• PAUL FUSSELL - HISTORIAN: The argument is always made against the actual showing of photographs showing death in war -- that it would bother the relatives. My position is that I WANT to bother the relatives. You see, because I think war is a really appalling business, and I think it's everybody's business to know how appalling it is.
• RAYNA GREEN - SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE: The photographer Edward Curtis gave non-Indians an image of a world that they wanted -- Indians as beautiful, Indians as romantic. He dragged around a trunk full of clothes just in case Indians didn't look the way he wanted them to look. If they didn't look right, he fixed it. Curtis left us with an amazing legacy, these beautiful pictures of a moment in time that we all wish was true, that last brief shining moment when we looked glorious, when things weren't shattered.
• MIKE DEAVER - FORMER REAGAN AIDE: I never let a photographer get on his knees in front of Ronald Reagan because all you would see are his jowls. You kick him, and it doesn't take too many of those before they understand that Deaver isn't going to allow somebody to get down on their knees before they take a picture.

The role of photography in the 20th century is the subject of this moving and informative Public Television series. It explores the influence photographs have had on every aspect of our lives -- in what we buy, how we dress, how we get the news, in matters of life and death in medicine, science and war. Photographs changed forever how we choose our leaders, what we see on the walls of museums, how we catch criminals and even how we remember the past. In this century of images, the very way in which we see ourselves individually and as a country has been driven by the camera, the lens and the technology to hold and preserve pictures.

In 1840, its invention was announced in an American newspaper with the simple words: "wonderful wonder of wonders." From the x-ray to the sonogram of a baby, from the horrors of war to the view of the earth from moon, this television series will explore the surprising and ever renewing power of this wonder of wonders. As we will see, in the right context at the right times, photographs have indeed changed the world.

• MALCOLM BROWNE - NEW YORK TIMES: With a vivid imagination one can, one can think of what it would look like, to see a monk burning to death, but the actual image has a different impact. I was stunned, a cold sweat had broken out on my head and I could, you know, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I kept my attention focused on the exposures and focusing and mechanics of picture taking, because it was horrifying. I had never seen, anything, anything to approach it.
• DAVID TURNLEY - PHOTOJOURNALIST : The Gulf War was really, by far, the most sophisticated marketing scheme I'd ever run against, in terms of government censorship of images. It was first exercised in Grenada, and then in Panama, and by the time they got to the Gulf War they were really good at it.

SERIES OUTLINE
PROGRAM ONE: 1900-1934

HAROLD EVANS - PUBLISHER: The Daily News photographer had a camera strapped to his ankle. And you see Ruth Snyder being electrocuted. Shocking photograph. And the simple, single word on that front page was DEAD! Well, that's news.

In this first program we will see that suddenly pictures were everywhere -- on passports and postcards, in crime scene photos and mug shots. Legislation would eventually change working conditions, in part because of the powerful effect of the camera in the hands of social reformers. Science would never be the same. Both distant galaxies and sub-atomic particles were discovered by being first being fixed on the photographic plate.

National Geographic, a dull technical journal in the 19th century, was transformed by photography in the early part of the twentieth century. The magazine was soon to make widespread use of color photography. Later many would come to question its rose-colored view of politics and its relentless pursuit of the exotic, but the magazine was enormously popular, bringing images of the world into the homes of ordinary Americans.

While not the first war to be covered in photographs, the abundance of carefully selected photographs of World War I convinced many reluctant Americans that they had a stake in this distant war. After the war, the tabloids hit the news stands. The program will show that television was not the first medium to use sensational images to attract huge audiences.

In the 1920s as well, fan magazines and publicity stills created idealized images of celluloid heros, the movie stars, and people rushed to a new creation, the beauty parlor, to try and mold their faces and bodies into copies of these photographic images. Gangsters, politicians and socialites now had recognizable faces to go along with their fame, and we find ourselves at the beginning of a very twentieth century, image-dominated creation -- celebrity, the possibility of being famous for being famous.

Advertisers embraced photography first for its seeming ability to tell the truth, and then for its ability to evoke a fantasy world linked to what they were trying to sell. Soon modern advertising would not be possible without the power of photography to engage and motivate. Photographs came to dominate print advertising and look down on the nation from huge billboards.

In thirty short years, we were awash in photographs and yet the full impact of this new medium had yet to be felt. The series will show that our image-obsessed century was just beginning.

PROGRAM TWO - 1935-1959

• DAN CZITROM: By 1930, people really think that the photograph is the most trustworthy source of information. It's the thing they want most. It's the thing they believe in most. There's no question that most ordinary Americans have been socialized in a way that says that seeing is believing, and the photograph is the most accurate way to see.
• HAL BUELL: A Photograph has a certain selective nature that will take an instant and lift it up out of the ordinary. It can make bumps in history that you wouldn't find if it were not for photography.
• JERRY DELLA FEMINA: ...That moment in time when that Spanish Civil War soldier is shot and bends back. Can you ever erase that image from your mind? Can anyone ever say, "alright I saw it, I don't have to see it again? I don't remember"?

The government, as well, exploited the power of photography. The country was in the middle of a Depression, and several government agencies used photography as a means of both documenting the widespread suffering and getting the country to support massive programs of government intervention in the economy. As we see in this series, the dream of the early reformers was coming true -- photographs carried with them powerful emotions and powerful messages. Presented in the right way, they could and did change the country.

