A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Last Sunday Mom, Troy and myself went to a fantastic exhibit at the Ohio Historical Society. From April 25th through July 25th they are featuring  “Caught in the Moment” the Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs from 1942 through the present.

I cannot say enough about how amazing this exhibit is.  Each of the pictures has been reproduced and enlarged. Next to the photograph itself is a placard that tells the story of the photo and its photographer.

In addition to the pictures, there is a video presentation. The video features an extended look behind six of the award winning pictures. There are interviews with the photographers and others who were witness to the event at hand. One of the photographs highlighted in the video is the 1964 winner, of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

As I walked through the exhibit looking at the pictures and reading the placards, I recognized many of the photos. Some of them are iconic images in American history, pictures like the Oswald photo, the shooting at Kent State, the returning of Vietnam POW’s to their families.

The photographs are in order chronologically, moving through them I of course recognized many of the more recent ones from seeing them in the paper and on television in my lifetime. The rescue of Baby Jessica, the forced taking of Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez, The Oklahoma City bombing, the shooting at Columbine high school, and of course the fireball exploding out of Tower Two on September 11th.

So many of the pictures are as heart breaking, as they are breath taking.  My favorite picture is the winner from 1984.
Anthony Suau of the Denver Post was awarded for two different sets. One was a series that shows a depiction of the starving children in Ethiopia and for a single shot of a woman in a cemetery at her husbands’ grave on Memorial Day.

It is the Memorial Day picture that brought me to tears.
The picture depicts a widow sitting next to the grave of her husband.  She has her arms wrapped around the grave marker and is just holding on to it with such a strength. Below her arms you can see that the stone is inscribed with all the wars that her husband had been involved in, World War II, Korea, Vietnam etc. This man had been a lifelong dedicated solider and this woman had spent a lifetime loving him and most assuredly waiting for him to come home safe.

The photographer had been in the cemetery shooting Memorial Day events for the local paper, when he had the shots he wanted he began to walk away and that was when he saw the widow. She was hugging the grave, she stopped, then reached out and did it again, and he snapped his picture. When you look at this picture you can see the lifetime of love this woman and her husband shared.

If you are in the Columbus Ohio area, you need to make the time to visit this exhibit.