Iconic Photos

During the First World War, drafts created the armies that were drawn from remarkably similar societies for the first time in modern warfare. Along the Western Front, on both sides there were industrial workers and farm laborers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. For Catholics, Protestants and Jews fighting for separate armies, they sometimes identified more with their religious brethren on the opposing side than with their fellow soldiers.

The soldiers, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians were equally irreverent about what they were supposedly fighting for. Over the longer period of trench warfare, a kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude developed in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line; war was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans. English pacifist Vera Brittain noted about a Scottish and a Saxon regiment that had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a lot of noise and an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. Robert Graves — in his pivotal memoir of the Great War, Goodbye to All That — recollected about letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: “Your little dog has run over to us, and we are keeping it safe here.” Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion. Louis Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’.

Nothing symbolized this easygoing attitudes more than the informal Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing soldiers in many sectors joined together to sing carols, and exchange Christmas greetings and gifts. Soccer games were played in no man’s land with makeshift balls. Of course, there were some who refused to participate in the truce; among those was a German field messenger named Adolf Hitler, who grumbled, ““Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?”

At Diksmuide, Belgium, the Belgian and German soldiers famously celebrated Christmas Eve together in 1914, drinking schapps together. One year later, ad hoc ceasefires took place again, this time in northern France. No man’s land was suddenly transformed into ‘a country fair’ as lively bartering began for schnapps, cigarettes, coffee, uniform buttons and other trinkets. More worryingly for their superiors, the soldiers sang the Internationale.

Yet socialist hopes that soldiers would ultimately repudiate their national loyalties for the sake of international brotherhood were proven to be futile. Christmas Truce was almost the last hurrah of a bygone era; as the war went on, mutual hatred grew, expunging the common origins and predicament of the combatants. War, too, has lost its mystique; soon, only fools would celebrate it or enter it with excited patriotic fervor. After August 1914, when thousands of red-trousered Frenchmen and white-gloved officers in full dress and plumes were decimated by German machine guns, France eschewed her pride and switched to neutral-colored service uniforms — the last world power to do so. Soon, there will be no more sabres and Sam Browne belts, no more centuries-old habits of chivalry, no more leaving civilians out of war.

For two brief years in the late 1960s, there existed on Stuttgarter Platz in Berlin a notorious squat often referred to as the Horror Commune. Kommune I was a Maoist microsect which aggressively promoted sexual promiscuity-as-liberation. Its members rejected such bourgeois norms as personal privacy — the bathrooms had no doors — and devoted themselves to organizing political protests and stunts. It had been set up in March 1967 by Fritz Teufel; his notoreity began after he broke into the dean’s office at the Freie Universitat, took his cigars, toga and chain of office, then rode a bicycle through the corridors to the auditorium, where he allowed the cheering student body to appoint him the new dean. His first official act was to sack all of the unpopular professors.

When the American Vice-President Humphrey visited Berlin in April 1967, eleven Kommunards tried to ‘assassinate’ him by attacking him with puddings, flour and yogurt; the absurd joke was lost on Die Zeit, which called them the “eleven little Oswalds”. Teufel was one of the eleven, and was soon arrested. He soon became a celebrity, helped by his last name, which means “devil” in German.

During Teufel’s absence from Kommune 1, it circulated a self-portrait: seven nude young men and women splayed against a wall, displayed with the headline: Das Private ist politisch! (“The personal is political”). The photo was taken by Thomas Hesterberg, and was captioned ”Naked Maoists Before a Naked Wall” when the photo ran (partially censored to remove private parts) in Der Spiegel in June 1967. Although it would be subjected to much parody and mockery in later years, the photo was extremely controversial and divisive when many German newsmagazines decided to reprint it.

The photo’s message was as explicit as its contents were: the commune tried to draw the parallel between the pictures of helpless, naked concentration camp bodies and the rebelliously unclothed bodies of Maoist revolutionaries. Thusly, deeper message was that adolescent promiscuity should force the older generation to be open about sex, and consequently about their past, i.e., Hitler and everything else. The Kommune’s proclamation that “If Germans can look at the truth about our bodies, they will be able to face other truths as well” provoked Rudi Dutschke (an influential conventional leftist of the older order) so much as to condemn the Kommunards as ‘neurotics’.

