Iconic Photos

Architecture is nothing more than a practical combination of arts and science, and nothing symbolized this triumphal combination more than Case Study houses, a high point in modern American architecture. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, major architects of the day were invited to design affordable and efficient model homes, and some thirty of them were built, mostly in Southern California. The sponsor of this ambitious project was the Californian magazine Arts & Architecture, which engaged an architectural photographer named Julius Shulman to dutifully record them.

Thus this experiment in residential architecture was gloriously captured by Shulman in his iconic black and white photographs. Fittingly for Shulman, one of the first architectural photographers to include the inhabitants of homes in the pictures, his most famous image was the 1960 view of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 (also the Stahl House), which showed two well-dressed women conversing casually inside.

In the photo, the cantilevered living room appears to float diaphanously above Los Angeles. “The vertiginous point of view contrasts sharply with the relaxed atmosphere of the house’s interior, testifying to the ability of the Modernist architect to transcend the limits of the natural world,” praised the New York Times. Yet this view was created as meticulously as the house itself. Wide-angle photography belied the actual smallness of the house; furniture and furnishings were staged, and as were the women. Although they were not models (but rather girlfriends of architectural students), they were asked to sit still in the dark as Shulman exposed the film seven minutes to capture lights from LA streets. Then, lights inside were quickly switched on to capture two posing women.

Result was the photo Sir Norman Foster termed his favorite “architectural moment”. Indeed, the photo captured excitement and promises the house held, and propelled Case Study No. 22 into the forefront of national consciousness. Some called it the most iconic building in LA. It appeared as backdrop in many movies, TV series and advertisements. (Tim Allen was abducted by aliens here in Galaxy Quest; Greg Kinnear would make it his bachelor pad in Nurse Betty. Italian models in slicked-back hair would frolic poolside in Valentino ads). According to Koenig, Case Study No. 22. was featured in more than 1,200 books — more often than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

The 20th Century opened with Russia slowly teetering towards disenchantment and chaos. Emancipation of serfs in 1861 left many landowners at a loss — unable or unwilling to implement better administration and more efficient farming methods, they rapidly ran up crippling debts. Directly or indirectly, this led to series of poor harvests and a widespread famine in 1891, which revealed the inadequacies of the Tsarist government. Demonstrations, strikes and general unrest were slowly gathering momentum as Russia commenced a long anticipated war on Japan in 1905.

The war was initially viewed as an opportunity to improve Russia’s domestic situation, but its navy suffered humiliating defeats in the Far East. The Interior Minister Vyacheslav Plehve, who predicted that the impeding war with Japan will be a ‘victorious little war’ was assassinated. In January 1905, as military disaster unfolded, dissatisfaction erupted into revolution in St Petersburg. The immediate spark was the dubious dismissal of three workers, and the leader of the demonstration was the factory chaplain named Father Georgi Gapon. Gapon was himself no revolutionary, though he was subsequently represented as one. He wrote, “I went to the Tsar in the simple-hearted belief that we would receive pravda …. I went … to purchase with my blood the renewal of Russia and the establishment of pravda.”

At the Winter Palace, the protestors were met not by the Tsar, who was in his retreat outside the city, but by the Preobrashensky Regiment which opened fire on the procession. Above photo of the line of soldiers in their long winter coats taking aiming at a crowd on the other side of a brilliantly white square was thought to have been the only photo taken that fateful day which would go down in history as Bloody Sunday. The protestors had approached the regiment believing that the soldiers would not fire upon people carrying religious icons and images of the Tsar. They did. In the photo, demonstrators scrambled to safety as a sole isolated figure intriguingly was left alone in the no man’s land.

At the end of the Bloody Sunday, Gapon had fled, 130 demonstrators had been killed and 300 wounded according to official estimates. Foreign journalists reported as many as 4600 casualties. Its consequences were even more far reaching: as the news of the massacre spread, strikes broke out all over Russia, demanding shorter hours and higher wages. Aboard the battleship Potemkin, indignant sailors hoisted the red flag because of maggots in their meat. In Volokolamsk, peasants formed their own successionist ‘Markovo Republic’. Elsewhere, peasants looted and burned down their landlords’ residences, or cut down timber from landlords’ forests. For the first time since 1721, a Russian Tsar was forced to create a legislative assembly, the Duma. Although this Duma would prove to be ineffectual and short-lived, the other legacy of the Bloody Sunday was more indelible: before 1905, socialists, anarchists and many members of the bourgeoise had no possibility of breaking the hold of nobility and clergy in Russia. After Janaury 1905, it finally seemed their time had arrived.

