The Royals … as Cecil Beaton saw them

In addition to being a great and iconoclastic photographer, Cecil Beaton was an inveterate diarist. He was also, for forty years, the premier royal photographer, having cemented his friendship with Elizabeth, The Queen Mother at his very first sitting, which was supposed to last 20 minutes but lasted 3 hours.

He remembers his first call from the royal household in July 1939:

The telephone rang, “This is the lady-in-waiting speaking. The Queen [The Queen Mother] wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon.” At first, I thought it might be a practical joke — the sort of thing Oliver [Messel, his friend and rival] might do. but it was no joke. My pleasure and excitement were overwhelming. In choosing me to take her photographs, the Queen made a daring innovation. It is inconceivable that her predecessor would have summoned me – my work was still considered revolutionary and unconventional.

On his first visit, he wrote:

When I entered the gates of Buckingham Palace for the first time…I was determined that my photographs should give some hint of the incandescent complexion, the brilliant thrush-like eyes and radiant smile, which are such important contributions to the dazzling effect she creates in life. I wanted so much that these should be different from the formal, somewhat anonymous-looking photographs…that had until then been taken of the Royal Family.

Previously when he photographed The Duke of Windsor the day before the latter’s wedding to Mrs. Wallis Simpson, he showed his keen attention to detail and irreverence:

His expression, though intent, was essentially sad, tragic eyes belied by impertinent tilt of nose. He has common hands - like a little mechanic – weather-beaten and rather scaly and one thumb’nail is disfigured. His hair at 45 is as golden and thick as it was at 16. His eyes fiercely blue do not seem to focus properly – are bleary in spite of their brightness and one is much lower than another.

When Wallis appeared to be photographed, the Duke was busy looking for a crucifix to put on the improvised altar that had been set up for the next day’s ceremony. The Cockney maid telephoned to his room: ‘Is that your Royal Highness? Well, will you please come down right away?’ When he finally did appear, Wallis let him see she was annoyed. After a preliminary argument he apologized.

He first photographed Princess Elizabeth as a 16-year-old, and then to mark her 18th birthday. He remembers in a newspaper article on July 1 1951 entitled “What the Queen said to the Photographer”:

Princess Elizabeth’s easy charm, like her mother’s, does not carry across in her photographs, and each time one sees her one is delighted to find how much more serene, magnetic, and at the same time meltingly sympathetic she is than one had imagined…One misses, even in colour photographs, the effect of the dazzlingly fresh complexion, the clear regard from the glass-blue eyes, and the gentle, all pervading sweetness of her smile….

I was always impressed by, and grateful for, the exceptionally charming manners that the young Princesses had in relation to the job of being photographed. Unlike other children, Royal and otherwise, by whom I have been victimized, they never showed signs of restlessness.

However, he was not really enthralled by the either princess: “[Elizabeth] would make an extremely good hospital nurse or nanny. Her smile is reserved,” he wrote, while [Margaret] wore her hair “scraped back like a seaside landlady”. Their father, George VI, was “without any mystery or magic whatsoever. One forgets after a few minutes that he is in the room.”

Beaton was also asked to photograph Princess Elizabeth’s first born son in December 1948:

Happily summoned to the Palace to take the first long-awaited photographs of the heir to the throne. Prince Charles, as he is to be named, was an obedient sitter: He interrupted a long, contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens, the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of public duty.

I was astonished that a month-old baby should already have so much character…For so young a child he seemed to have a remarkable range of expression; and I was fascinated by the looks of surprise, disdain, defiance, anger and delight that ran across his minute face…

His mother sat by the cot and, holding his hand, watched his movements with curiosity, pride and amusement.

Beaton went on to take the photographs commemorating the births of all of the Queen’s children, and documenting their childhoods. A particularly unpleasant experience with Princess Anne was recounted here:

She was a bossy, unattractive galumphing girl, When about 15, I photographed the family in a group, celebrating the birth of the latest addition [Prince Edward, 1964], she was not helpful … At the end of the sitting, a very unsatisfactory one, I cornered the girl and said, ‘I know you hate it, but let me take you hating it in this direction, now hate it in that direction, go on. Hate it! Hate it!’

The girl looked at me with a snarl. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a smile or a sign of trapped terror. The pictures were revolting.

