Iconic Photos

For more than 10 years, Horst Faas covered the Vietnam war for the AP. Travelling alone, he jumped out of helicopters, tramped through villages, rice paddies and jungles, and took photos of street fights, interrogations and executions. One day in January 1964, Faas and the South Vietnamese Unit he was travelling with came across a suspected collaborator. A South Vietnamese ranger uses the end of a dagger to threaten punishment to the farmer for allegedly supplying government troops with wrong information on Communist guerrillas. Faas recalled, “If the prisoner didn’t talk, they would be hurt and even if they did talk they would be hurt or killed. In this case, the knife was a threat — and I think he used it. The photo won a Pulitzer.

Faas came to develop his own code to decide whether his war photos were too graphic. “If it was a really exception event, one crazy man, then we wouldn’t use it. But this event was not a singular event, not even occasional. It was a routine event. That’s the story that pictures like this told newspaper-reading people during the weary days of the war.”

October 12th, 1960. It’s election season in Japan. Three thousand people cram Tokyo’s Hibiya Hall to hear socialist party chairman Inejiro Asanuma debate the incumbent Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda. Ikeda was inspired by the Nixon-Kennedy debates, and decided to hold his own with his opponents. Asanuma critcized the government for its mutual defense treaty with the United States and right-wing students in the audience began to heckle and throw pieces of paper at the burly chairman.

Police rushed in, and one student 17-year-old son of a Self-Defense Force Colonel, Otoya Yamaguchi ran out of the police cordon carrying a samurai sword. Before anyone could stop him, he plunged his sword into Asanuma, pulled it out and speared Asanuma again — through the heart. Less than three weeks after the assassination, while being held in a juvenile detention facility, Yamaguchi used his bedsheet to hang himself. He lived his samurai tradition to the end: his suicide was owabi—or an apology to those inconvenienced by his assassination.

An assassination’s aftermath was always traumatic. The Socialists have tried to make the assassination the top issues in the election. They paraded Asanuma’s widow in hope of a sympathy vote. After Yamaguchi’s death, the Socialists pointed out that the fact that an important criminal was able to commit suicide exposes the utter irresponsibility of the authorities in charge and jadedly noted that Yamaguchi had the only detention cell in Japan with a light fixture strong enough for hanging oneself. They also tried to link Yamaguchi with the ruling party, the United States and the CIA. Yamaguchi, in fact, belonged to an ultranationalist group called the Great Japan Patriotic party, which reportedly worships Adolf Hitler as well as the Japanese Emperor. Although the Great Japan Patriotic party was quick to distance itself from Yamaguchi, they called Asanuma’s killing as “a heaven-sent punishment.” Perhaps of all the coverages, none is more telling of prejudices and sensations of the time than this article from TIME magazine.

Despite all the benefits of democratic government. Asia’s highest literacy rate and the world’s fastest-growing economy, Japan still often seems a nation with one foot planted in the fanatic past. Chief worry of responsible Japanese is that Asanuma’s murder may be only the first of a renewed wave of political killings in a country where, before the war, political assassination was almost a tradition.

Although the predominantly right-wing audience reacted strongly to Asanuma’s opposition to the mutual defense treaty, the treaty was sure controversial. The new treaty on long-term basing of US troops in Japan signed in January 1960 was so unpopular that strikes and clashes followed the ratification. President Eisenhower canceled his state visit, the prime minister responsible for the treaty Kishi Nobusuke had to resign.

Although many reporters, TV crews and photographers were present, only one man took the photo of the decisive moment: Yasushi Nagao, staff photographer for the Tokyo Mainichi newspaper, who took this picture with his last remaining shot in the camera. The United Press International widely distributed the photo under the title, “Tokyo Stabbing” and it was reprinted in many American newspapers. Life magazine dedicated a spread. Nagao became the first non-American photographer to win a Pulitzer in photography.

See the youtube clip for what happens when photographers flock in after a major event.

