Regarding film, Moore recollected that the majority of his images for the civil rights movement were captured on Kodak Tri-X film, which he estimated and modified the exposure as needed, as there was no time for a light reading and his camera had an integrated light meter. Moore still valued being close to the action as much as possible: “My emotional connection is when I’m close up, when I am close in there, up there as close as I can be.”
By 1960, the majority of photojournalists were using just 35 mm cameras more and more, while it was usual to have several camera bodies, each with a different lens to accommodate a different distance or an aperture to react to a different amount of light. Editors urged magazine photographers to take many frames of an event in addition to offering them additional leeway in terms of deadlines and printed page space. This shooting mode was promoted by certain preset camera bodies. But in cases when cover had to be discrete, carrying many cameras wasn’t the best option. Moore talked about the photos he took that day and mentioned that he didn’t have much gear with him in Birmingham, mentioning only his 28 mm wide-angle lens.
After two days of the unrelenting wave of protesters flooding Birmingham’s streets, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor called in police dogs to brutally support his overburdened men. Five officers and at least as many dogs were occupying the crossing at a crosswalk close to Kelly Ingram Park and 16th Street Baptist Church, where hundreds had protested the hoses the day before. The protesters seemed to be spectators because of their relaxed demeanor and clean attire. Moore caught the exact moment a German shepherd signaled the line separating protest and authority.
The image, which was taken at an angle to the crossing, shows a man stopped in the middle of the roadway with the attack dog pulling back his torn trouser leg while he struggles to keep it on its leash. Though his lips are split, maybe in surprise or command, the policeman in charge of the leash looks down and doesn’t appear to have stopped the attack. The dog is about to bite the man’s buttocks in Moore’s subsequent shot as he bends forward midstride; a cop and another dog are joining the attack from behind.
With his body squared off perpendicular to the crossing, Moore has made the group of people gathered at the left side of the preceding frame look like a wall of bystanders. By the third frame, the first policeman’s dog has turned to confront Moore, so the two other dogs are left to attack him. One of the dogs bites the guy in the right buttock, while the other rushes for him, showing its bare fangs.
Moore intentionally avoided including the vertiginous horizon line and the initial officer and his dog’s foreground intrusion in favor of emphasizing the triangle formed by the two attacking dogs and the immobilized man. Generally, the images they created are prized for their historical significance as well as their ability to bring about political and cultural change, as Cox has argued. In other words, their value as social records is frequently valued more highly than their standing as critical or artistic depictions. However, every now and then, they deeply and sporadically reveal to us something we have never seen before—a viewpoint that inspires us to approach the topic and the world with fresh focus.
Moore’s carefully thought-out compositions in his dog attack photos from Birmingham accomplish this. Moore’s closeness to the events is evident because to the dog and policeman’s front presence, for instance. As Roberts and Klibanoff have pointed out, other photographers capture the first of these three pictures from the safety of the far curb, which lessens the scene’s immediate impact by a few feet.
Interestingly, Moore appears to feel just as intimidated by the police and dogs as he is by the protesters who are the background of his second shot. Numerous academics have contended that photojournalists, like Moore, were aware of the possibility of swaying their audience’s perceptions while framing their images. As Michaud put it so plainly, “Party planners and viewers are aware of each other’s activities and methods.”
Jorg Huber elaborates on the methodology underlying this perspective in the same catalogue on modern photojournalism. He notes that terms like “emotional impact,” “telling a story,” or “providing context” represent our “cultural patterns on which the interpretation of communication and information is based… act as a filter in the photographer’s mind and camera: pictures are created as the product of ideological programming.”
Furthermore, Huber goes on, “shooting a picture actually frequently means moving so fast that there is rarely time to wait for the ‘decisive moment’ or think through the specifics of the scenario beforehand. Photographers must not only react to the action they are shooting, but also replicate previously stored pictures in their minds due to the demands of spontaneity and intuition. While Huber mentions Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” which is the moment when lighting, subject, point of view, and framing come together to create a unique and definitive image, he also raises the possibility that some of these elements might go unnoticed in the rush to respond quickly.
As a result, the photographer works under accessible and readable guidelines, which in photojournalism serve as self-reinforcing mechanisms. Visually recognizable villains and heroes, like the numerous Birmingham police officers and dogs engaged in an attack on a single person, reinforce the codes of legibility and accessibility in images of war or political gatherings whose iconography and language frequently appear on civil rights photographs.