Donnamarie Barnes, Vanessa Barnes Hillian, Fay D. Bellamy, Lisa Bellamy, Dawoud Bey, Hart Leroy Bibbs, Bonnie Brisset, Barbara Brown, Lisa Brown, Millie Burns, Muriel Agatha Fortune Bush, Cynthia D. Cole, Juanita Cole, Cary Beth Cryor, Tere L. Cuesta, Fikisha Cumbo, Phyllis Cunningham, Pat Davis, Carmen DeJesus, Lydia Ann Douglas, Barbara Dumetz, Joan Eda, Sharon Farmer, Phoebe Farris, Valeria "Mikki" Ferrill, Collette V. Fournier, Roland L. Freeman, Rennie George, Bernadette F. B. Gibson, Anthony Gleaton, Dorothy Gloster, Lydia Hale-Hammond, Gail Adelle Hansberry, Inge Hardison, Teenie Harris, Madeleine Hill, Zebonia Hood, Vera Jackson, Louise Jefferson, Michelle M. Jeffries, Brent Jones, Brian V. Jones, Julia Jones, Kenneth G. Jones, Marvin T. Jones, Leah Jaynes Karp, Irene C. Kellogg, Lucius King, Romulo Lachatanere, Allie Sharon Larkin, George Larkins, Archy La Salle, Abe C. Lavalais, Joyce Lee, Sa'Longo J.R. Lee, Carl E. Lewis, Harvey James Lewis, Matthew Lewis, Roy Lewis, Fern Logan, Edie Lynch, Peter Magubane, Jimmie Mannas, Louise Martin, Mickey Mathis, Carroll T. Maynard, Rhashidah Elaine McNeill, Marlene Montoute, Michelle Morgan, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Marilyn Nance, Yvonne Payne, Patricia Phipps, Ellen Queen, Phillda Ragland, Arkili-Casundria Ramsess, Odetta Rogers, Veronica Saddler, Lloyd Saunders, Cheryl Shackelton, Victoria Simmons, Coreen Simpson, Lorna Simpson, Clarissa T. Sligh, Ming Smith, Toni Smith, Charlynn Spencer Pyne, Jo Moore Stewart, Celeste P. Stokes, Elisabeth Sunday, Elaine Tomlin, Sandra Turner-Bond, Jacqueline La Vetta Van Sertima, Dixie Vereen, William Onikwa Wallace, Sharon Watson-Mauro, Carrie Mae Weems, Dolores West, Judith C. White, Elizabeth "Tex" Williams, Lucy Williams, Pat Ward Williams, Deborah Willis, Carol R. Wilson, Jonni Mae Wingard, Ernest Withers, and many, many others. Not all listed in this description, but all individual photographers are cross-listed. Large stout 4to, pictorial boards, no d.j. (as issued). First ed. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis is the son of a migrant laborer and the first of his siblings to be born in the United States. He grew up in Chicago’ Mexican-American community of Little Villages, where he was immersed in its particular immigrant experience. After graduating with a degree in photography from Columbia College, he began his career as a summer intern for his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. At the end of the 13-week internship, at the young age of 24, the paper hired him as a staff photojournalist. There he worked on many local stories and covered everything from parades to politics, from food to fashion, to fires, and sports. Since the fall of 1998, Pablo has been a staff photojournalist for the Associated Press’ Washington Bureau, where he primarily covers the office of the President and various administrations. In 1999 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for team coverage of the impeachment during the Clinton Administration. Pablo has received awards for World Press Photo, The White House News Photographers, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Assistant Chief of Bureau for Photography in Washington. Pablo has been an integral part of the AP photo staff for more than two decades. He joined the AP in 1998 as a photographer in Washington, forging a career that has spanned four presidencies and taken him to all 50 states and over 70 countries. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Pablo embedded with the 101st Airborne during deployment into Afghanistan, and in 2003, was part of President George W. Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. He has covered major sporting events including the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup in addition to World Cup Soccer, NCAA and MLS tournaments. With fellow AP photo staff, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for coverage of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and has received awards from World Press Photo, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is a founding member of Iris Photo Collective, with whom he recently received a Knight Foundation grant for projects documenting Haitian and Cuban communities. Prior to the AP, Pablo worked as a staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and was honored as the Alumni of the Year in 2009. He lives in Washington with his wife Jessica and son Luca. I’m very happy to let you know that Pablo Martinez Monsivais is our new assistant chief of bureau for photography in Washington. This is a well-deserved promotion for Pablo and completes our cross-format leadership team in the bureau. Pmm1 AP Washington Assistant Chief of Bureau for Photography Pablo Martinez Monsivais. (AP Photo) Pablo has been an integral part of the AP photo staff for more than two decades. He joined the AP in 1998 as a photographer in Washington, forging a career that has spanned four presidencies and taken him to all 50 states and over 70 countries. