LEICA LOUNGE: with Eric Newton | Thurs, January 8, 2015 | 7pm - 8:30pm

‘Home-grown’ Pulitzer Prize Photographs

Michel duCille won the 1988 Feature Photography Pulitzer for a photo essay
on crack cocaine addicts in a Miami housing project 

Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his photograph of the United States Border Patrol's BORTAC team's seizure of Elian Gonzalez

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Join us in the Leica Lounge on Thursday, January 8, 2015 with Eric Newton. Eric will be talking about 'Home Grown' Pulitzer Prize photographs and the photographers who created them. 

‘Home-grown’ Pulitzer Prize Photographs

A passport is not a Pulitzer. In other words, being in a war zone on the other side of the world is not a guarantee you’ll get great photographs. Prize-winning photos are all around us, often coming suddenly and captured only by those who are ready for them.

On the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, author and journalist Eric Newton tells the story behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos taken of the “World Series quake” by the staff of the Oakland Tribune. How do they hold up? Are they history? Art? Both? How do local news Pulitzers compare with the ones from faraway events?

Newton, co-author of Capture The Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs, will lead a visual tour of the “home-grown” Pulitzer photographs. Some are born in the immediacy of a shocking news event, from the rubble of Florida hurricanes to firefighters at the World Trade Center; others are dramatic eyewitness accounts, such as the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. Still other photographers linger, documenting what happens after the news, and some are the completely unexpected result of a drive in the country.

Many of the issues faced by “home-grown” Pulitzer-winners are identical to those faced by their globe-trotting colleagues: how much risk should they take? … how do they shoot in a hurry? … can they win the trust of subjects? … did they know what they had when they got it? But other issues are uniquely local, such as the welfare of the photographer’s own families. 

Leica Lounge is a lecture series hosted by Leica Store Miami which features presentations by local members of the photography community. Held monthly, these free events are designed to create and inspire the local photography community through sharing images and exchanging ideas.

The Leica Lounge is kindly sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery. Participants will be able to sample some of their amazing craft beers during the event. Brooklyn Brewery is one of the largest craft breweries in the United States, producing a portfolio of traditional and experimental beers sure to impress any beer drinker.

About Eric:

Eric Newton is senior advisor to the president at a leading national funder of journalism programs, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami. As a program director and vice president during his first decade at Knight, he helped build the journalism and media innovation program from a department of one into a team of seven, overseeing the development of more than $300 million in grants.

Previously, Newton was founding managing editor of the Newseum, leading the content team at the world’s first museum of news. He started at California newspapers. As city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Oakland Tribune under Bob and Nancy Maynard, he helped the paper win more than 150 awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. 

His most popular books are “Searchlights and Sunglasses: Field Notes From the Digital Age of Journalism,” “Crusaders, Scoundrels, Journalists: The Newseum’s Most Intriguing Newspeople” and “Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs.” A distinguished alumnus of San Francisco State University (BA in journalism), he was a Rotary International Scholar at the University of Birmingham, England (MA in international studies). He has taught journalism at all levels and is the co-founder of the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit that provides legal services on free speech and free press issues.

Newton shared a Peabody Award for Link TV’s “Mosaic: World News From the Middle East.” He won the Reddick Award at the University of Texas for service to the field of communications, the Radio Television Digital News Foundation First Amendment Award for Knight Foundation’s work to create Sunshine Week and the Markoff Award from the University of California Berkeley for Knight’s support of investigative reporting. 

Pulitzer Prize: With Photojournalist Patrick Farrell

BY PATRICK FARRELL

PFARRELL@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Winning a Pulitzer Prize is a big deal for a journalist. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that.

Yet it’s a fleeting high. The celebration doesn’t stay with you. When you’ve won an award with images of horror and unbearable pain, what sticks is guilt and grief.

That’s the honest truth.

For me, the only lingering magic is this: A Pulitzer means I can keep my silent promise to Frantz Samedi. Samedi was a father I met on Sept. 7, 2008, in the small town of Cabaret a day after torrential rain and flood waters from Hurricane Ike destroyed its flimsy infrastructure, killing 70 people. One-third of the dead were children swept from their beds and parents’ arms.

