Iconic Photos

On June 10th 1996, Alexander Zemlianichenko captured in a photo that would eventually win a Pulitzer and a Word Press Photo award the essence of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. In the photo, Yeltsin was dancing at a rock concert in Rostov while campaigning for his re-election. In 1996, his main opponent was Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, who was ahead of Yeltsin in early polls. His dance at Rostov was to prove that Yeltsin was in good health but it was merely indicative of Yeltsin’s erratic leadership, always known for wrong moves at wrong times. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin indeed stood tall on a tank during the failed coup attempt in August 1991, but spent the next decade besmirching this early integrity as not the Soviet system but also law and order collapsed around him. He sat idly as his family and cronies plundered not only the state’s coffers but also its prized assets.

Holed up inside the Kremlin with a trusted group of oligarchic advisors, Yeltsin was also plagued by chronic drinking problem. Yeltsin won the 1996 election handily through publicity stunts like the Rostov concert, and through dozens of popular legislation (such as one that multiplied the savings of all Russians older than eighty by a thousand). The Russian media, which preferred Yeltsin over any harkening back to Communism, also helped him by cordially withholding some negative information. For years the media had speculated that the Russian President was in ill-health, due to his alcoholism, but during the campaign, it disappeared as a major issue.

Yeltsin’s drinking was proverbially “normal” for a Russian, i.e. one bottle of vodka a day. As his ill-health and alcoholism — no doubt exacerbated by the stress of managing increasingly chaotic Russia —  worsened, his erratic acts multiplied. During a visit to Washington D.C., Yeltsin was found on Pennsylvania Avenue, drunk, in his underwear and trying to hail a cab in order to find pizza — that perennial food of choice among the inebriated. Yeltsin would also call the White House from the Kremlin totally drunk. Once above the Shannon Airport, Ireland, his plane circled overhead for at least an hour as the welcoming party waited on ground, Yeltsin being too ill — read, too drunk — to meet the Irish prime minister. Although mostly harmless, this unpredictability caused great alarms in outside Russia as he threatened the West with a world war when the NATO bombs fell over Belgrade in 1999, and ordered the military to shoot on civilians and burn down everything in Chechenya.

In the current choleric atmosphere of financial sector bashing, scapegoating and blame games, Wall Street’s biggest critics can find solace in the above photograph by Paul Strand. In this photo, taken by morning light 1915, the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building appears sinister and foreboding and dwarfs (perhaps consumes even) the humanity of suited men and women, their long shadows dragging behind them, walked alongside its facade.

Paul Strand studied under Lewis Hine and Alfred Steiglitz. Although he set up in New York as a portriat photgrapher, Strand often visited Stieglitz’s gallery to see the new European painting which it exhibited. In 1914-15, under the infunece of this new form of art, Strand turned from soft-focus pictoralism towards abstraction. It was in this spirit that the above photo was taken, originally named, “Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce”. Strand did not intended to show Wall Street in a bad light, he admitted. However, as the Great Depression happened (criticism was squarely towards Wall Street back then as it is today) and Strand turned more communist, he later spoke of “sinister windows” and “blind shapes” inherent in the above picture.

The photo, now simply titled “Wall Street”, was one of six Paul Strand pictures Stieglitz published in Camera Work. In three of the six pictures, humanity strides out from abstract ideas, and each figure was a study in itself — an irregular item complimented by modular formats that surround it. Another set of eleven Strand photos were published in the magazine’s final issue in 1917, and those pictures, overwhelmingly endorsed by Stieglitz as ‘brutally direct’ made Strand’s reputation.

(Wall Street’s dramatic growth from curbside deals of the 18th century into America’s financial centre was not finalized until the 1900s. Although many pivotal events in the American history — the California Gold Rush, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the Civil War — happened far away from the Wall Street, it firmly remained as the nation’s financial centre. It says something about the vast American capital that in 1901, J.P. Morgan was already creating a billion dollar merger of the U.S. Steel and that in 1907, $800 million dollars in securities were unloaded within a few months of panic. Many recognizable practices and institutions were starting to form as well: bank runs and bankruptcy of the Knickerbocker Trust led to the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. From 1910-1915, hostile takeover of General Motors was fought primarily in Wall Street, and brought Wall Street into national consciousness. In 1914, the House of Morgan moved in to 23 Wall Street, which was for decades the premier address in American finance and industry. In 1920, a bomb exploded in front of the bank, killing 38 and injuring 300, prompting fueling the Red Scare. The damage from this blast can still been seen on the bank’s facade. In 1929, it was in front 23 Wall Street that many ordinary people learnt that the stock market crash had vaporized their life savings.)

