Nice interview by Boston Herald photographer Mark Garfinkel with former Boston Herald American photographer Stanley Forman to mark the 40th anniversary of Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showing an African-American lawyer, Theodore Landsmark, being attacked by a white anti-busing protester wielding an American flag. Forman tells Garfinkel:
I took the image and followed the group to Post Office Square not realizing the impact the image had. Herald American reporter Joe Driscoll caught up with me in the Square telling me about [what happened] via the AP wire and he was dispatched from the office. I said, “I have the photo of it!” Of course I had no idea what I had gotten. I knew I had motor drive trouble and there was no instant looking at the back of your camera 40 years ago.
Forman, who’s been a videographer with WCVB-TV (Channel 5) for many years, won two individual Pulitzers with the Herald American. (He was part of a team Pulitzer as well.) The two individual awards were for news photos that are among the most iconic in Boston’s history—the Landsmark image, taken in 1976, and, the year before, a picture of a 19-year-old woman and a 2-year-old girl falling from a fire escape. The 19-year-old later died.
You can see both photos here. Also, the Herald‘s Jack Encarnacao recently spoke with Landsmark about the effect of Forman’s photo.
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In case you think a good news photo is simply a matter of pushing a button, there is planning and discipline that goes into those shots. I heard Forman speak, decades ago. He told of an incident where a man was pinned in an MBTA station in Southie. Forman ran down the stairs, jumped the turnstile, stopped 8 feet short of the scene and took the pic. An MBTA cop turned and yelled for him to get out, and he did. But he had the pic. He had pre-focused for 8 feet, and he knew that.