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Pablo embedded with the 101st Airborne during deployment into Afghanistan, and in 2003, was part of President George W. Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. He has covered major sporting events including the World Series, NBA Finals and NHL Stanley Cup in addition to World Cup Soccer, NCAA and MLS tournaments. With fellow AP photo staff, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for coverage of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and has received awards from World Press Photo, the White House News Photographers Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is a founding member of Iris Photo Collective, with whom he recently received a Knight Foundation grant for projects documenting Haitian and Cuban communities. Prior to the AP, Pablo worked as a staff photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago and was honored as the Alumni of the Year in 2009. He lives in Washington with his wife Jessica and son Luca. Pablo is a talented photographer, a smart and generous colleague and a natural leader who will make our coverage of the nation’s capital and national politics stronger. Please join me in congratulating Pablo on this new role.   Double Exposure DEMO Feature Two Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers reflect on their careers and the craft of photojournalism. Audrey Michelle Mast '00 As photojournalists for The New York Times and The Associated Press, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers Ozier Muhammad ’72 and Pablo Martínez Monsiváis ’94 have watched history unfold right before their eyes. In his 30-plus year career, which included 22 years at the Times, Muhammad covered everything from the war in Iraq to the Obama campaign, the Haitian earthquake, and the state funeral of Nelson Mandela. In his 19 years at the AP, Martínez Monsiváis has trained his lens on four presidents and is still on the White House beat today. Here, DEMO talks with these two Columbia College Chicago grads about their prolific careers, changing (and often wrangling) technology, and an ever-shifting media landscape. DEMO: You’ve both been working at the highest levels of photojournalism for decades. But you each won the Pulitzer Prize relatively early in your careers. Ozier, your 1985 award was for work you did at Newsday. MUHAMMAD: It was about the famine in Africa, an international reporting prize. I shared it with Josh Friedman and Dennis Bell. The assignment from the foreign desk was to cover the 10th anniversary of the first big famine of 1974. We ended up in Ethiopia and we just happened to be there when the situation was at its worst. We dispatched stories from there for a couple of months. I had to ship [film] by DHL courier ... you know, it was prehistoric times. If you didn’t have an AP device... MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: A transmitter. Over the phone lines. MUHAMMAD: I didn’t have one, so I had to ship [the film] back. When the first dispatch was published, it seemed to stir a hornet’s nest with the rest of the media and also the U.S. and European governments. Because we were so early on that story—that’s why it won the prize. ozier muhammad - 2 Ozier Muhammad, Newsday, 1984—This photo from Ethiopia was part of the "Africa The Desperate Continent" series that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1985. DEMO: Pablo, your AP team won the 1999 Feature Photography prize for its coverage of President Clinton’s impeachment. What was that like? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: Until that point, I hadn’t paid attention to how intense the impeachment was. It was madness. They threw me into a hornet’s nest, and I had literally no idea what was going on. I told people later: You cannot send people blindly into events like this anymore. It’s incredibly competitive here in D.C., for like, inches, for the same photo. But the photo that was entered [for the Pulitzer] was taken my second day on the job. DEMO: That’s the photo of U.S. Representative Bob Livingston and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich walking down the steps of the Capitol? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: Yes. I was shadowing the chief photographer for the AP, and they sent me to the Hill to photograph this event. I brought the photo back and they were like, “Hey, this is a nice photo,” but I didn’t realize it was entered as part of the Pulitzer package. When I heard we won, I was at Jiffy Lube. They gave me a call, and I thought it was a joke, but they were like, “No, you’ve got to come back down to the office.” The whole time, I thought the impeachment was going to be the craziest thing I’d ever seen. No. It just keeps getting nuttier and more intense. But it turns out that I really like political coverage. And every now and then, they still send me to cover sports. DEMO: What have been some of the most memorable moments you’ve had on assignment? