Summer of '69

摘要

ON JULY16,1969,as Apollo 11 prepared for liftoff, the banks of the nearby Indian River in Titusville, Florida, some seven miles from the launch pad, were crowded with hundreds of thousands of citizens who had come to see history being made. I was a 22-year-old photographer for Time magazine. My idea for pictures wasn't simply to follow the rocket from launch pad to a distant point of flame in the sky. I chose instead to aim my cameras at this gathering of the faithful. After the calamities of 1968 (the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War), the Apollo mission gave a weary public an awe-inspiring event to share with loved ones.