Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville

Although not as iconic as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s the sailor kiss on the V-E Day, Robert Doisneau’s “The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” taken on a Parisian street in 1950, is considered one of the most romanticand popular photos ever taken. Although Doisneau worked in Paris as a street photographer and stole many an intimate moment of Parisian couples, this classic shot was staged. However, this fact didn’t prevent the picture from gracing the walls of many freshman dorm rooms since its first production in 1986. More than 500,000 posters and 400,000 postcards have been reprinted from the original.

The picture was taken for a photo spread about Paris lovers for Life magazine, but the image stayed in the archives of Doisneau’s photo agency (Ralpho, which benefited greatly from this single picture) for more than 30 years before it was commercialized by a poster company. 

The picture’s success sparked controversies when several couples claimed that they were the subjects and sued Doisneau. In 1993, a former actress, Françoise Bornet sued Doisneau for $18,000 and a share of the royalty in the image, by claiming she was the women in the picture. The case was dismissed, but Doisneau admitted that he, Bornet and her boyfriend Jacques Carteaud staged the photo. The couple who would later separate were the students studying theater when Doisneau approached them.  Doisneau reflected, “I would have never dared to photograph people like that. Lovers kissing in the street, those couples are rarely legitimate.”

 

Dalí Atomicus

Philippe Halsman made his career out of taking portraits of people jumping, an act which he maintained revealed his subjects’ true selves. 

This Dali photograph is Halsman’s homage both to the new atomic age (physicists had recently announced that all matter hangs in a constant state of suspension) and to Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece “Leda Atomica” (which hangs on the right, behind the cats, and unfinished at the time). In 1941 Halsman met the surrealist Salvador Dalí and they began to collaborate in the late 1940s.

Halsman reported that it took 28 attempts to be satisfied with the result. Halsman and Dali eventually released a compendium of their collaborations in the 1954 book Dali’s Mustache, which also featured 36 different views of the artist’s distinctive mustache. Halsman’s wife, Yvonne, held the chair, on the count of three, his assistants threw three increasingly angry cats and a bucket of water into the air; and on the count of four, Dali jumped and Halsman snapped the picture. It was that simple, said Halsman, but it nonetheless took six hours. 

Halsman’s original idea is to use an opaque liquid (milk) but it was abandoned for fear that viewers, fresh from the privations of World War II, would condemn it as a waste of milk. Another idea involved exploding a cat in order to capture it “in suspension.”

Gandhi at the Spinning Wheel

It was the defining portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential figures, but the picture almost didn’t happen. LIFE magazine’s first female photographer, Margaret Bourke-White was in India in 1946 to cover the impending Indian independence. She was all set to shoot when Gandhi’s secretaries stopped her: If she was going to photograph Gandhi at the spinning wheel (a symbol for India’s struggle for independence), she first had to learn to use one herself.

It was a rare photo-op and Bourke-White was not going to lose it. She learnt how to use the spinning wheel, but further demands followed–Gandhi wasn’t to be spoken to (it being his day of silence.) And because he detested bright light, Bourke-White was only allowed to use three flashbulbs. The humid Indian weather wreaked havoc on her camera equipment, too. She tried to take the picture without flash, but the bright Indian day hindered her further. [Less than stellar pictures can be seen here and here]

When time finally came to shoot, Bourke-White’s first flashbulb failed. And while the second one worked, she forgot to pull the slide, rendering it blank.She thought it was all over, but luckily, the third attempt was successful. In the end, she came away with an image that became Gandhi’s most enduring representation. 

 

 

Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath

First housecats in Minamata, on the west coast of Kyushu in Japan, went berserk, jumping into the sea. Then it began to affect local fishermen, whose lips and limbs would tingle and then become numb. Their speeches slurred; many died. Women gave birth to deformed foetuses and blind children. It was termed Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning. Caused by methyl mercury in industrial wastewater from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory from 1932 to 1968, the disease claimed thousands of lives surreptitiously while the government and company did little to prevent the pollution.

It was a dramatic photographic essay by W. Eugene Smith in LIFE that brought world attention to the disease. Smith and his interpreter, a Japanese American student from Stanford University named Aileen Mioko Sprague (whom Smith would soon marry) were touring Japan for an exhibition of his works. They planned to stay in Minamata for three weeks, but ended up staying for three years. For eighteen dollars a month, they rented a house belonging to one of the victims, sharing a dirt-floored kitchen and bath, where they developed photos.

