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(Clockwise from Top)Anthony Berger. Abraham Lincoln, February 9, 864. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Five-dollar billFifteen-cent stamp, 1866. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.After his election Lincolns portrait continued to be influential. Brady (or operators in his studio) photographed him thirty times more by 1864. Two of those portraits reached even larger audiences than the one taken in 1860. One was the model for the Lincoln penny. The other made its appearance in 1866 on a fifteen-cent stamp and again in 1920 on the three-cent stamp--and it sits in the middle of the five-dollar bill as well.
Alberto Korda (born 1928). Che Guevara, March 5, 1960. Alberto Korda.In Ches image, the religious connotation of the word icon returns. Bolivian peasants commonly believe that those who die tragically are empowered to perform miracles. In less than two weeks after his death, sixty-seven hundred photographs of Che were sold at the weekly regional fairs in the province where he died. Peasants came from remote villages and lined up to by his picture, which they then took to church to have blessed. The miracles he performed were soon the stuff of legend, and his portrait appeared in huts next to pictures of Christ, the Virgin, and the more standard roster of saints.
William Anders (born 1933). Earthrise, December 24, 1968. Color Photograph, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, D.C.Like a parent who no longer seems so big once we grow up, Earth had been deprived of its majestic size and power by the long view. We were stunned to finally realize that although it was all we had, it was every bit as minor as astronomers said it was. At the same time, that startling comparison to the moon made our planet seem stupendously alive, unique, and valuable. The Last Whole Earth Catalogue (1974) published on its inside front cover ”the famous Apollo 8 picture of the Earthrise over the Moon that established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness (dry moon, barren space) and began to bend human consciousness.”
Don English (born 1926). Miss Atomic Bomb, May 1957. Las Vegas News Bureau.The mushroom symbol itself was soon simplified. (even the language was abbreviated: ”Atom bomb” became ”A-bomb,” then simply ”the Bomb.”) The cloud was regularized and abstracted in simple drawings that depended less on the original photographs than on the idea of a mushroom. Powerful and well-known visual images, if they can be converted to easily recognized graphic shapes, are sometimes reduced to logos, symbols of symbols, losing much of their force while retaining their meaning. The word atomic and the hallucinatory cloud were tamed for everyday use by being reduced to cartoon levels. The Bikini Atoll test in 1946 was celebrated with a cake shaped like an icing covered mushroom cloud. There was the Atomic Cab Company, the Atomic Cocktail, and the atomic hairdo, arranged on a wire form. By 1947 there were forty-five companies in the Manhattan phone book with the word atomic in their titles, including the Atomic Undergarment Company, and many had a sweet puffy little mushroom cloud as their logo. The museum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, displays a photograph of Miss Atomic Bomb from 1957: a young woman who wears little but a smile and a big mushroom-shaped appliqué of cotton.
Lewis Hine (1864-1940). Child in Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908. Print made by Hine Foundation of The Photo League. Gelatin silver print on Masonite, 10-1/2 x 13-1/2 in. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Purchase.Hines pictures began as documents and ended as persuasion and publicity. A movement that believed that people who knew the facts would act appropriately needed to get the facts out. The documents had to be trustworthy, and they had to serve as effective publicity for the cause. At the conference where Hine told social workers to despise not the camera, another speaker said, ”The rule of right publicity in public health work, as I see it, is essentially the same rule as the rule for commercial advertising: as striking as you can make it.” (He added that yellow journalism would do if that was the only way to convey information to the public.) Hines photographs were arranged to tell stories in articles or collaged onto posters that would preach a simple moral instantly.
The Power of Photography
How Photographs Changed Our Lives

By Vicki Goldberg 
Size: 8 1/2 x 11" 
Paperback, 288 pages
118 black-and-white illustrations
Published 1993
ISBN: 978-1-55859-467-8
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Selected by Choice magazine as one of its outstanding books of 1993.

"The Power of Photography is a seminal work of such importance that it should become mandatory reading in the fields of communications, media, photography, and sociology. Taking specific images from the history of photography. Vicki Goldberg weaves her analysis of the impact that specific images have had on society. The quality of research and Goldbergs keen perception, along with her personable writing style, combine to keep the reader interested and entranced. . .Unquestionably the only book of its kind." --Choice

Vicki Goldberg, who lives in New York City, is also the author of Margaret Bourke-White.

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