Iconic Photos

Why photojournalists play only marginal roles in fiction is a question that throughly troubles me. I, for one, believe they live more interesting lives than lawyers, academics or scientists, who are constant staples in books. (Full disclaimer: I don’t read ‘novels’ with a shirtless man on their covers, I don’t know whether muscular photographers play an important and steamy role with their nymphette models in these boudoir novels). So it was with mild astonishment that I opened a gift book last week and discovered a photojournalist as the protagonist. The novel was “The Lotus Eaters” by Tatjana Soli, the title being a not-too-subtle reference to an island-dwelling race in “The Odyssey” who eat the opiate fruit of lotus and share it to those who wash ashore, so they won’t want to leave.

The protagonist is Helen Adams, a young photographer from California who starts out as a freelancer and eventually gets a job with Life magazine. In between, she goes to Vietnam, sees all the horrors of war, falls in love with a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Sam Darrow, losses him to the war, takes an iconic photograph, and marries her Vietnamese assistant. By describing Helen’s transformative experience, Soli was comparing addictiveness of war reporting to that of the lotus flower: many journalists who experience the horrors of war ironically refused to go back to their mundane jobs and remained the chroniclers of war, pestilence and famine.

The models for Soli’s characters were real photojournalists of the Vietnam era: Larry Burrows, Sean Flynn, Henri Huet and Catherine Leroy. Even Helen’s last name and iconic photograph she takes, that of a sudden execution of a harmless-looking old man, seems directly borrowed from another famous Vietnam photographer: Eddie Adams. But Helen Adams was clearly based on another photographer, who briefly but spendidly reported on the Vietnam War in the conflict’s early days: Dickey Chapelle.

Dickey Chapelle covered the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa for National Geographic, was captured and jailed for seven weeks covering the Hungarian uprising for Life. In the meantime, she learned to fly an airplane and jump with paratroopers. She arrived in Vietnam in the early ’60s, and described her early experiences in her 1962 book “What’s a Woman Doing Here?” On November 4, 1965, when on patrol with a Marine platoon, the soldier in front of Chapelle activated a boobytrap (a mortar shell with a hand grenade). The explosion hurled Chapelle off her feet, and a piece of shrapnel slit her carotid artery, wounding her mortally.

The Associated Press photographer Henri Huet took a photograph of Chapelle as she lay dying, a picture that captured the same life-and-death drama that she herself reported before. In Huet’s photo, Marine Corps chaplain John Monamara administers the last rites to Chapelle, as an American Marine and a South Vietnamese soldier, both carrying M-14 rifles, look on. Blood puddles in the dirt near her head; from her left earlobe, a small pearl earring glistens. The Australian bush hat, which is her signature as much as her pearl earrings are, lies nearby, complete with a tiny bouquet of pink flowers she tucked in its band earlier.

Vietnam proved to be an extremely dangerous war for the journalists. Huet himself would later die in the same helicopter crash that killed Larry Burrows. But Chapelle’s death had a special meaning to it, not least because of the above haunting photograph. Chapelle was the first female war correspondent to be killed in Vietnam, as well as the first American female reporter to be killed in action. Chapelle was so admired by the Marines with which she was embedded that her body was repatriated with an honor guard of six Marines and was given full Marine burial. One of the eulogies read: “”the kind of reporter all women in journalism openly or secretly aspire to be. She was always where the action was.”

Before 1989, there was 1974. Some thirty years after the Second World War, three of the four big Southern European countries were still living under taciturn, oppressive, fascist dictatorships, that were nominally supported by the West because they more or less shared the antagonism for communism. And in 1974-75, all of those regimes came to an end: in April 1974, a group of Portuguese officers seized power from Marcelo Caetano; three months later, the Greek regime collapsed, isolated and exhausted after a student revolt and a Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and in November 1975, after having held Spain in a gagging hold for almost forty years, Francisco Franco breathed his last.

