Iconic Photos

Stanfford Cripps: The First Modern Chancellor

The position of the Chancellor of Exchequer is a powerful job. In a country where the Prime Minister is the First Lord of the Treasury, the Chancellor is a de facto number two in the British government. Three greatest of British Prime Ministers, Gladstone, D’Israeli and Churchill served as Chancellors of Exchequer (albeit their tenures were unremarkable). Living just next door to the PM, the Chancellor sets the fiscal policy and dictates the monetary policy to the Bank of England.

The most important day in a chancellor’s calendar is of course the Budget Day, now set on a Wednesday in March. The night before, he would have a dinner with the monarch, who is the first person to be told on the new budget. The next morning, he makes the short journey from Number 11 to the Commons after showing the assembled crowd the battered budget box. The beginning of this somewhat silly photo-op tradition dates from 1869 when Chancellor George Ward Hunt opened the Budget box in the Commons only to find that he had left his speech at home.

Inside the Commons, the Chancellor is allowed to drink whatever he or she wishes whilst making the speech. (This includes alcohol, which is otherwise banned under parliamentary rules). Geoffrey Howe drank gin and tonic; D’Israeli, brandy and water; Nigel Lawson, spritzer; and Gladstone, sherry and beaten egg. Chruchill opted for brandy, while Hugh Dalton singularly drank milk and rum. With a touch of irony, Kenneth Clarke announced a cut in taxes on spirits, holding a glass of whisky. This tradition nearly caused trouble when Norman Lamont took his own bottle of Highlander whiskey to the Commons in the budget box. Lamont waved the budget box containing both the bottle of whiskey and the speech. In the following years, Lamont’s PPS William Hague had to carry the speech in a plastic bag to prevent a disaster.

Perhaps the funniest the budget day story happened in 1953. Rab Butler announced that the sugar ration would be increased from 10oz to 12 oz a week to help the nation make celebratory cakes for the Queen’s coronation that year.

Congressional hearings are always a joke: a few minutes of soundbites, a few days of moral posturings and then back to normal. The crowning moment in this theatre of absurd was the Pecora Commission formed to investigated the causes of the financial market crash (sounds familiar, doesn’t it) in 1933.

With the public clamoring for some action (awfully familiar), the persecutor Ferdinand Pecora went after the private banking and its crown jewel, the House of Morgan. Pecora was successful in figuring out that their executives paid no taxes in the years immediately following the crash, and that before the crash, Morgan offered stocks at discounted rates to many influential people, including the former president Calvin Coolidge, Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts. Defending himself, Jack Morgan said Pecora had “the manners of a prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.”

The Morgan testimony was so outrageous that Senator Carter Glass quipped, “We are having a circus, and the only things lacking now are peanuts and colored lemonade.” A press agent for the Ringling Brothers Circus took advantage of this quote to put a midget (one Lya Graf) on Morgan’s lap. To compound the error, the committee chairman, Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida, asked with newspapers not to print the pictures, which only made them rush to do so. Senator Glass later barred cameramen from the committee room.

The photo of Morgan with a circus midget became the symbol of everything that was wrong with Washington. However, the Pecora hearings were successful in creating financial regulations that existed until Clinton and Bush administrations abandoned them. A similarly sad end came to Graf, who returned to her native Germany only to be put inside a concentration camp and she died at Auschwitz in 1941.

As for Jack Morgan, he was barred from securities business for a year. His company was separated into an investment bank and a commercial bank by the Glass-Steagall Act. The Morgan fortune would greatly diminish after this as the depression, the inheritance and income taxes, and lavish spending on arts took its toll. By the time Jack Morgan died in 1943, he left behind only $3 million dollars and the House of Morgan’s assets were meagre $35 million.

I don’t usually made political predictions, but if there is one reason David Cameron might lose the General Election, it is the above photo–a picture taken in 1987 at Brasenose College, Oxford which Cameron attended. Although the Labour party accused him of being a member of a secret society,the Bullingdon Club, is far from a secret society. Immortalized as the Bollinger Club by Evelyn Waugh, the Buller usually make its presence known by throwing exclusive yet rambunctious parties.

