Iconic Photos

Revolutions often come from unlikeliest places: from a shipyard in Gdansk; from a bus in Montgomery; from a prison cell on Robben Island. But even by these standards, it is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit vendor whose self-immolation set in motion the events that would culminate in the first successful revolution in the Arab World.

On December 17th 2010, a policewoman confiscated Mr. Bouazizi’s fruits, and then slapped him in the face; Bouazizi first complained at a local office, which was unhelpful, and then out of desperation, set himself on fire. By the time he died on Jan. 4, protests that started over Mr. Bouazizi’s treatment. They unfolded quickly, helped by shaky images taken by phones, posted on YouTube and shared on Facebook and Twitter. On January 14th, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country, ending his 23-year-old rule.

Although they might have been there always, cracks in other Arab autocracies become clearer to see in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution. Gaddafi quickly denounced the Tunisian revolution, although in the past, the erratic Libyan dictator had been always critical of Ben Ali’s pro-American regime. There were further immolations in Algeria, and protests over the ruling Hashemite dynasty in Jordan. And yesterday, it was the turn of Egypt, the Middle East’s largest and most influential Arab state.

At the time of writing, the situation in Egypt remains murky, but Hosni Mubarak looks vulnerable for the first time in his three-decade long authoritarian rule. Yesterday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets, occupied the central Tahrir Square, and surrounded the parliament building. It was there that an amateur photographer took the above photograph, which many are already calling Egypt’s ‘Tank Man’ moment (there is also another video clip that has been thus termed). For this writer, the photo is interesting not just for the historical associations its invokes. Fittingly for an uprising started via Facebook, it comes from an anonymous user who posted it on Reddit and illustrates how social media has changed marketplace of ideas and political discourse.

In the wider Arab world, however, revolution will not be televised, merely because press freedom, as well as democracy, remains elusive. But the region’s geriatric despots are slowly discovering that internet is much more difficult to control.

2011 may or may not be another 1989, but for the time being, it is satisfying to entertain the comparisons with that pivotal year when Communism died in Eastern Europe. Like the Revolution in Hungary which opened that annus mirabilis, Tunisia had unleashed glimmers of hope, if not winds of change, for the Arab world. Comparisons with 1989 are still immature, but it is only January, and a year is a longtime in politics.

On Kungsgaten, one of the main shopping streets in Stockholm, one can still see the PUB department store, where Greta Garbo used to work in the millinery department. The screen legend who would eventually be voted the most beautiful woman who ever lived by The Guinness Book of World Records was born into poverty. She was just 21 when she played the second female lead in G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street.

She left for America where Louis Mayer reluctantly signed her up. Though there were many doubts about her acting ability and her husky voice, the PR people at the studio saw Garbo’s reticence as gold. Notoriously reclusive, Garbo answered no fan mail, seldom signed autographs, rarely attended social functions, and refused to gave interviews. (In press reporter jargon, refusing an interview is still “pulling a Garbo” or “going Garbo”). In her last interview, as the interviewer (Paul Callan of Daily Mail) opened his questioning with, “I wonder…”, the feisty actress interrupted with “Why wonder?” and left, making it one of the shortest interviews ever published. For MGM, however, mystique surrounding her reclusive nature was so great than headlines screamed, “Garbo Talks!” when she appeared to great success in her first talkie, Anna Christie (1930). “Garbo Laughs!” they echoed in 1939 for her first comedy, Ninotchka. This was a theme also echoed in several of her other roles. In one of the most memorable lines in the cinematic history, Garbo, as the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel (1932), lamented, “I want to be alone…. I just want to be alone.” Previously, her characters ‘spoke’ the lines via title cards, “I am walking alone because I want to be alone” (The Single Standard, 1929) and “I like to be alone” (Love, 1927).

Her demons and insecurities eventually overtook her. Severe criticism for her 1941 movie “Two Faced Woman” made Garbo skittish about taking on new parts. Soon she would disappear from the screen entirely and spend the rest of her life (she died only in 1990) vacationing in Switzerland, on the French Riviera, and in Italy but making home base in New York City. She turned down an invitation from the White House for a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth. She would not return to Hollywood, even to accept her Honorary Oscar.

