While in Atlanta to research Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace for Monuments, I photographed two little girls playing in a fountain in Olympic Park, capturing a moment that seemed to sum up Dr. King’s dream.
In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Diaz constructed an impromptu memorial in Manhattan for his missing brother Matthew. It consisted of a Payless shoebox holding a pair of worn black shoes, neatly tied. The top of the box, propped up, served as a kind of headstone. A verse from the Gospel of Mark [...]
Soon enough, official photographs of the dead Bin Laden will be released into cyber perpetuity. Phony documents have already shown up online. Given our “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world,” as Sontag described it, not looking at the postmortem imagery will be nearly impossible. I wonder how they will be received, since no one believes [...]
The reading public rarely suspects the blood, sweat, and tears that go into designing a book cover. Creating a cover that will entice bookstore browsers to pick up the book and visually convey its essence (in a glance) is ultimately more of an art than a science. The fine online journal Ancora Imparo ran the [...]
What a joy to attend the Inaugural. The frigid cold instantly gave everyone something in common–staying warm–and conspired with Obama’s message: We were one, and how! Everyone in that ocean of humanity knew that the stranger pressed up against us was a source of warmth. I’d say it was a good start.
One thrill of the writing life is receiving pictures of one’s “babies” taken in faraway places. Bill Pinkney, the visionary behind the recreation of the Amistad schooner as a floating, living memorial to civil rights, presented a copy of Monuments, which tells Amistad’s story, to Josephine Kargbo of the Monuments and Relics Commission of Sierra [...]