But Beaton is best remembered today for his photos of the Queen’s coronation in 1953. That was an unexpected assignment:

Have been wondering if my day as photographer at the Palace is over: Baron, a most unexpected friend of Prince Philip’s, has been taking all the recent pictures, so the call saying the Queen wanted me to do her personal Coronation photographs came as an enormous relief. The same night…at a ball at the American Embassy, I saw the Queen for a brief moment and thanked her. “No, I’m very glad you’re going to take them,” she said. “But by the time we get through to the photographs, we’ll have circles down to here (to the eye), “then the court trains comes bundling up to here, and I’m out to here (sticks stomach out.) She spoke like a young, high-spirited girl.”

[Sidenote: Stirling Henry Nahum, known simply as "Baron" (although his title was suspect), was an Italian Jew who took photos of  Elizabeth's and Phillip's wedding and their offsprings' christenings. He died young and today best known as the man who coached Lord Snowdon's early photography career. No wikepedia page exists for him].

Although he would go on to document the rest of the royal household until just before his death in 1980, his final shoot with the Queen came in 1968 (above). By this time, his relationship at the court was rocky at best:

The difficulties are great. Our point of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part.”

A selection of his coronation photos are here. Read all of his diaries here. Next post: the Coronation, Revisited.

Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi

Twenty one years ago today, the former prime-minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in India. IP looks back on how the night’s events unfolded.

First Two Frames: photo of the crowd was used by police to look for back-up bombers and conspirators

I couldn’t find third and sixth frames but here are frames 4, 5, 8, and 7 (clockwise from top left)

Last Two Frames: You can see the woman in orange and green approaching

He was a prince of Machiavellian proportions, there was no doubt about that. First scion and then head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that ruled India for 32 of previous 37 years, Rajiv Gandhi became India’s prime minister in 1984. He tried to modernize and deregulate the Nehruvian state, intervened in Maldives and Sri Lanka, and placed Punjab under martial law for “terrorism”. He was a skillful orator, a masterful charmer, and after his fall from grace in 1989 in the aftermath of a corruption scandal, a political spoiler and kingmaker.

In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was back on the campaign trail, after fracturing the coalition government — his second such attempt in as many years. On the night of May 21st in the southern town of Sriperumbudur, his dynamism was rudely stopped by a woman who bent down to touch his feet (an expression of respect among Indians) and detonated herself. Rajiv Gandhi and at least 14 other people were killed.

The assassination was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an armed insurgency fighting for a separate state in Sri Lanka against whom Mr. Gandhi had previously intervened. The above photos were taken by Haribabu, a 21-year-old local free-lance photographer who died in the blast, but whose Chinese-made 35-mm camera was recovered. The last photo showed a harrowing red explosion.

The photos were developed and sent to India’s most advanced military lab to be thoroughly examined. Haribabu was thought to have been paid $5 by the Tamil conspirators to document the assassination, and hence his first photo showed the bomber and her co-conspirator; the assassin was second from left, dressed in orange, and disguised behind glasses. The mastermind behind the attack, Sivarasan, posed as journalist on rightmost.

Subsequent three-month manhunt ended with a cornered Sivarsan and six others killing themselves on would have been Mr. Gandhi’s 47th birthday. As for the late lamented Rajiv, he would continue to haunt the Indian politics for many more years: in 1997, after the investigation on the assassination revealed that an Indian political party secretly supported LTTE, another coalition government fell.

The Family, 1976 | Richard Avedon

Early  in 1976, with both the post-Watergate political atmosphere and the approaching bicentennial celebration in mind, Rolling Stone asked Richard Avedon to cover the presidential primaries and the campaign trail. Avedon counter-proposed a grander idea — he had always wanted to photograph the men and women he believed to have constituted political, media and corporate elite of the United States.

For the next several months, Avedon traversed the country from migrant grape fields of California to NFL headquarters in Park Avenue and returned with an amazing portfolio of soldiers, spooks, potentates, and ambassadors that was too late for the bicentennial but published in Rolling Stone’s Oct. 21, 1976, just in time for the November elections.

