Iconic Photos

In 1915, the decaying Ottoman Empire launched a pogrom against eastern Turkey’s Armenian population, falsely accusing them of supporting a Russian invasion. Tens of thousands of men were shot and hundreds of thousands of women and children driven out of their homes and on forced marches towards Syria and Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been a million people.

It was also one of the century’s first atrocities to be photographically covered; there are anonymous photographs and there are signed and documented photographs that corroborated witness accounts. A German military officer Armin T. Wegner, stationed with the 6th Ottoman Army, took a series of photographs of dying and dead Armenians. These pictures anticipates photographs that were to follow during the Second World War, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

In fact, the international nonchalance over the Armenian genocide emboldened Hitler. In his August 1939, he spoke “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?” in an haunting harbinger of his own Holocaust. “The world believes only in success,” he added, justifying his potential invasion of Poland and all the deeds that would follow that calamitous event.

A pivotal event which paved the way for the rise of Nazi dominance over Germany burned brightly on the night of February 27th 1933. At 9:25 pm, a Berlin fire station received an alarm call that the Parliament (the Reichstag) was ablaze. The fire apparently started in the Session Chamber, and by the time the police and firefighters had arrived, the main Chamber of Deputies was engulfed by flames.

At that time, Hitler was having dinner with Joseph Goebbels at the latter’s apartment in Berlin. When Goebbels received a phone call informing him of the fire, he regarded it as a “tall tale” at first and only after the second call did he report the news to Hitler. Hitler, Goebbels, the Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Prince Heinrich Günther von Hohenzollern were taken by car to the Reichstag where they met by Hermann Göring. Göring told Hitler “This is a Communist outrage! One of the Communist culprits has been arrested”. Hitler called the fire a “sign from heaven”, and claimed the fire was a Fanal (signal) meant to mark the beginning of a Communist Putsch.

A sign from heaven indeed. Whether it was orchestrated by the government or not, the culprit of the Reichstag Fire had been predetermined since Hitler came to power four weeks before. Inside the building, the police found a naked man, a Dutch insurrectionist by the name of Marinus van der Lubbe. The Nazis pointed the blame at the Communists; van der Lubbe and many Communists (including elected Communist Party delegates) were arrested. and the civil liberties were suspended. Van der Lubbe was found guilty and beheaded. In total, fifty one anti-Nazis disappeared. With the communist delegates gone, the Nazis became the majority party from a plurality party. On the next election a week later (March 5th), the Nazis consolidated their victory.

November 26th 1922. When the broken lid of the golden sarcophagus of King Tut in his tomb was slowly lifted away from its base using an elaborate pulley system, there was an audible gasp from the crowd of dignitaries who had assembled for this very event. What they found, underneath two sheets of linen, was a splendid coffin covered with now famous golden mask. The tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of Kings was discovered by Egyptologist Howard Carter on November 4th 1922.

The mummy itself was anatomically examined only three years later, on 11th November 1925. The autopsy by Douglas Derry, the Professor of Anatomy at the Egyptian University, was a total disaster. Although the mummy was intact, the unguents made it stuck to the bottom of the coffin and dried it to a stony hardness. They decided to cut the bandages and saw off the body, and thus released “King Tut’s curse”. The death of Carter Expedition leader Lord Carnarvon set the media on fire.Much to Carters displeasure, he began receiving letters from spiritualists from around the world. Faux legends claimed that by 1929, eleven of the people connected with the discovery of the tomb had died, including two of Carnarvon’s relatives, and Carter’s personal secretary, Richard Bethell. This would spawn a widespread interest in mummy movies and merchandise ever since. It was an amazing legacy–or call it afterlife if you may–for an unimportant puppet king who died under dubious circumstances.

Above, Howard Carter examines the triple coffin of Boy Pharaoh.

On January 18, 1912, Captain Robert Scott arrived at the South Pole hoping to be the first there only to find that the Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had arrived 35 days earlier. Above from left to right, Scott, Lieutenant Titus Oates, Dr. Edward Wilson and Petty Officer Edgar Evans posed next to the tent left by the Norwegians. One of the key differences between Scott and Amundsen was that Scott’s team undertook the race by foot and Amundsen brought with him 100 sled dogs to ferry him to his destination and back.

