I remember where I was that day, I was upstate in a bar
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The team from the university was playing football on TV
Then the screen went dead and the announcer said,
''There's been a tragedy
There's are unconfirmed reports the president's been shot
and he may be dead or dying.''
Talking stopped, someone shouted, ''What!?''
I ran out to the street
People were gathered everywhere saying,
did you hear what they said on TV
And then a guy in a Porsche with his radio hit his horn
and told us the news
He said, ''The president's dead, he was shot twice in the head
in Dallas, and they don't know by whom.''
- Lou Reed, 1942-2013
Where were you the day the president died? My recollection is a little foggy. I had just turned three and wasn't that heavily into international affairs at the time. I do recall the assassination of JFK's brother, Bobby, five years later, however. It was just after lunch in June 1968, and I was helping mum wash up in the kitchen of our flat.
The ABC news came on and suddenly mum exclaimed: ''My God, they've got the other one.'' I'm not entirely sure who ''they'' were meant to be and never got around in later life to asking mum if she subscribed to one of the many conspiracy theories that were prevalent at the time.
The reason I delve into these hazy childhood memories is that Friday marks the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas.
There is, remarkably, a contemporary Canberra connection to this event courtesy of the Richard Avedon exhibition now in its final days at the National Portrait Gallery.
I suspect that while the fame (and in some cases notoriety) of the celebrity snapper's better known subjects has attracted many people to the show, most visitors would be quickly seduced by Avedon's documentary work. His brilliant narrative pictures and candid portraits of ordinary people doing ordinary things are a people watcher's delight.
A case in point are the shots he took for Life magazine in Harlem in the late 1940s. Avedon, apparently concerned some of the images might be viewed as exploitative, handed his retainer back and did not publish the images until half a century later by which time they were of historic significance.
These, along with his images of inmates at the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital and photographs of the early days of the American Civil Rights movement, reveal a deep fascination with society's outliers and deep-seated principles of social justice.
Few of his better-known portraits, which frequently come across as conscious collaborations with the subject to present an image rather than a deeper truth, have the same visceral sense of power.
To my mind the most compelling image on display is of a New Yorker, a woman of a certain age, staring straight into the camera and holding up her copy of the New York World-Telegram, a long-defunct afternoon broadsheet.
The dateline is Friday, November 22, 1963, and the headline reads ''President Shot Dead''. The first paragraph, clearly readable in the Avedon print, states: ''Dallas, November 22. Two priests stepped out of Parkland Hospital's emergency ward today and said President Kennedy died of his bullet wounds.''
It is not the newspaper that holds your attention, however; it is the face of the woman. A mask of sorrow and grief, her silent gaze captures the shock and pathos of an entire nation. The leader of the most powerful country in the world had just been gunned down in broad daylight in a busy street in front of thousands of people.
The world had changed and nobody knew what was going to happen next.
As with September 11 almost 40 years later, the legacy of the assassination still has the pundits and historians bickering. Who did it? Was Lee harvey Oswald acting alone? What would have been different if it hadn't happened? Whatever, Avedon has been able to capture the moment.
Given the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery ends on Sunday, my advice would be to catch it if you haven't already done so.
There is a lot more to this guy than pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and the Beatles.