Sixty-nine black-and-white portraits (seen all together in an Met exhibit here) were in Avedon’s signature style — formal, intimate, bold, and minimalistic. Appearing in them are President Ford and his three immediate successors — Carter, Reagan, and Bush. Other familiars of the American polity such as Kennedys and Rockefellers are here, and as are giants who held up the nation’s Fourth Pillar during that challenging decade: A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times who decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, and Katharine Graham who led Woodward and Bernstein at Washington Post.

Their source, Deep Throat, is here too: W. Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI, although he didn’t reveal that fact until 2005 — the year after Avedon himself died. It is also clear here that apart from a few civil rights leaders and eminent wives, the pantheon of 1976 was mostly white, mostly male, mostly besuited, and mostly elderly. Yet, some familiar contemporary names amongst its younger members — the activist Ralph Nadar, 42; Jerry Brown, 38, then as now the governor of California; Donald Rumsfeld, 44, then and future Secretary of Defense — also suggest this group’s political endurance and Zeligian relevance.

Consciously or otherwise, absent were the supreme court justices and the man whose resignation made this portfolio possible. Instead, Avedon convinced Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods to pose for him.

If we assemble a project like this today, what will be its composition? There’ll definitely be more ‘celebrities’ I guess, but weigh-in here in comments or tweet to @aalholmes.

Three Years, Nine Hundred Posts

This is another of those tl;dr self-deprecating, self-congratulating posts.

Back in 2009 when I started this blog, I would have laughed if you told me I would still be updating this 3 years later. But not only that day has arrived, but another milestone — 900th post mark — is also just around the corner.

1. I am still single; some of my readers still racist; and I still receive ads for some mail-order Slavic brides, but a few things has changed since the last time I posted a sappy self-serving post. Now I tweet (although I have always called been a twat) and my email is posted on this site which leads to….

2. Some quite interesting emails. I have been invited to some photo galleries and conferences, asked to talk at a few, and offered a book-deal. I work full-time (65h+) so I am mostly unable to go, and as for the book-deal, I cannot imagine any profits after copyrights.

3. Last time I ranted about people inquiring to buy poster-sized photos off IP. They still inquire, but worse are other emails — including one from a lawyer of a wealthy collector — which ask me to hunt down who own whose copyrights. As romantic as the image of me wearing a homburg and a trench coat might be, I am not running a detective agency out of IP. But creme de la creme was that one where a high-school student asks me to do (not help with, but do) his school project.

4. In these three years, I have become more introspective, and consequently I have asked myself a few times that why I blog — especially in those dreary rainy days. Perhaps it was because collective wisdom of internet was often dubious. Initially it was because no one site has thorough analysis I wanted in an age where you can find anything scattered about online. Since then, many magazines have made great effort towards archiving photojournalism, making my retiring easier when that comes. Especially throughout last year, I seriously considered giving Iconic Photos up finally, although a famous photographer’s death would always draw me back in — partly because of some incompetence and penny-pinching refusal to re-publish the deadman’s photos by most media these days. Blogging is like me trying to give up smoking — not so easy to quit, easy to relapse.

5. History today is visual, and careless use of photos is all the more lamentable because of that. I see mislabeled, misattributed photos in textbooks and magazines all the time. Copyeditors are fired when there are many factual and typographic errors but with photos, editors don’t know better, and the reading public doesn’t know better either. That makes me sad, and makes lives of photomanipulators and propagandists so much easier.

6. Another attack towards sanity comes from armchair history books such as Collapse and Why Nations Fail – the latter being the flavor du jour of the faux intelligentsia. I’m fine with people reading such simplified versions of history, and of making equally tenuous assertions and bending the long arc of history to suit my own hypotheses, this blog is oft guilty, but when Harvard or MIT professors start doing that, it spells trouble.

7. Tweeting often makes me first to respond to many photography stories, but the proudest I was was when I published a year in photography review a day ahead of TIME magazine. Take that.

8. On copyrights, that perennial thorn, I just want to say this: when this site was smaller, no one cared, but now, I have to (a little). Now, I am doubly careful when I post about living-photographers, but I am not going to change my postings because of it. While I can’t say I approve of all hacktivism going around, and I will be the last person to support incoherent psuedo-intellectual justifications for either side of the copyrights issue, I embrace the fact that internet remains an anarchic place. And, I  don’t know whether this will come out as arrogant or not but I believe IP does some photographers service by introducing their work to people who would not otherwise know about them.