In Portugal, the repressive government had been slowly withering away since the illness of her strongman, General Antonio Salazar in the late 60s. Salazar died in 1970, leaving the country in the hands of Marcelo Caerano, and the disenchantment only grew. The country was not only succumbing to high rate of inflation (some 30%) and trade deficit, it was also fighting expensive and unwinnable colonial wars in Africa, that had claimed more than 13,000 soldiers, and the army was now unwilling to fight on. On the night of 23rd April, at 12.25 a.m. Radio Renaissance played the forbideen song ‘Grandola’, which was the signal for the rebellion. All over Portugal, the armed forces came into action. By 3 a.m. they had occupied the radio and television stations, the airports and the centre of Lisbon.

For most part, the revolution was peaceful. It only claimed one student’s life, when the trapped fascists tried to kill someone before they got captured. Starting from the 25th of April, all the soldiers had a red carnation their rifles, symbolizing their non-aggression. (The choice was largely incidental. A focal meeting place of the revolutionaries was at the Lisbon flower market, which was then richly stocked with carnations because they were in season). An iconic image came out of this struggle: the above poster of a poorly-dressed child, placing a carnation in a gun barrel held by three hands – those of the army and the workers in agriculture and industry.

It was quite remarkable that Western Europe’s oldest dictatorship was overthrown by junior officers. Dismantling of Salazar’s secret police and freeing of political prisoners ushered in a period of febrile activity, social protests, takeovers of factories and agricultural units, purges of institutions related to the previous regime and constant assembleas to decide everything. The Communists emerged with key positions of power, and swaths of nationalization put the country on the road to socialism.Portugal would toy with forces of authoritarianism for next few years, and would witness political instability until 1985.

Outside Portugal too, the revolution had important consequences; Portugal’s new junta hastened to address the underlying problems behind the disenchantment in the country and rapidly began to withdraw from her colonies abroad. They were more concerned with the withdrawal than with creating stable transitions, leaving behind an immature revolutionary movement, FRELIMO, in power in Mozambique, and an internationalized civil war in Angola, where South Africa and Cuba confronted each other. Most importantly, the rapid collapse of the world’s oldest colonial empire deprived the apartheid South Africa of two vital buffer states and gave liberation movements from Rhodesia to Namibia moral and material boosts. The regional balance of power in Southern Africa was altered overnight.

In the last forty years, its obituary has been written many times. So far, it seems, these obituaries are always premature, and ‘Page 3′ marches on, pillorying, and in process, outliving careers of many of its trechant critics. Although the Sun began running photos of female models on its third page in 1969, the paper’s editor Larry Lamb waited until the paper’s conservative proprietor Rupert Murdoch was away to present a topless model that would later come to be identified with the magazine. On 17th November 1970, Stephanie Rahn posed in her birthday suit (above) to mark the first birthday of the relaunched paper.

Initially, the Sun upping its ante went unnoticed and caused little offence. As the topless ‘Page 3′ girl become more common and more risque over the next four years, controversy grew, and so did its popularity. Although “Page 3″ was initially as a response to the Sun‘s top rival, the Daily Mirror, which typically ran pinup photos, it was eventually come to identify a new segment of the permissive society. Both the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star — which together with the Sun forms racy ‘Red Tops’ — later copied the Sun‘s “Page 3″. As critics from both left and right were criticizing the feature as misogynistic and pornographic respectively, and as MPs denounced the paper inside the House of Commons, ‘Page 3′ entered into national consciousness and lexicons. Although initially furious, Murdoch was pleased with the increasing sales numbers and put a ‘Page 3′ feature in all of his newspapers worldwide, except in Australia, where they were not printed out of deference to Murdoch’s mother.