(N.B. Even as I wrote this, I was aware of the controversy over the authenticity of the image. Some contend that the all-powerful Soviet TASS news agency took a still from a 1925 film by Vyacheslav Viskovski called Devjatoe Janvarja (The Ninth of January) — which was also known confusingly by another title Krovavoe voskresenje (Bloody Sunday). However, it is unknown whether the scene was created for the film, or the film used an earlier still photograph. Most scholarly books I have encountered view the photo as authentic.)

It is often said that people get the government they deserve, but by no stretch of the imagination can the Libyans have deserved Muammar Gaddafi, who at the time of his downfall was the longest-serving ruler in Africa. Son of an illiterate Bedouin herder, Gaddafi had already hatched plans to topple the Libyan monarchy while at college and, after military training in Greece and Britain, led a successful revolution at the age of 27. Like Mao, Gaddafi outlined his political views in a pithy tome: the Green Book. His Islamic socialism was a curious mixture of Arab nationalism, socialist welfare state and religious moral codes, but succeeded only in reducing LIbya from a republic into a jamahiriya — a neologism that means “government by the masses” — a querulous tribalistic quasi-state.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi was left free to practice his interventionist and not inconsequential policies. Libya has donated money for humanitarian causes across Africa and also allowed Africans to travel to the country to find work. It supported African rebels in South Africa and Zimbabwe during apartheid. On the other hand, Gaddafi had supported scores of other baleful rebel movements in Chad, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Liberia. After he had became embroiled in Chad’s Civil War, Gaddafi sent high school pupils to the frontline, telling them that they were going on a field trip. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), Palestinian militants and the forces of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had training camps in Libya, although the Irish soon left after facing tight alcohol regulations.

These unseemly connections led to Gaddafi being identified as the world’s premier state-sponsor of terrorism. Implicated in several terrorist attacks including the Munich Massacre of 1972, shooting of protestors from inside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1983, and the Berlin discotheque bombing of 1986, Gaddafi was the “mad dog of the Middle East” to President Reagan, who authorized the bombing of Tripoli, which killed, among many others, Gaddafi’s own adopted daughter. His retaliation was the Lockerbie Bombings of 1988, which consigned Libya into international pariah-hood.

Although his military rank remained uncharged, the colonel subsequently festooned himself with rows after rows of decorations. His delusions of grandeur were also palpable when he tried to create a Federation of Arab Republics (with Egypt and Syria), an Arab-African Federation (with Morocco), and an Arab Islamic Republic (with Tunisia). They lasted five years, two years and two days respectively. As his fellow Arabs failed to support him in the face of international isolation in the 1980s and 1990s, he abandoned pan-Arabism for pan-Africanism. In the recent years, his vision was for a second USA — the United States of Africa, modeled after the EU — with Gaddafi himself as its “King of Kings”.

As his influence dwindled, Gaddafi became more idiosyncratic: he came to dress more and more eccentrically; two years ago, he gave an incoherent speech at the UN; he paid Italian women to study Islam. Bedouin tents, Amazonian bodyguards and an Ukrainian nurse closely accompanied him. Yet, he found limited success in his bridge-building to the West. After he partially atoned for Lockerbie, the new generation of world leaders sought Gaddafi’s help in the War on Terror and energy security. He emerged as the key mediator in negotiations over Western hostages kidnapped in Mali and Niger. He ‘magnanimously’ pardoned Bulgarian nurses accused to spreading AIDS in Libya. In 2009 — the year he chaired the African Union — Gaddafi was also at the G-8 summit, a worthy achievement for the man who was, for the better part of four decades, a bogeyman for the West.

After forty years of repression, Gaddafi’s end came astonishingly fast. As dictatorships to east and west of him crumbled, his position became increasingly untenable. Yesterday, he appeared in a 22-second TV interview, holding an umbrella, sitting in the front seat of a van and denying the rumors that he had fled to Venezuela (above). Preparing a symbolic last stand, he made a speech from his deserted residence, which was aerial bombed in 1986 by the U.S., brandishing his Green Book. Like his own dictatorship, the speech was rumbling and went on far too long; Gaddafi himself looked distant and shabbier than ever before, at last unable to steer the destiny of a nation that had ceased to listen to him, ceased to trust him. To the end, he remained defiant, saying “Colonel Gaddafi is history”. In this judgment at least, he was correct.

