Iconic Photos

Twitter also has become a place where iconic photos are shared.

So I decided to join Twitter. Again.

A few years ago, I tried to experiment with Twitter. That amounted to nothing – and I soon gave up. But now, I have substantial following on IP, I think I should try again.

So here it is: aalholmes – that’s me on twitter. Hurray.

What I post in the next few days – and weeks and months to come, if all goes according to plan – will not be solely limited to photography and photojournalism (although they may play a huge role). It will be just a general interest feed to share what I read, what I thought, and what I liked.

Another reason for twitter is so that I can interact with online readers. Be free to do so.

In the past, I got political, and subsequently polemical, when I blogged. The 140-characters should temper that. (Or so I hope).

So here we go again…

In 1965, at Jackson, Mississippi, Matt Herron took an iconic and ironic image from the civil rights era as a white policeman rips an American flag away from a young black boy, having already confiscated his ‘No More Police Brutality’ sign. Herron remembers the events that surrounded that World Press Photo prize wining photos:

The picture was taken at the side entrance to the Governor’s mansion on Capital Street in Jackson in the summer of 1965. The boy is Anthony Quinn, aged 5. His mother, Mrs. Ailene Quinn of McComb, Mississippi and her children were trying to see Governor Paul Johnson; they wanted to protest aganist the election of five Congressmen from districts where blacks were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance, they sat on the steps. The policeman struggling with Anthony is Mississippi Highway Patrolman Hughie Kohler. As Kohler attempted to confiscate the flag, Mrs. Quinn said: ‘Anthony, don’t let that man take your flag.’ Kohler went berserk, yanking Anthony off his feet.

In the South during the civil rights movement, the American flag was a potent symbol of support for racial integration (and support for federal law). Southerners who believed in racial segregation displayed Confederate flags instead. People were pulled from their cars by policemen and beaten simply for displaying an American flag on their license plates. So the simple act of a small child carrying an American flag represented defiance of Mississippi law and custom.

Anthony and his mother were arrested and hauled off to jail, which was a cattle stockade at the county fairground, since the city jails were already full of protesters. The Quinn protest was organized by COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), an umbrella organization responsible for most civil rights activities in the state. Today Anthony lives in Florida. I believe he is a lawyer. His mother died recently, and when Patrolman Kohler died a number of years ago, his obituary in the Jackson Daily News referred to this photograph and mentioned how Kohler regretted that moment ‘for the rest of his life’.”

Seventy-one years ago today, Adolf Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government at a ceremony in Compiegne, France. On June 21, 1940, Hitler melodramatically received France’s surrender in the same railroad car in which Germany had signed the 1918 armistice that had ended the First World War, thereby adding an additional flourish to century-long rivalry between France and Germany. (In 1918, the Armistice was singed in that railcar because it had once belong to Napoleon III, who lost the Franco-Prussian War).

It was an episode full of pointless symbolism. Hitler sat in the same chair in which Marshal Foch had sat when he faced the defeated Germans in 1918. After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler – in a calculated gesture of disdain to the French delegates – left the carriage, leaving the negotiations to General Wilhelm Keitel (who ironically would sign a surrender of Germany five years later).

After stepping outside, while talking to his generals and aides, Hitler stepped backwards; however, this is not what audiences in the Allied countries saw. John Grierson, director of the Canadian information and propaganda departments, noticed that Hitler raised his leg rather high up while stepping backwards. He looped this moment repeatedly to create the appearance that Hitler was childishly jumping with joy.

In those days of newsreels before films, the scene was played over and over again in movie theaters, and served the purpose of provoking popular disdain towards Hitler. 

The Armistice site was destroyed on Hitler’s orders three days later; the monuments, which included a German eagle impaled by a sword, and a large stone tablet which read “Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German Reich, vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave”, were destroyed. A statue of Foch was left intact so that it would be honoring a wasteland. The Armistice carriage was taken to Berlin, but later destroyed in war. See here for Hitler’s reaction to the Armistice site.

It kept photobloggers busy for a few days; Iconic Photos weighs in with its two cents.

