Iconic Photos

Yanayev, second from right, was as dour as any Soviet apparatchik

Along with Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank, it was one of the iconic images of the dying Soviet Union’s comic opera coup in August 1991: Gennady Yanayev, the new figurehead president, facing the world’s press for the first and only time, stammering out one inept and bumbling answer after another, his voice quivering and his hands shaking from nerves and too much vodka. It was a performance that confirmed the coup was amateurish and helped undermine it.

A coup by hard-liners had been in the air since the previous December, but few would have guessed that Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev — the man described by David Remnick in his magestrial history of the end of the Soviet Union Lenin’s Tomb as “a witless apparatchik, philanderer and drunk” — would be at the helm of the USSR. Whether Yanayev ever bothered to sober up during the three-day coup is unknown. Although he was not one of the principle players in the coup, as the USSR’s vice-president, he was the palace coup’s veneer of constitutionality. On 19th August, 1991 — the day after he declared a state of emergency — Yanayev held a disastrous press conference at the Foreign Ministry, in which the ruling ‘State Committee’ projected nothing but hesitancy and weakness. Ironically, the plotters, who viewed themselves as patriots, merely quickened the demise of the Soviet Union. The coup quickly withered, and with it the Soviet Union itself.

Yanayev was initially imprisoned and charged with high treason, a crime that carried the death penalty. But as disillusion with new Russia grew — and with it nostalgia for the Soviet Union — he and other coup leaders were pardoned by the parliament in 1994. Yanayev returned to the obscurity — from which he had briefly but so dramatically been plucked — and died there last week, virtually a forgotten man trampled by a wave of history he never understood yet struggled in vain to resist.

– the obituary adapted from the Independent. See his trembling hands here. I don’t speak Russian that well but people who do should comment.

When I went away for the weekend, I was so sure that David Miliband was going to be the next Labour leader and I wrote this post. It became inappropriate as David lost to his brother in a tight election that definitely surprised me, and concerned me a little. The Labour leadership election is in fact the most inclusive leadership election in Britain: 350,000 people cast their ballots compared to 200,000 voters at Conservative Party leadership elections and 50,000 at Liberal Democrats’. David Miliband won 53% of MP/MEPs’ votes, and 54% of Labour Party Members’ votes but what carried Edward Miliband to victory was the union bloc vote. He won a decisive 60% of Union vote, which means this victory marks the return of union politics.

In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me at all: after an election defeat, political parties sometimes go for a more radical candidate: hence, in US, Goldwater in 1964, McGovern in 1974, and current movements within Republican party; in UK, Michael Foot in 1980, a succession of Tories from 1997-2005. David Miliband’s defeat was sad reminder that Labour not only lost an election but also its centre. I met Ed Miliband in Copenhagen last December; he was a tireless worker and a wonderful intellectual, but also inexperienced in statecraft and diplomacy.

David Miliband, well he was a different story. In my opinion, he got too much crap for the above banana story (I am not helping here either). He was merely holding a banana in one of one-too-many photo-ops a politician witnesses; during the 2008 Labour conference in Manchester, he walked into the conference centre clutching his banana in the fashion of a handgun, prompting one photographer to joke: “Don’t shoot.” Maybe it was David’s insistence that he be taken seriously despite his age that made this photo an instant ironic classic. In the end, this (his arrogance, not banana) and his failure to conceal his ambitions for higher office, probably did him in.

Oliver Sipple (leftmost) lunges for the assailant

On September 25th 1975, Oliver Sipple was walking past the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco where the then President Gerald Ford was scheduled to speak. As he moved forward to get a better look at the speech, he noticed the woman standing next to him reach into her raincoat and pull out a revolver. Instinctively, Sipple grabbed for her arm and deflected it as she pulled the trigger. The bullet, intended for the president, ricocheted off the wall and wounded another man in the crowd. Sipple, a decorated Vietnam vet, tackled the assailant , prevented her from shooting again and handed her over to the Secret Service.

