How do photojournalists get the pictures that bring us the action from the world's most dangerous places? How do picture editors decide which photos to scrap and which to feature on the front page? Find out in Get the Picture, a personal history of fifty years of photojournalism by one of the top journalists of the twentieth century. John G. Morris brought us many of the images that defined our era, from photos of the London air raids and the D-Day landing during World War II to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He tells us the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures like these, which are reproduced in this book, and provides intimate and revealing portraits of the men and women who shot them, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith. A firm believer in the power of images to educate and persuade, Morris nevertheless warns of the tremendous threats posed to photojournalists today by increasingly chaotic wars and the growing commercialism in publishing, the siren song of money that leads editors to seek pictures that sell copies rather than those that can change the way we see the world.
In "Twice Upon a Time," Professor John Morris takes us back to his roots in New Amsterdam, Guyana, South America and leads us forward on a tortuous, convoluted journey of danger and deception from Puerto Rico to New York, Washington D.C., Maryland, Toronto, Anguilla, St. Thomas, Brazil and back to Guyana with poems and prose filled with courage and wisdom. --
In an anthology spanning 40 years of observation and reflection, John Morris brings a man of the world's wry and informed sensibilities to issues great and small. Ichabod is both a scream that cries "I am" and a contemplative servies of essays disguised as poems." -- Back of book.
With a bow to recent masters like Justice, Wright, and even Nemerov, John Morris's poems explore the uncertain footing of middle age. The characters we meet are clear-eyed, straight-faced, occasionally nonplussed. They're uncertain of their allegiance to either comfort or anguish. And their ciphering of the debts and credits of their days creates little dramas we can recognize as something like our own. Cars are "rust-colored, late-modeled;" poems "twist into failing origami;" and an old high school yearbook "needs a vacation. It needs a drink." The lines dissect moments and events as if each implication must be given its due. Sentences surprise and involve us, somehow intuiting their own inevitable ends. Richard Terrill, author of Fakebook and Coming Late to Rachmaninoff This is the new West--harsh sunlight shining onto office complexes and strip malls and--just past the purview of respectable people--onto pawn shops, Indian casinos and meth labs too. These elegiac poems describe the loneliness of eking out a decent life in an inhospitable context, keeping lassitude at bay, the depleted sense your recent last shot at joy, your grief over someone's death by natural causes, the meted-out unhappiness that is our human portion, constitute problems too small, too merely ordinary, to matter. These poems depict transgression and desperation in local headlines but also the transgression and desperation we find as we examine our own quiet, obedient lives. Even while Noise and Stories mines this vein of mute despair, it celebrates life's constancy, its "motion, texture, smack, & murmur." Debra Monroe, author of Newfangled and Shambles John Morris is a poet of great versatility, sensitivity, and perception. He takes a moment from our lives, crystallizes it into forever. This is lovely work. Rilla Askew, author of Fire In Beulah and Harpsong John Graves Morris' first collection of poems is a work of many years where music and image clock one another for all the surprise and sharp edges that poetic voice admits to-these sometimes elevated and lyric voices are both true and memorable. What a wonderful volume. Norman Dubie, author of Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum and The Insomniac Liar of Topo
CULTURAL WRITING. MEMOIR. THEN: ESSAYS IN RECONSTRUCTION is a memoir on which John N. Morris was working at the time of his death. Morris was a poet, essayist and scholar of eighteen-century English literature. "The memoir is perhaps the most naked literary expression of ourreluctance to keep to ourselves the self we so desperately seek toidentify. These two reconciling ambitions account for the urgency thatlies behind all autobiography. They lie at the heart of John Morris'sThen, a work wisely and accurately subtitled Essays in Reconstruction"-Wayne Fields.
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