Tag: David Burnett

CLICK NOTE: Click on FEATURE GALLERY to see the photos. It’s VERY EASY to miss.
Link: 44 Days: A Revolution Revisited – The Digital Journalist:

In the case of these photographs, they have lived happily, cared for in the file cabinets at Contact Press Images in New York for the past three decades. Now and then a picture would be licensed but for the most part, as a body of work it remained relatively untouched. Then, about two years ago, I returned from a trip to find that a small conference room at the agency had been papered with 5″x7″ Xerox copies of dozens of photographs from the Revolution. They had been taped up in the timeline sequence they were shot in, and for the first time, I realized that I was looking at the whole story all at once. The progression of the story was laid out, and it made total sense. Jacques Menashe, a reporter with Contact, and Robert Pledge, the director, had, in my absence, put together this visual narrative in a way that really told the story. We worked from this point forward, sharpening details about what happened where, and on which day, cross referencing with both contemporary news accounts and books written about the Revolution. In the end, when we presented the package to the book division at National Geographic a year ago, it was pretty much ready to go. And once they signed on, there were dozens of little detail items that we wanted to make sure were right. Between those accounts, my caption envelopes, and my sometimes fading memory, we managed to structure the book layout in a form which tries to tell the story in the timeline that unfolded. It is a book of history. Yes, photography is memory, and whatever else is written about the Iranian Revolution, and the ways in which it became the precursor for much of what has happened in the Middle East in the last three decades, this book will remain to tell that story.