Oliver Sipple was immediately hailed in the national press, and received thousands of letters. However, President Ford only sent him a short note, and avoided a personal meeting. News organizations wondered why the White House was avoiding Sipple; although he was openly gay, Sipple’s sexual orientation was a secret from his family and employers; he asked the press to keep his sexuality off the record. However, news organizations refused to comply. The gay community thought it was a great opportunity too; while discussing whether  Sipple’s sexuality be disclosed, Harvey Milk noted: “It’s too good an opportunity. For once we can show that gays do heroic things, not just all that caca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms.” Milk further suggested that Sipple’s sexual orientation was the reason he received only a note, rather than an invitation to the White House — something newspapers took and ran with.

Herb Caen, a columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle, finally ‘outed’ Sipple as gay. The Chicago Sun-Times called him a ‘Homosexual Hero’; The Denver Post was more pithy: ‘Gay Vet’. Back in Detroit, Sipple’s staunch Baptist family became the subject of ridicule and abuse by friends and neighbors. His mother refused to talk to him and when she died in 1979, his father told him not to come to the funeral. Sipple filed a $15 million invasion of privacy suit against seven newspapers, and various publishers, but after a long and bitter process, the courts held that Sipple himself had become news, and that his sexual orientation was part of the story.  Oliver Sipple sank into a downward spiral of depression, alcoholism, obesity and drug abuse. By the time he was found dead with an empty bottle of bourbon in 1989, Oliver Sipple was already a forgotten footnote to ethics and freedom of press. His apartment was littered with press clippings from that fateful day, when he saved a man’s life and subsequently ruined his own.

(Opinions follow: This post is partially inspired by my misgivings towards DADT policy in the US. It was initially enacted without much tangible information,  and nearly two decades on, seems a little dated. Over twenty countries allow gays to serve openly in their armed forces, and most of these countries are members of the coalition forces fighting together with Americans. In the British Army — which itself was largely homophobic until recently when it was forced to accommodate gays by the European Union — there had been no incidents of bullying, harassment, blackmail or erosion of unit cohesion or effectiveness because of allowing gays to serve openly. And on a personal level, I believe it is unhealthy and unproductive to keep secrets from one another in the military where camaraderie and trust are the most important values.)

In the recent days, there have been a lot of back and forth over Freedom of Speech, especially in the United States. Personally speaking, a lot of these debates falls into “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” category. One of the literally shining examples of this is the above photo by the  shock artist Andres Serrano. The 1987 photo shows a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of  what was purportedly the artist’s urine. (Without Serrano’s insistence that it was his urine, the viewer would not probably be able to differentiate between urine and amber or polyurethane).

Although Serrano himself has not revealed a lot about the motives behind his photo series (which also included submerging various other classical statuary in various fluids — blood, milk, urine, sperm), he noted that while this work is not intended to denounce religion, it alludes to a perceived commercializing or cheapening of icons in contemporary culture. Although some praised the work as mysterious, ethereal and beautiful, all the hell broke loose when it was discovered that Serrano received a grant from taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts.

I realize this post is going to be controversial; this photo has been sitting in my draftbox for months and I know I eventually have to post it in order to be true to modi operandi of my site — which is to post any photo, famous or infamous, and frame it from a fairly objective standpoint. A photo’s inclusion does not automatically reflect its iconicity or importance.  But the last straw to post this photo came when I saw a news report while vacationing in the U.S. a few weeks ago — one of the talking heads was arguing that the Muslims should not be angered at the Mohammedan cartoons in Denmark and South Park because Christians were very tolerant during Piss Christ, etcetra etcetra. I said to myself, that’s bulls**t. Not unlike those cartoonists,  Andres Serrano was harassed and did receive hate mail and death threats. Even gallery owners and museum curators who displayed the work received death threats.  The photo itself was vandalized several times.

Freedoms of speech and expressions are fundamental rights still alien to billions of people around the world. But it is unfortunate that those freedoms are sometimes abused by a handful, and the entire society is subsequently judged by the actions of craziest of its loons — whether they be suicide bombers, book-burning ideologues or Christ-blaspheming iconoclasts. (Serrano went on to put together another controversial exhibition, a literal shit show, which included 66 pictures of poop, generated by 66 different creatures — from jaguars to bulls to the artist himself.)