Above,

(1) the Hon. Edward Sebastian Grigg, the heir to Baron Altrincham of Tormarton and current chairman of Credit Suisse (UK)

(2) David Cameron

(3) Ralph Perry Robinson, a former child actor, designer, furniture-maker

(4) Ewen Fergusson, son of the British ambassador to France, Sir Ewen Fergusson and now at City law firm Herbert Smith

(5) Matthew Benson, the heir to the Earldom of Wemyss and March

(6) Sebastian James, the son of Lord Northbourne, a major landowner in Kent

(7) Jonathan Ford, the-then president of the club, a banker with Morgan Grenfell

(8) Boris Johnson, the-then president of the Oxford Union, now Lord Mayor of London

9) Harry Eastwood, the investment fund consultant

In the photo taken in 1992, there are eight famous faces:

(1) George Osborne, now the Shadow Chancellor;

(2) writer Harry Mount, the heir to the Baronetcy of Wasing and Mr. Cameron’s cousin;

(3) Chris Coleridge, the descendant of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the son of Lloyds’ chairman David Coleridge, the brother of Conde Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge

(4) German aristocrat and managing consultant Baron Lupus von Maltzahn,

(5) the late Mark Petre, the heir to the Barony of Petre;

(6) Australian millionaire Peter Holmes a Cour;

(7) Nat Rothschild, the heir to the Barons Rothschilds and co-founder of a racy student paper with Harry Mount

(8) Jason Gissing, the chairman of Ocado supermarkets.

Two figures on left of (6) and (7) were blacked out before the photo was released, causing wild allegations. Their identities are yet unknown. My top contenders (based on the influence in the City, the Athenaeum and their Oxford prominence) include:

(1) the Hon. Michael Gove, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, former president of the Oxford Union and “one-man think-tank”

(2) the Hon. Adam Bruce, the son of the Earl of Elgin and incumbent Unicorn Pursuivant of Arms

(3) the Hon. Edward Vaizey, the son of Lord Vaizey and the Shadow Minister for Culture

(4) the founder of Think Tank Policy Exchange, and conservative activist Nicholas Boles

(5) Steven Hilton, the director of strategy for Cameron and godfather of Cameron’s children

The pictures were withdrawn from circulation as the Oxford-based company Gillman and Soame, which own the copyright, was persuaded to withhold the further permission to show the picture. Mr. Cameron has since shown embarrassment for his association with the Bullers but these photos could easily have tipped the outcome of the close election. The Brits are still conscious about a classless society: although most of the British prime ministers hail from Eton-Harrow, Oxbridge circles, there still deep animosity towards elites. Douglas Hurd, Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary, wrote: “If I had not gone to Eton I would have become Prime Minister in 1990.” During the Tory leadership contest in 2005, David Cameron was discounted because he was an Old Etonian, a name Gordon Brown throws at him usually these days. John Prescott called the conservative front-bench an “Eton mafia,” while a lot of influential journalists (outside of Murdoch circle) are dismissed of the old school ties too. [In fact Mr. Cameron is descended from an illegitimate child of William IV and his wife  from an illegitimate child of Charles II by Nell Gwynn].

It will be a pity if he loses just because of where he went to school. Cameron himself is a moderate, and has assembled the most celebral shadow cabinet since Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s.

Read more about David Cameron in Vanity Fair.

Adolf Hitler, in these photos taken by his personal photographer, rehearses gestures intended to look spontaneous while listening to a recording of one his speeches. In 1927, when Heinrich Hoffman took these action shots, Adolf Hitler has already restored the Nazi party to the political significance (just one year after becoming its Führer). The 38-year old was also already a millionaire, thanks to his book Mein Kampf*.

The impoverish failed artist has already come a long way, but he has his sights on a bigger price. He carefully cultivated his image as the party leader using the propagandistic value of photographs. Hoffman, Hitler’s good friend and exclusive photographer, captioned it:”Adolf Hitler rehearses supposedly spontaneous gestures while listening to a recording of one of his previous speeches”. The photos undermined the myth of Hitler’s apparently natural oratorial skill and Hitler ordered Hoffman to destroy the negatives; Hoffman didn’t.

[*In fact, people were tricked into buying the book: they thought it was a revealing autobiography or an account of the Beer Hall Putsch. From the royalties, Hitler was able to afford a Mercedes while still in prison. He spent years evading taxes, and waived his taxes himself when he became the dictator.

After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, millions of copies were sold (ten million by the end of the war), but mostly to the German government, which purchased six million copies as a gift at weddings, graduations and birthdays. Before 1939, all the royalties abroad went to Hitler too. In addition to not paying the taxes, Hitler also charged the German government for the right to reproduce his likeness on the stamps, postcards and posters. Following Hoffmann's suggestion, both he and Hitler received royalties from all uses of Hitler's image, which made the photographer also rich.]

It was a media war that the United States lost in Somalia, ironic since its involvement was forced by the pictures of famine-stricken people there. In one of the clearest and earliest examples of the CNN effect, the war was repeatedly dogged by the dozens of press photographers. It is an anticipating media, not snipers or enemy combatants, that greeted the U.S landing forces in Mogadishu in December 9th 1992.