To this author, the furore over ‘Page 3′ is incomprehensible. The Sun, with a respectable circulation of 3 million, is first and foremost a commercial enterprise, and ‘Page 3′ (along with other sensational halftruths that paper oft enjoys printing) is also first and foremost a tool to further that commercial interests. Although the author is sympathetic to arguments about banning the paper from public transportation and public libraries and imposing age-limits on buying, the arguments demonizing the paper are not solely limited on these grounds. Criticizing ‘choice’ based on broad righteous, moralistic and feminist arguments leave something to be desired. The models choose to pose for the Sun; readers choose to buy it. Also, not only it can be pointed out that these willing models came from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, but it can also be noted that the feature, like equally-vilified Playboy, enables women to challenge traditions and mores, to embrace their own sexuality, and to escape from rigid social dimensions of the yesteryears. Of course, a complex matrix of objectification and expectations plays into this, but so does freedom of choice. After all, for better or for worse, many models graduated from ‘Page 3′ (and its copycats) into popular culture, Katie Price, Samantha Fox and the Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell being three most prominent names.

(The last paragraph is a gut reaction to this article in New Statesman by Laurie Penny, who I usually read for comic value. She is, of course, entitled to her own opinions, and I even agree with her on this dubious ‘Page 360′ feature, but comments to her columns always astound me. They are mostly all fawning and unctuous that I sometimes wonder whether selection bias is at play there or whether everyone just simply agrees with her).

Never before or since had a series of photograph been this throughly analyzed. From the day they were discovered as the police raided Lee Harvey Oswald’s home, the photos of Oswald posing with a rifle and two communist newspapers were subjected to intense scrutiny and subsequently provided enough fodder for conspiracy theorists.

The photos, taken by Oswald’s wife Marina in the spring of 1963, were highly important because the rifle Oswald was holding appeared to be the one used to assassinate President Kennedy. It was made public in late February 1964, when it appeared on the covers of many publications, but the most notably, on the cover of Life magazine. To enhance the image’s quality, the photo had been retouched in several areas — a common practice in the magazine world. Many readers noticed some details of photo differed from publication to publication, and a controversy arose.

In particular, the readers noted that on the cover of Life (top) Oswald’s rifle had a sniper scope, but on the cover of the Detroit Free Press and Newsweek, there was no sniper scope. It later transpired that a copy editor accidentally erased the scope while altering the image’s contrast, but it was too late. On seeing the photo from inside the jail, Oswald insisted he had never seen it before and that someone had superimposed his head onto another body. Skeptics — including those geniuses behind the movie J.F.K. — pointed at the strange line across Oswald’s chin suggesting the head may have been pasted into the photo (This line was later determined to be a water spot).

To reassure the restless public, the C.B.S. asked a professional photographer to reproduce the photos as part of an ambitious four-part CBS documentary called “The Warren Report”. The photographer, Lawrence Schiller recreated the picture at the same address, 214 Neeley Street, on the same date and time in March, using a model, and discovered that a straight nose shadow corresponded with an angular body shadow, just as in the disputed picture. Unsatisfied, the House Select Committee on Assassination commissioned a further panel of photographic experts to study the photo. After a meticulous examination that involved microscopic analysis and photogrammetric comparison of Oswald’s face to other photos of him, the experts answered twenty-two points raised by skeptics, and concluded the photos were genuine.

This drawn-out analysis subjected onto the contents of the photo eclipsed other more important questions: Why was the photo taken? How many versions or copies were made? To whom were they sent and why? What is the meaning behind mysterious and foreboding phrases in various languages scrawled on the backs of some photos?  Answers to these remain inscrutable, but they don’t suggest a vast underlying conspiracy. Yet the speculations that John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the CIA, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, the Kremlin, the FBI or the military industrial complex will simply not go away. Tall tales are part of the catharsis process by which many deal with traumatic life events, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination center on the public’s inability to grasp that even the most powerful man on earth could be simply gunned down by a lone gunman.

History is not always written by winners, but no matter who writes it, Aung San Suu Kyi will be given a central chapter in the history of modern Burma. Even the military junta, which usurped her 1990 election victory and worked hard to erase her name and that of her father — the country’s independence hero, General Aung San — from the official records, could not dim her popularity. Therefore it is not surprising that despite a total news black-out by the government which involved the intense censorship of the Internet, hundreds of people gathered in front of Ms. Suu Kyi’s house earlier today to celebrate the latest release of the woman whom Vanity Fair dubbed ‘Burma’s Saint Joan’.