For the Kommune, it was all downhill from there. In April 1968, two members were arrested for attempting to burn down a department store in Munich. During their trial that October, rioting broke out, and about 400 sympathizers were arrested. Teufel’s original visions, Spass-Guerillero (“fun guerrilla”) and  Witz als Waffe or (“joke as weapon”), were soon forgotten; Teufel found out that fame too was considered a bourgeoise anathema when he himself was expelled from the Kommune. When the Kommune dissolved in 1969, its remnants slowly turned into a terrorist cell: in the early 1970s, a splinter Kommunard group banded together to form the Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). The allusions to the Royal Air Force (RAF) was not accidental: just as the British had bombed Germany from above, they intended to raze ‘new fascism’ (i.e., capitalism) from within. A chaotic game of cat and mouse with the authorities followed, culminated with the mysterious deaths of the gang’s leaders in their cells. In total, the RAF carried out almost 250 attacks, robbed 69 banks, kidnapped a few dozen politicians, businessmen and journalists, and murdered 28 people.

Elizabeth Taylor, screen’s ‘pre-Christian Elizabeth Arden’, is Dead at 79.

Liz Taylor was perhaps Hollywood’s best known star, albeit one better known for her alluring beauty and offscreen antics than for her acting. In an acting career than spanned six decades, she received her share of accolades and excoriations, and was best remembered for her 1963 film Cleopatra — one of the sliverscreen’s biggest flops.

The picture was originally intended as a low-budget remake of 1917 epic, to cash in on the recent popularity of sword and sandal pictures like Ben-Hur. But Fox brought in Liz Taylor, and built sets worth millions at London’s Pinewood Studios. After hefty demands (which included an unprecedented million-dollar salary, a $1500 a week stipend for her husband, a $3000 a week stipend for herself) were made, Liz Taylor conveniently woke up with a cold on the very morning the filming was to begin. The cold turned into a five-week absence.

Veteran Director Joseph Mankiewicz was brought in to save the picture the press was already calling the greatest movie never made. As the script was being furiously rewritten by Mankiewicz, Taylor again become sick, this time with pneumonia. She fought for her life and claimed that she died and came back, a publicity stunt that helped rekindle her waning star. Claiming that London’s weather contributed to her sickness, she demanded the production — massive sets and all — move to Rome.

The studio considered replacing Taylor (with among others Marilyn Monroe) but decided against it. But other cast changes led to the fateful decision to hire Richard Burton as Taylor’s opposite number. Their subsequent affair, Le Scandale as Burton called it, was shocking by the day’s standards, as were Burton’s lurid descriptions of torrid sex with Liz Taylor. Paparazzo Marcello Geppetti’s famous shot of Burton and Taylor kissing on a yacht on the Amalfi Coast confirmed these rumors. The photo was responsible for triggering not only the worldwide interest in the affair, but also sundering of carefully constructed studio images of celebrities’ lives all too common in the 50s and the 60s. The world of June 1962 had never seen anything like it. According to Snap! A History of the Paparazzi, there had always been rumours surrounding stars in gossip magazines such as Confidential and Hush Hush, but never before had there been pictures such as these to substantiate them.

The last to know were their respective spouses, and when Burton’s long-suffering wife threatened to leave him, Burton dumped Liz, who promptly overdosed. Her suicide attempt was another disaster for Fox, but a publicity scoop for Taylor. Burton dumped his wife of 12 years, and reunited with Liz. Yet things hardly picked up for Fox; Burton and Taylor’s stormy fights often incapacitated Taylor; the duo would often show up to work drunk. But Taylor kept on charming the studio executives and they kept funding this vanity project. Mankiewicz, who wanted to make a seven-hour epic, presented another problem. When the final, four-hour version was presented, the critics universally panned it, singling out Liz Taylor’s performance. “Overweight, overbosomed, over-paid and undertalented, she set the acting profession back a decade” noted David Susskind. The New Statesman‘s review which included the words “monotony in a slit skirt” was withering.