Many probably have seen the above picture, emblematic of the daring lengths photographers have to go to record an important event. However, very few people would have noticed that the photographer at the centre was James Nachtwey, one of the greatest photojournalists alive, and that the photo was taken by David Turnley — another great photojournalist covering the same event: post-election violence in South Africa in 1994. Although neither Nachtwey or Turnley were the members of the Bang-Bang Club — the notorious group of four photographers (Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva) who covered South Africa in the last years of the Apartheid — they worked closely with the members of the Club.

Today, we mistakenly recall that South Africa’s transition from Apartheid was largely conflict-free. However, the backlash from white supremacists was not negligible in those tumultuous months leading up to the election:  some whites called for a separate, whites-only homeland, while others formed neo-Nazi movements. Although the anti-election Freedom Alliance gradually lost its influence, violence persisted, abetted by the police (as it was later discovered). A state of emergency had to be declared and troops had be to deployed in some provinces to help residents to go to the voting booths undeterred. The elections took place under intense international pressure (on regional presidents) and scrutiny. The election was chaotic: there was no voter registration list, and the balloting had to be extended for three days to accommodate some 22 million voters who had newly won their right to vote.

Nachtwey would win his fourth Robert Capa medal for covering the violence that followed the election as some accused election fraud. He would also witness the clash between peacekeepers and the African National Congress that killed Ken Oosterbroek and injured Marinovich.

For more information about the Bang-Bang Club, see the movie of the same name, starring Ryan Phillippe, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year.

Last week, Middle Eastern leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. to begin a new round of peace talks. Pessimists outweigh optimists in the policymaking circles on the prospects of the peace process, which indeed has a long insurmountable road ahead of itself. The meeting was merely a preliminary photo-op and the above photo, of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Obama, President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, and King Abdullah II of Jordan (l. to r.) walking towards the East Room of the White House was the one widely reprinted.

Except in Egypt, where they published a hilariously altered photo which placed the Egyptian president front and centre (even before President Obama). Egypt’s oldest and the most circulated newspaper, the state-run Al-Ahram altered the image and published it both online and in print. When criticized, the paper’s editor-in chief, Osama Saraya defended it, saying the paper published the original photo on the day talks began and the photoshopped version was to symbolize Egypt’s leading role in the peace process. In the editorial, Saraya wrote: ”The expressionist photo is a brief, live and true expression of the prominent stance of President Mubarak in the Palestinian issue, his unique role in leading it before Washington.” The photo is still up on its website as of this moment.

Ironically, the actual photo — with Mr. Mubarak separated from the group at the back — may have more symbolic meanings than any photomontage Al-Ahram came up with. The photo suggests Egypt’s — and her aging president’s — waning role in the Middle East peace process. Mubarak has been a staple of Middle East politics for more than 30 years, but with the presidential election coming up in 2011, and the health of her 82-year old president perilous and the presidential succession unclear, Egypt’s regional influence is dwindling.

Hosni Mubarak is the longest-serving Egyptian head of state in 150 years and he ruled Egypt with a peculiar mix of charisma and brutality. Being one of the United States’ staunchest allies in the region, Egypt has her records seldom scrutinized. Thanks to Mubarak’s Kafkasque bureaucratic machine — Egypt has been under an uninterrupted state of emergency for past 29 years — the voter turnout in 2005 was 3% and in 80% of the elections, Mubarak’s party was unopposed. Mubarak himself got 89% of the vote — and his opponent was later sentenced to five years in prison on dubious fraud charges. At least they had an election in 2005; for his four previous terms, Mubarak has been nominated by Parliament as the sole candidate, then confirmed in a referendum. Mubarak himself has never appointed a vice-president, which could lead to constitutional problems in the future as his health condition worsens.

The above photo, titled “Sense”, of a woman encased in black fabric with the exception of her face and a thin line of her naked body launched Tono Stano’s career as a photographer. Mainly known for his art photography of female nudes in black and white, the Slovakian photographer started out as an art photographer for film studios in the-then Czechoslovakia, and developed a new style of photography, deeply influenced by performance art.

Perhaps only the most enthusiastic jazz fan would recognize Herman Leonard as the ingenious artist behind smokey, backlit photographs that defined the jazz age. However, his photographs are instantly recognizable classics of performers such as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra. A protege of the great Yousuf Karsh, Leonard was encouraged by Karsh to break out on his own. Starting in the late 1940s, Mr. Leonard not only followed jazz as a musical genre but helped define it too. He used the cigarette smoke present in the clubs as if it were a part of the music itself, and also followed the musicians behind the scenes too.

