A picture, indeed, is worth a thousand words.


What prompted this cliché? Strangely enough, an item I heard on the radio, about a certain senator who was planning a fund-raiser in a private home, safely shut away from prying cameras.


Which got me to thinking about Wendell Willkie.


Now, chances are, you’ve never heard of Wendell Willkie, or, if you have, you’ve just thought about him for the first time in 60 years. As for me, the man died almost 20 years before I was born.


Willkie was an unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate who ran against the unstoppable incumbent president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. Willkie’s campaign went nowhere, but it left as its legacy a classic photo in the old “Life” magazine of Willkie standing tall in a big black open-top car as he waved to cheering crowds in some Norman Rockwell-like town in the Midwest.


It looked like something in an MGM movie, and the only reason I know about it is because I own an old coffee-table book called “The Best of Life,” which chronicles several decades of iconic photographs from that mid-20th-century magazine. The Willkie picture is one of those images; and though the guy lost, his stab at greatness in that one moment says something about the grandeur of politics, when men — and, sorry, it was, in those days, men — looked larger than life when running for office.


But allow me to get back on track. My point being that there are frozen photographic images that will linger in the collective memory long after the age of Instant Image Every 30 Seconds fades away.


Those of you under 30 — or maybe 40 — might as well stop reading here. As for the rest of us, close your eyes for a second after I mention the following and picture what comes to mind:


Lee Harvey Oswald being shot.


The Hindenburg.


The kneeling girl at Kent State.


Iwo Jima.


VJ Day, Times Square.


The man in Boston stabbing another man with a pole bearing the American flag.


Birmingham, and the police dogs.


For those of us who are not so old, the fireman and the baby at Oklahoma City. And the three firefighters at Ground Zero.


See, it’s not so difficult, is it? I’d like to bet even you kids know what I’m talking about.


Today, it seems, the cameras are on the run, jockeying for position to capture images of Paris Hilton. I’m not a photographer, but I don’t like to think that this will be the photographic legacy of our time.


Someone once called architecture “frozen music.”

Photography, then, could be called the “frozen art” — not frozen in a negative sense, but still and timeless, in a world where we are bombarded with visual stimulation. We see everything, every day; but, really, how much do we remember?


There’s going to be a presidential election in a couple of years. Maybe we will, indeed, get to see that Great Photo, even if it’s of somebody who loses.


Surely Wendell Willkie would smile.




Stephen Kopfinger is a Sunday News staff writer. Contact him at skopfinger@lnpnews.com or at 291-8799 blog comments powered by Disqus