From rugged and rocky ocean-scapes to wide sandy coves, Portugal is a fantastic destination for beach lovers and avid shredders. There’s something to be said for that, I think.With over 1,000 miles of dramatic coastline, Portugal is home to several picturesque surf breaks up and down the stunning shore, providing an array of beaches that draw avid surfers all year long. Maybe people have looked at it and realized they can’t be too careful with their children at the beach. All of these pictures are, for better or worse, iconic, and capture a moment in time that words cannot express.įor what it’s worth, maybe this picture has saved lives. A teen girl crying over the lifeless body of one of the four victims at Kent State. Two girls falling down a broken fire escape in Boston. Lee Harvey Oswald at the moment he was shot. The Pulitzer is awarded for something dramatic, a moment captured in time - frequently, but not always, tragic. Did anyone read that? Would he have given up the award to have the child live and have this be just another day at the beach? No doubt. We don’t know, and will never know.Īnd as far as the award, he said it made him ill. Even then, sometimes people will smile or laugh nervously. I do not think he was trying to benefit from a tragedy.Īs far as the smile in the last picture we do not know what context this was taken in, or what was said to make him smile. I never met the man but everything I read was that he saw something and took a photo in the heat of the moment. If he'd kept it as a private memento and it was revealed and publicised, maybe, but to ride the wave of someone else's grief is dirty. They didn't consent to it, they didn't authorise it's distribution, they just got sucked into his distant camera-lens and he lapped up the recognition. This isn't some artistic piece, it's not some horrific event in public history, it's just an opportunistic, shady little snoop into someone else's business at a moment that was probably ruinous for them. This was an intensely private moment, and while he can rightly be forgiven for snapping a scoop, to have then been informed of what happened and waddling out with a chuffed-grin to accept a prize for it, is shameful. There isn't an audience thirsting for a window into other people's tragedy, but our instincts force us to look when it's waved under our noses. The problem I think people have with it is that we don't need to see it. Yes it evokes emotions - empathy, sadness, trying to comprehend such a profound loss. Yes the photo catches your attention, and we having now seen the photo might seem hypocritical to then complain about it after the fact. He particularly relished the challenge of covering fires, his daughter recalled… In his years at the paper, Gaunt, who was known as Jack, worked primarily as the nightside news photographer, coming in at 3 or 4 p.m. The couple in the photograph lived locally and, although Gaunt did not know them, he knew people who did… ”…the image was hard for him to bear at first.” She noted that he was just 31 when he took the photograph and had a 3-year-old daughter at home. The image won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for press photography the Pulitzer committee called the photo “poignant and profoundly moving.” But for Gaunt, the image was hard to bear at first, his daughter recalled in Gaunt’s 2007 Times obituary by staff writer Jon Thurber: The photograph entitled “Tragedy by the Sea” appeared on the front page of The Times the next day. Later in the day, the child’s body was found on the beach a mile away. Despite the back-and-forth efforts of the helpless parents, there was nothing to do but wait. The surf, suddenly aggressive, reached out and took the child from the shallows. Only then did he learn that just moments before, the couple’s nineteenth-month-old son, Michael had been playing along the shoreline. He realized that someone must be lost and he took a photograph from two hundred feet away. As they moved forward, then back, clinging to one another, their body language told Gaunt a story that tightened his stomach. On the shore, with high, crashing surf as a backdrop, stood a young couple, Mr. On the morning of April 2, 1954, Los Angeles Times photographer John Gaunt was lounging in the front yard of his beachfront home in Hermosa Beach when he heard a neighbor shout, “Something’s happening on the beach!” Instinctively, Gaunt grabbed his Rolleiflex camera and rushed over to see a horrified couple clutching each other. April 2, 1954: A couple are photographed moments after learning that their 19-month-old child had been swept out to sea at Hermosa Beach.
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