His memorable photos were countless: Ella Fitzgerald in Paris in 1960, eyes closed in fierce concentration, with a rivulet of sweat coursing down her cheek; unmistakable silhouette of Frank Sinatra; Louis Armstrong munching a sandwich while looking at bottles of champagne; Armstrong lighting a cigarette as Duke Ellington looks on from the piano, a still life of sheet music, cigarette, a Coke bottle, a porkpie hat and a saxophone case that defined Lester Young; silver and smoke portrait of Dexter Gordon; Dizzy Gillespie with his bebop big band, Art Blakey on a drum solo; Duke Ellington and his writing partner, Billy Strayhorn, sharing a cigarette break in Paris; Thelonious Monk at the keyboard; Lena Horne laughing in front of a microphone; and the list goes on. Of all these, the above photo I chose was that of Ella Fitzgerald, in 1949, singing at a New York nightclub as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman looked on from a front-row table. (See all of his great images here, and collected in The Eye of Jazz (1985).

Jim Marshall captured rock and roll stars behind the scenes; William Claxton, Lee Friedlander and Annie Leibowitz all depicted off-guard moments of individuals and bands. But Herman Leonard captured jazz itself—not only its passion and spontaneity but its sound and smell too. After his archival prints were lost to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Leonard became the subject of the BBC program, documenting his painful journey home and his efforts to rebuild his life’s work. It was fittingly called Saving Jazz for Mr. Leonard who died last month (14th August 2010) at the age of 87 immortalized jazz. The jazz age lives on in his photos.

Every great man has his own hagiographer –the Caesars had Suetorius; Johnson, his Boswell. However, Corinne Day — who died last week prematurely at the page of 48 — was much more than a hagiographer for Kate Moss. Their initial relationship was that of mutual dependence, not different from that between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. One just couldn’t exist without the other.

With the help of Phil Bicker, the art director of the Face magazine, Corinne Day reinvented the fashion photography to be less glamorous, a gritty reduction that befitted the grunge era. It was Day who spotted 14-year old Kate Moss in the files of a London model agency in the spring of 1990, and showed her photo to Bicker. By June 1990, Moss was featured in the Face, then the most influential style magazine in Europe. Inside were the photos of Kate on Camber Sands in and out of hippy clothes. On the cover was Moss, sans make-up, who was full of excitement and awkwardness that was shared by many who grew up in that giddy yet tumultuous decade.

A former model herself, Ms. Day insisted on plain, real, un-airbrushed beauty. For the next three years, Day and her young muse would live together in Day’s Soho flat, with the photographer endlessly documenting Moss’s every moment. The duo eventually had their ‘artistic differences’; after Day took Moss’ first Vogue cover in 1993, they parted ways — although Day would return to take the photo of Moss for her induction into the National Portrait Gallery. Moss would go on to be “the anti-supermodel” notorious for being so relaxed on camera and flouting the norms; Day would be accused of glamorizing anorexia, drug use and “heroin chic” — by many, including then-President Clinton. She died, defending her artistic beliefs, but never transcending the society’s views that she was merely another fashion photographer.

N.B. (Before everyone starts throwing hissy fits and flame wars) The photo inside the Face included one topless photo and another which strongly suggests that she was naked. Moss was sixteen at the time, but the images were considered legal — only in 2003, the Sexual Offences Act was enacted to raise the age limit to eighteen.

To read Kikuji Kawada’s photobook, The Map, is to take a journey — a journey into an essential part of Japan, her reconciliation with war years and her reflections on them. The book’s own title was thought-provoking. There are no maps in the book. Rather, abstract and sometimes indecipherable images — such as the walls of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome — are presented as maps. In a sense, they are maps, you can wander into their hidden dimensions and get lost in them.

The Map (Chizu) was originally published on August 6, 1965 — the twentieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was indeed the starting point of the book. However, it covers pretty much everything: metal scraps, possessions left behind by kamakazi pilots, the remnants of fortifications, dead soldiers, Coca Cola ad and bottle caps, TV sets that were results, one way or another, of the Second World War. My favorite was the above black and white picture of the Japanese flag, laying on the ground, soaked and wrinkled — which has a certain gravitas to it.