Fox nearly went bankrupt over the movie which cost it a record $42 million, and earned back just half of that. Cleopatra entered history books as the only film ever to be the highest grossing film of the year, running at a loss.

As I have noted previously, I am on vacation; when I am on vacation, I do not blog, but I broke that rule yesterday and I am breaking it again. As I type this, sitting in my room in St. Moritz, sipping my apres ski Hot Toddy, and reading the Daily and the Times on iPad, I feel somewhat sad and disillusioned about the situation in Libya. I have many comments, but cannot bring myself to write them down from safe and cozy distance of my hotel room. I wonder whether many other commentators feel this way.

Anyway, onwards to photos. No matter what you may think of the Libyan Campaign, it cannot be denied that a lot of great photos are coming out of it; I don’t know why but Iraq and Afghanistan produced not that many memorable/iconic images, considering that there were so many photographers working there. On the cover of yesterday’s Times, there was a beautiful (if carnage can be described as such) photo of a tank explosion (above). Immediately, I told myself, wow, there was one iconic image. Many people felt this way, I guess, for today’s Times featured a piece by the photographer, Jack Hill:

About 30 km south of Benghazi, we came across the site of a huge airstrike. One tank was destroyed and another was burning. There were abandoned self-propelled guns and charred bodies covered with blankets.

Slightly farther down the road was more destruction: a munition truck was burning heavily and the ordnance was exploding out of it. It was a dramatic sight.

I moved carefully towards the burning truck. I was captivated by the smoke and the colours within it, and the exploding shells wee an impromptu fireworks display. How to photograph such a scene? It was hard to know where to look or start.

I added a 1.4 converter to my longest lens, a 70-200 mm and I filed the frame, aiming to illustrate the power and destruction of the strike. Edging as close as I felt comfortable, I compared a picture just as contents of the truck started exploding again. I started shooting, not even checking my exposures. I was shooting 1/6400th of a second at F5.6. That was accident rather than design, but the exposure was good. As I was shooting a young ran across the frame. At the time, I though “if that works out, it won’t be a bad picture”. It was hard to know what to shoot. There was so much to take in.

I chose this picture over the others because it gives a human scale to a scene that I couldn’t have imagined.”

Other great photos on Libya are courtesy of Goran Tomasevio, Suhaib Salem and Finbarr O’Reilley for Reuters, and Anja Niedringhaus for AP. (shameless ad: I recommend getting an iPad, if only for photos; its resolution is great for viewing photos, and photo sections of the Times, the Daily, Paris Match, and the New York Times really make iPad an aesthetic device).

(click to see enlarged photos at Der Speigel)

In 2010, there operated in the southern province of Kandahar, Afghanistan, a US Stryker tank unit that called itself a “Kill Team”. Twelve members of that team are now currently on trail in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians. In one incident in May 2010, when the team arrested a mullah who was merely standing by the road, they took him into a ditch and ordered him to kneel down. The group’s leader, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, threw a grenade at the mullah, ordered his men to shoot him, and then cut off the mullah’s fingers and a tooth. Then, he reported to his superiors that the team had no choice but to shoot the mullah because he threatened them with a grenade.

Now, Gibbs and his men are being charged for this incident, and other crimes, which included drug abuse, and possession of images of human casualties (I didn’t know that was a crime). The U.S. military had tried hard to prevent these images reaching into the public domain, but Der Speigel had obtained nearly 4000 photos and videos taken by the men; last Sunday, it has decided to publish three, editorializing that since there are collections of pictures which pointed to other heinous crimes committed, in addition to the crimes these men were on trial for, it would only be fair for a news outlet to draw attention to them.

I agree. While publishing all 4000 images will be repugnant and unnecessary, reproducing a small number of photos is informational. Like shocking images from Vietnam, these photos will spur the conversation on all too real human casualties of wars we fight, collaterals we often forget. I believe the perpetrators of these acts are merely rogue agents and bad apples, but sometimes it is healthy to examine, like in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, whether the systemic failures of the barrel prompted these apples to go bad.

