Errol Morris

Editor’s note: The seventh annual Hitchens Prize was awarded to the filmmaker Errol Morris at a dinner on April 10 in New York City. The award is given by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation in association with The Atlantic, where Christopher Hitchens was a contributing editor. The Atlantic is joined by Air Mail. The award was given originally in association with Vanity Fair, whose editor, Graydon Carter, now Air Mail’s co-editor, where Hitchens was also a columnist and contributing editor.

“Anatomy of a Photograph” is an occasional series in which we assess visual meaning in a hyper-recorded world.“God, forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system.”  — Mary Chesnut’s Diary, on the eve of the Civil War, March 1861Pick almost any recent event. In all likelihood, an extraordinary amount of visual evidence of it will exist. Body cameras, cellphone cameras, news cameras, traffic cameras. Cameras everywhere.