Like the Maid of Orleans, her rise was incidental and meteoric — Suu Kyi was pushed into politics in 1988, the year she returned from Oxford to Burma to look after her dying mother, and the same year a pro-democracy uprising in Burma was brutally suppressed. Although she was born into a political family, she barely knew her father, who was assassinated when she was three. She grew up detached from harsh realities of the military rule in Burma — a childhood spent riding with Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi; an education at St Hugh’s, Oxford; an internship with U Thant, the Burmese Secretary General of the United Nations; a marriage to a brilliant young academic to whom she had been introduced by Lord Gore-Booth, the former British ambassador to Burma; a honeymoon in the Himalayas, where her husband was tutor to the ruling family of Nepal.

She jumped into the politics in 1988, sensing that the junta, which had controlled Burma in one way or another since 1962, was finally weakening. Seeing a threat, the junta arrested her shortly before she led her party into a landslide victory in May 1990. Hoping that she would return to obscurity from which she had been plucked dramatically by the 1988 Uprising, the junta kept her under house arrest for the most of last two decades. The effect, however, was just opposite; awards and international accolades followed. For her message of hope and non-violence, she was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991. People from Nelson Mandela to Vaclev Havel had called for her release. (The above photo, one of the most iconic images of a leader even whose face was banned in Burma, was taken by Nic Dunlop in 1996, just a year after Ms. Suu Kyi was first released from house arrest. Defiant looking, with her arms folded and her head turned reluctantly towards the lens, the Nobel Laureate glares at one of the reporters who had an argument with her).

Without delving much into deeply complicated politics of Burma (even this name is contentious), this writer would like to make an editorial judgement here. I have been to Burma (where I witnessed perils of reporting from such a country first hand), and deeply respect Aung San Suu Kyi’s convictions and courage. However, to this writer, she remains an incomprehensible person; her refusal to negotiate with the junta places her at odds with Gandhi and Mandela, two of her heroes. Her call for economic sanctions by the West merely opened Burma to more rapacious Chinese and Thai companies; many who were elected with her in 1990 were politically inexperienced and probably no better at tackling the country’s deep rooted problems vis-a-vis corruption, poverty, insurgencies and drug trafficking than the current regime. Ms. Suu Kyi, herself, has never held a government office before, and remains deeply divorced in her Leftist ideologies from the realities of the world that has dramatically changed since the last time she ran for office.

Seventy years ago, the Germans started the Blitz more or less out of frustration, without clear planning, as a sequel to the Battle of Britain. During the first half of the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe focused on dominating British airspace, in preparation for a possible landing, and its bombardments were limited to airfields and other military installations. On 24th August, more or less by accident, a pair of Stukas dropped the first bombs on central London. Churchill seized the opportunity, and in ‘revenge’, 80 RAF bombers pounded Berlin. Hitler was infuriated. Nearly 600 German bombers came back during the next two weeks to bomb English cities, factories and airfields.

Then, at 5 p.m. on 7th September, the first major attack on London began. On that sunny afternoon, 348 Luftwaffe bombers crossed the English Channel, and for the next two hours ignited the city with incendiary bombs, the docks being their primary target. That same evening, the Germans were back, raining 625 tons of high explosives on working class neighborhoods in the East End. The Blitz went on for 57 consecutive nights and then spread to other cities in the U.K. In ‘Second Great Fire of London’ on the night of 29th December 1940, nineteen churches, thirty-one guild halls and all of Paternoster Row, including five million books went up in flames.