The most striking photo of the essay shows Ryoko Uemura, holding her severely deformed daughter, Tomoko, in a Japanese bath chamber. Tomoko was poisoned while still in the womb. The pieta of our industrial age, critics called it, and the photoessay was ‘a case study in Japanese politics’ the New York Times wrote. Although the photo was posed for Smith, the family subsequently asked the photo to be withdrawn from circulation. The picture does not appear in recent anthologies of Smith’s works.

A month after this photo, on January 7th 1972, Smith joined other Minamata victims at a demonstration at Chisso’s plant near Tokyo, where he was attacked and seriously injured by Chisso employees which left him with a permanently damaged eye and a crippled health. This attack made Smith a familiar face on local news. A Tokyo department store staged an exhibit of Smith’s photos, which was visited by 50,000 people in twelve days. The photos led the government to take more direct actions and the company to pay compensation. Tomoko died in 1977 at the age of 21.

Eisenhower in Warsaw

The picture was taken on the Old Town Square of Warsaw. General Dwight Eisenhower visited Warsaw, the capital of Poland, after the end of the war. There he enjoyed tremendous public recognition because of his role as Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. The city was totally destroyed by the Nazis after the Warsaw Uprising (1944). Eisenhower was so moved by the destruction that he commented, “I have seen many towns destroyed, but nowhere have I been faced with such destruction.” Later the historic centre was reconstructed (it finished in 1962), but the establishment of the Warsaw Pact (under the Eisenhower Presidency) rifted the West and the Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Old Town was finally included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1980 despite UNESCO’s reluctance to have the reconstructed sites in that list.

Napalm Attack

In 1972, this picture of a nine-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, fleeing her village after a napalm attack brought the Vietnam War home to many. Although the picture was initially scoffed for having a naked girl at its centre, the shocking nature of napalm attacks silenced the prudes. The picture was so revealing in the nature that President Nixon accused its photographer of staging the photo.

Behind the girl, one can observe all the South Vietnamese armies running with Kim, other members of her family including her younger brother, who looked back into the black smoke. The Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut had been just outside the village when two planes dropped four napalm bombs. He heard the cries, and “I want some water, I’m too hot, too hot,” – in Vietnamese, “Nong qua, nong qua!”

Nick snapped this picture, and afterwards gave her some water, and took her to the hospital. The New York Times, where the photo editors were relieved that the girl was too young to have pubic hair (that would have required a retouching), decided to put the photo on the front page

Nick won a Pulitzer and the World Press Photo of the Year for this photo. Kim Phu herself would toured the world inciting numerous political controversies: she became the star of numerous humanitarian events and anti-war campaigns and also the hero of a bestselling book Girl in the Picture.

Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné

The recipient of 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 was German doctor Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), who was also a theologian, musician and philosopher. Although the Peace Prize was given for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life”, it was also given for the founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, French Equatorial Africa.

The next year, journalists and photographers flocked to Lambaréné. W. Eugene Smith–the father of the photoessay–was among them. In the photoessay “A Man of Mercy” later published in LIFE, he documented Dr. Schweitzer, his hospice, and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa. A perfectionist, and darkroom master, Smith spent up to five days developing and manipulating Schweitzer photographs. 

Smith’s work is one of the flattering ones 78-year old Schweitzer received. Other journalists (for instance, James Cameron) pointed out flaws in the practices and attitudes of Schweitzer and his staff. The hospital suffered from squalor, was without modern amenities and Schweitzer had little contact with the local people, although Cameron withheld the story for the great humanitarian’s sake. The American John Gunther was more blatant: he reported Schweitzer’s patronizing attitude towards Africans, the lack of skilled Africans, and Schweitzer’s dependence on European nurses after three decades.

A Library Divided

During the Partition of India, a librarian divides the books between two piles. The partition led to the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on August 14-15, 1947 and included not only the geographical divisions  but also the division of other assets, including the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service, the Indian railways, and the central treasury. This partition (Mountbatten Plan) was based on a misguided border secretly drawn by the London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe from August 9-12, and the actual geographical details are not released until 2 days after the partition. 