The above picture, was taken at the Club St. Germain in Paris sometime in the 1950s by George Dudognon, a noted chronicler of the Left Bank. Although Dudognon’s photo was more incidental than exploitative, many paparazzi, avant le lettre, would continue to follow Garbo. Fascination with her was such that in 1976, People magazine published topless photos of the 71-year old Garbo, taken with a long-range lens during her vacation in Antigua. Even in her evening years, this woman, who once famously said, “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is a whole world of difference”, couldn’t escape the media hounds.

The show, titled “The Perfect Moment”, could easily have been called “The Perfect Storm”. On June 12nd, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. announced that it was canceling a traveling exhibition of Robert Mapplethrope photos which was scheduled to open on July 1st. The gallery had been under intense pressure from conservatives to cancel the exhibition, and its Board of Trustees initially supported the cancellation. Eventually they backtracked after the museum membership dropped by 10%, senior stuff resigned, prominment artists forbade the museum to show their work, and another venue in the capital picked up the Mapplethrope exhibition and the profits instead.

When the traveling Mapplethrope show reached Cincinnati, Ohio, the police briefly shut down the Contemporary Arts Centre to examine the pictures. The videotapes taken there would be used as evidence to charge the centre and its director with obscenity in connection with seven photos, five showing sadomasochistic sex and two showing naked children. The ensuing trial was a farce. Eight-member jury, of four men and four women, were mostly blue-collar and suburban, and only three had ever been to a museum. The state so confident that the jury would easily agree that the photos were obscene that the only prosecution witnesses were police officers brought in to testify that the photographs had actually been in the show. This strategy spectacularly backfired when the defense called in expert witness after expert witness for five days. (This included one Philadelphia curator who lectured on how meticulously Mapplethrope positioned the wrist that was penetrating an anus). After just two hours of deliberation, the jury agreed that the pictures could be considered as art and acquitted the museum.

Had he been alive for a few more months, Mapplethrope — who died in March 1989 at age 42, of complications from AIDS — would no doubt have enjoyed the enormous fuss he had caused. Although he was perfectly capable of creating suggestive and beautiful pictures sans sex — like sharply lit and enticing pictures of flowers – Mapplethrope pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable and what was not. His explicit photographs are of homosexual S&M, blunt images of rough sex, men urinating into others’ mouths, fists in anuses; the photos were as one critic noted,  ”a calm Apollonian framework for wild Dionysian content”. Although many family-value conservatives were deeply offended in D.C. and Ohio, the show opened without fuss in Philadelphia and Chicago and the offending material was confined in an age-restricted “X” portfolio.

But in that summer of 1989, media circus over Piss Christ poisoned the political atmosphere. Unlike Piss Christ and its creator, the Corcoran, the CAC or Mapplethrope never received any federal grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, but the conservative war on the NEA was only just beginning. Despite the NEA’s best efforts to placate its critics, the GOP cut its funding by more than a third after unsuccessfully trying to axe it altogether. Artists angered by new NEA decency rules took their grievances to federal courts, whose rulings were often narrow and vague. In 1998, one such case reached the Supreme Court, only to result in a hair-splitting decision that satisfied no one. The NEA funding never recovered from these fights in the early 90s. In 2008, President Obama’s first budget allocated $161.3 million fro the NEA. That figure is $8 million less than what the agency got in 1989.

Between 1870 and 1900, Alexander Bassano ran one of the most successful London photographic studios. Bassano enjoyed a fashionable status in the London High Society;  the Prince of Wales popularized Bassano’s name and many distinguished names visited Bassano’s Regent Street studio, people ranging from Queen Victoria and Lillie Langtry to Cecil Rhodes and the Zulu King Cetewayo. His pictures were frequently sold as celebrity photographs or reproduced by the illustrated press. Bassano’s most famous photograph is undoubtedly the portrait of Lord Horatio Kitchener used for the iconic World War One poster “Your Country Needs You.”

When Britain declared war in 1914, the name Kitchener was on every lip. The Conservatives in the Parliament called for him; the big newspapers demanded him, and Winston Churchill recommended his appointment to the Cabinet. The venerated position which Kitchener held in the eyes of officialdom and the public was demonstrated in that he became the first member of the military to hold the post of Secretary of War, and that large crowds gathered to watch him enter and leave the War Office each day. There was the feeling that Kitchener could not fail. (No soldier had served in a major office of state since the Duke of Wellington and served in a Cabinet since General George Monk, who was awared with high office in 1660 for the Restoration).