His name was well-known, even if it is whispered with muted distaste in photography and copyrights circles. His body of work is unknown, eclipsed by a single pictorial he undertook for American socialite Teri Shields. In 1975, Garry Gross scribbled his name into a dubious footnote in the history of photography by photographing a nude 10-year-old Brooke Shields. The photos of bejeweled soon-to-be-child-actress, in thick makeup and in a steaming, ornate bathtub, however, wouldn’t become known outside the arts community for another three years.

After seeing the photos Louis Malle cast Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, his acclaimed movie set during the last months of legal prostitution in New Orleans. The rest was history — and a rancorous one as that. Some two decades after New York’s highest court ruled that the photos are not “sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic” and are distributable as long as they are not included in pornographic publications, the public remains as divided as ever before on the issue. On this blog, the post of Brooke Shields which detailed the controversy remains the most visited entry, and comments there represent a veritable cross-section of pluralistic viewpoints and range from informed to inane.

As for Garry Gross, he didn’t share the spotlight created by the controversy. His name was mentioned sporadically as the Brooke Shields controversy raged on, as when the famed appropriationist Richard Prince, who photographs other people’s photographs and exhibits them, dug this hoary old chestnut up again in 2007. “The photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be…. she was supposed to look like a sexy woman,” Gross admitted to the Daily Telegraph then. But apart from occasional interview, Gross remained in semi-retirement. He was shunned by the society and rejected by galleries which were hesitant to court controversy by staging Gross exhibits. Never returning to celebrity photography, Garry Gross worked and died as a humble dog photographer and trainer. He is 73.

Travelogues tend to be disappoint. Instead of travelogues that tell gripping stories about both people and history of a particular locale, travel writing these days obsesses itself with how to travel cheaper and faster, and with some architectural minutiae that fail to interest anybody but third year arts students. I was in Moscow to meet some Russian government officials earlier this summer and they put me at a huge hotel complex outside the city at Partizanskaya. I have been there several times before — Partizanskya being the site of a massive souvenir market — armed with varying guidebooks, but what they failed to tell me was that the distinctive looking statue at Partizanskya Metro Station was that of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, once one of the most revered martyrs of the Russian State.

I first met Zoya several years ago in David Plante’s novel The Age of Terror. The picture above of Zoya’s corpse spurs the novel’s young American hero to travel to the then slowly collapsing Soviet Union in search of identity. When I read it the book, I thought the photo was made-up. It was not, but scholars still debate how much of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya story is. For some, it bored all the fingerprints of the hagiographers of the godless Soviet Union who were all too happy to create martyrs.

The official Soviet story went something like this: When the Nazis invade Russia, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya quit the tenth grade at Moscow. Hair-cropped, and in men’s clothes, the 18-year old joined the Resistance and became one of its most celebrated heros. The Germans finally captured her in November 1941, and subjected her to various tortures — which included belts, punches, lighters, saws and bayonets.  She refused to talk and the Germans led her to the gallows with a card inscribed “Guerrilla” about her neck.

There, at the village square of Petrisheva, Zoya gave her courageous speech: “You hang me now but I am not alone. There are 200 million of us. You won’t hang everybody. I shall be avenged. Soldiers! Surrender before it is too late. Victory will be ours.” She was hanged, and the Germans left the body hanging on the gallows for several weeks. Eventually she was buried just before the Soviet liberation of Petrisheva in January 1942. The above photo of her body were later found on the body of a dead German officer at Smolensk along with three other photos of the execution process.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became popular with a Pravda article was written by Pyotr Lidov, who had heard about the execution from an elderly peasant. Yet many doubted this official version; they noted that ‘Kosmo’ and ‘Demyan’ were both proper first names, which had been combined to make an all-inclusive family name with the feminine ending kaya (much like Jane Q. Smith). Others said the Soviet authorities were pulling America’s leg with a ridiculous sounding last name that sounded almost like ‘Damn Yankee’. Later, there were acrimonious debates on whether it was just local peasants who hanged Zoya after she destroyed their property. Some questioned whether Zoya myth was created to draw attention away from the other heroine of the Resistance who happened to be a Jewess. No matter what, Stalin immediately named her a Hero of the Soviet Union. Many young soviet soliders carried a photo of her, and the words ‘For Zoya’ were also written on Soviet tanks and planes heading to Berlin. Streets, kolkhozes, Pioneer organizations, a mountain and a minor planet were all named after Zoya. The ultimate accolade came when she was reburied at the Novodevichy Cemetery. There she rests now, surrounded by many Russian luminaries, whose works she allegedly enjoyed in life.

(One source I find online says a Pravda photographer named Sergej Strunniknow took the above photo. I find this a little hard to believe but there it is).

These days, people don’t talk much about Biafra. Many probably have never even heard of it before, let alone know which continent it’s on and what happened there. During the 1960s, however, the name Biafra was a synonym for the horrors of famine and civil war, as much as the names Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Rwanda or Darfur are synonyms for atrocities committed during our generation. In 1967, the Igbo — a people in the oil-rich south east part of Nigeria who were Christianized by missionaries (like many areas in coastal Western Africa) — unilaterally declared their independence from Nigeria.