9. Like all great stories, this one is perhaps apocryphal: an English literature professor getting fired because he admitted that he had never read Hamlet. I had a moment like that a few weeks ago when I admitted that I have never heard of Robert Frank until six months into this blog. People were mildly surprised, and some asked what my qualifications are for blogging here when I haven’t heard of Frank before. Snobbery much? I recognize certain photos, without knowing their photographers — a condition I believe shared by a lot of people here.

10. I have said before that the best thing about this blog is the looks I got from friends (at times some girl I am trying to impress) when I say in a understated tone that a few thousand people read it everyday. In these three years, blogging has gone from nerdy to kinda passé, kinda cool (they: you are still doing what?). But the story I want to share was about a brag backfired spectacularly only last month — a hipster I was trying to impress took one look at the blog, and became quite unimpressed with the blog (presumably realizing that Iconic Photos are not made for Instragram or Pinterest generation) and with me by extension. I literally  heard her thighs snapping shut.

Finally, I will leave you with these words of wisdom from Time magazine:

We hear it sometimes that photographs are losing their power. In a world where every other cell phone has a built in camera and and all the people you know just posted their summer vacations, their snow angels, and their tonsillectomies online, there are just too many pictures out there. Plus, those picures are so easily manipulated and photoshopped, how do you know when to trust them anymore? And anyway, we’ve seen it all before. You can almost believe all that, right up until that moment you come across one picture that speaks to you, the one that takes your imperfectly formed feelings and judgements and snaps everything, if you’ll excuse the expression, into focus.

Honeyhunters | Eric Valli

"Going down the rope required Zen concentration," Valli recalled.

Twice a year for nearly 12,000 years, men of Gurung tribe of central Nepal have braved the Himalayan foothills to harvest the honey of the world’s largest species of honeybees. The knowledge of extracting honey from hives that were precariously parched on the hillsides was passed from father to son for these millennia, and in 1987, the 63-year old villagehead Mani Lal was the last of his village to have mastery of the technique.

But that year, he was aided not just by an experienced team of his fellow villagers; he was accompanied by the French photographer Eric Valli and his Australian wife Diane Summers who was acting as a filmmaker (Summers was a lawyer when she met Valli on a Nepali bus). The couple had spent the two previously years tracking and searching a thousand Himalayan cliffs for the rumored master honey hunters of the Himalayas.

They finally found Mani Lal, who was planning to retire the very next season, and agreed to take Valli on the dangerous mission. The photographer dangled from a nylon rope down a 395-foot cliff to make what is perhaps one of the most breathtaking nature photoessays of a generation. They appeared in National Geographic, and handily won that year’s World Press Photo Award for Nature Stories, and the accompanying well-narrated book was a hit. (See other photos from the series here).

The book also was an illustrated lesson, showing how Mani Lal descends down the rock cliff, how he dislodges beehives with bamboo poles, and how the hive is lowered using pulleys, and was responsible for kickstarting an anthropological interest in these arcane honey hunting skills of the Gurungs. Ironically, soon their way of life was threatened not by obscurity but by over-exposure as anthropologists and tourists hiked up there.

Follow me on Twitter here.

Titanic | How The Story Broke

A forgotten photograph provided a human face to the tragedy of a modern Icarus.  

Although advertised as “unsinkable“* inadvisably two years before, Titanic disaster was, in a sense, the inevitable culmination of a half-century exercise on man’s hubris. Ever since Isambard Kingdom Brunel constructed the Great Eastern, the original “unsinkable” vessel and her sailing into New York harbor in 1862 with an 83-foot-long, 9-foot-wide gash in her outer hull but her inner hull unscathed, both designers and shipping lines had viewed oceanliners as virtually indestructible and lifeboats as perfunctory during peacetime.

Therefore, it was perhaps unsurprising that the initial newspaper reports were grossly incorrect, claiming that the ship was “being towed to Halifax with no loss of life”. The first paper to receive/break the news was the (Montreal) Gazette, which appear reporting an assistance signal from the ship reassured its readers of the ship’s safety. The Gazette which had a news-sharing agreement with the New York Times, sent the story forward. Back then The New York Times was not yet a prestigious “newspaper of record” but just one of several papers serving the city.