After all, Field Marshal Herbert Horatio Kitchener was avenger of Gordon, reconqueror of the Sudan, hero of Fashoda, protector of the Northwest frontier, Commander-in-Chief in South Africa and Earl Kitchener of Khartoum. His photo hung on many walls throughout the Empire. For all this immense reputation, Kitchener was a warrior of the 19th century; all his previous campaigns were imperial in nature and involved only relatively small forces. Although he nonetheless excelled at his initial task of recruiting a large army to fight Germany, warfare on an unprecedented industrial scale truly disturbed him. Unsuccessful in government, he was despatched to Russia; the pretext was to assess the Eastern Front, but the Cabinet was merely wishing to avoid the political embarrassment of a resignation. Lord Kitchener was on the armoured cruiser Hampshire, sailing from Scapa Flow for Archangel, when on the evening of 5th June 1916, she hit a mine in the North Sea and quickly sank, taking with her virtually everybody on board.

In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin offered this assessment: “If he had died in 1914 he would have been remembered as the greatest British general since Wellington. Had he died in 1915 he would have been remembered as the prophet who foretold the nature and duration of the First World War and as the organiser of Britain’s mass army. But in 1916 he had become the aging veteran of a bygone era who could not cope with the demands placed on him in changing times.”

Kitchener myth, however, had survived him. At far-away outposts of empire, Kitchener waged the very first media wars; he was a larger-than-life character only by the virtue of writers, journalists and photographers that followed and deified him. Tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with bushy eyebrows, bristling mustache, cold blue eyes set widely apart, and an intimidating glower, Kitchener was not only a living legend but also a symbol. Kitchener might have been a lone, insecure figure who relied on a small group of aides, but he appeared strong and determined in appearance, and in the end, it was all that mattered.  His moustache, too, outlived Kitchener; under its watchful presence on recruiting posters, over 2,000,000 men volunteered in the first two years of the war; very soon, numerous imposing characters, paternal or otherwise, would be glowering out of many posters, with an accusatory finger to beckon the viewer towards whatever incomprehensible causes there may be.

The Second World War claimed the lives of at least forty-one million Europeans, more than half of them in the Soviet Union. Between 8-9 million soldiers in the Red Army were killed, and 18 million more were wounded. Between 16-19 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Estimates of the total Soviet casualties are around 25 million, five times that of the Germans, and even this rough number was deduced only by reducing the total population figures at the next census.

Although the Soviet hagiographies conveniently ignored it, there was more than a whiff of self-destruction in these numbers. Employing an insulating jargon that removed them from realities and incomprehensibilities of war, Soviet commanders asked ‘How many matches were burned?’ or ‘How many pencils were broken?’ when they wanted to know about their losses after a battle.  For all his charisma, political awareness, and good sense of military strategy, Stalin remained, in the words of the acclaimed Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov, “an armchair general”, who had ‘fathomed the secrets of war at the cost of bloody experimentation.” His planning was erratic, and his measures ‘to combat cowardice’ were extreme. According to one especially infamous order, Number 227, every army was to organize units which would move along as a second front behind the first wave of attack, and shoot down any soldier who hesitated or retreated.

The huge toll in human lives paid for Stalin’s ‘brilliant strategy’ was captured in Dmitri Baltermants’ photo, ‘Grief, or Searching for the Loved Ones in Kerch’. Before ultimately reaching Berlin like the Red Army itself, Baltermants covered the battles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. Grief was taken at the Crimean front, where he went upon his release from the hospital after seriously wounding himself in Stalingrad.

The photo depicts a 1942 Nazi massacre in the Crimean village of Kerch. Village women searched for the bodies of their loved ones. The contrast between the oversaturated sky above and the bodies haphazardly strewn in the foreground underlines the poignancy of the moment, but for the same reason, the photo was censored in the Soviet Union where authorities only published the photos that could help boost morale; ‘Grief’ reflected nothing but harsh tragedies of war, and it wasn’t seen by the general public until the 1960s.

The photo was allegedly cropped, and oversaturated sky itself was either the result of studio error or deliberate manipulation by Baltermants. Like so many tales originating from behind the Iron Curtain, these stories were of course unverified.

