Showing posts with label anti-busing protests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-busing protests. Show all posts

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Photographer Stanley Forman discusses his iconic Anti-Busing photograph with subject Ted Landsmark

 


Ted Landsmark was an attorney going to a meeting at City Hall who came face-to-face with protesters. The clash was captured in this iconic photo by now WCVB photojournalist Stanley Forman.


Men behind iconic Boston photograph to be part of Antique Roadshow special

Hide Transcript Show Transcript -- THAT TOOK THAT PICTURE NEWSCENTER 5 PHOTOJOURNALIST STANLEY FORMAN MET UP AT THE , SPOT WHERE THAT PHOTO WAS TAKEN. NEWSCENTER 5'S MATT REED WAS THERE. >> IT'S FUNNY LOOKING BACK THE PICTURE, TAKES ME BACK TO THAT DAY MORE THAN MY MEMORY DOES.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

THAT'S ME IN THE PICTURE

That;s me: Ted Landsmark


That’s me in the picture: Ted Landsmark is assaulted in Boston, at an ‘anti-bussing’ protest, 5 April 1976 via The Guardian


View this photograph at the AIPAD Photography Show, Monroe gallery of Photography, Booth #119, April 15 - 19 2015







"38 years ago today I won my second Pulitzer. I recently found this clip (I have lots of clips but where they are nobody knows, including me). With the help of my friend Scott Ryder we copied a lot of stuff lately.

It was Marathon Day, April 18, 1977. The Marathon back then began at noon. I raced (by car) back to the finish line at the Prudential Building after covering the start in Hopkinton. The winners would start showing up around 2:10.

The Pulitzers were historically announced the first Monday in May so I had no clue why I was summoned back to the office immediately. It was a very exciting day."  --Stanley Forman

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Stanley Forman talks about bearing witness to the news, being the first on the scene, and the importance of photography

Credit Stanley Forman
The flag turns into a weapon in fight outside City Hall during the busing riots in 1976. Forman won a Pulitzer Prize for for this photograph

Via WGBH

Photojournalist Stanley Forman has been at the scene of most of Boston’s news events for the past 40 years, capturing iconic images that define the people and places in those stories. His work has earned him three Pulitzer Prizes, and he’s now working on a book entitled “Before Yellow Tape: A Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Fire Images.”

Forman sat down with Emily Rooney to talk about bearing witness to the news, being the first on the scene, and the importance of photography.



On becoming a photojournalist…

As a kid, I [followed] the sirens, the blue lights, the red lights. And finally, when I was around eighteen, my father said, “You go to all these things — why don’t you take a camera?” I thought I was going to be a firefighter. But he gave me a camera, and I got interested in photography, and I was very lucky.

On covering fires today…

You don’t have the access. I get to a fire, forget yellow tape — no matter what it is — you just don’t have the access that we had in the ‘60s, the ‘70s, the ‘80s. Everything has changed. I blame [changes in access] on O.J. Simpson, because everything changed after the mistakes they made at the scene.

On technology turning everyone into a photographer…

I’m self publishing — I know nothing about publishing … Anything you want to do in this digital age, you can become it. Do I like everyone taking pictures? I’m beat before I get there. No, I don’t like it … I’d like to think my framing is better than the guy with the iPhone, or the woman with the iPhone, but they have the image. Everything gets used.

On moving from the Boston Herald to Channel 5 in the ‘80s…

You cover news … with a still camera or a video camera. You use a Phillips screwdriver or a standard screwdriver. I’m still covering news, and that’s the most important thing to me.

Credit Stanley Forman
Fireman rescue Tammi Brownlee from a burning building in South Boston, 1977
 
 
 
 
Credit Stanley Forman
Evacuating horses from a burning stable at Suffolk Downs
 
 
 
 

Friday, September 2, 2011

LABOR DAY


Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (Time Inc.)
Carl Mydans: Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (Time Inc.)

WPA picketers protesting against nationwide layoffs and reduction of hourly wages of WPA workers in 1937 due to reduced funding from Congress.


Related: The History of Labor Day






Friday, July 15, 2011

"The Soiling of Old Glory”: The Power of a Photograph



The Soiling of Old Glory



“The Soiling of Old Glory”: The Power of a Photograph Lecture by Louis Masur

Thursday, July 14 7-9pm
Fairfield Museum and History Center, Fairfield, CT
$8; Members and Students, $3
To register in advance, call 203-259-1598.

Join us for Trinity College Professor Louis Masur’s engaging discussion of The Soiling of Old Glory, a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by Stanley Forman. Learn how an harrowing image of an angry white teenager brandishing an American flag at an African-American man crystallized complex issues about forced busing.


Fairfield Museum IMAGES


Taken in April of 1976, the photograph is of Theodore Landsmark, an African American lawyer heading to Boston's city hall for a case. Here he encountered over one hundred and fifty anti-busing youths from South Boston and Charleston protesting the decision to bus in students from Roxbury, an African American suburb. Entering into this, Landsmark was attacked, ironically, with an American flag, in Boston, home of the Revolution, on the 200th anniversary of the United States. The photo won freelance photographer Stanley J. Forman of the Boston Herald American a Pulitzer Prize.


On April 5, 1976, Stanley Forman, age 30, reported to work early, as he always did. A photographer for the Boston Herald American, Forman had a nose for the news. A year before he had raced to a fire in Boston and captured a horrifying moment as a fire escape gave way and a woman and girl plunged to the ground. The photograph was reprinted around the world and led to changes in fire safety codes.

Sitting at the city desk that April morning, Forman asked what was going on and his editor dispatched him to City Hall Plaza where an anti-busing protest was under way. As Forman arrived at the scene, he saw the group coming towards him. He also saw a black man walking across the plaza and sensed there might be trouble. Forman was too close to get a picture with the lenses on his two cameras, so he quickly changed to a 20mm lens. He started shooting, but heard the motor drive failing and he began taking single frames manually. The entire incident lasted ten or fifteen seconds; Forman took some twenty-odd shots, though a few of the negatives ran together. As he returned to the office, he had no idea what he had.

It did not take long to discover that the image of a protester wielding the American flag as a weapon to attack the man identified as Theodore Landsmark, an attorney, was a powerful one. Some editors feared that publishing it might inflame the already volatile racial situation in Boston. But it had happened, it was news, and, in the year of the bicentennial, it captured something profound about patriotism, race, and violence in America. The Boston Herald American ran it on the front page on April 6. The photograph appeared as well in the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other papers around the country.

A week or so after taking the photograph, Forman learned that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his fire escape picture the year before. As he prepared to submit the flag photograph for Pulitzer consideration a colleague suggested the title “The Soiling of Old Glory.” It is an ideal title for a stunning spot news photograph. In April 1977, Forman learned that he had again won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on that April day. Two years later, he was part of the staff that won the Prize for coverage of the blizzard of 1978. The most accomplished spot news photographer of his era, Forman is now an equally accomplished, award-winning television news photographer.

Louis P. Masur
Trinity College