A Father's Guide to the Pulitzer Gallery

Abstract

A Father's Guide to the Pulitzer Gallery Jefferson Slagle (bio) Two figures stand in a low, dark hallway. On the wall ahead of them a photo is illuminated: a man in a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag, his face curtained in dreadlocks, a bag of St. Louis Red Hot Riplets in one hand, a flaming tear gas can in the other. His arm unfurls behind him, primed to hurl the spangled canister back at a police officer who stands, they infer, just outside the frame. They've seen this photo before, but never at this size, so close and so large it obscures everything behind it. The exhibit hall occupies the basement of a university art museum, and the figures are a father and daughter taking a tour of the campus, but you know this from looking at them. A year from now, the college she chooses will be her home, the first of her own making. He will be the guest, she the proud host showing off the historic building where her international politics class meets, the trail where she runs in the evenings, the sculptures on the quad. But today they defer to each other in the uncharted space of her anticipated departure, circling in a tentative, fleeting orbit. On the far side of the entrance wall is a placard, a quote from Pulitzer-winning photographer Eddie Adams: "If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, it's a good picture." They consider this message and turn away from it, toward the gallery. She heads right, toward the newer photos. He goes left, into the past. On the wall behind them, the world is about to burn. [End Page 103] ________ On the wall before him, Air Force Colonel Robert Storm is returning home. His dark, dress-uniformed back anchors the left margin of the photo. His family runs toward him out of the right side of the frame, his wife and young son trailing, a daughter and older son ahead of them. His oldest daughter, closest to him, has taken flight, her arms thrown out like wings to embrace him, heedless with joy. The caption informs the viewer that his wife has filed for divorce, and a few weeks later they will separate for good. Their children, at this moment, are unaware of the upheaval that awaits them just outside the frame. The conceit of the Pulitzer exhibit is to make each photo play a single narrative beat in a history of the modern world, to build a narrative out of images. It's the kind of activity our brains are designed to perform, making connections among apparently disconnected things, then connecting those things to us. John Berger observes that "we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are." What synaptic connections are firing in the heads of these giddy, oblivious running children, in the slower, time-snarled heads of their equivocal parents? What fireworks erupt inside the head of the daughter, across the room, as she watches a pair of Syrian rebels huddle in a sniper's nest, the sun flaring through bullet holes behind them, each beam diverging from the others inside that cramped, dim space? It seems ridiculous to treat these photos, this room, as a kind of historical narrative, to make each bear the weight and complexity of its birth year and the effects that will flow out of it. Nineteen seventy-four was not only the year Col. Storm returned home; it was also the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped, the year Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle, the year the Milgram experiment was first described, Ted Bundy abducted two women in Washington state and one woman escaped him in Salt Lake City, the second-largest swarm of tornadoes in U.S. history struck thirteen states, Notre Dame upset UCLA to end a record eighty-eight-game men's basketball...