Some will break your heart.

Others bring a knowing smile.

Still others may move you - to write a letter, to call a family member, to reflect on good fortune in a world gone sometimes mad.

In every case, the pictures that have won the Pulitzer Prize for photography since 1942 will move you.

"This is an exhibit that is rife with the many lessons of history," said Barbara Koostra, director of the University of Montana's Montana Museum of Art and Culture. "There is something that will touch everyone, regardless of where you're coming from."

Some of the pictures are iconic. The naked, screaming little girl running down the street after a bombing goes astray in South Vietnam.

Babe Ruth standing at home plate in Yankee Stadium as his number is retired.

Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John Kennedy.

"The subject matter of this exhibition is truly international," Koostra said. "This is the world in all its glory and misery and joy. It's an exhibit that really engenders a special regard for the people who do journalism. They are capturing both life and death as it happens every day."

The exhibit was assembled by the Newseum, an interactive museum of news, working with the Business of Entertainment Inc.

The show includes all 143 pictures awarded the Pulitzer Prize since 1942.

The exhibition has played to large crowds across the country, and Koostra said she's already gotten interest from around Montana.

"We had a call from Froid the other day, so I think people are going to be willing to drive a while to see this exhibit," she said.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams described a great news picture this way: "If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture."

Adams, of course, took one of the iconic pictures, of a South Vietnam policeman shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head.

The picture showed the full horror of war, but Adams always maintained that he understood the police general's action.

"If you're this man, this general, and just caught this guy after he killed some of your people ... how do you know you wouldn't have pulled that trigger yourself," Adams said.

Part of what lends the exhibit its power are the explanations that accompany the photographs.

"It's a lot of material, with 143 photos and 143 panels accompanying, but those panels really lend a context to the work," Koostra said. "I think the way it's laid out in chronological order is really effective. It really moves you through history."

The panels make it clear that some of the photographs were functions of both luck and skill, while others arrived on the wings of talent and patience.

Take the photographs taken by Los Angeles Times lensman Don Bartletti, who followed teenagers from Mexico and Honduras trying to slip into the United States.

Bartletti hitched rides on freight trains for

more than 1,500 miles as he followed the youths, and he slept in a cardboard box on the banks of the

Rio Grande to await

their arrival.

The flip side is photographers like Stanley Forman, who worked for the Boston Herald American. Forman was nearing the end of his shift on July 22, 1975, when he heard a report of a fire in Boston's Back Bay area.

Forman arrived to find a woman and small child on a fire escape, a fireman climbing down from the roof to help them. Suddenly, the fire escape collapses. Forman's camera captured the falling victims, as well as a few potted plants that had been perched on the escape.

The woman died, but the little girl lived. Forman himself turned away before they hit the ground.

"Then a bell went off in my head," he said in a book that encompasses the exhibit. "I didn't want to see them hit."

To be sure, some of the photographs are nearly unbearable to see.

A starving Somalian child huddles on the ground as a looming vulture waits patiently.

An arm extends from a massive mudslide in Colombia.

A South African man attacks another man - a man who has already been set on fire - with a machete.

Others, however, will stir your soul.

A family runs to meet their father, who had been held as a prisoner of war.

A little boy smiles up at a helpful policeman.

The joy of a child being born.

"I think what this exhibit does is show humanity in all its faces," Koostra said. "There's really not an emotion that isn't somehow portrayed in these pictures."

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.