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times, there is something very tragic about Bahrain, the next stop on the Arab World’s 1989 train. That it is one of the most democratic countries in the Arab World may say more about its neighbors than Bahrain itself, but the country indeed made some crucial strides towards democracy in the last decade. In addition to a F1 racetrack, an international banking centre and a US naval base, Bahrain also has a well-educated political classes, constitutional monarchy and representative (if powerless) parliament. Yet, in the last two days, by violently attacking its own citizens, Bahraini government had negated all these steps towards democracy. Even if Bahrain’s Sunni rulers survive in its predominantly Shi’ite state, they will never recover from the bloodshed of yesterday — a poignant reminder of the Other 1989.

The Other 1989. The one in which the Chinese government brutally decimated its own citizens on the Tienanmen Square. Today, we don’t talk much about it for various reasons. Firstly, time had, sadly, clouded our memories. Secondly, positive-thinking forces us to focus more on (and draw parallels only with) on the Cold War that was won in 1989, not on its inconvenient Chinese chapter. Thirdly, we have cravenly abandoned our democratic and humanitarian principles to nurture our (undeniably important) relationship with China. Lastly, within China itself, Tienanmen Massacre was carefully purged out of history and out of collective memory itself.

On another front, the Bahraini protests provide a rare glimpse into how photoagencies and newspapers work alongside one another to cover breaking news from far away lands. Currently, the same photo from Getty Images taken by John Moore near the Pearl Square graces the homepages of major English-speaking news outlets: the New York Times (Global)/IHT; the Telegraph; the Times of London, the BBC; and Time magazine. Le Nouvel Observateur has a smaller version on its homepage and El Pais has another John Moore/Getty Image which is part of the same series. These days, seeing an identical image on such varied assortment of papers is extremely rare, and almost an unique occasion. (In other major papers, Le Monde has an AFP photo and Der Spiegel has a Reuters photo on their homepages).

This is a clear illustration of advantages photographers working for huge photoagencies have over other freelancers or even those who work for individual papers/magazines. This is also another reason that individual papers and magazines do not hire photographers exclusively anymore. For instance, no less than four photographers covered the famous Tank Man moment, but Jeff Widener was able to rely on a network (AP) and managed to distribute it faster than others working independently. It was Widener’s photo that was widely reproduced the next day. Likewise, Charlie Cole, with distribution and publicity power of a weekly (Newsweek) behind him, won a World Press Award for his version, although it can be said that of Stuart Franklin (Magnum, independent) was more aesthetic.

In 1950, Guatemala overwhelmingly elected a reformist government under Jacobo Arbenz, a well-educated landowning idealist of Swiss descent. His government — “the most democratic Guatemala ever had,” according to the historian Howard Zinn — fought against corruption, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour work week and legalized unions. In 1952, a disastrous career move, Arbenz enacted Decree 900, a reform that took idle land away from some of the country’s biggest estate owners — his included 1,700 acres of his own land — and redistributed it to poor peasants.

Among the landowners dismayed by this development was the United Fruit Company, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The American company owned nearly everything of consequence — the ports, the railroads, the communications networks, banks, stores and some 550,000 acres of farmland. Some 85 percent of this land was left more or less permanently idle, to keep banana production artificially low, and prices high. In February 1953, the Arbenz government confiscated a quarter of a million acres of company land, offering in return government bonds worth $1,185,000 — the exact sum to which the United Fruit had discounted the land’s value for tax purposes.

Now, the United Fruit had decided the land was worth $16 million — a sum the Guatemalans couldn’t afford to pay. The company also won its case in the Guatemalan Supreme Court, which struck down the nationalization as unconstitutional, but Arbenz fired the judges. “One can live without tribunals but one can’t live without land,” one trade union leader declared. But the United Fruit had friends in higher places than the Guatemalan Supreme Court: the United States Government. One of its former attorneys was the-then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose brother was the-then Deputy Director of the CIA. With the help of the US Embassy in Guatemala, the United Fruit successfully lobbied to convince American politicians that Arbenz’s government had Soviet support — a claim still unsubstantiated today. In June 1954, President Esienhower finally underwrote a coup. The anti-Communist coup/invasion was almost a fiasco, it gave the Guatemalan army an opportunity to seize power from Arbenz.

The new military government received quick blessings from Washington. Always willing to help, the CIA gave the junta a list of seventy thousand “questionable individuals” — teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests — who had supported the land reforms. Thousands of them were never seen again. Arbenz got a safe passage to Mexico, but before he departed, he had to strip and be searched (above) by customs — an ultimate indignity. Among many left-wingers to flee to Mexico was an impressionable young Argentine doctor who had just arrived in Guatemala before the coup; his name: Che Guevara.