Radcliffe was to grant the majority Hindu regions to India and the majority Muslim areas to Pakistan. Therefore Pakistan came into being with two non-contiguous enclaves, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, separated geographically by India. However, Radcliffe was not consistent in his division–he gave Chittagong to Pakistan, although the area was non-Muslim. Why he did so remain a mystery, since Radcliffe destroyed all of his records and Mountbatten expressly denied any special-knowledge or favouritism.

Nonetheless, the massive exoduses from both sides (about 14.5 million people in total) occurred in the months following Partition crossing the borders into the state of religious majority. The newly independent states were unable to keep public order in these exoduses. One of the largest population movements in recorded history was therefore subsequently followed by complete breakdown of law and order, riots, starvation and massacres. 

Chamberlain at Heston

At Heston Aerodome on 30th September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who had just came back from Munich holds up the Anglo-German Non-Aggression Declaration. This Munich Agreement gave the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in an attempt to satisfy his desire for Lebensraum or “living space” for Germany. Now in retrospect, the settlement was a misguided appeasement, but back then, a war-weary populace embraced Chamberlain’s statesmanship.

He gave a speech on the airfield, “The settlement of the Czech problem, which has now been achieved, is, in my view only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace” (Cheers). “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor Herr Hitler and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.” (As he holds paper up and waves it, people cheer again). “Some of you perhaps have already heard what it contains, but I would just like to read it to you.” He Reads, “We, the German Fuhrer and Chancellor and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognising that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for the two countries, and for Europe. We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again” (Cheers) “We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted” (lots of “hear hears”.) “to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.'”

Someone shouts “three cheers for Chamberlain”, and everyone joins in the cheers as the PM walks away and gets into the car. Waves and cheers encouraged Chamberlain to make a much more daring speech from Number 10 Downing Street. He read the agreement again, but this time added, “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time … Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

The next day, the German occupation of Sudetenland began, and the world entered the downward spiral into WWII.

Aftermath of the Siege of Lucknow

A Corfiote, Felice Beato, visited India during the Great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, possibly by the commission of the War Office in London. In Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and other mutiny sites, he took many photos with a large box camera which needed long exposures. In Lucknow, he took 60 photographs of the city, where the defending British garrison was besieged by the sepoys only months before. 

The above picture showed the interior of the Secundra Bagh after 2,000 rebels are slaughtered by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th Punjab Regiment, after the first attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November 1857. The British reaction to the mutiny became especially fierce after the women and children were mercilessly gunned down by the sepoys in Cawnpore. The British dead were buried where the Indian corpses were left to rot.

Lucknow was evacuated and was not recaptured until March 1858 and it was shortly afterwards that Beato probably took this photograph. As one contemporary commentator described it: “A few of their [rebel] bones and skulls are to be seen in front of the picture, but when I saw them every one was being regularly buried, so I presume the dogs dug them up.” A British officer, Sir George Campbell, noted in his memoirs Beato’s presence in Lucknow and stated that he probably had the bones uncovered to be photographed. However, William Howard Russell of The Times recorded seeing many skeletons still lying around in April 1858. 

Nixon in Israel

Richard Nixon disliked Jews and may even have been anti-Semitic. However, in Israel, Nixon is fondly remembered for his role in saving Israel in the dark days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When Israel had run dangerously low on ammunition during the war, Nixon sent planeload after planeload to resupply the depleted Israeli military stocks. The relations between Nixon and Golda Meir remained strong throughout their administrations.

In June 1974, Nixon visited Prime Minister Rabin–the first visit by an American President to Israel. Under central tapestry which depicts the history of the Israelites from Moses to the Holocaust in the Chagall Hall (drawn by Marc Chagall), the President spoke to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. The picture by Harry Benson shows the president being upstaged and propped simultaneously by Moses who is seemingly preaching the Law to the beleaguered President, who will resign a few months later.

Eisenhower groundbreaks the Lincoln Centre

During Robert Moses’ program of urban renewal in the early 1960s, a consortium of New Yorker led by John D. Rockefeller III started ”Lincoln Square Renewal Project” to transform the place into New York’s new cultural centre. Thus, Lincoln Center was born. On May 14, 1959, with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. watching on, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction. The occasion was lavishly commemorated. Leonard Bernstein was the master of ceremonies; the New York Philharmonic (which Rockefeller lured away from its old venues at the Carnegie Hall) and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.”