Featured post from our Tumblr project, theamericannow: Take a...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:15:06 -0400

Featured post from our Tumblr project, theamericannow:

Take a closer look at this photo…

Photographer and Vietnam vet Joe Cantrell took this photo of a crane lowering The Three Soldiers — the statue positioned near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — into position. He snapped the photo on a visit to D.C. in 1984.

“It has had very strong effects on other vets who’ve seen it,” he says about the image, which he thinks of as a sort of self portrait. It also evokes, for him, “a multiple crucifixion” or a lynching. “The elephant in the room,” he says, “is the way we vets were treated here by our own people.”

Cantrell sent the photo and shared his thoughts in response to my Public Insight Network query, sparked by the previously unseen photographs from Vietnam just published by Newsweek. You can see more of Joe’s photos here. (Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel. 3.21.12)

See what we’re up to at Dispatches from the American Now,...

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 15:09:00 -0400

See what we’re up to at Dispatches from the American Now, a Tumblr project of the Public Insight Network, American Public Media and these four journalists.