Ernie Pyle was perhaps America’s most famous war correspondent. No war correspondent was more able to depict the day-to-day life of the ordinary World War II foot soldier than Ernie Pyle, whose columns, at their peak, appeared in some 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers. Both warfare and journalism have changed since Pyle’s day, but Pyle’s heartfelt accounts of destroyed cities, realities of army life, and fronts read as if they were written only yesterday. Here’s Pyle reporting on fighting in Tunisia:

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

and on the Invasion of Italy:

Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly — but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.

On the day he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Pyle was reporting on the preparations for the D-Day,

The best way I can describe this vast armada and the frantic urgency of the traffic is to suggest that you visualize New York city on its busiest day of the year and then just enlarge that scene until it takes in all the ocean the human eye can reach clear around the horizon and over the horizon. There are dozens of times that many.

and his accounts of the D-Day would later form the basis for the opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan.

Soon, the bloody fighting he witnessed came to haunt Pyle; he transferred himself to the Pacific Theatre, where at least from the ships where he posited him, the war seemed distant and impersonal. On April 18th 1945, Pyle came ashore on the small island of Ie Shima, where a Japanese machine gun fired on the jeep in which Pyle was riding. He was hit in the head and died instantly. An army photographer, Alexander Roberts, crept forward in the dirt to take the above image. He withheld it from publication, “out of decency,” until 1979.

Pyle’s death came just six days after that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In both cases, many Americans felt they had lost an old friend. Both civilians and soldiers alike mourned Pyle’s death. Inside his pocket was found some material that he hoped to publish when the war ends in Europe. The most poignant excerpt read:

There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production — in one country after another — month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference…

During apartheid, South Africa’s white minority government made its goal to encourage Inkatha-ANC divisions to keep its black enemies at each others’ throats. Now, in 1990, as the government of F.W. de Klerk began negotiating with Nelson Mandela’s ANC, these divisions presented a golden opportunity for some. Using the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) as their proxy, some elements within the establishment tried to destabilize the country, scuttle the negotiations, and at least delay the majority rule. Thousands of Zulus were forced out of their homes in ANC-loyal areas in Natal. The Zulus fought back violently, as police were reluctant to restore order. From July to September 1990, in one of the bloodiest clashes in modern South African history, the Zulus launched raids in the Transvaal townships, where nearly 800 were slain. In 1990 alone, over 3,000 people died as violence escalated.

A mob murder at Soweto’s Nancetield Hostel put a previously broke freelancer with obsolete cameras named Greg Marinovich on the road to international recognition. Marinovich felt as if he was “one of the circle of killers, shooting with wide-angle lens”. For the above photo of a man hacking at a burning man with a machete, Marinovich would later win a Pulitzer. A Zulu named Lindsaye Tshabalala was suspected of spying for Inkatha, and was executed by African National Congress supporters. Marinovich remembers: “This was without doubt the worst day of my life, and the trauma remains with me, despite some twenty years and a lot of coming to terms with the incident, my role and what it means to be involved in murder. This mudered happened a month after I had witnessed the one in Nancefield Hostel, and I was determined to redeem myself by not just being an observer. I neither saved him, nor redeemed myself, though at least I did not act shamefully.”

Violent nature of the image garnered ire from American editors when it was distributed via AP wire. Police approached the AP Johannesburg bureau to ask the photographer hand over his pictures so that they could identify the killers. Marinovich was convinced that this was unfair: the police did not request the pictures from Nancetield where the perpetrators are their Inkatha allies. Marinovich didn’t want to hand in his other negatives from Tshabalala murder, and fortunately for him, the police were unable to locate and subpoena one Sebastian Balic, the pseudonym Marinovich used for his photographs. He fled South Africa before further subpoenas could arrive.

The government saw the violence as an vindication of its predictions that the ANC would not be able to govern South Africa. But violence or not, apartheid was dying. In 1992, the Boipatong massacre derailed the negotiations briefly, but they resumed, and South Africa slowly crawled back from pariah-hood. In the same year, it was permitted to compete in the Olympics following the repeal of all apartheid laws the previous year. In 1993, it announced that it had permanently halted its nuclear program, whose very existence once denied vehemently. F.W. de Klerk and Mandela shared a Nobel peace prize in 1994, shortly before the all-race elections formally ended four-decade long apartheid.

A father stares at the hands of his five year-old daughter, which were severed as a punishment for having harvested too little caoutchouc/rubber

(This is an unnaturally long post for this blog, but even if you skim, please pay attention to last two paragraphs).