Normally, it’s an hour’s drive to Cabaret from Port-au-Prince, but that morning it took several hours for our driver to get Miami Herald reporter Jacqueline Charles and me through washed-out roads. We saw the first solitary bodies along the street outside of town, but soon there were crowds urging us forward.

“Babies,” we kept hearing. “There are babies.”

They were lined up side-by-side, as if sleeping. They ranged in age from infants to 12- year-olds. Many of them were naked, mud-caked.

I don’t know how I pressed the shutter, but Jacquie and I numbly went through the motions, stifling our horror.

Suddenly, Samedi pushed through the crowd with a plastic jug of water and a rag. “This is my baby,” he shouted at me.

“This is my baby! Give me a picture!”

He began crying and cradling a 5-year-old girl, peeling her muddy clothes away and tenderly washing her body. He wanted to put her in a pretty dress for a proper burial, but a pickup truck from the morgue showed up.

He protested wildly, asked them to wait so he could run to get the dress. The police convinced him to let go. They had to take her. They threw her naked body onto a stack of others in the back of the truck.

Her name was Tamasha Jean.

The way Samedi held her in his arms, her body slumped and limp, reminded me of the way parents carry sleeping children in from the car. My own daughters back in Miami were 9 and 8 years old at the time.

My racing mind clung to Samedi and his simple request to acknowledge his girl’s life. I made a silent promise to give him a picture.

How could this tragedy occur without the slightest notice of the world?

When the photo of Samedi cradling Tamasha Jean ran on the front page of the Miami Herald the next day, other people asked themselves that same question.

Humanitarian aid began pouring into Haiti to help the country recover from one of its worst hurricane seasons ever, with a total death toll of 800.

That was before the devastating 2010 earthquake.

I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever see in my life. I was wrong.

Everywhere you turn in Haiti, there is an image that has to be seen. It is a place of breathtaking beauty and strength. It makes you happy to be alive. Unfortunately, all too often, Haiti also is ground zero for disaster and brutal poverty.

Seven months after that morning in Cabaret, when Samedi’s photo and 18 others I shot during that merciless season won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography, an even wider audience noted Tamasha Jean’s life and Haiti’s fragile state.

For that brief moment of recognition, Haiti wasn’t some strange country filled with foreign problems and unimaginable lives. It became a place where a father loved his daughter.

I hope that human connection happens every time Frantz Samedi’s photo is published in a newspaper or posted on a Web site or hung on a wall.

And I hope it happens for people who visit “Capture the Moment” while the Pulitzer photos curated by Cyma Rubin are on exhibit at Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum in Miami.

It’s the only way I can keep my promise.

On Exhibit

What: “Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs”

When: Runs through April 20

Where: Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, 10975 SW 17th St., Miami

Museum hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday noon-5 p.m.

Sponsors: Knight Foundation and the FIU School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Info: Capture the Moment

Wednesday, March 5, 2014 | 4-6pm Panel 1: "The Story Behind the Photo: A Conversation with Pulitzer Winning Photographers." 

Moderator: Eric Newton, Knight Foundation | Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | 4-6pm Panel 2: "Photojournalism in the Digital World." 

This panel will be a conversation with photojournalists, photo editors and experts about issues such as photo-manipulation, the threat to credibility, crowdsourcing, and ethics | Moderator: Prof. Michael Sheerin, SJMC | Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/15/3937745/images-help-keep-promise-to-grieving.html#storylink=cpy

Miami Herald Pulitzer Prize

winning photojournalists

Patrick Farrell's photos from Haiti are among 166 still frames included in the exhibit, 'Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs,' at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum at Florida International University.

Other featured images are the work of former Herald photographers Michel duCille for the calamity of crack addiction in Miami in 1987 and Carol Guzy and duCille for the devastation caused by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia in 1985.

To view each photo story CLICK HERE.

Related Stories & Links:

Personal Perspective On Pulitzer Prize Photos

Documenting the World Miami Herald Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalists

Images at Frost Museum spotlights the power of photojournalism

Photojournalists’ images can speak louder than words

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/07/3920340/photojournalists-images-can-speak.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/11/3927487/traveling-exhibit-of-pulitzer.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/static/media/projects/2014/documenting-the-world/#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/15/3937745/images-help-keep-promise-to-grieving.html#story

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