In 1872, Mary Todd Lincoln went to a ‘spiritualist’ photographer who could show in a picture what she had always believed: that her late husband, President Lincoln never left her side. She liked the picture, and refused to believe that it was a fake. Three years she was committed to an insane asylum.

The spiritualist photographer was one Boston engraver named William Mumler who in 1861 took his own photograph and ‘discovered’ the image of a dead cousin in the photograph. What Mumler discovered perhaps was double-exposure, but he nonetheless became the go-to man when it comes to ghost photos. Lincoln photo made him very popular, and Mumler is now credited with launching the popularity of spirit photography. Mumler said Mary Todd Lincoln used an assumed name and a veil and he didn’t recognize her until he was developing the print.

Over the next few decades, many people who flock to spiritual photographers to have their pictures taken in the hope of seeing some long lost relative. Frederick Hudson in London and E. Buguet in Paris followed Mumler’s footsteps. In 1891, when the famous Combermere photo was taken, Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the fathers of the theory of evolution) reflected that spirit photography should be taken seriously. In 1911, James Coates published Photographing the Invisible, a treatise on spirit photography.

Although it was still a few years before rolling 24 hour news channels, the 1972 Munich Olympics and the subsequent hostage crisis unfolded live on televisions around the globe. Terrorists with sympathies for the Palestinian cause broke into the Olympic Village and kidnapped members of the Israeli Olympic squad. Although the security service braced itself for a likelihood of such an event (infamous Sieber scenario 21) before the Games, it seemed that the German police were oblivious that the kidnappers were able to follow their preparations to attack by simply turing on their television sets.

The above photo of the hooded terrorist on the balcony outside the Israeli team’s hotel is framed in living memory and was one of the defining images of international terrorism. Clad in a nondescript pull-over, his face hidden by a sinister looking balaclava, with the slits for the eyes cut out, he looked more like a faceless monster than the young man from a Palestinian refugee camp he was. We don’t know for certain who he was—a faceless, unknown individual personified the very image of the modern terrorist: someone who was not like us, did not look like us, and came from some place far distant from our neighborhood or country of which we knew little, someone different, alien and and inherently evil.

Two athletes were already murdered before the scene of the hostage crisis was shifted to a military airport at Fürstenfeldbruck, where a failed rescue attempt ended up with the 9 remaining hostages being killed.The Games continued during the crisis, but eventually they were halted for a few hours. There was a move to cancel the rest of the Games, but they continued, a decision which the Israeli authorities supported. When the Games re-started, it was with a memorial service held in the Olympic Stadium. Although attended by many of the competing athletes, ten nations requested that their flags not be flown at half-mast during the ceremony, in a frightful display of endorsement for terrorism and disdain for the Olympic spirit.

The hostage crisis brought the Palestinian cause to the world’s attention. Indeed, at the time of Munich, the Palestinians were still a forgotten people; Israeli prime minister Golda Meir insisted they did not exist. All the footage from 1972 never used the word “Palestinian”; the gunmen are described simply as “Arab.”

In 1955, O Winston Link set out to capture the last days of steam railroading in America . Responsible for establish rail photography, Link also pioneered night photography, producing several well known examples including Hotshot Eastbound, above and Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole showing a train crossing a bridge above children bathing. Link’s interest in railroads developed as a youth growing up in Brooklyn. He reflected: “The train is as close to a human being as you can get. It talks, it moves, it grunts and groans. And each engine has its own characteristics–its own sound and smell and sights.” In the 50s,  Link used a large-format view camera to take 2,400 pictures, most of them at night, of Norfolk and Western’s coal and passenger trains — the country’s last steam engines. The company retired its last steam engine in May 1960.

