8
rival in infl uence Carleton Watkins’ work, which ac-
tually led to the creation of the park. Similarly, no
one of Evans’ deservedly celebrated pictures from
the Depression conveyed the human toll of that
dark period with the immediate force of Dorothea
Lange’s Migrant Mother.
Photography was born of a great innovation and
is constantly reshaped by new ones. So it is fi tting that
our defi nition of an infl uential photo changes along
with the ways pictures are taken and seen. There
were other photographers who captured the man
confronting a column of People’s Liberation Army
tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
But only Jeff Widener’s picture of “Tank Man” was
sent out over the wire of the Associated Press. For al-
most seven decades, that wire was the most powerful
distribution tool in photography, off ering the fastest
route to the largest audience. It is possible that even
such an astounding image as the one Eddie Adams
took of an execution in Saigon—a masterwork that
distilled the futile horror of the Vietnam War into a
single frame—might not have become iconic had it
not been launched far and wide by the AP.
In other cases, it was the appearance on the
cover of a magazine or the front page of a news-
paper that lent a photo its infl uence. The fi rst time
the world saw Abraham Zapruder’s haunting im-
ages of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was not as
a moving picture but as a series of frame-by-frame
stills published in LIFE magazine. Before televisions
were in every home, the photos that ran in LIFE in-
fl uenced how a lot of people understood their world.
But LIFE was far from alone. In 1955, Jet magazine
published pictures from the open-casket funeral of
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American mur-
dered for supposedly fl irting with a white woman in
Mississippi. The photo of Till’s mother grieving over
her son’s mutilated body became a clarion call for
the nascent civil rights movement.
A far lighter image reminds us that an infl u-
ential picture is not necessarily a great one. Annie
Leibovitz’s 1991 photo of a nude, pregnant Demi
Moore shattered the taboo of sexualizing pregnancy
because it was on the cover of Vanity Fair, not be-
cause it was an important portrait. As Leibovitz
herself put it, “It was a popular picture and it broke
ground, but I don’t think it’s a good photograph per
se. It’s a magazine cover. If it were a great portrait,
TANK MAN by Jeff Widener
on the front page of the June 6, 1989,
New York Times.
The July 23, 1964, issue of Jet
magazine featuring David Jackson’s
photographs of Emmett Till.