The largest private estate ever ‘owned’ by man in history was perhaps a chunk of Africa as big as Europe acquired by the Belgian King in 1885. Between 1885 and 1908, Leopold II of the Belgians was the de facto owner — not merely an administrator, trustee, company director, colonial overlord or even king, but an owner in his own personal capacity — of over a million square miles of central Africa, in the form of Congo Free State, with its capital at Leopoldville.

Belgium never had interest in joining the so-called Scramble for Africa, but seeing a boom in demand for rubber (which Congo had plenty), Leopold decided to do the job himself. In 1876, he founded the Association Internationale Africaine, a strictly humanitarian organization with the highest ideals (at least in theory) to ‘carry to the interior of Africa new ideas of law, order, humanity and protection of the natives’, according the Daily Telegraph in 1884. In reality, however, its mission was, as Leopold himself confided privately, to carve out a slice of the “magnifique gateau africain“.

From the very beginning, Congo had a certain mystique that appealed to outsiders. The popular magazines Le Congo Illustre, Voyages et Traveaux des Belges dans l’Etat Independent du Congo and Etat Independent du Congo provided the alluring pictures of sights and tribes. Absent from them, however, were shameful realities that Leopold’s greed had wrought: exploitation, mass-mutilations, state-sponsored slavery and murder, genocide.

This reality was uncovered, almost by accident, by Edward Dene Morel, a shipping clerk who noticed that outgoing cargoes to Congo were predominantly arms and ammunition. Morel slowly gathered information from hundreds of eyewitnesses to discover the shocking truth. In his tenacious quest, Morel was aided by a group of missionaries who managed to photograph some atrocities. The most famous photo was perhaps the one depicted above, taken by the Rev. John Harris and his wife Alice, who returned from Congo in August 1905 to tour Britain with their shocking photographs, giving lectures condemning Leopold’s rule.

The general public suddenly realized that this truly was Heart of Darkness evoked in the 1899 novel by Joseph Conrad. The Congo Issue was slowly becoming a media war; Leopold bribed newspapers to dismiss atrocities as ‘old wives’ tales’. When two distinguished travelers on a fact-finding mission went to Congo, they were shown so little that both came back with glowing tales. One of them, Viscount William Montmorres, published a gushing book about hardworking officials and cheerful natives. The other, the publisher Mary French Sheldon, fell in love with the captain of her steamboat, and later wrote in the Times, “I have witnessed more atrocities in London streets than…. in the Congo.” Frederick Starr, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, was hired to selectively use photos, and write an apologist text, “The Truth about the Congo” in 1907.

However, Leopold finally lost the media war. In November, Congo was confiscated — or rather bought by millions of pounds — by the Belgium government from their king. The importance of news photographs in influencing public opinion was underlined in Mark Twain’s denunciation, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy“, where the aging king complains that the incorruptible Kodak camera was the only witness he had encountered in his long experience that he could not bribe. Fittingly, the book was illustrated with the Harrises’ photographs.

Even after Leopold and its independence the situation didn’t improve; we use coltan from (now Democratic Republic of) Congo in many things, including in the computer or phone you are currently using to read this article. For this lucrative reason, exploitation of Congo remains an undermentioned story in a world where Kodaks are incorruptible but journalists and photographers can be threatened or bribed away. A sobering note is that this is still happening more than a century after Morel founded the world’s first international human rights campaign and the world’s first NGO over Congo. In the last century, the only thing we have succeeded was in transferring Congo from a private property of Leopold into that of many corporations. Leopold would have been very pleased with the successes the latter are having in information blackout.

This is not a shameless plug but rather a heartfelt proposal: I know some photographers and political pundits read this blog, and I request you to explore more about Congo. For the rest of you, I want you to repost/re-tweet this article. I believe the situation there deserves more attention. I have always wanted to go to Congo myself and report it myself, but at last, time and resources do not allow that. This post, however, is the best I can do.

— this post incorporates some text from The Vertigo Years.

(continued from yesterday)

On May 21, 1981, eleven days after his election, Francois Mitterrand officially took office as the French president. The day was marked by official ceremonies and public events. After the ritual wreath under the Arc de Triomphe, Mitterrand headed to Paris’ Left Bank for a new ceremony of his own: a pilgrimage to the Panthéon that was orchestrated to outdo Giscard’s farewell two days prior.