In World War II, another war fought far from home, everything came together. The government, the wire services, and the picture magazines used the power of photography to rally the country to the cause. This was to be the last war to be seen by the public almost exclusively through vivid still pictures. Nowadays when we visualize this war, we still see it frozen in a series of iconic images.

With both the war and the Depression over, came a new style of fashion photography. Everyone could now afford to be in style and radical innovations in fashion photography appearing in an explosion of popular fashion magazines, showed them, not only how to dress, but who to be.

If anyone still doubted the raw expressive power of photography in 1955, they would be overwhelmed by a photographic show first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, later in a travelling exhibition around the country, and then around the world. As an exhibit, and as a book, The Family of Man remains the most widely seen collection of photographs in the history of the world. In the universal language of pictures, it conveyed the simple but powerful message that under the skin, all of humanity is driven by the same hopes, fears and desires. Coming in the midst of the Cold War and the under the threat of nuclear annihilation, these pictures would profoundly affect an entire generation which would, in turn, profoundly change the decade to come.

In a sense, the power the of photography to sell, first shown in the 1920s, was truly unleashed during the prosperity of the 1950s. Both the advertising and copy pages of the newspapers and the picture magazines packaged this new prosperity and idealized images of the American way of life. The pictures are both the icons and the models, the shining all-white kitchens inhabited by the perfect all white family. But there was another America, a dark side of racial strife, poverty and alienation. This America was beginning to be captured by a new movement of individual photographic artists. As the next program will show, their view of the other America will be highly influential in the turbulent times ahead.

PROGRAM THREE 1960-1999

• GRAHAM NASH: I think the frozenness of the image, representing exactly what it was that was going on is more powerful than seeing a movie of it. When you capture a tremendously brilliant image, you have frozen the very essence of what it was that was going on. And it only gives you this much of a slice of what was going on, but it was the right slice.

  In this final program, we explore the enormous influence which individual photographs have had on the later part of this century. We hear from the Ladner sisters, activists in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and how photographs helped get their story out to a national and then an international audience.

  Vietnam may have been the first television war but as Hal Buell formerly of Associated Press remind us: "still pictures, had a much greater impact on American readers than the television did. No war will ever be covered the way the Vietnam war was covered. There was no censorship in Vietnam of any kind, photographers had greater access to that war then they did either Korea or World War II. And it was that intimacy with the war that came through that has not come through in any other war photography before or since."

  There was, of-course, an ecology movement before the photograph of the earth rising over the barren landscape of the moon but as Stuart Brand who had agitated for that picture explains: "The planet seeing itself from the outside was a major self-realization of its existence as a planet, as both a beautiful thing, and a fragile thing."

  During this program we will begin to see the fact that this is an era where the images are, at once, most carefully controlled and most out of control. This is the time of the photo-op. Politicians and leaders stand on marks on the floor, with lighting and background carefully preplanned by the image makers.

• MIKE DEAVER: There are photographs, obviously, millions of them that just happen that are very dramatic. That there is no pre thought to the photograph. It's instant and it happens. It's an action. That is the last thing I ever wanted to happen when I was in the White House. I didn't want any kind of a surprise. So, everything I did was preplanned, premeditated.

  At the beginning of this century, the photographic image was a great rarity, a stiff studio picture of mother, the occasional murky illustration in a magazine. Now they are instantly available and everywhere.

• DAVID FRIEND - EDITOR: There are some statistic that the average urbanite sees something like 11,000 images a day, that there are 46 million pictures taken by Americans every year. You would think that this dilutes the power of the individual picture. I disagree. I think that this proliferation of pictures has made us more comfortable looking at pictures. There are certain cultures that look at calligraphy and they understand the nuance. We understand the nuance of pictures. We understand when a picture's telling the truth.

  Photographic images, printed images, enhanced digital images, images coded in electrons on the internet, embossed in plastic on buttons, milk cartons, posters, stickers and credit cards. Photographs dyed onto tee shirts. They are now everywhere, the have become like the air we breath, and like the air, their influence is at once pervasive and very difficult to see. As this program will conclude, the still image retains its raw power to reach our emotions directly, to grab us in the gut. We are moved by pictures, profoundly influenced by pictures, but now there are so many of them pulling us in so many directions that this influence has become almost impossible to measure.

  One thing is clear -- despite new technologies, still images, whether they are captured in electrons or the photographic emulsion, will endure.

  As Jerry Della Femina reminds us at the end of the series. "photographs are what we were, and what we are, and what we're going to be. Imagine that there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? How my mother look when she graduated from junior high school on Mott Street? It links us all. It keeps us all together. It's really what our history is."

BROADCAST DATE: Wednesday October 13, 1999 (check your local PBS station for the time of broadcast)

PROGRAM CREDITS:

PRODUCERS/DIRECTORS: Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde
SERIES WRITER: Ronald H. Blumer
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: John Schott
EXECUTIVE IN CHARGE OF PRODUCTION: Gerald Richman
CO-PRODUCERS: Ronald H. Blumer & Sharon Sachs
EDITORS: Sharon Sachs, Eric Davies, Kathleen Dougherty
KEY ADVISORS: Vicki Goldberg, Robert Silberman
A PRODUCTION OF: KTCA/Twin Cities Public Television in
association with Middlemarch Films.