For a war that began with memorable images, it is both fitting and ironic that it ended because of another set of dramatic images. The photos taken by Canadian photographer Paul Watson, of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu spelled the beginning of the end for U.S.-U.N. peacekeeping force. Domestic opinion turned hostile as horrified TV viewers watched images of the bloodshed—-including this Pulitzer-prize winning footage of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed’s supporters dragging the body of U.S. Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, cheering. President Clinton immediately abandoned the pursuit of Aideed, the mission that cost Cleveland his life and gave the order for all American soldiers to withdraw from Somalia by March 31, 1994. Other Western nations followed suit.

When the last U.N. peacekeepers left in 1995, ending a mission that had cost more than $2 billion, Mogadishu still lacked a functioning government. The battle deaths, and the harrowing images prompted lingering U.S. reluctance to get involved in Africa’s crises, including the following year’s genocide in Rwanda. In 1996, Osama bin Laden cited the incident as proof that the U.S. was unable to stomach casualties: when “one American was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear.” Never before or since had a photo altered a nation’s political destinies so much so.

[In the topmost photo, the soldier's genitals are exposed. When Time magazine decided to print it, they decided to cover them up in a controversial decision. Right after Watson took that photo, the crowd turned more violent, and they forced him to enter into a leaving car. He bolted from it and took the middle picture. The people in that photo looked a lot meaner and their eyes were focused on Watson, who defied the order to leave. It was this middle picture that AP ran (AP had tough policies against nudity). Supreme irony was that, as Watson noted, "decision was made to censor something sexually offensive, while the outrageous violence of desecrating a corpse is deemed safe for the general public's consumption."

Time magazine's Stephen Mayes replied: "[It] exposes the sensitivities of a nation that is militarily strong enough to confront one dead soldier but morally too insecure to risk the exposure of a single genital, even in such a non-sexual context?”]

The great Mathew Brady studied photography under Samuel Morse, and opened his own photography studio in New York in 1844. Starting next year, he started taking photos of famous Americans, and produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans in 1850. For Brady, neither his itinerant photoadventures nor the album was lucrative, but it brought increased attention to Brady’s work. The most famous images in the album was an elderly Andrew Jackson, the former president of the United States, whose photo he took at the president’s plantation, the Hermitage in 1845.

He would be the first U.S. president to have his picture taken. At the age of 78, just months before his death, the sickly president sat for Mathew Brady, whom he denounced for making him “look like a monkey.” Jackson was sickly throughout his term too, prompting concerns that he might die prematurely. Despite suffering from chronic headaches, abdominal pains, and a severe hacking cough, caused by a musket ball in his lung from a duel (his coughs would often brought up blood and sometimes even made his whole body shake), he served two full terms, and retired far more popular than he was when he entered. A formidable politician, ‘Old Hickory’ was by then an elder statesman–politicians sought his approval for their bills, an imprimatur that guaranteed widespread support. Cantankerously he supported two successful presidential campaigns, and worked tirelessly on the annexation of Texas, encouraging his friend Sam Houston to endorse annexation.

As I always maintained, you know an iconicity of a photo by looking at parodies and pastiches it caused. I first saw this with Cameron Diaz reenacting the scene (see below), photographed by James White. The original is, of course, above–actress Sonia Romanoff attacking a paparazzo with ice-cream in Rome’s historic Via Venato in 1966. The paparazzo in question was Rino Barillari, self-styled king of paparazzi, who was one of the original paparazzi whose antics inspired Federico Fellini to make La Dolce Vita.

Sonia Romanoff–an unsuccessful Yugoslavia-born actress–eventually married an 81-year old count to get an Italian citizenship and disappeared into obscurity. The above photo by Giacomo Alexis has been her only milestone.

Flint Journal photographer, Bill Gallagher had a reputation for getting comedic pictures, and he took this picture of Democratic presidential candidate and Illinois Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson (right) and Michigan Gov. G. Mennen Williams on the Labor Day 1952. Kneeling in front of the podium to cover Stevenson’s speech, Gallager noticed a hole in Stevenson’s shoe. Gallagher set his focus on six feet, set the lens opening and removed the flash gun so as not to attract attention. He set the camera on the floor of the platform and fired one bulb.

