Standing on a crowded city sidewalk in D.C., I peered up at yet another tall, modern looking museum. I wedged myself further into the group of people around me, hoping that doing this would somehow make me a fraction of a degree warmer in the icy winter air. I began to walk through the doors of the building, my sole purpose being to get out of the freezing weather. Immediately I was entranced by what I saw. There were high ceilings that seemed to extend forever, breathtaking pieces of art hanging on walls in every direction, and endless staircases on either side of the enormous room. I aimlessly began following a group of people and noticed a small room off to the side entitled “Pulitzer Prize Photographs”. I stepped away from my group of peers and closer to the room noticing a quote in huge letters plastered across a blank wall. “If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture. ~Eddie Adams”. Intrigued by the statement displayed on the wall I walked further into the room to discover the photographs on display.

Instantly I forgot everything that was occupying my mind previous to that moment. I forgot the frigid weather, the people around me, and every superficial thought that had been crossing my mind a short minute ago. I was so completely captivated by the plethora of amazing photographs around me that I didn’t know where to begin. I walked at a snail like pace around the perimeter of the room absorbing every picture, completely mesmerized by the immense amount of emotion portrayed in each image. There were photographs capturing the triumph of the Marines raising an American flag in Iwo Jima, a small innocent
looking child being lifted over a barbed wire fence in order to escape conflict in Kosovo, an emaciated African child curled up in the sand in front of a vulture, two siblings embracing each other after the Columbine shooting, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk burning himself alive, and a woman injecting herself with heroin while her child remained forgotten in a chair behind her.

These images brought forth all of the things that I personally tend to distance myself from. Like many other human beings I feel that I tend to keep the problems occurring in the world at arms length; they are almost too much for me to think about. But in that very moment in the museum, my previously held mindset changed. For the first time in awhile I was stunned to silence and couldn’t peel my eyes off of the photos around me. I had never experienced something like these photographs before. It almost overwhelmed me to tears to see all of these human emotions so perfectly depicted in these still shots of humanity. Suffering, triumph, neglect, fear, and pure joy. Every single human emotion one could even dream of feeling was portrayed in every one of these images. Looking at these photographs made me feel as if I had just stepped out of my own life, and into the world of things I would never wish to think about. I stepped into a reality of awareness of the past and present conflicts in this world we live in.

Being in that room of the museum that day opened my eyes to the world around me. I suddenly experienced a new height of consciousness that was beyond the level of my own personal life. Those Pulitzer Prize winning images captured unbelievable, enthralling situations that depicted human conflict and exposed them to the world. Those images captivated my attention and emotions that chilly day in D.C. and I will forever have a new outlook because of them. The photographers of the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs I
viewed that day managed to bring about an endless amount of emotions in their work and in their audience. These amazing photographers revealed situations that the world rarely gets the chance to see; they captured humanity through a viewfinder.