By the time the Blitz ended (as Luftwaffe diverted its planes east for the attacks on the Soviets) on May 16th 1941, more than 43,000 people had died in the strategic air raids. Writer Harold Nicolson compared himself to a prisoner in the Conciergerie during the French Revolution: “Every morning one is pleased to see one’s friends appearing again.” Yet, the English, being the English, just got on with it stoically. In stubborn, indignant fashion, the life went on. A survey taken during this period found that weather had a greater impact than air raids on the day-to-day worries of many Londoners. In his magisterial history The Blitz: The British Under Attack, Julian Gardiner observes, “egg rationing produced more emotion than the blitz.”

Thus predictably, most well-known of the countless photos taken during the Blitz did not depict carnage and chaos, but rather an extraordinary tale of survival and defiance. The above photograph featured on the front page of the Daily Mail, captioned as ‘War’s Greatest Picture’, was taken from the roof of the same newspaper’s Tudor Street offices by Herbert Mason two nights before (on 29th December). St. Paul’s Cathedral was surrounded not only by fires and smoke that fateful night, but an incendiary bomb did drop inside the Stone Gallery. During the Blitz, the importance of the Cathedral was so much so that Churchill insisted that if the church were to be bombed, all fire-fighting resources be directed there, and that “At all costs, St Paul’s must be saved.” The Daily Mail echoed this sentiment in the text accompanying the photo that the image is “one that all Britain will cherish – for it symbolises the steadiness of London’s stand against the enemy: the firmness of Right against Wrong”. To that effect, the editors at the Mail decided to crop the photograph quite liberally, to take out the gutted remains of houses in the foreground.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the photo was telling quite a different story on the continent within days. The Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung announced that “Die City von London brennt!”, and gleefully informed its readers that the conflict with England too was approaching its endgame. For Germans, the photo, with the blazing foreground ruins included, depicted nothing more than the centre of “britischen Hochfinanz” burning in London’s biggest blaze since “Jahre 1666″. Photographs never lie indeed.

In the summer of 1999, Tehran was rocked by students demonstrating for reform and democracy. Although students had been calling for the reform of the theocratic system for years, it was a dawn raid by Islamist vigilantes on a student dormitory and a reformist paper that sparked the protest. One of thousands who protested was Ahmad Batebi, who was photographed holding aloft a T-shirt stained with the blood of a fellow protester. It was photographed by Jamshid Bayrami working for Iranian Jame’e Daily Newspaper (since shut down).

The photograph was carried by many newspapers around the world, including Iranian ones. Most famously, it appeared on the cover of The Economist on July 17th 1999, and gained the international attention. With his long hair and bandana, Batebi — whom the New York Times later called Iran’s Johnny Depp — embodied the new spirit of defiance in Iran. The publicity did Batebi no good. After the government had cracked down the protests, he was arrested; Batebi did not know of the picture’s existence until he was dragged to court.

There, Batebi was shown that dramatic Economist issue, and was told: “With this, you have signed your death warrant.” They tortured him to betray his fellow students, and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint. When he refused, Batebi was sentenced to death. But, ironically, Batebi was saved by the same photograph that condemned him — unlike death penalties of another group of student leaders which were quietly carried out, Batebi’s conviction was made internationally famous by the notoriety the photograph created. After a global outcry, his sentence was commuted to 15 years in jail. In 2005, while on a medical release, he escaped, and now lives in US.

Last year, Iranian government again survived a popular uprising predominantly orchestrated by students and young people. Youth involvement in politics and anti-clericalism is not surprising for two reasons. One, in a 2000 study by a reformist mullah named Mohammad Ali Zam noted that 73% of Iranians (86% of students) did not say their daily prayers. It was a surprising secular turn for a country which had embraced a religious renaissance less than a generation ago. Two, in a nation where the legal marriage age is nine, at least 45% of the population is under 20 and 60% under 30. These demographics are actually compatible to other Middle Eastern sheikdoms, which had witnessed their own babybooms as the oil prices soared in the 70s, but Iran’s babyboom has more artificial nature to it. Thanks to shackling Islamic laws towards abortion and contraceptives in the years following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the country’s population grew from 35 million in 1979 to 65 million. Some birth control measures were implemented in the late 80s and 90s, and population growth peaked at 3.2% in 1986. Iran is (and will be) unable to create jobs now as rapidly as mothers created babies in the 80s; in 2007, unemployment was nearly 12%; now it is over 20%. Considering all these numbers, although it has been able to survive waves of unrest periodically in the past, the theocratic regime in Iran is unlikely serve out this decade.