One of the nice things about writing for a blog, as opposed to writing for a newspaper, is that I don’t really have to care much about censors. (But, I have decided to link them because they are too brutal to be depicted on my homepage). But I don’t deny that these photos won’t have any consequences; they do — in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

As the Second World War came to a close, a wave of suicides swept Berlin and other parts of Germany. Hitler was a lifelong admirer of Wagner and his climatic opera, Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) where the heroine Brünnhilde returns the stolen cursed ring to the River Rhine and hurls herself onto her dead lover Siegfried’s funeral pyre. This immolation unleashes a fiery conflagration that topples the stronghold of the gods, Valhalla. According to a dispatch from a Japanese diplomat in Berlin, Hitler initially planned “to embark alone in a plane carrying bombs and blow himself up in the air somewhere over the Baltic” if the Allies enter Berlin. His motive was to suggest to his supporters ”that he had become a god and was dwelling in heaven” — a Brünnhildean self-sacrifice, in a Messerschmitt.

In the end, his suicide was less grandiose and ignominious — although it didn’t stop some of his fervent followers from believing that Hitler had escaped unharmed from the wreckage of his 1000-year Reich. But Hitler was not the only Nazi to follow Brünnhilde’s example. Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler all committed suicide, as did Justice Minister Otto-Georg Thierack and Culture Minister Bernhard Rust. Eight out of 41 regional party leaders, seven out of 47 senior SS and police chiefs, fifty-three out of 553 army generals, fourteen out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and eleven out of 53 admirals killed themselves. Housing Commissar Robert Ley strangled himself awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Goering would follow him when the Nuremberg judges denied him the firing squad he requested.

This suicidal impulse was not confined to the Nazi elite. Ordinary Germans in untold numbers responded to the prospect of defeat in the same way. At the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance, which coincidentally but not too surprisingly was Götterdämmerung, the audience was given potassium cyanide pills. In April 1945 there were 3,881 recorded suicides in Berlin, nearly twenty times the figure for March. Untold numbers of victims of rape by the Soviet Red Army also committed suicide, and news of violence and rape further propelled mass suicides in villages all over Germany. Although the motives was widely explained as the “fear of the Russian invasion”, the suicides also happened in the areas liberated by the British and American troops.

Mass suicides that created a sensation were those of Leipzig burgomaster’s family, that was captured by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller. The photos showed a different approach between this two great female war-photographers. Bourke-White, a meticulous observer as always, kept her distance from the tragedy, even taking photos from the gallery above. Miller moved in closer; a fashion photographer covering the war for Vogue, Miller’s photo of the body of burgomaster’s daughter was almost a fashion shoot of a wax mannequin — her Nazi armband immaculately displayed, her lips parted as if waiting for a true love’s kiss that would revive her.

Bourke-White's pictures are on the left, and Miller's on the right.

When I saw conflicting reports over the exploding nuclear power plant in Japan that had been damaged by an earthquake and a tsunami, I wanted to believe much of it was due to media-hype and difference in threat perception between the general public and the nuclear industry. Nuclear power was considered safe by experts, but the general public who grew up watching Homer Simpson bumbling at the Springfield Nuclear Plant always maintained healthy skepticism. Daily aerial photos of the fuming plant didn’t speak to me as powerfully as the image above, which chillingly reminds me of the images of Chernobyl disaster nearly three decades ago. Both the Soviet Union and nuclear industry never recovered from that incident. Today, the question is how bad the situation in Japan is going to get and how precisely the Japanese society will be transformed by this incident.

There are already some signs of disquiet. Yesterday, the Japanese Emperor Akihito gave a television address – the first time a Japanese emperor has given a speech directly to the people on television during a national crisis. Beyond poignant comparisons of the address to the radio address his father gave in 1945 to declare Japan’s surrender to the allies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a harsh fact that the Japanese public broadcaster NHK instructed its employees to cut into the speech if there were crucial developments in the nuclear crisis. In a country where the Emperor is revered universally, this instruction bordered blasphemy, a potent indicator of the deep cultural impact of the crisis.

