Moments in time
Dirck Halstead
Few people in photojournalism can carry the title of “Legend.” Dirck Halstead may be one of those. At the age of 17 he talked LIFE Magazine into sending him to Guatemala to cover the CIA-led war against the Communist leader, Jacobo Arbenz. That resulted in a double truck spread in the magazine, and a pub letter the next week calling him “Life’s youngest war photographer”. In 15 years with United Press International he started the UPI photo bureau in Saigon and spent two years directing and photographing coverage of the Vietnam War. He was one of six photographers selected to accompany President Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972. Later that spring, he accepted a contract to join TIME Magazine, and over the next 29 years covered stories all over the world, and wound up becoming Time’s Senior White House photographer covering every US president from Kennedy to Clinton. In addition to his work for TIME, between wars and the coverage of the White House, he turned his lens towards the movies, and did more than three dozen campaigns for major movies, contributing to our shared cultural history and rounding out a remarkable career. In 2002, he was invited to become a Senior Fellow at the Center of American History at the University of Texas in Austin, where he now lives.
Preview
At an age when most people would be happily entering on retirement, he has turned his attention to being a force for change in the industry he loves. In 1997, he created “The Digital Journalist”, an online monthly magazine for photojournalism, which is read by more than a million viewers all over the world. He helped to start “Video News International”, which started a revolution in television news, by teaching photojournalists how to use the new HI 8 video cameras. In 1999, he created “The Platypus Workshops”, which took the concept even further. He has conducted 18 of these two-week workshops to train photojournalists in video. In the past two years, as the media have changed, the audience for these workshops has become predominately newspapers as they recognize the need to train their staff in video for their web sites. The exhibition “Moments in Time” is based on his book, which was published by Abrams early this year. It is a look back at the turning points in the last half of the 20th century.
