Ray Platnick
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Raphael Platnick (March 30, 1917 – November 1986) was an American photojournalist and newspaper photographer.
Raphael Platnick, known as Ray, was born in 1917, son of Samuel and Sarah (née Graubard) Platnick, and was the brother of Milton and Harriet. He was educated at Hempstead High School, Long Island and took up photography.
War photographer
During World War II, as Chief Photographer's Mate Platnick was one of the few Coast Guard combat photographers in the Pacific. He joined the first attackers on the beaches of Makin Island in August 1942 and in February 1944 scouted Japanese gun emplacements during the Battle of Eniwetok to warn Marines if they were occupied.[1] He photographed young marines, exhausted after two days and two nights of fighting, downing mugs of coffee.[2]
A February 19, 1944 portrait attributed to him[3][4][5][6] and made during the Battle, of United States Marine Corps Private Theodore James Miller (later killed there on March 24, 1944) boarding the Coast Guard-manned attack transport USS Arthur Middleton presents a famous example of the traumatised expression of combat fatigue.
In 1955 Edward Steichen selected Platnick's picture of a slain soldier on Eniwetok[7][8] for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man seen by 9 million visitors. The man rests face down with the back of his shirt ripped open,[9] having slid to the bottom of a trench atop which his rifle is planted, bayonet-first, into the sand. Accompanying the photograph were the printed words of Sophocles' rhetorical question; ‘Who is the slayer, who the victim? Speak!’.[10] Cropped and enlarged as a tall ‘exclamation-mark’ at 228.7 × 81.3 cm, the photograph stood by the entrance to a darkened room which housed a giant back-lit colour transparency (in the original in New York, replaced by a monochrome print at other venues) of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test, also on Eniwetok Atoll.[11]