It is also undeniable that Japanese culture and psyche too will be greatly transformed by this crisis. In a country where cabinets and prime ministers (31 of them since 1947) came and went, government and industry are effectively run by elite bureaucrats and corporations, with whom Japan always had ambivalent relationship. While revered for Japan’s rapid growth since the Second World War, they were also reviled for elitism and insularity they represented. While the Soviet Union had nomenklatura, Japan’s top civil servants retire to high-paying corporate jobs in a system known as amakudari. Now they seems overwhelmed by the crisis.

While the Soviet belief in the messianic might of their empire contributed to the Chernobyl cover-up, the Japanese brief in discretion is equally troubling. Until recently, many Japanese people concealed their maladies from family members to avoid causing alarm, and disrupting calm. Reassurances along the same vein seem to be coming from Japanese authorities, despite the fact that the situation in the reactors seems to be deteriorating.

According to a wikileaks cable, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Japan more than two years ago that strong earthquakes would pose “serious problems” to her nuclear plants. I am a strong supporter of the nuclear power, but have always been disturbed by the way industry reacts to such warnings. In university, I took a class on nuclear power with someone who is now the head of his country’s civilian nuclear program. He was very dismissive of my concerns over nuclear waste storage and transfers. Everyone else in the class (there were 15 of them) does not seem to be too concerned either, and quite worryingly, some of them actually went into nuclear industry. My professor have always insisted that Chernobyl was an isolated accident that could not have happened outside the Soviet Union. Let’s hope he’s correct.

I have always squirmed at the expression “the photograph that changed history” for better part of last two years. Titling my blog “Iconic Photos” rather than “Photos That Changed History”, I have always insisted that vast sociopolitical decisions, rather than trinkets, that inspired historical changes. You can almost believe all that, right up until that moment you come across the one.

Ron Haviv’s photograph of a Serb gunman about to kick a bleeding woman in the head was perhaps that one for many. Ron Haviv remembers how he took that photo in The Guardian (Nov. 2009):

During the Balkans conflict, I took a photograph of the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan holding up a baby tiger. He liked it very much, so when I met him, in March 1992, I asked if I could photograph his troops as they fought. “Sure,” he said.

Later on, I was following some of his men when I heard screaming. Across the street, they were bringing out a middle-aged couple. The soldiers were telling me not to take any photographs when, suddenly, some shots rang out and the man went down. The woman crouched down, holding his hand and trying to stop the blood. Then her sister was brought out: more shots rang out and both women were killed.

As I stood there, I realised that it would be my word against the soldiers’ unless I could get a photograph of Arkan’s men in the same frame as these three people. So as the soldiers set off back to headquarters, I waited behind for a moment. As they moved past the bodies, I lifted my camera.

I was in the middle of the street and I was shaking. When people are in the throes of killing it’s like they are on drugs: their adrenaline is so high. It would have been very easy for any of those guys to just shoot me and say the Muslims did it. Then, just as I was about to take the picture, one of the soldiers, a brash young kid in sunglasses who was smoking a cigarette, brought his foot back to kick the bodies as they lay there dead, or dying. As he did it, I took a couple of pictures, then put my camera down. All the soldiers turned and looked at me, so I smiled at them and said: “Great. Let’s go.”

I was really nervous. I wanted to leave town before Arkan found out what I had photographed, but I couldn’t leave without his permission, so I hid a couple of rolls of film in my car, and a couple down my pants. Then Arkan arrived.

After he heard what had happened, he came up to me and said: “Look, I need your film.” We proceeded to have this whole conversation about whether or not I should give him the film. I made a really big push to protect the film in my camera so he wouldn’t think there was anything else.

In the end, I had to give him the film. Then he let me go and I immediately drove to the airport and sent my film to Paris. That night, I was very emotional about what I had witnessed, and how these people had died. But at least I knew I was able to document it. I truly believed that my pictures could have a real effect in preventing a Bosnian war.