Its managing director Carr Van Anda published the story which echoed the Gazette’s story in the morning edition of the April 15, 1912; however, he suspected that a lack of communication from the ship meant that the worst had happened, and printed a headline in the afternoon edition stating that she had sunk. It was a scoop which helped the paper’s reputation, since other newspapers reprinted  the White Star Line’s ambiguous story about the Titanic having trouble after hitting an iceberg.

In next day in London, one of the most iconic images of the disaster was made. Ned Parfett, who was 15 in the photograph, was selling the Evening News outside the White Star Line offices at Oceanic House. Before the decade was out, he too would be dead; initially too young to come when the war came, he enlisted in 1916; on October 29th 1918, less than two weeks before the Armistice, he was killed in a German bombardment.

*

* Yes, she was advertised as “unsinkable” in brochures by White Star Line in 1910. The New York Times repeated this when it reviewed RMS Olympic, the first of the White Star trio. After the disaster, the shipping line turned its considerable muscle towards backtracking these claims. That many today including news agencies believe that she was never advertised as “unsinkable” testifies to that PR campaign’s success. 

Robert Doisneau’s Contact Sheets

Yesterday, Google celebrated Robert Doisneau’s centenary (100th anniversary of his birth) with a doodle. In the doodle was the famous Doisneau photo – Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville – an internationally recognised symbol of young love in Paris. Here’s its contact sheet.

Also, there was an interview in Doisneau in that marvelous series, Contacts.

The above photo seemed like a testament to spontaneity of a street photographer — that of someone who just happened to look up from his Pernod, say. Let me disabuse you of that notion. Doisneau had seen the man and woman days earlier, near the school at which they were studying acting (as it later transpired). He was on assignment for Life magazine in 1950, for a story on romance in Paris, and hired the couple as models for the shot.

That he hired them and who the couple were, however, were not brought to light until the early 1990s, when lawsuits demanding compensation were filed by several people who claimed to be the models in the famous picture. Their names were Francoise Bornet and Jacques Carteaud.

Doisneau later came to hate the photo’s fame; as he saw himself as a realist — “a brutal thief of images”, he resentedhis reputation as a romantic photographer that this photo brought.

Follow me on twitter here. 

How It First Appeared: Not Even the Largest Photo in the Story

Father Browne on Titanic

If it had not been for an intransigent Jesuit Provincial, our understanding of life abroad the doomed oceanliner would have been all the poorer. 

6-year-old Robert Douglas Spedden and his father Frederic

In James Cameron’s Titanic, there was a scene, as the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio sneaks onto the first class deck, of a child and his father playing with a spinning top on the promenade. That innocent scene of domestic bliss Cameron copied directly from a famous photograph actually taken abroad the Titanic by one Jesuit novitiate named Francis Browne.

Browne, later better known as Father Browne, sailed with the ship for the first leg of its journey, from Southampton, England, to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland. Although a wealthy family he befriended while on the Titanic asked him to continue the journey all the way to New York, his superior at Queenstown sent him a laconic, but providential, telegram requesting him to disembark.

Therefore, Browne became one of only eight people who disembarked from Titanic; back to his post, Browne carried back around 1,000 photographs taken between April 10th and April 12th 1912 on and around the ship. They were the only photographs taken of ‘Titanic’. Among them was the above photo of  – the one recreated by Cameron.

Cameron also owed Browne for his photo of the ship’s Marconi Room, which he had taken when he was sending his clerical superior the Marconigram request to travel to New York. The photo was the only picture to be taken of the room – and in any Titanic films since, the Marconi room had been based it on Browne’s partially exposed photograph. Browne also took the last known photograph of Captain Edward Smith.

After the disaster, the photos were instantly featured in many newspapers, and Browne himself became a minor celebrity. He delivered many Titanic-themed talks, but his photographs were forgotten after his death in 1960. They were only rediscovered by a different priest, Eddie O’Donnell, 25 years later. As for the Speddens, terrible fate continued. Although both survived the sinking, Robert was ran over by a car only six months later, and his father drowned in his own dimming pool just a few years later the father.

Jean Leslie (1923 – 2012)

Jean Leslie, MI5 secretary whose photograph may or may not have changed the outcome of the Second World War, has died, aged 88.