The Republic of Biafra was doomed from the start; its independence was recognized by only five countries* but Biafra became a battleground on which dying imperial powers and their tumultuous successors fought one of the last proxy wars. France, which officially denied any involvement, sent arms to Biafra via Gabon and the Ivory Coast. France and Portugal, which controlled the nearby islands of Sao Tome and Principe, assumed that they could benefit from the break-up of Nigeria, a former British colony. Britain which had major oil contracts with Nigeria decided to back the Nigerian government. Meanwhile, Soviet Union, South Africa and Rhodesia all saw the conflict as a chance to increase their influence in the region.

After initial setbacks, Nigerian Army blockaded Biafra, cutting off food supplies. Western food aid was refused by the Biafra government, paranoid that it would have been poisoned, and the route for food aid would have opened a gap in the Biafran defence. What happened over the next three years was tragic, because it was all too preventable. It took a long time for the West to see pictures of Biafra; during the first six months of the fighting, few photographers managed to penetrate anywhere near the front lines. Yet, slowly reporters and photographers arrived, making Biafra the world’s first media famine. But the world could only sit and wait as more than one million people perished, mostly from starvation. With the pictures such as that of a hauntingly emaciated albino boy, Don McCullin introduced the world to the sight of children with stick-thin limbs and grotesquely distended stomachs, characteristic of protein deficiency — images which are to become all too tragically familiar in subsequent decades as famines happened in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Sudan.

Biafra eventually collapsed. In 1970, its president, Lt. Col. Emeka Ojukwu fled the country with just one $100 bill, all that was left of the massive £7m personal fortune; the remainder having been spent on food supplies and arms to protect his country. Biafra seems to have faded into history, its dubious claim to fame now being ‘Jello Biafra’, the stage name of American punk rocker Eric Reed who thought it was ironic to juxtapose the concepts of mass starvation in Africa and the nutritionally worthless junk food of the West.

*(Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Zambia if you must know).

"Indecent!": The Offending Slides

By modern standards, the controversy over the above pictorial seems almost incomprehensible. Yet, when Life magazine decided to publish it on April 11st 1938, the magazine’s editors knew that it would be one of the biggest controversies of Life’s early years.

The pictorial was titled “The Birth of a Baby” and included pictures from a film by the same title produced to reduce the maternal death rate. Both the 72-minute educational film and 35-paneled pictorial tell the fictional story of a married woman who becomes pregnant and who learns, along with the reader, about the major stages of pregnancy and birth. The movie had been banned in several U.S. cities for its ‘indecency’ , but Life decided to go ahead with their pictorial. Predictably enough, its appearance in a widely published news magazine for all audiences caused an immediate uproar in newspapers from Paris to Seattle, although Life cleared the stories with officials and warned its readers in advance.

Although a Gallup poll showed 76% of people were against a ban, thirty three U.S. cities banned the magazine, along with Canada and the state of Pennsylvania. Roy Larsen, LIFE’s publisher (and later chairman of Time Inc.’s executive committee) and six newsdealers were arrested. Lawsuits followed but every indecency charge brought before court was thrown out, except in Boston, leading to one headline: “Storks still bring Boston babies”. In this era, where the phrase “Banned in Boston” entered lexicons, the debate was the most intense in the-then more traditional bastions of WASP establishment: New England. Many important figures of the age weighed in; that arbitrator of good taste, the New York police department, mused that the pictorial “would be detrimental to the morals of youth.” In the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt was more ponderous: “I never think that honest things are bad.” The New Yorker published a parody, and many questioned the decision to ban these pictures, which contained no nudity nor depictions of sexual activity, while allowing other prurient magazines to be sold.

Always the one for bon mot, Life magazine described the controversy as pro-Life and anti-Life. Eventually, it proved to be a blessing in disguise for then-fledgling magazine. Even before Conde Nast mastered the art of $1-magazine, Life was marketed as a cheap magazine for all. Yes, its sales numbered around a million, but Life was sold at 10 cents per issue, which didn’t fully cover the expense and the magazine lost money from the beginning;. The controversy which followed the decision to print the film turned out to be a huge publicity boon for the magazine.

In the subsequent trial, the famed censorship lawyer Morris Ernst successfully defended the magazine. The landmark decision that resulted was to help to destigmatize public representations of pregnancy and birth. In 1965, Life published Lennart Nilsson’s photos of a fetus without much criticism and opposition. Looking back with more than seventy-years of hindsight, the entire episode seems quaint but it is oddly current too: in the recent years, the debate — decidedly quieter than the one above, but a debate nonetheless — is on whether Facebook should allow breast-feeding pictures online. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.