If there is one small part of photojournalism that this blog revels in, it is on how photos lie. Seeing is believing, but we also only see what we want to see, and the above photo taken amidst the chaos of hockey riots in Vancouver is almost a textbook case. The image seemingly showed a young couple determined to make love, not war – to use a much clichéd phrase.

But was it a passionate embrace, a staged photo-op or a piece of performance art? Like many a good kiss captured on film, this photo was dogged by endless questions. Like Eisenstaedt, Richard Lam who took the photo didn’t have time to verify the identifies of his subjects; he even didn’t realized what he had captured until he got back to his office, initially assuming that he was taking pictures of some injured youths.

But this is no 1945, there are Twitter and Facebook to propose many theories, and also surveillance cameras and camera phones to substantiate and repudiate them. A fake twitter account popped up; Esquire gushed it may be the greatest photo ever. (Still another tongue-in-cheek retort). In the end, it took a little more than 24 hours for details to emerge. [See the Guardian]

The man in the photo was identified as the 29-year old barman Scott Jones by his family which lived 10,000 miles away in Perth, Australia. “I knew it was him because he doesn’t have a lot of clothes with him and he always puts on the same thing,” his mother mused. Mr. Jones was lying on the road with his Canadian girlfriend who had hurt her leg. The kiss, alas, was one of reassurance and comfort, rather than one of passion.

(N.B. I showed Emily the photo, hoping to solicit an “awww”; instead she noted cynically that had the girl been wearing pants, there would have been no fuss. She may be onto something here – it’s the legs that made this photo, in my opinion).

On this blog, I have often been accused of glamorizing war photography. Yes, I guess I do perpetuate the myth of photographer as a Nietzschean hero — probably because I myself have always wanted to be one. Anyway, my favorite neighbourhood leftie paper, the Guardian, has an excellent piece on war photographers this weekend called, “The Shot That Nearly Killed Me“.

The piece includes many photos we have seen here on Iconic Photos, such as this one by Ron Haviv and this one by Greg Marinovich and this one by Julie Jacobson.

At the Chancellor’s residence in Bonn, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt speaks with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. On the far right is German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel; surrounding them are interpreters and other members of the government, but at the back, you can see another photographer, shooting the back of Brezhnev’s head.

The photograph was taken by Barbara Klemm, chronicler in black and white of West German history. In addition to being in the room with Brandt and Brezhnev, she took the photos of left-winger Joschka Fischer being sworn in as environment minister while wearing trainers; the student revolts in Frankfurt am Main in 1968; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the lesser known versions of the above photograph also shows Egon Bahr conversing with Andrei Gromyko on the lefthand side — a true meeting of powers behind their respective thrones.

Bahr devised Brandt’s revolutionary — and domestically controversial — Ostpolitik, the policy of détente with the Eastern bloc. Brezhnev’s five-day visit in May 1973, historic as the first ever by a Soviet leader to West Germany, marked a pinnacle of Ostpolitik, but by this time Brandt had overplayed his hand. He may have been Germany’s first left-leaning chancellor but Brandt proved to be unpopular with his party’s leaders in the parliament. The next year, he resigned, after one of his top aides was arrested on charges of spying for East Germany; however, Ostpolitik survived, in one way or another, until the end of the Cold War.

Brezhnev and Brandt had a great relationship, something akin to what Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin had thirty years later. Brezhnev later noted that Brandt was his favorite head of state to work with.A Western diplomat confided, ”It is easier for Brandt to talk to Brezhnev than to Nixon.” Two ambitious politicians who came from lowly backgrounds and who struggled with alcoholism surely must have sympathized with each other a great deal. However, back in May 1973, the press was more concerned with two leaders’ striking similarities than what they actually discussed at the summit meeting. Burly constitutions of two leaders were compared, and the German press remarked upon the fact that Brezhnev was a head shorter than Brandt.

The week after the memorial service for Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, twenty photojournalists who covered the wars with Hetherington and Hondros agreed to be photographed for a New York Magazine spread. Here is the link to the original article.

I personally don’t like Chris Anderson’s blur effects on the photos, but the photospread is an interesting family portrait.