A couple of weeks ago, I went to a photo exhibit at the Minnesota Historical Society: Capture the Moment, The Pulitzer Prize Photographs. The images were amazing. I saw many of these images while studying to be a photojournalist, but for me a photo's impact is magnified when they are printed large for a musuem show and you can get up close. I am always amazed at howpowerful a still image can be and how images can evoke a physical and emotional response.

Michael Ignatieff seemed to some up this mysterious ability images have in his introduction to Magnum °.

Despite the coming of television, and the demise of the photo-weeklies, photography retained its ability to define the essential iconography of key historical experiences…Images seem inexhaustible in their capacity to disclose new information because, unlike film, they freeze experience as memory does and hold up time itself to examination. Television seems to tell us all everything we need to know. It drains reality of mystery by suggesting that what we see is all there is. Good photography restores the mystery of the world by stopping time so that we can both see and reflect upon what is there. Hence the unending strangeness of photography: that it both documents the world, establishes what is essentially there, while at the same time showing to us what we cannot see with our eyes alone. So if photography has a redeeming or cleansing effect on our vision, it is because it seems to restore both the reality of the world and its essential elusiveness.

Photographs give us time to see, to think, and while we will never know the whole truth of a situation we see, photos give us a window, a way to enter into others' lives and wonder what they may be like.