Although his photos exuded spontaneity, they were often the result of elaborate preparations and darkroom manipulations. “Hot Shot East Bound” was photographed on August 2, 1956, in Iaeger, West Virginia, in an effort to depict small-town American life at the end of an era. As the steam engine symbolically exits the frame, a young couple in Link’s own 1952 Buick convertible takes center stage, both literally and metaphorically. Later, in his darkroom, Link added the U.S. Air Force Sabre airplane on the movie screen to extend this metaphoric power. The photo was a poignant display of a cultural lifestyle in speedy transition. The 50s marked the beginning of excess, decadence, and conspicuous consumption. For Link, no landscape embodied this as effectively as the drive-in theater, a cultural space first created in 1928 by Richard Hollingshead in response to the United State’s burgeoning car culture.  By the late 50s, America — a nation of 40 million people — was buying cars at the rate of 8 million annually. Under President Eisenhower, more than 50% of federal transportation budget went to creation of highways and less than 5% to public transportation. Los Angeles had more cars than the whole of Asia, and GM’s profits overtook Belgium economy.

(See the Smithsonian Magazine’s account of how the photo was taken).

Félix Tournachon was born into a family of printers. In the 1840s, he moved in socialist, bohemian circles and adopted the pseudonym Nadar (from ‘Tourne à dard’, a nickname he gained because of his talent for caricature). Nadar would become extremely famous for Panthéon Nadar, a photographic panorama of contemporary French celebrities.

With this success, Nadar asked his younger brother Adrien Tournachon to apprentice for him. The duo collaborated for a short period of time, their most famous work together being the series of portraits of the mime artist Charles Deburau, illustrating various expressions, like Surprise and Terror. Nadar relied on his earlier study of medicine and neurology to accurately translate the emotions, and Adrien, with his interest in theatre, also played an important role.

Charles Deburau (and before him his father Baptiste) transformed the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot, a base and thieving knave, into a modern free agent whose clever, quicksilver maneuvering appealed not only to the lower classes but also to the literati. Gautier, Champfleury, Baudelaire, and George Sand saw Pierrot as a metaphor for the creative artist—autonomous, ironic, and endlessly imaginative.

The Deburau series was an immediate hit and won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition of 1855; ironically, it was awarded not to Nadar but to his brother, who by then was operating under the name, “Nadar Jeune” and”Nadar jne”. The brothers acrimoniously split up, and in two lawsuits, Félix claimed exclusive rights to the pseudonym Nadar. Weaker Adrien, who was just the type of lovable rogue Pierrot represented, never recovered from the bitter trial which Félix finally won in 1859.

Bill Hudson, who died yesterday was an AP photographer who covered the civil rights movement. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama when police turned their dogs on demonstrators who defied a city ban on protests and again in Selma, when the choice of weapon was fire hoses. Like many other iconographers of the era, he documented police brutality and helped galvanize the public, both domestically and internationally.

The most famous of Hudson’s photos was taken in Birmingham on May 3, 1963, it seemingly showed a police dog attacking a young protestor. The officer’s dark sunglasses, his clenched teeth. his grabbing the youth by his sweater as he lets a police dog bury its teeth into the youth’s stomach, and the youth’s passive, lowering of eyes seems to suggest that totalitarian state has finally come to America. The New York Times published the photo across three columns above the fold the next day.

Like so many other photos on the blog, the image, however, has a complicated backstory. The youth was a high school senior Walter Gadsden; he was not even a protestor but merely a bystander. The officer was Dick Middleton, a mild-mannered policeman, who arrested Gadsden earlier for refusing an order to leave the street. Yet unlike others photos, some information in the photo; either the audience is distracted by other visual cues (dark sunglasses, absence of Gadsden’s look) or it just chose to ignore the inconvenient facts that didn’t fit the narrative of a peaceful protest.

Gadsden had his gaze lowered not because of passivity, but because the gaze was on the dog, whom he would subsequently attack. Middleton was not setting his dog on Gadsden but separating the dog away from Gadsden. Hudson’s photo captures the moment as Gadsden plunges his left knee into the dog’s throat. Gadsden also was seen clenching Middleton’s hand in an apparently defiant gesture. In addition, almost tranquil nature of people in the background suggests that this was neither the centre of the protest nor the scene of widespread police brutality.

This is not to suggest that the police brutality didn’t happen in Birmingham. But with Hudson’s death yesterday, we will never know what exactly the photo shows. The image, which merely showed two unruly dogs, was an icon for an event it may not represent.