When my photos were published in magazines around the world they caused a bit of an uproar, but not as much as I had hoped. Instead I think they made a difference on an individual level. One general specifically attributed his decision to fight for the Bosnian side to this photograph, and he was one of the people largely responsible for saving Sarajevo.

I’ve been back to Bijeljina and met people in the town who have told me how important it was. The pictures from that day were also used by the war crimes tribunal to indict Arkan, and as evidence in other indictments.

A few weeks after the pictures were published, I heard that Arkan had put me on a death list, and publicly stated that he looked forward to the day when he could drink my blood. After that, I spent the rest of the war, right through to the end of Kosovo, narrowly missing him in different places. Though during the Nato bombing of Belgrade, a friend of mine actually spent time with the kid in this picture. The kid said he was very proud of it.

It made him famous.

Haviv also made Arkan — nom de guerre of Zeljko Raznatovic — an erstwhile juvenile delinquent and bank robber, who grew up to become a politician, famous too. The photo Haviv originally took of Arkan holding up a baby tiger became a mythic icon for Arkan’s paramilitary group, nicknamed the Tigers, whose members included some of Belgrade’s most notorious hooligans. The Tigers committed some of the most heinous atrocities during the Balkan Wars, including the Vukovar hospital massacre, in which hundreds of patients, mainly Croats, were bussed to a deserted field and executed. In the end, Arkan reaped the whirlwind of what he had sown; the man, who even Serbian President, and no angel himself, Slobodan Milosevic said he was afraid of, was unceremoniously gunned down in a Belgrade hotel in January 2000. With war-crime trials in the Hague looming, someone high-up somewhere decided that Arkan simply knew too much.

My favorite political TV shows is Yes, Minister (Westwing was too idealistic and I never grew to like it) and in one episode, bumbling Jim Hacker offers this piquant judgement about Britain’s newspapers:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.*

To which his aide adds, “The Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.” Indeed. I personally do not subscribe to any of these papers (when I am in London, I just get the Metro for free) rather confining myself to their online versions. The Guardian has a good photography blog and section, and regularly produces nice supplements. This weekend, I heard they had a two-part series (The Guardian/Observer supplement) on History of Europe in Pictures. It is too late for me to get hold of paper copies (if you got it, lucky you) but an abridged version is online.

I missed their previous great nine-part series on 100 years of great press photographs too. It was in November 2009 and I was in Moscow. (Again, an abridged version online). In addition to great photos, the supplement included interviews with one of the last surviving witnesses of the 1937 Hindeburg disaster, photojournalist Ron Haviv on his harrowing ordeal photographing the Balkan war, BBC reporter Kate Adie’s eyewitness account on the Tiananmen Square ‘tank man’, a scientific analysis of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s famous photo, and the story behind the most controversial picture of 9/11.

(*In France, I guess it would be: Le Figaro is read by people who think they run the country; La Croix is read by people who think they ought to run the country; Le Monde is read by people who actually do run the country; Paris-Match is read by the wives of the people who run the country; L’Equipe is read by people who think the country is not being run; Les Echos is read by people who think the country ought to be run by a company; and l’Humanité is read by people who think it is.)

In the Soviet Union, the 1930s unfolded dismally. Collectivisation was not going very well, and rumors of plots and coups permeated. Instead of remedying the underlying ills of collectivisation, Stalin’s response to step up the propaganda. In his blatant lies, Stalin had an unwitting help from America; Fordson tractors, which were widely imported by the Soviet Union, represented everything that was modern and efficient — the very monikers that Stalin wanted to attach onto collectivisation.

