One Man’s Fight to Get a Photo Published, and How it Changed Photojournalism (warning, disturbing)

[n2doc]

DL Cade · Apr 07, 2013



A recent article in the New York Times tells the story of one Addison Beecher Colvin Whipple — better known as Cal — to whom photojournalists in particular owe a great debt of gratitude. Mr. Whipple passed away last month at the age of 94, but his quest to get one particular photo published in 1943 has left a legacy that will last for many years to come.

Whipple was a writer and a censor fighter for Life best known for his fight to get the above photo — taken by photographer George Strock on a beach in Papua New Guinea — past the WWII military censors who were blocking the publications of any close-up photos of American soldiers killed in combat. But when Life requested that they be able to publish the photo, the censors said no. That’s where Whipple stepped in.

Mr. Whipple and his colleagues at Life believed that Mr. Strock’s photograph would provide a badly needed dose of reality for those on the home front who were growing complacent about the war effort. “I went from Army captain to major to colonel to general,” he recalled in a memoir written for his family, “until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.’ ”

In September 1943, Whipple accomplished his goal when President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to allow the publication of the image, saying that “the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.” And with that, the censorship rule was abolished.


Read more at http://www.petapixel.com/2013/04/07/one-mans-quest-to-get-a-photo-published-and-how-it-changed-photojournalism/

[freshwest]

1. My Dad went through there.

[Scuba]

2. Never underestimate the power of such images ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carter

[LeftofObama]

3. I've seen this particular photo several times

and it makes me cry every time I see it.

[jerseyjack]

4. Thank god we no longer have our breakfasts spoiled with images of war like this.

We got our news people embedded.


Yes, dumbass, it is sarcasm.

[Auntie Bush]

5. Sad...they were someone's sons.

Bless them and their families.

It was hard to even get photos of coffins being returned in the middle of the night under the Bush/Cheney administration.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

6. The Republicans learned their media lessons well.

Don't show any war images.
I was a child and I remember the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor and the film from the war in South Vietnam.
It eventually turned public opinion against the war.

That's why dictators are in favor of censorship. They don't want to see the results of their wars shown. Dead people.