This weekend, I witnessed for the first time what The Dallas Morning News dubbed the Texas Sports Personality of 2009—Cowboys Stadium (for the record, it is the first non-living winner).
I’ve never seen a comparable sporting venue—it’s just Texas-sized, and there is nothing bigger in Texas. The shots the networks show on TV don’t do it justice, and niether do the pictures I have seen in print or on the Internet.
That’s not to say, though, that photographs lack the power to transport you to the time and place they capture.
Photography is not one of my strengths, it’s definitely a skill I would like to develop further. I never realized how difficult it is to actually take a strong photograph until I watched how Chris Dunn, Zach Gray and Tina Phan approached their craft at Poynter last summer.
Here are three tabs I’ve kept open that illustrate, in my mind, the power of photography.
Jamie Livingston – he took a Polaroid every day, until the day he died (courtesy of Mental Floss): What a visionary concept. I’ve always wished I kept a diary so I could remember what it was like to grow up—this is a visual diary of what it was like for this man to live, love, and die of cancer in the 1980s and 1990s.
Captured: America in Color From 1939-1943 (courtesy of the Denver Post): Whenever I think of the Great Depression, I inevitably think in black and white. These pictures, taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only colored photos to survive from this era. Seeing the faces of adults and kids alike made me realize that, throughout the years, people haven’t changed too much—we’re still driven by similar desires and necessities.
North Korea’s military parade (courtesy of the Sacramento Bee): It literally blows my mind that today, in the year 2010, there is a place that exists on this planet that virtually no one in the free world has ever seen. We know it exists, but we can’t see it or go there. The only images we get are those released by the state media. We don’t even know how old Kim Jung Un is, and he’s set to become the ruler of this nuclear-capable state! Anyhow, these are pictures released mainly by the North Korea or China state media. Unlike the only picture we’d previously seen of Kim Jung Un as an adult (released last month), these ones are clear—so clear that you can see the acne of the female soldiers’ faces.
Maybe I will invest in a DSLR after all.
So it's not North Korea or 1940s America by any means—but it is a beautiful sunset on a September night in Sevilla.
