Document Type
Review
Publication Date
1995
Abstract
Rarely is an image of the actual moment of death captured and preserved. When it is, as in the famous photographs of President John F Kennedy's assassination or of the summary execution of a Viet Cong officer by a South Vietnamese police chief,4 it is haunting. Even photographs of the moment before sudden death have great power-whether death is totally unexpected (as in a photograph of Luis Donaldo Colosio campaigning for the presidency of Mexico just before his assassination'), planned (as in a photograph of a man bound in an electric chair awaiting execution6 ), or in doubt and anticipated with dread (as in the photograph of a South African white supremacist pleading for his life shortly before being shot to death by a black police officer in Mmbatho, South Africa7). To some extent the photograph itself might tell us what is about to happen; to some extent we might need extrinsic information to understand the full story.' In either case, forward-looking knowledge is the principal source of the photograph's power.
Recommended Citation
Friedman, Richard D. "Still Photographs in the Flow of Time." Review of Evidence, by L. Sante. Yale J. L. & Human. 7, no. 1 (1995): 243-65.
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