Thirty years on, it all seemed like a surreal curiosity — when the billboard of a well-muscled young man in white briefs went up in Times Square in 1982, it stopped traffic there. The perspective which focused on the obvious bulge in the briefs caused a big controversy. It nonetheless led to the acceptability of the male form in mainstream American advertising and ushered in the era of “male as sex object” which saw a renaissance in the early 1980s. American Photographer magazine named the photo as one of “10 Pictures That Changed America.”

The model was the Brazilian Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus. For Calvin Klein advertising campaign, hotographer Bruce Weber took him to the Greek island of Santorini and took the photo of Hintnaus leaning back like Adonis. The photo, which incidentally was also a gay icon, was quite a departure from previously unsexy underwear ads involving with Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer. Hintnaus was frustrated by his fame, telling The Los Angeles Times, “I worked so hard to be the best pole vaulter in the world and I ended up being more well known for putting on a pair of briefs.”

Weber would go on to craft similar images for Banana Republic and notoriously for Abercrombie & Fitch. His black and white shots, of a naked couple on a swing facing each other, two clothed men in bed, and Marcus Schenkenberg barely holding jeans in front of himself in a shower, were seared in the memory of a generation that grew up entrenched in the consumer culture.

CK never shied from controversy either. A series of campaigns which focused on athletes followed, and so did accusations that so much had been digitally enhanced in those photos. Joel West’s spread-eagled stance in 1995 offended even Linda Wachner, then the head of Calvin Klein’s underwear licensee. The models’ antics outside the photostudio are often an embarrassment to the company. But by the time Mr. Klein retired from the company, he had made sure that male sexual objectification is hardly a rarity in advertising, and the job of Calvin Klein underwear model has become the male equivalent of appearing in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

When President Obama fired General Stanley McCrystal yesterday, the Americans were reminded of another painful episode in American history — the firing of General Douglas MacArthur by Harry Truman. “When you have nothing to say, take refuge in history” notes one aphorism and that’s precisely what I am going to do: the stories were pretty similar; the extremely bureaucratic ways of the Truman administration, which was then struggling with the nascent Cold War, annoyed more gung-ho MacArthur.  The general believed Truman was unfit to be his commander-in-chief while the latter thought the general was “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat”.

The first bone of contention was with Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, whom the general was specifically asked by the White House to stay clear of. Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung had taken over China, chasing Chiang’s Nationalists off to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). As the conflict in Korea grew, Truman felt that courting Chiang might prompt the entry of Red China and the Soviet Union into the Korean peninsular. MacArthur, however, believed Chiang could be a valuable ally, if not an ideal one: “If he has horns and a tail, so long as Chiang is anti-Communist, we should help him,” he declared. “We can try to reform him later,” he added.

In late July, MacArthur visited Formosa under his own initiative, and was photographed (above) kissing the hand of Madame Chiang. Madame Chiang looked both shocked and delighted, but Truman was incensed and more incensed were the etiquettists. The fact was that MacArthur was shown not only kissing a gloved hand, but also wearing his hat and grasping a pipe in his left hand. The question of whether this was proper for a gentleman was passed around and furiously debated until the-then Due de Levis Mirepoix, the world’s foremost authority on manners and the writer of La Politesse, Son Role, Ses Usages delivered the verdict that it is okay.

Truman probably couldn’t care less. In September, he met the general for the first and the only time. When he decided to dismiss the hero of the Pacific Treater in April, 1951, the Army, including MacArthur was the last to know. The public outrage was unprecedented; newspapers reacted furiously, with the New York Times lamenting “Asia apparently will be surrendered to Communism.” City councils adjourned. The American Legion was outraged, and in California Truman was hung in effigy. Truman’s approval ratings pummeled to low 20s, and he decided not to seek a second term.

MacArthur, on the other hand, returned triumphant. Half a million greeted him on his arrival in San Francisco; New York threw him the biggest ticker-tape parade ever, with five million people turning out to see MacArthur. The general gave an address to a defiant Congress; the speech which was interrupted by fifty ovations ended with the iconic line, “Old Soldiers never die, they just fade away.” In fact, that’s what happened to the general. His subsequent presidential candidacies came to nothing, and the only American ever to become a de facto emperor slowly fade into oblivion.

