It’s been busy at work — and getting busier, with an election coming up — but I took the time today to attend a special media preview of an exhibition of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in downtown Nashville. (Back when it was Nashville’s downtown post office, my grandfather was head of parcel post there.)
It was a great exhibit, and a wonderful opportunity to hear its curator tell us about some of her most meaningful photos. There are 134 photos in the exhibit — far too many to list here — but here are some memorable ones:
- Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
- The second plane hitting the World Trade Center. The photographer couldn’t get to his regular photo lab so he waited 90 minutes at a one-hour photo counter to see if the photos were sharp and usable.
- A charming photo — regardless of what you think of “Slick Willie” — of Bill Clinton leaning over a food court counter to talk at eye level to a little boy behind it.
- A heart-breaking photo of a woman embracing a headstone at a veterans’ cemetery
- The famous photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. I’m writing a general story about the exhibit but I’ve written a separate front page story about this photo — which was not staged, despite what you may have heard. A bizarre sequence of events and misunderstandings led to that story, and I try to repeat the way the curator untangled it.
- The famous photo of a Vietnam POW returning with his family running towards him on the tarmac. The irony is that his wife (who is smiling, somewhat, in the photo) was in the process of filing for divorce. But the children are obviously thrilled to see him.
- Babe Ruth walking away from the camera on the night the Yankees retired his number.
It was amazing how many of the photos had to do with Africa or other areas of the world stricken by famine or hardship.
It was an incredible exhibit. I missed a similar preview a month or two ago about the museum’s exhibit of ancient Egyptian treasures, but I got to see it for free today, and it, too, was breathtaking. The Pulitzer Prize exhibit will only be in Nashville through Aug. 20, but the Egypt exhibit will be in town until Oct. 8, which means those of you in Middle Tennessee have no excuse not to see it.