As America’s anger thermostats overheats on Mark Twain censorship, Iconic Photos looks back at a visual issue that regularly graces our semi-annual, revisionist political correctness hissy fits: cigarette censorship in photos.

The French, for all their enthusiastic fume-making, seems to be the worse offenders. Not even presidents or philosophes escape the firm hand of their cigarette censors, whose efforts are often sophomoric and inexplicable: Jacques Tati’s much-loved character, Monsieur Hulot, someone so iconic that even his silhouette was instantly recognizable, was depicted as gnawing on a papier-mache windmill instead (how did they come up with this idea?!). This actually reminds me of a scene in Thank You For Smoking where an American senator attempts to digitally remove cigarettes from classic films. The scene was not in the original novel, but its author Christopher Buckley would have agreed; Buckley once called a similar practice, “tampering with cultural DNA”.

Buckley was referring to a 33-cent stamp commemorating Jackson Pollock. In 1999, Pollock becomes the second American painter to be thus commemorated (first was Norman Rockwell). The U.S. Postal Service hired an artist, one Howard Koslow, to copy the iconic Jackson Pollock image by Martha Holmes. Holmes took the photo at Pollock’s studio in East Hampton, N.Y., for a LIFE magazine cover story in 1949. The photo, of course, showed the denim-clad artist, a chain smoker, pouring paint onto canvas, with a cigarette hanging languidly from his mouth. Koslow was explicitly ordered to leave out the cigarette, and despite much hoo-hah, the stamps went to press without it.

But this is not the first time a cigarette has been excised by the U.S. Postal Service. A more egregious example was the 1994 stamp commemorating Robert Johnson; the original photo showed the blues guitarist with his signature cigarette, which was notably absent from the stamp. This is more egregious because there were only two verified photographs of Robert Johnson, and the portrait on the stamp was the defining image of the man. Altering it was like, I don’t know, taking away Churchill’s cigar. But wait, they have also done that too:

Yousef Karsh literally took it away to capture Churchill’s combative nature. If he were still alive Churchill would probably have been angrier with public censorship of his cigar, committed by the London museum, The Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience. Churchill makes a “V” shaped symbol with his fingers, with his signature stogie in the corner of his mouth, in the original photo, but not anymore in the images that greet museum visitors. (Come on, how many museum-goers actually say, “OMG! Winston was soooo cooool with the cigar! Let’s go and buy some!)

Churchill would have hated it, but his German nemesis might be enjoying a posthumous chuckle. Adolf Hitler was an anti-smoking zealot; he believed that smoking was “decadent” and equal to “racial degeneracy” and that it was wrong for the master race to smoke. Feeling it was bad for Germans to see statesmen and role models with cigarettes, he ordered many top Nazi officials to stop smoking; this directive even extended to foreign leaders. Hitler had a cigarette removed from the photos of Stalin that Nazi Germany published when Stalin met with the Nazi envoy, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

It is tempting to play “You Are Hitler” card here, but other unfavorable comparisons can be found too; sociologist Todd Gitlin put it better than I ever can: “The communists used to airbrush inconvenient persons from photographs. Americans are airbrushing signs of inconvenient sins.” However, it is not just Americans; everyone seems to be doing it these days. Soon, we will be learning sanitized versions of history, where FDR, Sigmund Freud or Humphrey Bogart never smoked, reading books where Sherlock Holmes didn’t rely on cocaine and tobacco, and watching movies where protagonists are allowed to blow others’ heads off but not allowed to light up.

Often, the argument is about the children, for they are impressionable. Removing the cigarette from the photo of Clement Hurd which was on the dust jacket of the book he illustrated, “Goodnight Moon,” was such a case. In this case, the concerns were legitimate as “Goodnight Moon” was a classic which has lulled children to sleep for nearly 60 years but I am willing to bet 95% of the readers — both parents and children alike — would never have noticed that tiny little cigarette. Sometimes it is to be wondered whether the publishers deliberately try to stir up controversy for they could easily have skirted around the entire issue by using a different picture of Hurd where he was not smoking.

Yet “think of the children”, or for more educated among us, “Ad usum Delphini” is often a cravenly argument to further political agenda. On censoring a cigarette out of a stamp of the chain smoker Bette Davis, Roger Ebert quipped, “We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting.” And don’t think it was all harmless; revisionism is only hilarious up to a certain level: in the far-away and simpler time called 1959, the American Gas Association managed to have all references to gas ovens and the gassing of Jews removed from the broadcast it sponsored, which happened to be the film Judgment at Nuremberg.