The above photo is in a poor condition. If anyone has a better version, please send it my way.

In 1950, editor of Picture Post Tom Hopkinson sent reporter James Cameron and photographer Bert Hardy to cover the Korean War. While in Korea the two men produced three illustrated stories for Picture Post, including General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon. But the photos Hardy took outside Pusan Station were the memorable images that eventually ripped Britain’s premier picture magazine apart.

In early September 1950, Pusan was the only Korean city held by U.N. Forces. There outside the train station were about sixty political prisoners, aged 14 to 70, suspected of opposing South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. They were tied up, and wore almost no clothes; when they tried to scoop a drink from the puddles of rain that they were squatting in, South Korean guards beat them with rifle butts. When Hardy took the photos, they were about to be taken off and shot. Their fate reminded Hardy and Cameron of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. Cameron wrote a story harshly critical of the Allies, the UN and the Red Cross for giving Rhee a free rein.

In London, Tom Hopkinson admitted that Hardy’s photos were the best he ever received. But Hopkinson was constantly conflict with Picture Post’s owner Edward G. Hulton. In August 1945, Hulton wrote to Hopkinson whom he suspected was a socialist: “I cannot permit editors of my newspapers to become organs of Communist propaganda. Still less to make the great newspaper which I built up a laughing-stock.” Cameron’s story was the last straw: Hulton — who was then on the verge of receiving a knighthood — stopped the presses, fearing that coverage would “give aid and comfort to the enemy”. When Hopkinson persisted, Hulton sacked him.

Hulton sent Cameron and Hardy into the Himalayas on a wild goose chase for the Dalai Lama. Their “Inchon” story touting Gen. MacArthur covered nine pages of the Oct. 7, 1950 Picture Post. After Hopkinson, Post was led by a revolving door of incompetent editors until it finally closed shop in 1957. Syngman Rhee’s authoritarian presidency lasted ten more years until 1960, when following popular protests against a disputed election, he resigned. More than 200,000 perished under his reign of terror.

Hitler used the 1936 Olympics as a propaganda tool, inadvertently creating the modern Games, complete with torch relays, grand stadiums, publicity films and screens set up outside to transmit the Games. What the Nazis couldn’t stage-manage were the outcomes, and wonderful story of Jesse Owens smashing Hitler’s theories of racial superiority on the 100m sprint is an oft repeated story. (Enthusiastic crowd reaction on this clip suggests that the German people are less Aryan-obsessed than Hitler.Although his coach warned Owens about a potentially hostile crowd, there were German cheers of “Yesseh Oh-vens” or just “Oh-vens” from the crowd. Owens was a true celebrity in Berlin, mobbed by autograph seekers.)

It is oft mentioned that the Nazi leader refused to present Jesse Owens with his medal, shake his hand and subsequently stormed out of the stadium. However, Hitler was not even in the stadium when Jesse Owens was securing his medals, and his absence was more to do with his row with the Olympic organizers than with Owens . Hitler had congratulated German athletes on the first day, only to be informed by the IOC officials that he should congratulate all athletes or none, in order to show neutrality as the presiding head of state. In a characteristic fit of petulance, Hitler refused congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition, not even the German athletes. (Hitler did snub a black American athlete on the first day; just before Cornelius Johnson was to be decorated, Hitler left the stadium.)

Jesse Owens tried his best to correct the myth-making that went on around him: he admitted that he received the greatest ovations of his career at Berlin. he recalled:  “When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing [Hitler] …. Hitler didn’t snub me—it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram”. Such was an atmosphere of segregation back in the U.S. that Owens was never invited to the White House to be congratulated. When there was a ticker-tape parade in New York in his honour, he had to attend the reception at the Waldorf-Astoria using the back elevator set aside for blacks. (Even in Berlin, he was allowed to travel and stay together with whites).