The Map is more than a book, it is an experience. In their magisterial review, The Photobook: A History, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger wrote: “No photobook has been more successful in combining graphic design with complex photographic narrative… various layers inside peeled away like archeological strata, the whole process of viewing the book becomes one of uncovering and contemplating the ramifications of recent Japanese history. … The Map combines powerful graphic design with a masterful photographic narrative exploring recent Japanese history — its imperialistic past, western-influenced popular culture, and brutally violent clash with the United States.

Atom Bomb Dome. Patterns made by blood.

In 1997, Hocine Zaourar was working for AFP in Algeria, covering the brutal conflict there which is now saddly forgotten. The military government’s cancellation of 1992 elections led to a civil conflict and massacres of villagers by Islamic fractions that climaxed in 1997. The day after the massacre of Bentalha, on 23 September 1997, Hocine was prevented by the authorities to photograph the victims in hospitals. On exiting a hospital, he took three photos of a woman suffering from severe pain. Hiding this film in his bag. he sent it to AFP.

The photo was featured on the front pages of many newspapers around the world. It showed, according to the captions, a mother who lost her eight children. The woman, with exposed cleft palate and teeth, her mouth twisted in pain, was reminiscent of screaming mouths depicted on Picasso’s Guernica. It was quickly dubbed the “Bentalha Madonna”, and controversy ensued. It was revealed that the woman, Umm Saad did not lose her children, but three members of his family. She also showed her displeasure at the name of the picture since she was a Muslim and didn’t want to be identified with Chrisitian Madonna, and tried to sue the AFP for defamation and exploitation of human suffering.

The controversy did not stop there; after Hocine Zaourar won the World Press Photography Award, he was accused of taking a staged photo that was decidedly pro-government. Whether the photo was anti-guerillas or not, the Algerian government didn’t enjoy the publicity. The Algerian army had previously tried to ban, or worse, neutralize the journalists who reported the civil disorder in the country. For this and other violent photos, Hocine Zaourar was eventually forbidden from working in Algeria.

For further details, see Our Lady of Bentalha, a film by Pascal Convert — who also sculpted a homage to the photo.

As the first child born to a sitting president in nearly 80 years, John F. Kennedy Jnr enjoyed a national spotlight throughout his life. He was in utero during his dad’s campaign, and grew up in the White House. The photo of John Jr. peering out from the panel which he called ‘the secret door’ under the desk (‘my house’ to John Jnr) as his father reviews the papers was an instant icon — both for its timing and composition.

The photo was taken by Alan Stanley Tretick, a former Look magazine photographer who took many intimate pictures of President Kennedy and his children. Ms. Kennedy was against her children being photographed and used for political purposes, and the above photo was taken when Jacqueline Kennedy was out of the country. JFK invited Tretick over in October 1963 — by this time, JFK had recently lost a child to premature birth and needed all the family affection.

An advance copy of Look magazine with the photos travelled with the Kennedys to Dallas — and hit the newsstands several days after the assassination. The image immediately comes to summarize the myth and memory of Camelot — that of a youthful President running the country with a young family playing at his side in the White House. It would take another Democratic president some forty years to portray a similar image in these photos (here, here).

The desk in the photo was the Resolute Desk, was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes and was built from pieces of a salvaged Arctic discovery vessel. With a few exceptions, it has been used in the Oval Office by every president including Obama. Nixon used the same one he had used as vice president. After the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson allowed the desk to go on a traveling exhibition with the Kennedy Presidential Library and later to be displayed in the Smithsonian. Primary reason was that Johnson found he was too large for the desk, and commissioned a plainer replacement from the Senate cabinet shop. Under President Reagan, the desk underwent a height adjustment so that the President could sit at the desk without banging his knees. The ‘secret door’ dates to an earlier adjustment. President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested that the kneehole be fitted with a modesty panel carved with the presidential seal to conceal his leg braces. (He had to placed a waste basket in front of his desks). FDR did not live to see it installed, but Truman liked the eagle motif and had it installed.