Original photograph taken by Lieut. “Birdie” W. R. Bowers, was the last photo of Robert Scott. On their return from the South Pole, Scott and his team (Oates, Wilson, Evans and Bowers himself) perished as a result of exhaustion, hunger, violent storms, and extreme cold. A search party discovered Scott’s last tent with the bodies of five navy man and their equipments (including an important diary and the above photos) on November 12th, 1912. The news of his death arrived back to Britain on February 12th, 1913 when the Times wrote, “One has to go a long way back in the history of British exploring to find any disaster of like magnitude.”

Despite their frenzied search for gold, the Spanish conquistadors under Pizarro never discovered Machu Picchu, which remained hidden on the edge of the Peruvian desert until 1913. This once inaccessible city (now a train station is at the foot of the mountain) in Urubamba Valley near Cuzco, Peru is perhaps the first capital of the Incan Empire and one of the most important architectural sites of a civilization destroyed by the Europeans.

Martin Chambi (1891-1973) was the great chronicler of the Altiplano, and visited Machu Picchu in 1925, more than a decade after Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor who discovered the ruins in 1913. His iconic picture above became the defining image of Machu Picchu. Every tourist and photographer tried to replicate the image–an ironic twist since Chambi’s intent was not to document the ruins but to take pictures of Huayana Picchu, the mountains that surround the ruins. Below is another photo by Chambi of Machu Picchu taken in 1943.

In summer 1941, in their push to invade Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler’s German army marched through Ukraine. On July 19th, Vinnitsa, Ukraine was captured by German troops. The town of Vinnista witnessed its own share of tribulations in the 30s and the 40s. As many as 10,000 Great Purge corpses were exhumed by the Germans. Adolf Hitler established his eastern most headquarters FHQ Wehrwolf near the town and spent a number of weeks there in 1942 and early 1943. But the greatest turmoil came during Rosh-ha-Shana holiday (September 22th) when 28,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis. According to the census data of 1926, 21,800 Jews lived in the region which means the entire Jewish people were exterminated in Vinnitsa.

This famous picture, inscribed on the back of the photo as of the Last Jew in Vinnitsa, was taken by German Einsatzgruppen solider before he was shot by another Einsatzgruppe Dofficer. His haunting face and hollow, distracted eyes were as symbolic of the Holocaust as later Margaret Bourke-White images. Present in the background of the photo are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.

A plain tan cardigan hangs in the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the same cardigan Carter wore to his first televised fireside address in February 1977. Despite the words of caution from his staff on wearing it, Jimmy Carter addressed the nation in a cardigan during the height of the fuel shortages in the 1970s. Mocked on the news as ‘community college professor’ and as an officious attempt to play ‘homey’ (Carter’s predecessor Ford was much more lucky in his attempt), Carter nonetheless achieved a symbolic act that came to be identified with his humble Southern roots.

Carter asked the American peopleus all to take a simple step to save energy: turn down the thermostat, and put on a sweater. Few remembered his message but his cardigan, it became a cultural icon.

Time magazine will publish a special commemorative issue on Michael Jackson on Monday, June 29. The stories from the issue appeared on Time’s website. (Many newsweeklies — The New Yorker, Newsweek, New York closes press late in the week but Time closes on Wednesdays, and missed the boat on MJ’s death).

For the special commemorative issue, Time spoke with Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Nancy Reagan, Lenny Kravitz, Jesse Jackson, Tommy Mottola, Berry Gordy, Spike Lee, Sheryl Crow, Anjelica Huston, Clive Davis, Al Sharpton, Deepak Chopra, Kobe Bryant, Lance Bass, Oscar De La Hoya, Savion Glover, A.R. Rahman, Peter Gabriel, John Mayer and more.

The special edition will be published in addition to TIME’s regular weekly issue and will retail for $5.99–a little more than $4.95 retail price of weekly issues. The last time the magazine published an impromptu special issue was after 9/11., but last special issue addressing a celebrity death was after Princess Diana’s. Then, Time released an unprecedented gold-bordered issue which sold more than 1.1 million copies domestically. In comparison, 9/11 cover sold 3.25 million copies domestically.