The Pantheon, completed in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution, was a symbolic mausoleum to “receive the bodies of great men who died in the period of French liberty”. Mitterrand entered the mausoleum holding a solitary rose — the symbol of the French socialists — as the Orchestre de Paris played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the background. The crowd outside and the TV viewers didn’t know that but the Pantheon had been turned into a studio for the occasion. Cameras greeted Mitterrand and followed his descent in the crypt. Artist Serge Moati was engaged to direct the entire sequence. Rehearsals, body doubles and props (for the flowers) were used. Shrewd video editing enabled Mitterrand to enter the Pantheon with a single rose but place three roses on three graves; as Pierre Mauroy, Mitterrand’s first prime minister, said: “The rose for Jean Jaures represented our heritage; it was for the man who knew how to mobilize the left. The rose for Jean Moulin was the man who was able to unite Frenchmen from all walks of life to resist the foreign invador. The rose for Victor Schoelcher was the man who made of France the emancipator of peoples.” When Mitterrand emerged from the Panthéon to face a crowd of cheering young supporters brandishing red roses, he displayed the first smile of his inauguration day. A final flourish was provided by a rendition of the Marseillaise, exuberant post-Giscard tempo that has been personally prescribed by Mitterrand.

But if Mitterrand’s election elated his supporters, it produced apprehension in the West and in certain areas of France. As Mitterrand entered the Pantheon, many Parisians frantically packed their bags to flee the impending socialist “campaign to out-Keynes even Keynes”. Hidden behind these fears was a deeper realization that France’s unparalleled economic prosperity of the last thirty years had ended. Only two years before, the demographer Fourastié eulogized the era by his neologism, Les Trente Glorieuses. Mitterrand’s election, in this sense, was as much a vote against incumbency as a profound soul-searching.

Yet, Mitterrand’s moderate supporters believed that he would take a far more centrist approach once in office but he went on with his most radical promises: he created 250,000 new government jobs, raised pay for government employees, shortened the workweek from 40 to 39 hours, added a fifth week of paid vacation, reduced the retirement age to 60, increased social payments through Allocations Familiales, and nationalized 38 banks and 7 industrial giants. The results were an unmitigated disaster. The budget deficit tripled; inflation and unemployment stood in double digits. Mitterrand had to devalue the franc no less than three times to keep France’s exports competitive. Following the time-honored traditions of French presidents, Mitterrand sacked his first ministry and embarked on one of the most extraordinary reversals of economic policy in modern history: he froze the budget in 1983 and held raises for public employees below the rate of inflation. Entitlement programs were rolled back, and labour rules that restricted private sector hirings were weakened. By the mid-80s, the budget was back in balance, and inflation fell to around 4%, thanks to this reversal which Mitterrand called “La Rigueur,” or roughly “Austerity” in English.

(Video of Mitterrand’s Pantheon Visit below; begins at 3:30 mark)

Even by the imperial standards of the French presidents, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing possessed an incomparable sense of arrogance and grandeur; Giscard, whose father borrowed the suffix “d’Estaing” from a distantly-related extinct noble family, surrounded himself with furniture and art objects which once belonged to King Louis XV. He ordered his prime ministers to walk three paces behind him; like the Bourbon kings, he did not allow anyone to sit in front of him and ate his meals staring at an empty place.

On 10 May 1981, Giscard narrowly lost the re-election; the infighting between Rightist factions, Giscard’s Union pour la démocratie Française (UDF), and Jacques Chirac’s neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) led to the Socialists winning the presidency for the first and the only time in the Fifth Republic. Nine days after the election, Giscard gave a television address to bid the nation farewell before handing over power to the Socialists’ François Mitterrand.

It was one of the memorable moments in French politics; even today, film makers study it and students write dissertations about it. In an uncharacteristic bout of humility, Giscard acknowledged his unfulfilled visions and middling achievements. He also arrogantly hinted that when his fellow citizens realized their errors of replacing him, they would summon him back to power, and he would be ready. Like a schoolmaster lecturing a class, he chided his countrymen, and warned them of tough times ahead. In an especially memorable climax, he said:

“Et dans ces temps difficiles, où le mal rôde et frappe dans le monde, je souhaite que la Providence veille sur la France, pour son bonheur, pour son bien et pour sa grandeur.

And in these difficult times, when evil lurks and strikes in the world, I wish that Providence looks out for France, for her happiness, for her well-being and for her greatness.”

(see full text here).

