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A lifetime of telling stories with pictures
In this story:
April 17, 1997
Web posted at: 10:30 p.m. EDT
From Correspondent Mary Ann McGann
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans was aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II.
He remembers one senior Japanese officer in civilian clothes.
"As he came across the deck, tapping the deck with his cane, the entire ship was absolutely silent," Mydans recalls. "And the sound of him coming to surrender his country -- tap, tap, tap -- affected me greatly. And my vindictive feelings about him vanished."
Mydans also accompanied Gen. Douglas MacArthur when he strode ashore at the Philippines in 1945.
"I found him an impressive man, and a very difficult man," Mydans says.
Mydans was taken prisoner while covering the war, and spent nearly two years in a prison camp in the Philippines. He later returned to take photos that captured the horror of that camp.
Mydans turns 90 next month, and his work is the subject of an upcoming exhibit in New York.
'Carl Mydans is a humanist photographer'
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"Carl Mydans is a humanist photographer," says Sidney Monroe of the Soho Triad Fine Arts gallery. "I think he captures the human drama of both everyday events and of historical events."
Mydans' first job as a photographer was with the Farm Security Administration in 1936, a government agency established during the Great Depression to help poor farm workers.
His role was to photograph poverty in rural areas and publicize the need for government aid. To a man born and raised in New England, a man who had never been away from home, it was an eye-opening experience.
"I saw people and things and farming and ways of life and kinds of speech that were all new to me," he says. "And I realized how big and how wonderful America was."
Of the photographs Mydans shot during that period, Monroe says, "You really see dignity within people who are living through the most horrific of times."
Photos span many subjects
Mydans was not just a documentary photographer, however. He also shot landscapes, including a moody, evocative shot taken in Wales that will be included in the exhibit.
"It's very silent, it's very quiet," says Monroe, "but it speaks volumes about the Earth and about photography."
Other photos in the exhibit include a French woman accused of sleeping with German soldiers, and a so-called 'chain-gang' of New York Stock Exchange officials carrying valuable securities to banks.
Ultimately, what the exhibit will reveal is not just a photographer, but a sensibility finely tuned to the moment and to context.
"What I am," says Mydans, "is a storyteller."
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