It was quite provocative and personal by the standards of the day

It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France. Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.

Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam.

To create a believable fiancée, Cholmondeley wanted a photograph of Pam, so he asked the most attractive girls from the Secret Service to provide the kind of photo which a red-blooded young Marines officer would be likely to carry about his person. It was an open invitation, but Montagu in fact already had a strong candidate in mind — Jean Leslie. Montagu indicated to her that she might be a favoured candidate were she to be interested, and Miss Leslie provided the photo taken the previous summer; she had been swimming in the River Thames near Little Wittenham in Oxfordshire, with a Grenadier Guardsman on leave called Tony and he had taken the above photograph.

With that photograph, Major William “Bill” Martin of the Royal Marines, ID 148228, was complete. Among his possessions, placed with fictitious invasion plans, were an angry letter from Lloyd’s about an overdraft, a bill for shirts, a used bus ticket, a stern letter from his father, and a couple of love letters from affectionate but dim Pam — composed by Leslie’s own spinster superior. A drowned body was taken from a morgue in London and dispatched to the Spanish coast, where pro-Nazi officials passed the misleading documents to the Germans.

The deception was indeed effective. Hitler became convinced that any attack on Sicily would only be a decoy for the main assault in Greece and Sardinia, and for two weeks after the Sicily landings on the island on July 9, 1943, no attempt was made to rush reinforcements to meet them.

– see Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat for more details.

 

The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr

Arguably , the Founding Fathers of the American Republic aside, no other single name has affected the imagination and the parlance of the latter generations more than that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, the name today carries with it so much gravitas, symbolism and power that it’s hard to believe that when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Dr. King was only 39 and had only been on national consciousness for only 13 short, albeit turbulent and transformative, years.

It’s also hard to believe that King’s popularity was already declining before that fateful April morning, and the charismatic preacher himself was a tired man. Negative ratings for him gradually increased since 1964, and in 1967, for the first time in almost a decade,  King’s name was left off the Gallup-poll list of the 10 most admired Americans. His foreign policy initiatives such as trying to mediate in the Nigerian-Biafran War were not well-received; supports from his financial backers, universities and publishers were dwindling.

It was only partially because of FBI bullying after Dr. King refused to yield to FBI’s blackmails and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. As Michael Eric Dyson wrote, “The more he protested poverty, denounced the Vietnam War and lamented the unconscious racism of many whites, the more he lost favor and footing in white America…In many ways King was socially and politically dead before he was killed. Martyrdom saved him from becoming a pariah to the white mainstream.”

Indeed, by shooting him in Memphis, James Earl Ray created a martyr, complete with an iconic photographic relic. The iconic image of Dr. King dying was captured by Joseph Louw, a young black South African photographer who was working with King on a documentary film. He was staying at the same motel just a few doors away, and when Louw heard a shot he ran out to see King lying on the balcony floor, and his aides signaling to police below the direction from which the assassin’s bullet came. Afterwards, Louw asked the Memphis-based photographer Ernest C. Withers (known as the “original civil rights photographer”) the permission to use the latter’s darkroom to develop the film.

The next day, it was on the front pages all over the world.

Abel St. Clair-St. Clair (1940 – 2012)

Hugh Abel St. Clair-St. Clair, fig mental photojournalist who held up a satirical mirror to many of last century’s tyrants, has died, aged 72. 

Ceauşescu and Kim Il-Sung waltzed for Abel's lens

Access and charm come naturally to Abel St. Clair-St. Clair, the heir to the Barony of Grenoble. He perfected a “missing lens” gambit, whereby he would go back into press conference rooms ostensibly searching for it, but in truth hoping to spot the rich and the powerful in compromising poses. Indeed, he captured Nikita Khrushchev adjusting his socks, Charles de Gaulle grooming his mustache, and patrons of the Metropolitan Opera House trust picking their noses.

He was ingenious, daring, and sometimes absurd: he rang up the mafia dons in Chicago asking for access to their next meeting, and when that was denied, requested that they at least leave the window blinds open. As the Duvaliers’ rule crumbled in Haiti, he went to there with two Las Vegas showgirls to gain an audience with Baby Doc. He even promised to smuggle a microfilm for the PLO secretly with his negatives in exchange for access.