After a pause, Giscard ended the speech with a funereal “au revoir”, paused again for emphasis, and left his chair. Finally, as he left the screen, the camera focussed melodramatically on his empty desk and chair and La Marseillaise played on for next 53 seconds. It was a conclusion simultaneously solemn and farcical, and was later much parodied. The symbolism behind the empty chair was clear, but the void was felt more by Giscard than the nation, however. In the next several years, he struggled with his transformation from ‘le roi Giscard’ to ‘Monsieur l’Ex’. Although France never summoned him back, he eventually found a second career as an ardent proponent of the European Union or as the New York Times put it, the United Europe’s Thomas Jefferson.

As for the man who succeeded him, François Mitterrand would come into office on 21st May with even a bigger media spectacle, as we shall see tomorrow.

[I am tiptoeing the line between iconic photos and iconic videos now, but today and tomorrow will be exceptions, not new rules. Giscard's address is so famous an Ur-text of image making that I have to cover it here. I was also amazed to find out recently that not many people outside France know about it (and most inside France has already forgotten about it). While researching, I noticed someone has recently written about it (or rather recently translated some old articles) and decided to copy his style of two dual posts on Giscard's farewell and Mitterrand's grand entrance.]

(continued from yesterday)

After Franco’s death, the prognoses for Spain were exceptionally dim: the experts were almost unanimous in their predictions of old hatreds and new violence flaring up. During his four decade long dictatorship, Franco did very little to resolve ethnic, geographic, political and social divisions that initially had led to the bloody Civil War, and many predicted these divisions may be unreconcilable. This tumultuous transition was led by two unlikely figures: the first was the Bourbon Prince Juan Carlos — Franco’s designated successor. Within four months after Franco’s death, he created a sensation by speaking Catalan, which Franco had repressed; within eight months he had engineered the selection of centrist Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister. Adolfo Suárez, who had been Franco’s director-general of state broadcasting, was the second of this unlikely duo which led Spain towards democracy. In a carefully planned coup, Suarez succeeded in ridding himself of the last members of the regime and forcing through a democratic constitution. It was an exceedingly delicate and dangerous operation, for the threat of a new civil war dangled continually over the country.

The constitution was ratified in 1978, but there was one more test to come. After a series of bloody bombings by the Basque separatist terrorists of ETA, so-called ultras in the military launched a coup in 1981. On 23 February 1981, Col. Antonio Tejero entered the lower house of the Spanish Parliament, with 200 Guardia Civil and soldiers and held the depuities present hostage for some 22 hours. When it came down to it, Juan Carlos, who had been carefully maneuvered to play a modest role within the Francoist dictatorship, firmly stood his ground.

Within half an hour of the Guardia Civil’s attack, both the conspirators and the king were telephoning the country’s military leaders. The coup leaders were asking for the military’s support ”in the name of the king”. Juan Carlos insisted that he was on the other side, informed general after general that his name was being used in vain, and told to accept no orders unless they came from the chiefs of the general staff. He encountered hesitations and evasions, but Juan Carlos’ career in the military won them over. The military remembered the occasion when, with Franco on his death bed, Juan Carlos had flown to the rebellious Spanish Sahara to show solidarity with troops. As David Gilmour wrote in “The Transformation of Spain”, “They may have been dismayed, and perhaps surprised, that the king refused to back [the coup], but they accepted his decision. …. The king’s role . . . won him the respect and adulation of millions of people who had always considered themselves republicans.”

The coup was lost over the news media. The conspirators failed to seize key media outlets in Madrid; although the difficulty of getting cameras to the palace from the military-controlled television station delayed him, early next morning, eight hours after the first shots, the king finally appeared on television, in uniform as the Captain General of the Armed Forces, the highest Spanish military rank, declaring: “The crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate, in any form, actions or attitudes attempting to interrupt the democratic process.” Without the king’s support, the last coup attempt in Western Europe simply petered out. The man once disparagingly dismissed as a king who would be known as Juan Carlos the Brief, almost singlehandedly rallied a reluctant military to the side of constitutional order. Four days later, 3 million people marched in cities throughout Spain in support of democracy, chanting “¡Viva el Rey!”

In a fitting end, Tejero signed a surrender – known as the “Bonnet Pact”, as it was signed on the bonnet of a police Land Rover. Thirty-three people were eventually tried for taking part in the February 23 uprising, although the extent of the plot is still unclear and many civilian plotters possibly went un-prosecuted. Mostly importantly, the identity of Tejero’s superior whose reinforcements he had been waiting for, remained unanswered.