But I believe when we see a picture of someone famous — Churchill, Pollock or Freud — we admire them for their abilities and genius, not for their smoking. Whether a cigarette, cigar or any other fumigant is present or not, we see beyond them to witness in those photos men of talent; our focus is not on the cigarette, unless specific attention is called for by its inexplicable absence. Cigarette censorship opens a debate where such a debate was not necessary, where such a debate could only detract from the images and where such a debate would never have existed without the censorship itself.

In 1962, an unheralded conscript was killed in Fushun, northeastern China. Lei Feng was just 20 when a banal accident — a falling telephone pole — ended his yet-undistinguished life. Officials later fortuitously uncovered his diary, allegedly filled with words of selfless devotion to the Communist Party. His ideal had been “to be a small cog in the machine,” working for the party and Chairman Mao. “Parents are dear to their children, but they can’t compare with Chairman Mao,” read one entry.

Mao needed all the propaganda skills he had to divert attention away from the Great Leap Forward, which was failing spectacularly; Lei Feng’s story was a godsend — as much as that word can be employed within Mao’s atheistic society.  ’Lei Feng’ myth thus promptly began with a ‘Learn from Comrade Lei Feng’ campaign, initially focused on performing humble Communist deeds, but later also on following the cult of Mao. The biography of Lei Feng saw some strange variants before the definitive version was prepared by the writers of the Propaganda Department in 1964.

Chinese leaders, including Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin praised Lei Feng as the personification of altruism. ‘Lei Feng Exhibitions’ were organized in the large cities, showing many different “original” copies of the hero’s diary. These exhibitions –and the official illustrated diary — also contained a remarkable number of photographs, such as “Lei Feng helping an old woman to cross the street,” “Lei Feng secretly [sic] doing his comrades’ washing,” “Lei Feng giving his lunch to a comrade who forgot his lunch box,” and so forth. Susan Sontag was frankly dismissive of the authenticity of these photos in her On Photography. Simon Leys was more sarcastic in his 1977 book Ombres Chinoises: “Only cynical and impious spirits will wonder at the providential presence of a photographer during the various incidents in the life of that humble, hitherto unknown soldier.”

After Mao’s death, Lei Feng briefly remained a cultural icon symbolizing selflessness, modesty, and dedication, but his life became more openly questioned. A photograph later hilariously showed Lei wearing a wristwatch, an item of extravagance that was officially denied and practically unavailable to people of his rank*. Although many contemporary writers dismiss Lei’s continued importance, he remains one of modern China’s most resilient icons. Although his prominence in textbooks has declined, Lei Feng remains part of the national curriculum. He may now be subjected to open mockery, but there are still Lei Feng memorial, museum, and memorial day, and his life was also still celebrated in songs, T-shirts, kitsch internet animations and even a video-game even into 1990s and 2000s.

(cf. Wristwatches also made a rather unfortunate appearance in another series of iconic propaganda photographs made by an equally suffocating dictatorship.)

Every year, I do a ‘Year in Review’ for a different publication, reviewing the year past and predicting the year ahead (usually with dismal results). This year, I decided to do the same for photography, but it predominantly reads like a litany of deaths:

In the roster of those we lost this year, we saw such familiar names Dennis Stock, the man who made Jimmy live forever; Corinne Day, the discoverer of Kate Moss; Garry Gross, the originator of a thousand controversies; and Felice Quinto, the original paparazzo who served as a template for the aggressive celebrity photographer in La Dolce Vita. Some names harkened back to Don Draper’s America: Louis Fabian Bachrach, the last patriarch of the esteemed Bachrach Photo Studios; and Peter Gowland, “America’s No. 1 Pin-up Photographer,” according to the New York Times, whose pin-up photos graced more than 1,000 magazine covers, from Playboy to Modern Photography.

To remember Bill Hudson, Charles Moore, Elfie Ballis or Jeff Carter is to ponder the fortunes of the voiceless to whom their photographs gave a clear voice. Hudson and Moore captured the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement. Elfie Ballis’s monumental work — 30,000 photographs of labor leader Cesar Chavez and migrant farmworkers — highlighted their struggle in the Californian fields. Jeff Carter’s letterhead read “photographer for the poor and unknown”, and so he was to many Australians in the outback.