The Duvalier finally fled Haiti very prosaically

Along the way, St.Clair punctured the inflated egos of ambassadors, presidents and potentates. Once he hosted an uncomfortable dinner to which trade union leaders and government ministers were invited (unbeknownst to one another’s invites). While traveling across Africa with a British trade delegation, he saw poolside parties hosted by Haile Selassie, Bokassa and Idi Amin, where he snapped the self-proclaimed emperors and kings with literally no clothes. He took a rare and ironic photo of Pol Pot wearing glasses.

His antics proved too much for Castro, from whose mouth he tried to remove the cigar, a la Karsh with Churchill. He was jailed in Cuba for 8 months and some of his negatives destroyed. Equally unamused was the Vatican when he disguised as a prelate to infiltrate the 1978 Conclave. They threatened him with an excommunication.

Idi Amin and his son in the Presidential Pool

Yet, he pressed on. In his unapologetic memoir Abel’s Fools, he admitted that while he was intrusive, he never was a paparazzo. During the First Gulf War, he volunteered as a “human shield” for Saddam in one of his palaces only to annoy the Iraqi dictator with his cameras. He was quickly deported back. Although he retired soon afterwards, he returned in 2002 to capture sons of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi partying together with Western businessmen for a Vanity Fair report on the new generation of globally mobile scions of dictatorships and oligarchies that was never published. That was his last assignment.

Sammy Schulman | Cuba

Politics and revolutions are often cyclical. Just ask those intrepid yet forgotten reporters who covered the Cuban Revolution of 1933 — will this generation’s photographers and correspondents be better remembered? 

Elected in 1925 in Cuba was Gerardo Machado, who began his political career as a reformer determined to modernize his country, but ended up becoming a paternalistic dictator. But in August 1933, in a political watershed that’s seldom remembered today, Machado’s rule was rocked by a series of industrial strikes as rival factions fought in the streets of Havana.

Anticipating this, International News Photos’ manager Walter Howie had already dispatched their star photographer Sammy Schulman to Havana. On Saturday, August 12, Schulman and newsreelman Jimmy Pergola were walking along the Prado when they heard a burst of gunfire. They ran towards the action and found a dignified-looking old fellow lying on the pavement, mortally wounded. Schulman recognized him as Colonel Antonio Jiminez, head of the Cuban Porra, or secret police. He was President Machado’s strong arm, and the most hated man on the island because of his brutality to those who criticized the President.

Standing over him, Schulman recalled how he captured the moment above — the “spark” that fired the Cuban Revolution of 1933:

l cleared a little space in the crowd and made several pictures while he gasped his remaining breaths, at the same time asking what had happened. Jiminez had gone out for a stroll and had been followed by a number of youthful hecklers. To get rid of them, he whipped out his revolver and fired a few shots into the air. The kids scattered. As he fired again, a truckload of soldiers swung into the street. The truck stopped. A ragged soldier jumped out, backed Jiminez to a wall and shot him through the stomach. It blew him half apart.

People came running and, when they recognized the dying man as the much-hated Jiminez, went wild with joy. Someone called for a cheer for the soldier, who stood close by watching me work. A couple of wild-looking men picked up the hero and the clamorous mob went down the street to the Prado. I followed. The crowd pulled a statue off its pedestal and boosted the soldier in its place. He loved it, and struck statue-like poses while I banged away at him. Then someone yelled. ‘To the palace!‘ The soldiers jumped into their truck and led the mob. I ran along with them.”

After making a flock of other shots with my Speed Graphic, I got back to the Havana Post, where INS had its office. Bill Hutchinson, bureau manager, had made arrangements with Miami to fly a special plane over to pick up my films. Hutch had a tip a mob was headed for the Post Building to burn it. I quickly went to the seaplane base, waited for the plane to arrive, give the pilot the exposed film, and told him to get out as fast as he could.”

Schulman’s photographic record of the revolution was considered one of the great visual reporting jobs in the newspaper business then. However, the turn of events would soon overshadow his work. Staring the next month, a loose coalition of radicals, students, intellectuals, and lower-rank soldiers tried to stage several coup attempts against the wobbly provisional government which survived until January 1934, when it was overthrown by an equally loose and unstable anti-government coalition of right-wingers supported by the United States. Leading them was a young sergeant named Fulgencio Batista.