The above picture which won the year’s World Press Photo Award was taken literally in the heat of the moment. On 23rd February, photographer Manuel Perez Barriopedro was covering a tedious afternoon inside the parliament. Halfway through the proceedings (video), Guardia Civil burst into the chamber. Barriopedro took eleven frames, before removing his film to hide it from approaching Guardia Civil. Around 10 pm, when the journalists were released, Barriopedro smuggled the film out in his shoe. After midnight, when the first editions of the Spanish press appeared, the photo was across all the front pages; a few hours later, it would be on the world’s front pages too.

(this, as you might notice, is my first dual post. The idea behind these posts was threefold: (1) Inspired by Egypt, I wanted to make a post about a pro-US dictatorship’s transition to democracy. (2) I noticed the title “The King’s Speech” better fits Juan Carlos’ speech; (3) in a drunken boast, I asserted that I can write a better history textbook than any that’s currently being sold just by focussing on iconic images and videos. These two posts may or may not accomplish what they set out to achieve, but I am at least happy now that I have written these down).

During his early years in power, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led Spain into a level of starvation and disease unknown since the Middle Ages. Some 200,000 people died of starvation in the years (1940-1944) ensuing Franco’s triumphal but false declaration on 31st December 1939 that the problems in Spain were over because, “huge amounts of gold have been found in Spain.” It wasn’t clear whether he actually believed these claims about gold discoveries but Franco was prone to such swindles: the Austrian Albert von Filek convinced the dictator that he could make petrol from water and a secret plant extract. He was allowed to build a factory on the River Jarama and for a long time, Franco believed that his own car was the first to run on this new fuel.

His longevity, however, eclipsed these early erraticism and brutality. He positioned himself as a staunch anti-Communist, and won vital support and aid from the United States; the fact that his three foreign visits were to Hitler, to Mussolini and to Salazar were quickly forgotten. Finally conceding that he knew nothing about economics, Franco transferred economic management to technocrats who led Spain into Años de Desarrollo, the years of development from 1961 to 1973, when the Spanish economy grew faster than any nation in Europe.

Although he more and more delegated power as his health deteriorated, the old dictator proved to be as vindictive as ever even in his final days. In 1975, when faced with a Communist movement, he issued a harsh ‘anti-terrorist’ law and ordered that their leaders be arrested. Three were sentenced to death. Fifteen European countries recalled their ambassadors, and there were demonstrations and attacks against the Spanish embassies in Europe. Mexico demanded Spain’s expulsion from the UN. Ignoring calls for clemency from the pope and many governments around the world, Franco went ahead with the execution.

On 1st October 1975 — 39th anniversary of his ascent to power — Franco made his last public appearance. On the balcony of the Palacio de Oriente in Madrid, he appeared, looking very frail, and having difficulty speaking. He veered into his usual cliches, blaming the problem in Spain to a leftist Masonic conspiracy of politicians, terrorists, and communists. More touching was his goodbye to the crowd, in tears and with both arms raised. From this moment on his health was in terminal decline; exposure to winds on the balcony induced pneumonia and then a heart attack. Intestinal haemorraging and three operations followed.

The Spanish radio began playing mournful music. Newspapers, which until recently had been enthusiastically reporting El Caudillo’s good health and rigorous physical activities, began running daily maps of Franco’s body, as though it were a war zone, with arrows pointing to vital organs and other positions under siege. The press offered capital sums for photographs of the dying dictator; his thirty-two physicians refused, but it later turned out that his son-in-law, the Marqués de Villaverde, took one snapshot after another. The Marqués still insists that he never intended to distribute those photos and that the photos, which finally appeared in La Revisita in 1984, were stolen from him.

In theatrical gesture rather out of keeping with a life of decisiveness and iron will, Franco died protractedly and chaotically. In the US, his death was erroneously announced by ABC, prompting many parodies. ‘How difficult it is to die,’ whispered Franco but the old dictator was being kept alive by life-support machines at the insistence of the Marqués de Villaverde, who was also the family doctor. It was only on 20th November 1975, after thirty-five days of struggling against death, that the dictator’s coterie allowed him to depart. (The mummified right arm of St Teresa of Avila which always travelled with him, was on his bedside table).

Almost half a million people filed past his body, and El Caudillo was buried at the Valle de los Caídos, Franco’s own monument to his victory in the Civil War. Millions of Spaniards watched the ceremony live on television, as the man who had ruled them for 40 years was lowered into the ground. Although it can be said that Franco’s Spain had already ceased to exist even while he was still alive, now the four-decade long national nightmare was finally over. The last obstacle to a modern, democratic Spain was gone, but its transition would be bumpy, as we shall see tomorrow.