At 11:30 am on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal became the first human beings to conquer Mount Everest. At 29,028 ft., it is the highest place on earth. They were part of the ninth British Everest Expedition, led by Col. John Hunt.

“By any rational standards, this was no big deal. Aircraft had long before flown over the summit, and within a few decades literally hundreds of other people from many nations would climb Everest too,” wrote Time Magazine, “Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered.” However, it was the ultimate challenge: between 1920 and 1952 the mountain claimed seven major expeditions had failed and several lives, including that of famed mountaineer George Leigh-Mallory.

As they descended, they became public heroes. As Hillary got closer to his team, he uttered that famous phrase. ‘Well George, we knocked the bastard off!’. Instantly nationalism came into play. They were asked who stepped upon the summit first. In fact, Hillary was the first to reach the summit, but he maintains that this is irrelevant, and that they reached it together.  Of the above Kodachrome photos, he added: “I had carried my camera, loaded with colour film, inside my shirt to keep it warm, so I now produced it and got Tenzing to pose for me on the top, waving his ice-axe on which was a string of flags—British, Nepalese, United Nations, and Indian. Then I turned my attention to the great stretch of country lying below us.”

19th March 1932. The great triumph that kept any Australian employed over Depression times, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was finally opened. The Labor premier of the province of New South Wales Jack Lang, was to open the bridge by cutting a ribbon at its southern end. However, Colonel Francis De Groot, a Dublin-born antique dealer and manufacturer of fine furniture, dramatically intervened on horseback by slashing the ribbon with his sword and declaring the bridge open “in the name of His Majesty the King and all the decent and respectable people of New South Wales”. De Groot was not a member of the regular army but his uniform allowed him to blend in with the real cavalry.

De Groot was opposed to Lang’s leftist policies and was resentful of the fact that King George V hadn’t been asked to open the bridge. He had earned his sword with the 15th Hussars  in WWI. Dragged from his horse after cutting the ribbon, he insisted that a police sergeant was not entitled to arrest an officer of the 15th. He was convicted of offensive behaviour and fined £5 after a psychiatric test proved he was sane.The ribbon was hurriedly retied and Lang performed the official opening ceremony.

See other photos for that incident here at the University of Sydney.

October 1, 1940. The image of a child breaking free of his mother’s hold to reach out to his father became one of the enduring images of WWII. It was taken by Claude Detloff at Columbia and 8th Street in New Westminster, Vancouver as the soldiers of the Duke of Connaught’s Own Rifles marched off to fight in the Second World War.

The mother’s outstretched hand and the swirl of her coat, the boy’s shock of white hair and his own reaching hand, the father’s turning smile and the downward thrust of his own outreaching hand (he has shifted his rifle to his other hand to hold his son’s for a moment) and the long line of marching men in the background combine to make this an unforgettable image, a masterpiece of unplanned composition, a heart-grabbing moment frozen for all time.

The next day, the picture appeared in the Canadian Newspaper Province and the family, Jack, Bernice and their son Warren “Whitey” Bernard were suddenly famous. The picture was given a full page in Life, was portrayed in Liberty, Time, Newsweek, the Reader’s Digest and the Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbook, not to mention dozens of newspapers. It was hung in many schools in Canada during the war. First grader Whitey became the face of ‘Bring My Daddy Home’ War Bond drives. He finally did in October 1945, and Detloff took a photograph of their reunion.

4 June 1962. Navy chaplain Luis Padillo was walking around giving last rites to dying soldiers as sniper fire surrounded him. A wounded soldier pulled himself up by linging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them. Hector Rondón Lovera, who had to lie flat to avoid getting shot, later said that he was unsure how he managed to take this picture. [See all pictures he took that day]. Norman Rockwell eeriely used this photograph as a template for his Southern Justice painting, “Murder in Mississippi“.

It was taken in Puerto Cabello Naval Base, Venezuela, the city of 80,000 beside the nation’s largest naval base 75 miles west of the capital Caracas . In June 1962, Puerto Cabello was the scene of one of the bitterest fighting in modern Venezuelan history, now known as the Porteñazo.. The bloody struggle between government forces and guerrilla rebels in the naval base who had the support of the residents of Puerto Cabello. Official casualty figures for the military were 47 dead, 89 wounded. But unofficial estimates put the toll, including civilians, at more than 300.