Wider Soviet propaganda was becoming more pervasive too. While Lenin hated the personality cult that sprung up about him, Stalin seemed very conformable with it. In a sense, the Stalin cult overgrew the Lenin cult — metaphorically and literally. In early Soviet posters, Lenin was the dominating figure over Stalin, but as time went on, the two became first equal. Then Lenin became smaller and fainter. On November 7th 1939, Pravda’s front page showed a banner above the gathered dignitaries at the Bolshoi Theatre, which depicted a huge head of Stalin and a minute one of Lenin. Eventually, Lenin would be reduced to the byline on the book Stalin was depicted reading. Stalin’s insignificant role in the early Revolution and the Russian civil war was exaggerated. Stalingrad was renamed for him for he had “single-handedly, heroically and against orders” saved it during the civil war. On the other hand, inconvenient facts, such as his desire to cooperate with the tsarist government on his return from exile, were promptly forgotten.

Another major shift in Soviet propaganda was that by the 1930s, it was actively cultivating a feminized image of Russia as “Motherland”, opposed to its portrayal as “Fatherland” in the Tsarist Russia. Through this transformation, Mother Russia was now effectively in union with Father Leader, personified by Stalin. The press images of the mid-1930s showed Stalin in familial poses with women and children. On December 30th 1936, the trade union paper even portrayed him as Grandfather Frost, the Russian Santa Claus.

The first example of now ubiquitous “politician with non-related small child”, was an invention of ever-busy Soviet sycophantic propaganda machine. On July 1, 1935, in Pravda was an illustrated story of a girl Nina Zdrogova, who gave a bouquet to Stalin, and was rewarded with a bag of chocolates and cherries. Almost a year later, on June 29, 1936, Pravda printed what was to become a famous and ubiquitous image instantly, the above photo (by one M. Kalashnikov) showing Stalin with a small girl from the Buryat-Mongol Republic, Gelia Markizova.

In many respects, Gelia was an archetypical Stalinist icon. Firstly, she was a girl. Stalin told Sergei Eisenstein, “We cannot allow any small boy to behave as though he were Soviet power itself,” for the latter’s heroic depiction of a young Soviet martyr in Bezhin Meadow. Then, as befitting an unthreatening girl, Gelia was non-Russian. Stalin depicted himself not only as a father wedded to Mother Russia, but also as a stern paterfamilias of the Soviet Empire, an ironic sight in a country where newspapers reported trials of children as young as ten for counterrevolutionary behavior.

As for young Gelia too, the future held nasty surprises. The very next year, her father, Ardan Markizov, the Second Secretary of Buryat-Mongolia, would be arrested and later shot, together with other leaders of the autonomous republic, as a Japanese spy. Her mother was arrested and sent to Southern Kazakhstan, where she died under mysterious circumstances in November, 1940. Gelia’s transformation from a symbol to the daughter of an “enemy of the people” was complete when she moved in with an aunt in Moscow and changed her family name. Also among those who were purged was First secretary of Buryat-Mongolia, M.I. Erbanov, who was grinning in the background in the original photo; he was deleted from the photograph.

The photo, however, was widely circulated in postcards, posters and pioneer camps. A sculpture was made, but when rumors about the murder of Gelia’s parents circulated, the propaganda value of the image fell, causing the sculptor to be denounced.

The prison courtyard of the Bow London Court during a recess in the Casement Trial. Roger Casement was with a leaf of paper in his hand on the extreme right.

(continuation from the Congo post)

When the news about atrocities in the Congo spread, the British government dispatched a junior civil servant in the Colonial Office named Roger Casement to investigate it. Casement, an Irishman who spent two decades as the British consul in various African colonies sent back a damning report, and became involved in the humanitarian efforts for the Congo. Knighted for his diplomatic services, Sir Roger Casement became deeply involved in Irish nationalism too. In 1914, he travelled to the United States to collect funds from Irish Americans for the purchase of black market firearms to be used in an anti-British insurrection.

Casement took a steamer from New York to Germany to make an offer to the Kaiser’s government: in exchange for support for Irish independence, Casement proposed forming a brigade of Irish freedom fighters from prisoners of war held in Germany, a unit that would battle on the German side during those tumultuous days of the Great War. Having landed in Ireland in 1916 from a German submarine, he was arrested and brought to London, where he was held in the Tower, no less.

