Untitled, from the series Daily Photographs, 1969–1970, 1969–1970, Donald Blumberg, gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift in honor of the artist. © Donald Blumberg
Transcript
[poignant late 1960s guitar music]
Donald Blumberg There was an enormous pathos about the Vietnam War. People were devastated. They were absolutely devastated.
Everybody who went to Vietnam was taken. They were literally taken out of their life and dragged there. These pictures that I made were intended to somehow capture that distress that people were feeling.
[music ends]
Female Narrator For photographer Donald Blumberg, this distress was personal.
Donald Blumberg We would get the Buffalo Evening News every day and the stuff in the newspaper was horrific. I mean, it was just unbelievable. You couldn't believe that every time you opened up the paper there would be a picture of two young, 16 or 17-year-old Buffalo kids who were friends and got killed in Vietnam.
Female Narrator At this point, Blumberg gave up making photographs unless they were overtly political. To communicate his message, he began collecting newspaper articles.
Donald Blumberg I started clipping the articles and I started putting them in a box and I decided to re-photograph them. And the idea was to make large images that were inescapable to the viewer, and they were intended to be a record of what was going on during that period of time. They were supposed to be a direct political act.
[poignant late 1960s guitar music]
Female Narrator Though Blumberg didn’t alter the images, he enlarged them, then used the black frame that comes from printing a 35-millimeter negative for his own purposes.
Donald Blumberg When I was printing them, the black frame created a memorial. It had a funeral quality to it that these were dead people and these were injured people and this was a memorial to them based on that frame. These were supposed to be brutal propaganda photographs. That's what they were supposed to be.
[music ends]