Carol Guzy: Visual Storyteller

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

Film, Politics, Arts, Self-help, Sports, Society & Culture, Success, Literature, Humanitarian, Military, Social Justice, Technology, Podcast, Achievement, Music, Science

4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are only a handful of people who've won four Pulitzer Prizes. One of them is photo-journalist Carol Guzy. She has spent most of her life using her compassionate and creative eye to document the stories of people affected by violence, war and disaster in places such as Haiti, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Syria and Iraq. But she's paid a steep personal price for doing her work. In this revealing episode, she talks candidly about the PTSD, depression and lung damage that she struggles with. She describes why it's all been worth it, and tells the stories behind some of her most iconic images. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2021

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, it's Alice.
0:02.0	The first person to win four Pulitzer Prizes was poet-fryst.
0:09.0	He crossed that milestone in 1943.
0:12.0	By 1957, two others had done the same, both of them playwrights, Eugene
0:17.8	O'Neill and Robert Sherwood. But then five and a half decades passed before another person would achieve that distinction.
0:26.0	That person was Carol Guzy.
0:29.0	If you don't recognize her name, don't worry, photojournalists bring us the world in very immediate, profound ways, sometimes
0:37.4	making us gasp or cry, sometimes making us laugh, sometimes spurring us to action, but most of us never bothered to look at the
0:46.2	tiny credits below that let us know who was on the other side of the lens.
0:51.8	It's never been a job. It's been my life. It's literally my reason for being here. My legacy, what I'll leave behind are hopefully these pictures and perhaps a little enlightenment knowledge, you know, bit of history for my little part of the puzzle that I've documented over the course of a lifetime.
1:11.0	That crazy naive idea where we all start off in journalism thinking could change the world.
1:16.7	I mean that after you see inhumanity over and over again or history repeating itself that gets dulled but I think never that underlying hope that it
1:28.0	will make a difference. Picture here, story there, it'll make the difference even if it's for one person on one day.
1:40.0	Carol Guzy is one of the great photojournalists, as you might surmise from her four pollsters.
1:46.5	She was also the first woman to receive the newspaper photographer of the year award.
1:52.3	Like most photojournalists, Carol Guzy has covered
1:55.6	an awful lot of suffering. She's documented devastation in Colombia, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Louisiana, and too many other places to mention,
2:08.0	and she herself has suffered, is still suffering from all she has seen and experienced.
2:15.0	So while we will celebrate the life of this gifted photographer on her episode today,
2:20.0	we'll also dig into the dark with her about the personal price that many journalists pay for the important work they do.
2:28.0	This is what it takes a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement.
2:37.0	I'm Alice Winkler.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Academy of Achievement, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Academy of Achievement and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.