His friends and supporters — including Arthur Conan Doyle and Geroge Bernard Shaw — organized a campaign for Casement’s defense. The trial was swift, if not tragicomic. Casement was charged under the Treason Act of 1351, which was written in Norman French, unpunctuated, and contained these words:

If a man be adherent to the king’s enemies in his realm giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere …

Casement’s defence argued that Casement had not been adherent to the king’s enemies “in the realm” and therefore Casement was not guilty. Blithely ignoring the fact that Casement was clearly condemned by the phrase “or elsewhere”, regardless of how you punctuate it, the contentious sentence became the central point of the trial. Two judges were sent to the Public Record Office to examine the Act with a microscope. They discovered a faint virgule after the second “realm”, making the phrase “giving to them aid and comfort in the realm” appositionary. Casement was sentenced to death.

All efforts to commute his death sentence into life imprisonment were quickly and discreetly thwarted by the police, who showed influential figures in Parliament and London’s clubland incriminating entries in Casement’s diaries about his homosexual liaisons. Treason was a grave offense indeed, but to be a homosexual was virtually unforgivable back then. The appeals for clemency were promptly rejected.

Casement was hanged on the morning of 3rd August 1916. A few days before his execution, he wrote to a friend: “I have made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things wrong and failed at much — but … the best thing was the Congo.”

I started this blog in April 2009, and since then have posted nearly 800 entries — and what a weird and wonderful 24 months it had been! And I have some regrets, apologies, and non-apologies for what had happened over the last two years.

(1) In October I promised that I will Vanity Fair’s Shooting Past 80 portfolio immediately. “Immediately” finally turns out to mean four months. Only today, I have posted it. I can partially blame WordPress’s slow uploading speed, but the fault, as it often does, lies with me and my laziness only. I have also posted a bookshelf — my picking of interesting photography coffee table books for that special day in your significant other’s life.

(2) I also need to atone for the significant drop in the number of posts. They have come down from 100+ in May ’09, to 33 a year later, to mere eight in January ’11. What does that mean? Mathematically, it means the posts will cease to exist in six months’ time. Actually, it is again my laziness that is to blame; but posts have gone longer and more informative (I think) so I guess it is a good trade-off.

(3) A bigger apology is due for my abysmal communication rate. The Question Inbox I setup was soon quickly discarded and the link remains broken. Here is an alternate way to contact me now: iconic.photos.wordpress@gmail.com, although I am pretty sure my reply rate will still be bad.

(4) During the last month, the most commented post have been that of Emmett Till’s murder, a gruesome and inhumane racial crime committed in the American South during the waning days of segregation. I deeply regret that some comments are spiteful and heinous, and their rhetoric do not belong in polite and proper discourse. Internet, at last, remains a forum where anonymity breeds incivility.

(5) In this 24 months, I absolutely refuse to use the term “photog” in the blog. I hate the term as much as I hate pronunciation of nuclear as “nucular”. My English is not perfect, and I am in no position to be pedantic about the language of Shakespeare, but “photog” clearly is substandard usage.

(6) I have scheduled some posts for a holiday that I will be taking starting next week. I will not be back until second week of April, and will mostly be skiing and hiking in the Alps. I will be in Zurich/St. Moritz, Como and Trieste. Send me an email if you are in the area.

(7) Another atonement is for my abject failure to make the older posts more popular or to circulate the older posts. This creates an aura of stagnancy around the blog frontpage, and I hate this, but there is no alternative short of republishing the older posts, which screws up timestamps and makes everything more confusing.

(8) My obituary of Gaddafi two weeks ago, now seems ridiculous. Since it wasn’t very serious when I wrote it, and since many reputable papers seem to do this, I don’t have much to apologize for here. (A funny story here: I had been to the obituary desk of a notable publication, and in it, along with those of older people like Thatcher, Mandela and Mugabe, are obituary forms for Dmitri Medvedev and Kevin Rudd!)

(9) Lastly, a personal regret. In this 24 months, I blogged about so many photographers and so many photos, but that didn’t lead me towards being a better photographer. So my advice to all those aspiring photographers out there: reading books about swimming will not help you become a swimmer.

(10) Enjoy!