"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
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April 6, 2008

THE NEWSEUM: 9/11, VIETNAM - AND MEMORY

This week I visited the about-to-be-inaugurated Newseum – the museum dedicated to chronicling the History of the News. The impressive, airy facility with its vaulting atrium has been relocated from Arlington, Virginia, to Washington D.C.’s Mall. Most germane (for the readers of this Web site) was the 9/11 Gallery, which features a wall of newspaper front pages from 9/12; a transfixing documentary that chronicles news coverage on September 11 (with memorable testimony from Thomas Franklin, who took the famous Ground Zero flag-raising photograph); and a display of the damaged camera gear of Bill Biggart, one of the two working photographers who perished in the attacks.

newsweum911.jpg

Most arresting, for me, was the main artifact in the room - a portion of the mangled communications spire from the apex of the Trade Center, still affixed to the top of the tower itself. (The dedication page of Watching the World Change honors the memory of eight working journalists who died that morning - two photographers on the street and six TV engineers, monintoring that very communications spire, ensconced in the lofty reaches of the WTC: Bill Biggart, Gerard Coppola, Donald J. DiFranco, Steven Jacobson, Robert Edward Pattison, Glen Pettit, Isaias Rivera, and William Steckman. The book is dedicated to my parents and to photographer Harry Benson, with whom I spent two days down around Ground Zero the week of September 11.)

The real reason for my visit was that last Thursday the Newseum hosted a solemn ceremony during which the remains of four Vietnam-era photojournalists lost in Laos, in 1971, were finally laid to rest, interred in a crypt at the foot of the Journalists Memorial, an enormous, three-story wall of carved glass bearing the names of working press members killed while covering the news, from 1837 to now.

The most poignant moment of the day came when my friend Russell Burrows, son of Life photographer Larry Burrows, spoke to the assembled. I’ve rarely been prouder of our profession than I was when I heard Russell remark, as reported on the Web site of Photo District News:

"They chose to be there," said Russell Burrows. "It was the highest manifestation, I think, of their profession." Speaking of the memorial, Burrows said, "I'd like to regard this as kind of a family chapel."

The photojournalists’ remains had been discovered on a hillside in Laos in the mid-90s, thanks to the efforts of photographer Horst Faas (picture editor for the Associated Press in Saigon during the conflict) and Richard Pyle (the AP’s Saigon bureau chief). In 1999 I assigned Pyle to write about the search for the remains for Vanity Fair, which published his gripping story. His tale, which I described in a VF.COM posting this week, eventually served as the basis for the book, Lost Over Laos, co-authored by Pyle and Faas.

MEANWHILE...

CORDON RED. The New York Daily News discloses that a new proposal for beefing up security around the World Trade Center area would close or restrict "at least 24 blocks on eight major streets" and create what the paper calls an anti-terror Ring of Steel at the site.

THREE NEW BLOGS. I recommend James Danziger’s new photo-centric blog, “The Year in Pictures.” His recent post on Andrew Bush’s California Car Window series is a flashback to that 90s, devil-may-care buzz at the Cusp of Armageddon, that flush-with-Clintonian Good Times Meets Hollow, Alienated Edge. I remember first encountering Bush’s work in French PHOTO, back in the day.

Photography and picture editor Geoffrey Hiller emailed me (about a weak link on the site) and, in passing, mentioned his own documentary photography blog, which is quite an eyeful: Verve Photo.

And the Blurberati Blog (which bills itself as "Passionate about all things book: design, content, sharing, life...") praises a piece by yours truly on the Smithsonian Institution's new photography initiative: Click.

COMIC RELIEF… Finally, Your Faithful Blogger has posted a satirical ditty (about 3 a.m. White House Phone Calls) at VanityFair.com.

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