Stevenson looked over at him and uncrossed his legs. But Gallagher had the image–which would became one of the great political photos of all time. The next day, it the airwaves and papers. The hole was totally out of character for the aristocratic, wealthy, intellectual Stevenson, who was having difficulty establishing himself as a candidate of the people in his race against Dwight D. Eisenhower.  The photo was so loved by Stevenson’s campaign that it even sold silver lapel pins, T-shirts and posters to memorialize the symbol of everyman frugality (below)*. The witty candidate himself responded, Better a hole in the shoe than a hole in the head,” but it was not enough for him to win the presidency. The photo, however, won a Pulitzer and Stevenson sent a telegram congratulating Gallagher: “Glad to hear you own with a hole in one.”

Stevenson’s head was also at the centre of attention that year. His opponent Eisenhower’s vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon called him an “egghead”, referring to his baldness. Constantly under mockery for his hair, Stevenson remarked,“Via ovicipitum dura est” (The way of the egghead is hard) in a lecture he gave at Harvard on March 17 in 1954. A week later on March 23 he made another joke, ”Eggheads of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks.”

* In 2008, another intellectual democrat from Illinois would also don similar everyman frugality with old shoes. [link]

So another Oscar night has come and gone. I watched part of the ceremonies: Neil Patrick Harris rocked the opening; Steven Martin and Alec Baldwin were not as good as they usually were on SNL; best actor/actress tributes were touching; Farrah Fawcett was notably absent from In Memoriam and Tom Hank’s Best Picture announcement was very abrupt. The night lacked any memorable moment, but Katherine Bigelow’s Oscar moment is definitely long overdue one for women in the industry.

Almost all nominees come to the award show now–the biggest night of the showbiz; I saw Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers–about whom a documentary film is made this year–in the crowd (Even Steve Jobs is there). It was not always the case: Martin Brando refused his Oscar. In 1971, Vanessa Redgrave refused to attend after being nominated, saying that Americans didn’t like her and that the Nixon administration refused her a visa. Six years later, she did attend the ceremony only to accept the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and denounced Nixon and the “Zionist hoodlums” in her acceptance speech.

George C. Scott dismissed Oscars as a “two hour meat parade”, and refused to attend even when he won Best Actor for Patton. Some absences were tragic: Sidney Howard, winner of the 1940 screenplay award for his Gone with the Wind, was run over by a tractor just before Oscars night. Some were intentional: George Bernard Shaw refused to cross the Atlantic to collect his writing award for Pygmalion. He even quoted: ”It’s an insult for them to offer me any honour, as if they had never heard of me before – and it’s very likely they never have. They might as well send some honour to George for being King of England”. Shaw received his statuette by mail and used it as a door stop.

In view of all these absences, Joan Crawford’s in 1946 was masterly. Nominated as best actress for Mildred Pierce, she didn’t want to face losing so she claimed she was ill with flu. She sent her make-up artist and hair stylist to the ceremony in case she won, which she did. Immediately, the statuette was sent to her hospital, closely followed by photographers. There she posed for the above pictures. They stole the next day’s front pages and upstaged everyone else who won that night.

Horst Faas joined the A.P. in 1955 at the age of 22 and began his illustrious photojournalism career by covering the Congo crisis in 1960. There, he bribed Congolese soldiers with Polaroid snapshots to gain access to important events. The practice enabled him to be in the right place to take the last picture of Patrice Lumumba (above).

Patrice Lumumba who helped win Congo’s independence from Belgium in June 1960 was a passionate nationalist who failed to tame this volatile ‘state without a nation’ containing many different ethnic groups. His fiery and controversial independence day speech culminated with Nous ne sommes plus vos macaques! (We are no longer your monkeys!),* but Belgium continued to interfere. It backed a rebellion in the southern province of Katanga, and Lumumba sought Soviet aid to quell the rebellion. Within ten weeks, he was toppled by a military coup backed by the CIA.

He was put under house arrest, while a CIA officer was dispatched with a tube of poison toothpaste. Before his assassin arrived, Lumumba escaped from his house arrest, but rearrested from a plane in Elizabethville. He was beaten and humiliated in front of diplomats and journalists, and was on the truck that would inevitably carry him to his execution when the above picture was taken. It was Lumumba’s last photo. A month later, he was executed — put up against a tree and shot by a firing squad directed, so it seems, by Belgian army officers. His body was buried on the spot, later dug up, and dissolved in acid. The bones were ground up and scattered to the winds to make sure there was nothing left of him. The colonel who deposed Lumumba, Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko) would rule the country despotically until 1997 and proved to be an utter embarrassment for the West, with his Mao suits, cult of personality and nepotism.

