The documentary film, “Looking for an Icon” opens this week (if you live in a major market (and I don’t)). It’s a 55 minute look at four photographs that took top honors in the World Press Photo contest. World Press is hands-down the finest photojournalism competition in the world.
Here’s a clip from the movie review from the NYT:
This documentary by Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman about four World Press Photo contest winners defines icon to mean a still image so searing that it supplants memories of the event it was supposed to record. The selected pictures pass the test: a South Vietnamese brigadier general executing a Vietcong guerrilla in 1968; a 1973 image of President Salvador Allende of Chile, soon to be assassinated; the 1989 snapshot of a Chinese protestor blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square; and a 1991 Gulf War photograph of a United States soldier in a helicopter, weeping near the body of his best friend.
Can’t wait to see it. Whenever that is.
You can read the rest of the short review by clicking here. (requires free registration)