Growing up as a photographer is like going to medical school and becoming an intern. You start understanding what the world is about and how to translate it into photographs. You may become more efficient, more proficient, more educated, more intelligent, more loving. If you’re not moved by what you’re looking at, your pictures will not contain the human response.
—Cornell Capa, p. 251
I think it was in 1996 or 1997 that I was working as a freelance transcriptionist when I got a series of tapes that changed me. Sitting alone in my room, I was hearing the voices of people who talked about events that I'd learned about in school, and many nobody could ever learn about because they were private knowledge from firsthand experience. These photographers had not only been on the frontlines of WWII, but behind the lines, in the rooms where Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill sat; in a cave with Tito; on the sidelines as Hitler passed; on board the ship Vincennes when it was sunk in Guadalcanal (photographer Ralph Morse described, in the most matter-of-fact way, how men died right next to him and how “You’re in that other thousand that didn’t get scratched. Why? I don’t know. Your number wasn’t up.”*); with John Steinbeck supplying the back story that turned into The Grapes of Wrath; they had been with movie stars and poor black families that nobody ever heard of. And these were only the batch of audiotapes I transcribed. What about all the other interviews?
At the time, the entire collection comprised about half of the still-living original Life magazine** photographers—the first so-called photojournalists. At the time of their interviews, they were in their 80s and 90s and still humble and arrogant and regular people who had found themselves, mostly with no preparation, in extraordinary situations where they not only coped, but thrived. It was not just what they had witnessed that moved me; it was their ordinariness (and, in the case of a couple—Cornell Capa and Gordon Parks—their compassion). I'd listen and type for a while, then find myself lying on my floor sobbing, so overcome with the sound of their voices telling little me, an anonymous NYC transcriptionist, their history through my headphones. Nobody but John Loengard (the interviewer who was also a Life photographer who was tasked with videotaping these picture-taking historians) and his associates had heard this extraordinary material.
When I returned my transcripts to my boss at the transcription agency, I was gasping. "This stuff is unbelievable," I told her. "I can't stop crying." To which she responded that all the transcriptionists were reporting this reaction. Read More