[* Congo's independence ceremony was one of the most awkward episodes in modern diplomatic history. Belgian King Baudouin praised developments under colonialism, Belgium philanthropism in the Congo and the "genius" of Leopold II and glossed over atrocities committed during the Congo Free State. Patrice Lumumba's rebuttal was vicious: "Slavery was imposed on us by force! We have known ironies and insults. We remember the blows that we had to submit to morning, noon and night because we were Negroes!" The King just sat there, deeply shocked and offended. Although Baudouin wanted to return to Brussels immediately, his ministers persuaded him to stay--a negotiation that delayed the official programme for an hour.]

In America, Jacques Henri Lartigue’s claim to fame was that he was replaced from the cover of Life magazine by the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. However, in the wider world, Lartigue was probably the symbol of the transformation of photography into an affordable family pastime. The greatest of the earliest amateurs, he showed how a mundane scene can be transformed into a magnificent image.

He started with photographs of family games and childhood experiences, later moving onto the beginnings of aviation and cars and the women of the Bois de Boulogne. Without even realising it, he became the father of “modern” photography. One of his favourite subjects was the motorcar, which he photographed as early as 1910, in the above photo of a two-wheeled bobsleigh taking a turn at 60 km/h.

But when he saw the picture he took on that 26th January 1912, the eighteen-year old was disappointed. The number six car is only half in the frame, the background smudged and strangely distended. He put the photo away and forgot about it until September 1954, when the French photography magazine “Points de vue – Images du monde” published “In the heroic times of the motorcar”. Of all photographs of car races taken by Lartigue, the above photo stood out. Automobile Delage, taken at the French Grand Prix in 1912, as someone pointed out, “conveys a remarkable impression of velocity–the wheels of the speeding car are elliptical and tilted forward, their spokes blurred with motion, and the road itself is but a streak of grey”. It showed “all the rush, the energy, the velocity that were so important during the years … in which racing drivers are popular heroes, new speech records are established and broken every week,” wrote Philip Blom in The Vertigo Years.

The picture, ultimately one of Lartigue’s most famous images, transformed him overnight from a painter with photography hobby into “France’s leading amateur photographer” — as the magazine called it. He retired as a society photographer, taking the official portrait for President Giscard d’Estaing.

For someone whose photo career began at the age of six — with his father’s camera — in 1900,the title of his firsbook, a journal he kept throughout his life was especially fitting: Diary of A Century.

From left to right: the former Prime Minister Lord Home, Liberal leader David Steel, Michael Foot, Chancellor of Exchequer Geoff Howe (back), PM  Margaret Thatcher

A trenchant philosopher, giant of belles-lettres, eloquent orator and skillful Machiavelli of backbench politics, Michael Foot seemed well suited for the premiership. A Victorian one that is. In practice, however, his deeply cerebral aloofness and don-like pedantry proved to be his undoing. Michael Foot, as the Opposition Leader, presided over a three-digit electoral defeat, Labour’s worst defeat in 60 years, which ended his political career as much as the old Labour itself.

Oxford-educated, Byron-quoting old guard of Labour politics, Foot became the Opposition Leader just before his 70th birthday. White-haired, asthmatic and disheveled, he would walk into the Commons leaning on a walking stick, accompanied by his dog. Regardless of weather, he would refuse all offers of official cars or a lift and would limp off to catch a bus back home. And it took only one sartorial choice to finish off Michael Foot’s quirky leadership.

On 8th November 1981, Foot attended the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph, wearing a so-called “donkey jacket”. Although the Queen Mother was quite amused by the jacket, the media was not. Already mocked in the media for looking like “an out-of-work Irish navvy”, Foot appeared “as if he had just completed his Sunday constitutional on Hampstead Heath,” criticized the Guardian. He earned an enduring nickname, Wurzel Gummidge. Foot always denied that it was a donkey jacket, merely a short overcoat, but the jacket inevitably became a major issue that election season.

Margaret Thatcher riding high on Falklands fervor readily won the election and Michael Foot was promptly shown the door by his party. A man of principle, Foot refused to enter the House of Lords whose abolition he championed. He left politics, never to return, even when his beloved Labour slowly came to embrace Thatcherism he denounced vehemently. Foot’s stature as an international statesman was unparalleled: he spoke out against aristocracy, nuclear weapons, Franco’s Spain, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. In his Edwardian nature, Michael Foot was a romantic refuge from an earlier era, and the last of his breed. They don’t make politicians like Foot anymore. Michael Mackintosh Foot, Esq. was a sound man, and as one who refused to trade his clothes, appearances or principles for popularity, he remained an aberration throughout his entire career, and died as one this morning. He was 96.