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: The means by which we do everything now is speeding up. During the week of the [2016] election, we hear last minute that the president-elect is coming [to the White House] on Thursday to meet Obama. I needed to transmit electronically straight from the Oval Office, which I hadn’t done yet. I had not practiced this whole setup—also, there’s radio frequency blockers throughout the West Wing. I’m not 100 percent sure it’s going to work. I get to the Oval Office, take my spot in the middle, and literally, it’s the first time I’ve actually looked at Donald Trump. I hadn’t covered any of the election. I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s the guy from The Apprentice. I can’t believe this is happening.” You want the photo of them shaking hands. President Obama speaks, and then he offers his handshake, and I take the picture ... and my camera blinks with a green light. That means it’s transmitting. I’m like, “Yesss, it’s going, it’s going!” The whole thing was so surreal.  pablo martinez monsivais - 1 Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands during their first meeting in the oval office. DEMO: Ozier, you must have a few “can’t-believe-that-happened” stories. MUHAMMAD: Oh yeah, there are a few. In 2013, during my waning days at the Times, Nelson Mandela was in the hospital and I was going back and forth between Johannesburg and Pretoria on what we called the “death watch,” to be quite frank. Mandela happened to hold on for several months, but I was there for only one—during his birthday celebration. I went to a Catholic school in Soweto where I photographed children singing songs in tribute. I went to the African National Congress [ANC] office and a few other places. We were nine hours ahead of New York. When I got back to the hotel, I transmitted everything. It was probably almost 1 a.m. when I got it all done. Just as I was about to hit the sack, I get a call from the Times’ foreign desk, asking me to fly to Cape Town immediately for a Saturday profile on Ahmed Kathrada, one of the ANC leaders who had been in prison with Mandela. I was dead tired. Plus you’re driving on the opposite side of the road, and the steering wheel is in the passenger seat, right? I thought, “Now how the hell am I going to get to Cape Town?” I had to transmit the pictures by 8 a.m. South Africa time so that they could make the Saturday paper. I managed to fly in and photograph Kathrada...Then I had to transmit the pictures. It was the first time I used a dongle—basically, a thumb drive with a transmitter in it. I gave it a try, but I just couldn’t connect. I drove a little distance away and I still couldn’t connect. Turns out, it was just that I was so whacked out with fatigue—it was some protocol I didn’t quite hit. I didn’t have my TCP/IP settings right, but I finally figured that out and it made the paper. But it was pretty dicey for sure. DEMO: There have been so many changes in technology, culture, and media platforms over the years you’ve both been working. How do you stay centered? MUHAMMAD: People are more prickly, even hostile, about being photographed in the public sphere. In recent years I’ve kept a copy of the Constitution in my back pocket. I pull it out whenever a cop tells me I’m infringing or that I have to pay someone for their photograph. I’ve said a number of times: When I photographed President Obama, do you think I slipped him a $20 every time? No, that’s not what happens. We do have certain rights. MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: If I learned anything from art school, it’s that you’ve got to evolve ... the tools are always changing. ozier muhammad - 1 Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 1994—Presidential candidate Nelson Mandela appears in the National Soccer Stadium as he campaigns for the presidency of South Africa in Soweto. DEMO: What worries you in this era of “fake news?” MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: When Ozier took his photos in Africa, he was [directly] showing us the work [through verified sources]. Now we’re seeing images from everyone [on social media]. What scares me is that somebody can falsify imagery and people take it for the God’s honest truth. People steal images and use them for their own agenda. They’re not with the AP or the Times. They’re Joe Schmo, but with access to the same ways of disseminating information. I’m no longer just competing with Reuters, I’m competing with a guy with a smartphone. It’s crazy. Accountability is gone. When a photo has the stamp of the AP, there’s a lot of weight to it. But some people don’t understand that. DEMO: Is smartphone culture contributing to public mistrust? