Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. A little waer to corners. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Among the many thousands of images of John F. Kennedy one of the most striking barely shows the man at all. Instead the black-and-white photograph by Cornell Capa shows a placard-waving crowd surg- ing frantically toward JFK as if he were a matinee idol. To get his extraordinary shot of the crowd seen through a closeup of the candidate’s remarkably relaxed hands which members of the crowd were allowed to touch but not shake Capa had to place himself almost literally in Kennedy’s shoes. “IFK was standing on a flatbed truck in the parking lot of a mall” Capa recalls. “I was on the truck on my knees using a very wide-angle lens. I was trying to get lower and lower so that I could be on the level of the peo- ple’s faces. Before I knew it I was sitting on Kennedy’s shoes” Capa was fascinated by the highly charged ritual of the voter-candidate handshake and he wanted to zero in on that ritual in the midst of the frenzy. By doing so he gives the viewer a uniquely intense sen- sation of what it would feel like to be a man who pos- sessed such extraordinary charisma that people thronged to touch him. In Capa’s photograph the crowd’s enthusiastic adulation is so consuming that it almost begins to feel claustrophobic. Such psycho- (LL)