Music, too, lost those who hailed her ballads through photos. Brian Duffy, though best remembered for his fashion photography, created the iconic “Aladdin Sane” cover for David Bowie. Jim Marshall’s images of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash and many others helped define their subjects as well as rock ’n’ roll itself. Herman Leonard defined smokey aura of jazz in the United States while in France, Jean-Pierre Leloir was doing the same for Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet.

And then there were those whose lives were somehow intertwined with the memorable images past and present. Edith Shain was almost certainly the nurse who was the subject of Alfred Eisenstadt’s famous VJ day photograph. In his sympathetic 10-part series in the 1980s, Geoffrey Crawley, the then editor in chief of British Journal of Photography, gently deflated the Cottingley Fairies myth by showing the original cameras were incapable of producing such crisp images.

Among the lesser stars, we find those whose names are forgotten, but whose works are instantly recognizable: Lee Lockwood, the untiring chronicler of life in various Communist countries, Martin Elliott, the herald of teen angst via his saucy picture of the Tennis Girl; Alfred Gregory, the official photographer of the British expedition which made the first ascent of Everest; John Hedgecoe, the royal photographer whose photo of the Queen graced over 200 billion postage stamps. The year that saw the drawn-out saga of Ansel Adams prints also witnessed the passing of Joe Deal, who rejected the sweeping romanticism of Adams and Edward Weston to embrace the modern American landscape and its degradation at the hands of developers, corporations and suburban colonisers.

There would also be no more photographs courtesy of Alejandro López de Haro, Alexander Sliussarev, Balthasar Burkhard, Bahman Jalali, Běla Kolářová, George Pickow, Mario Pacheco, Mark Ellidge, Marty Lederhandler, Rigmor Mydtskov, Sigmar Polke and Werner Forman.

Lights were a little dimmer for photojournalism and print media themselves, but Time kept the beacon alive. The Tea Party photoshoot, and Platon’s assignment in Burma were just two recent examples; genius of the magazine’s new phono director Kira Pollack shone through as Time produced pictorials and portraits that harkened back to the Golden Age of Photography throughout 2010.

To learn of Margaret Moth’s death was to be reminded of this courageous photographer who barely survived being shot in the face in Sarajevo in 1992. But dangers for photographers didn’t diminish with more cameras; governments still oppress and struggles still claim collaterals. Those who died in 2010 — a dangerous year for journalists — lost their lives in places where no casual traveller would stroll, where no cellphone camera would be allowed to snoop: places like Caracas, Ciudad Juarez, Gaza and Baghdad. With the incapacitation by an Afghan land mine of Joao Silva, the former member of the Bang-Bang Club, the world lost a photojournalistic talent prematurely.

Afghanistan, with its election, its mercurial leader and general chaos of its existence, provided enough fodder of photojournalists like Silva. Therefore, it is not surprising that the most memorable picture of the year came from Afghanistan. On August cover of Time magazine was a shocking image: Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. If the photo was intended as a pastiche of Steve McCurry’s National Geographic cover, it succeeded in providing not only a face to anthropomorphize the dire situation there, but also a haunting Ur-text to contemporarize Afghanistan, still tragically war-torn thirty years after McCurry poetically depicted another Afghan Girl whose eyes had seen it all.

Strictly speaking, a faithful facsimile of McCurry’s photo could not possibly be made anymore. When McCurry took it in 1984, he used Kodachrome, a method that was de facto retired in 2010. Kodak officially discontinued the film two years ago, and Kodachrome’s death-knells had been sound exceedingly louder as many labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome closed one by one. In December, a shop in Kansas — the last lab for Kodachrome — stopped processing it. Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome was once nonetheless valued for its availability, economy, and radiance. It offers a rich palette of color and light and “makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” as Paul Simon famously sang in his eponymous 1973 hit. Even as they more and more abandoned it for digital cameras, many photographers remembered Kodachrome’s unique treatment of light as being incomparable. Kodachrome and eras and events it chronicled are irreplaceable. The same can be said for lives and works of those who left in 2010.

A. S. H.

31. 12. 2010. San Francisco