In hundreds of thousands of photographs taken of politicians and of the political theatre, one may be hard-pressed to find a single photo showing a politician wielding a camera, let alone a photo taken by a politician. Perhaps because photography is considered expensive, elitist and intrusive, it remains an unusually rare hobby among world leaders. Stalin, one of the most heartless of dictators, spent his free time sketching and drawing human body but never once directed his artistic talents towards photography. Hitler used photographs to aid his quite unremarkable drawing, but he delegated the responsibility of documenting the Fuhrer family to other hagiographers. Some of lesser strongmen, such as Tito and Ceausesu, were ‘photographers’ in the inflated doublespeak of their Orwellian lands, where the leader is the capable dilettante of almost any trade, but left behind only amateurish family albums.

In today’s politicians, there is Patrick Leahy, an American Senator from Vermont, who is quite accomplished and who has tremendous access. But perhaps the most famous politician-cum-photographer working today is the current president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev. In January 2010, his photograph above was sold at a charity auction for 51 million rubles ($1.75 million), making it one of the most expensive ever sold, and propelling the quirky Russian president into record books.

Being a camera-toting politician comes with its own complications. Last week, Medvedev caused a diplomatic incident during his visit to some islands disputed between Russia and Japan. If his visit — the first by either Russian or Soviet leader since the-then USSR seized the islands in the last days of the WWII — were not bad enough, Mr. Medvedev took some pictures of the island with his trusty DSLR and posted them on his Twitter, with the caption, “How many beautiful places there are in Russia!” The Japanese were outraged, and temporarily recalled their ambassador to Moscow. Even before his photographic jaunt, Mr. Medvedev got into a different photography-related kerfluffle when he and the Italian Prime Minister posed in front of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. For several minutes, the cameras flashed, despite the fact that the Milanese Church which housed the photosensitive mural clearly prohibited flash photography.

In 1898, the Parisian art gallery owner Maurice Joyant photographed his childhood friend defecating on the beach at Le Crotoy, Picardie. The series of photos would have been forgotten, had Joyant’s friend not been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the acclaimed French painter. Their intention in taking these photos — and later allowing them to be published in postcard form — was unclear, but these photographs remain the earliest photographic testaments to celebrities behaving dubiously, a century before Internet made such indiscretions well-known and widespread.

By this time, Lautrec, who precociously displayed prodigious artistic talent earlier, was slowly going downhill. Earlier that year, Joyant arranged a one-man show for Lautrec in Goupil & Cie, the leading Parisian art dealership. The show was a total failure. Alcoholism and venereal diseases plagued Toulouse-Lautrec’s life, and he moved back in with his upper-class family, which disapproved risque subjects he depicted in his paintings. His uncle even set fire to some of his canvases. To humor Toulouse-Lautrec, Joyant would take him to the coast for yachting weekends and to England. They also regularly visited Le Crotoy, where a lot of French artists (including Jules Verne and Colette) vacationed. It was at Le Crotoy that the above photos were taken, a year before Toulouse-Lautrec was committed to an asylum, and three years before he finally succumbed to complications caused by alcoholism and syphilis in 1901.

Maurice Joyant would live for another thirty years and work harder than anyone to preserve his friend’s memory posthumously. He wrote extensively about his relationship with Toulouse-Lautrec and staged retrospectives to the painter in 1902, 1907 and 1914. Entrusted by Toulouse-Lautrec’s parents as executor of his paintings, he would also convince the painter’s mother, the Countess Adele de Toulouse-Lautrec to create a museum to the artist, where works rejected by the salons of Paris, were proudly displayed.