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: This past summer I went to Zimbabwe, which is very restrictive. The only way people know the news is by talking with each other via social apps. When the establishment is not letting anybody know what is in the best interest of the people, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram are fantastic. It’s a perfect example of when it works well. Here, we have the reverse. During the last election, people literally segmented what they wanted to hear. I don’t know if we can find an even ground. But it’s always been the case—like with newspaper barons. At the turn of the [20th] century, they pushed us into the Spanish-American War to push newspaper sales. I think you can argue both sides. Being aware, knowing the limitations of the tools and what they’re capable of doing, is the priority. MUHAMMAD: I think we’re living in a great period, for many of the same reasons that Pablo articulated. We have all kinds of means of gaining information through social media platforms. I don’t think we have to worry too much about propagandizing when it comes to the mainstream media, like the wire services, the Washington Post, or The New York Times. Their ethics are clear and their staffs are very mindful of abiding by the rules. But one of the things that concerns me is what [influential journalist] Walter Lippmann called “manufacturing consent” about a hundred years ago. This applies mostly to text, the stories that are written—false equivocations and things of that sort, which is where most of the [current] hostility comes from. It doesn’t have as much to do with the medium of photojournalism. pablo martinez monsivais - 2 Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—Barack and Michelle Obama watch the musical performances at the 2016 National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony near the White House. DEMO: What might surprise people about your work? MUHAMMAD: The drudgery ... long waits and early setups. No matter the weather, you must get in place for a highly secured outdoor event upwards of 12 hours beforehand. Also, there are seemingly interminable stakeouts that may not yield anything. I had to wait outside Bernie Madoff’s Upper East Side apartment starting at 6 a.m., until he was to appear for sentencing at a courthouse in lower Manhattan in the afternoon. I never saw him. Madoff might have stayed in a hotel the night before he was sentenced. MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: The White House beat is very competitive and D.C. is stacked with talented photojournalists. If you blink, you will get your clock cleaned. Add deadline and work pressures—but surprisingly, everyone is very professional. None of my competitors are spiteful or malicious. We all tend to look after each other and help each other out. People outside of D.C. frequently comment about how well we all get along and how unusual this is, given what we do and what is at stake. DEMO: Any advice for aspiring photojournalists? MARTÍNEZ MONSIVÁIS: As a photojournalist, you have content that you need to advertise, distribute, and invoice for. Don’t give anything away for free, especially to another entity that will profit from your hard work. Journalism is a business, and as a photojournalist you have to look at it as one. Also, be—and stay—humble, no matter what you do and how many awards you accumulate throughout your career. This is the only thing people will remember. One of our jobs as photojournalists is to be human. When you get assigned “tragic” events, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, you will be seeing people at the weakest point in their lives. Don’t abuse that. Don’t be an emotionless robot with a camera taking photographs of people because you want to win Picture of the Year. MUHAMMAD: Learn how to shoot, capture, and edit video and sound. Sharpen your writing and interviewing skills. Learn how to gather information. Staff jobs are disappearing— photojournalists of the future will be free agents. Be willing to relocate.  Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martinez Monsivais Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2016—The Air Force Thunderbirds fly overhead as graduating cadets celebrate at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2017—President Donald Trump at his desk during his first flight on Air Force One. Pablo Martínez Monsiváis Pablo Martínez Monsiváis, Associated Press, 2009—President Barack Obama, center, salutes an Army carry team during a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Ozier Muhammad Ozier Muhammad Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 1999–Supporters of Olu Falae, the candidate for president of Nigeria, outside of his home.Ozier Muhammad Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 2012—NATO members dined at the Art Institute of Chicago while an Occupy Wall Street protest took place outside on Michigan Avenue.Ozier Muhammad Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 2016—A marcher in the New York City Gay Pride Parade wears an ORL sticker to memorialize the deadly shooting at Orlando nightclub Pulse.Ozier Muhammad Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times, 2011—Occupy Wall Street protesters circle the New York Stock Exchange without incident.
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