Photojournalism’s most memorable images were crafted by the right men at the right moment. John Sadovy was one of those men. The LIFE magazine photographer was one of only a handful of photojournalists who infiltrated Hungary during its tumultuous revolution in 1956. A Czechoslovakian by birth, Sadovy got past the Communist border guards by disguising himself as an ice-cream salesman. His astonishing, violent and graphic photographs of the uprising, featured in many international newspapers, became testaments to atrocities committed by the both sides in that doomed and tragic uprising, and won Sadovy the Robert Capa Award.

The Hungarian Uprising began as a student movement in the cafes, little noticed by the Communist authorities. Viewing the movement not as an ideological struggle, but as an economic and social one, the authorities both in Budapest and Moscow discounted the movement, and installed Imre Nagy, the sole remaining Hungarian politician respected by both communists and students, as the head of interim government. Meanwhile, John Sadovy found himself amongst a group of freedom fighters, who were attacking the headquarters of AVH, the Hungarian Secret Police. They waited for the secret police to exit the building, and once the secret police walked out they were shot dead at point blank range.

In his most celebrated series of photographs, Sadovy captured fury, revenge and terror — eloquent outbursts of an emotive revolution. In the LIFE magazine, he wrote an editorial which ran alongside his pictures: “I could see the impact of bullets on a man’s clothes.” The man who served as company photographer with the British Army during the Second World War recalled that these were the quickest killings he had ever seen, and there was ”nothing to compare with the horror of this…. the tears kept running down my face and I had to keep wiping them away.”

As the photos suggested, covering the revolution was extremely dangerous. Sadovy was wounded on the hand, and Jean-Pierre Pedrazinni of Paris Match — who along with Sadovy was one of the first Western journalists to arrive in Budapest — got a machine gun burst in his stomach and leg before he could get many pictures and died. What began as a peaceful student revolt slowly got out of hand and was usurped by radical elements. Finally, Nagy’s wish to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact was the last straw for the Soviet Union; its invasion proved that the Soviets still wished to maintain its Stalinist sphere of influence even after Uncle Joe was gone. Sadovy’s photos of AVH executions became the primary evidence against Imre Nagy and other members of his cabinet who were sentenced to death. The AVH’s response was equally swift and uncompromising; its revenge: deportation thousands of students, intellectuals and workers to the icy gulags of Siberia.

More photos here.

Six years after work began in 1862, the laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was there on May 10, 1869 that Governor Leland Stanford (one of the “Big Four” owners of the Central Pacific) drove the Golden Spike on the special tie of polished California laurel (later destroyed in an earthquake).

The completion of the transcontinental railroad was the world’s first live mass-media event: the hammers and spike were wired to the telegraph line so that each hammer stroke would be heard as a click at telegraph stations nationwide. Predictably, various problems occurred; the other ‘Big Three’ decided not to take the harsh journey. The ceremony was delayed by two days because of bad weather and a labor dispute, thus rendering the date engraved on the spike (May 8th) wrong. Eventually, technical problems force the hammer stroke clicks to be sent by the telegraph operators. The spike itself was merely gold plated (gold being much too soft for the purpose), and was immediately replaced by an ordinary iron spike. A message was transmitted to both the East and West Coasts that read: “DONE.” President Grant announced the message to the Capitol. The country erupted in celebration. Complete travel from coast to coast was reduced from six or more months to just one week.

I have always assumed that Leland Stanford was one of the people shaking hands at the center. Boy, was I wrong! Two people shaking hands were Samuel S. Montague (left) and Grenville M. Dodge (right), respective Chief Engineers of Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. In fact, Stanford hated this photo by Andrew J. Russell mainly because he was not in the photo. He subsequently commissioned a painter Thomas Hill to create a cleaned-up version which removed the cheeky champagne bottle, and included Stanford and his closet associates, including Theodore Judah, the visionary behind the Transcontinental Railroad, who had died six years earlier.

This post was originally created on May 10th 2009. Re-posted with a new picture.