Iconic Photos

Iconic Photos’ Picture of the Year goes to the photo taken during forty most intense minutes of the Obama White House. Due to the lack of images of bin Laden’s graphic death, the above photo of President Obama and his National Security Team inside the Situation Room, taken during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, immediately became a photographic “icon”. It drew 1.6 million views in 38 hours on Flickr — making it one of the website’s most popular photos ever.

(1) deeply Catholic Vice President Biden is fiddling with rosary beads (hidden by the laptop); Biden previously urged the president to focus more on Pakistan and use more drone attacks there.

(2) When Osama bin Laden is killed, President Obama solemnly broke the silence: “We got him.” Those may perhaps be the defining words of his presidency. Yet, here in the photo, his crouching position and grave expression reveal the deep anxieties of a man who had wagered everything in.

(3) Brigadier General Marshall ‘Brad’ Webb is Assistant Commanding General of Joint Special Operations Command. He is the only uniformed aide in the room.

(4) Admiral Mike Mullen, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the president’s top military advisor. Mullen, who had never seen eye to eye with the president over the Afghan policy, was no doubt glad that the United States got bin Laden before Mullen’s own term expired in September.

(5) National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is a Washington grandee. His brother Mike and his wife Catherine are both aides to Biden. He was one of Obama’s aides once derided as the “Politburo” by the Pentagon. Two days before, he signed the authorization order to the CIA to go forward with the execution.

(6) Bill Daley is the scion of Chicago’s legendary Daley Family and the son and brother of Chicago mayors. A lawyer and former banker, he is White House Chief of Staff.

(7) Tony Blinken worked as Biden’s National Security Advisor for the last ten years, nearly the entire post 9/11 period. His influence on Biden’s worldview is immense, and his worried glance over Daley’s shoulder suggests that the photo was taken at a key moment. I have met Blinken before, making the photo more personal.

(8) As director of counterterrorism working on bin Laden file, Audrey Tomason is the youngest and the most junior official in the room. There are suggestions that her clandestine cover had inadvertently been blown by the photo. (See here for another agent whose identity might have been compromised by this photo.)

(9) Officially, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security Assistant; unofficially, Brennan was the administration’s bin-Laden-hunter-in-chief. He joined the CIA after answering a newspaper ad and was the agency’s station chief in Saudi Arabia. He is the only one in the room who speaks fluent Arabic. He described the operation as “minutes passed like days.”

(10) As Director of National Intelligence, it was James Clapper’s job to coordinate rival intelligence bureaus.

(11) Denis McDonough, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor was also one of his closest aides, a status reflected by his ringside seat despite his youth and low seniority. He played a key role in pushing the president to honor his campaign pledge of pursuing bin Laden into Pakistan with or without Pakistani government’s approval and to authorize an Afghani surge.

(12) At the focus of the photo was the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose shocked expression lent deep meaning to the picture. While she insisted that she was probably trying to stifle a cough caused by her spring allergies, it was a 3-am-call moment for Clinton.

(13) Robert Gates, the departing Secretary of Defense gives a determined stare that suggests that he was unperturbed by what he is watching; his face showed that he didn’t harbor a trace of doubt that the mission would be a success. Nonetheless, he was a leading skeptic of the raid, and advocated for an airstrike.

N.B. A classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured.

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Internet age meant that it took less than a day for the above photo to become a meme; everything and everyone from joysticks to the Situation was introduced into the room. A lego version was also created.

Some argue that presence of Clinton and Tomason marks a giant leap after decades of all-male line-ups at the crucial moments of national crisis, but the Hasidic Jewish newspaper Der Tzitung begged to differ. Citing an ultra-Orthodox Jewish laws banning ‘sexually suggestive images’, it erased Clinton and Tomason from the photo. It later apologized for its attempt to alter history.

Iconic Photos bid fond farewells to those we lost in 2011.

The big photography news of the year was deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros during a mortar attack in Misrata, but among the Arab Spring’s other unfortunate victims were a few photographers: Lucas Dolega, who died from injuries sustained on day of Ben Ali’s departure from Tunisia; Ali Hassan al-Jaber, the Qatari photojournalist who had the dubious honor of being the first foreign journalist to be killed during the Libyan war, and Anton Hammerl, who was abducted and executed by pro-Qaddafi forces.

But those who want some reminding that the world has already been an inhospitable place to journalists and photographers need only to look at the lives of those old masters who died this year. As Rashid Talukder was documenting the birthpangs of Bangladesh, the retreating Pakistani army was massacred thousands of his compatriots. Guy Crowder, that acclaimed chronicler of black LA for five decades, and Shel Hershorn, who captured iconic images of the civil rights movement and retired traumatized after photographing a fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, both lived and knew that era of inequality and segregation.

The Golden Age of black-and-white photography once again flashed in front of our eyes with the depatures of many master lensmen of that era. There was Leo Friedman, who captured many of the iconic images of the golden age of Broadway. There was T. Lux Feininger, the younger brother of the great Andreas Feininger, who documented the artistic avant-garde in interbellum Germany. There was Richard Steinheimer, known as Ansel Adams of railroad photography.

And then there was Goksin Sipahioglu, the Turkish photographer who covered the Cuban missile crisis, the Prague Spring and the Munich Olympics attacks, and who more famously founded the renowned Paris-based photo agency Sipa. Most singularly, Miroslav Tichy, the Czech voyeur who died this year, took surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials.

On popculture side, two great music photographers who were known for their bold album covers died: Barry Feinstein, whose close partnership with Bob Dylan produced the singer’s most iconic photos and Robert Whitaker, who shot The Beatles’ butcher album cover. Gunther Sachs, bon vivant, playboy, and photographer, committed suicide.

Also dimmed are lens and flashes of Ken Russell, Deano Risley, Gautam Rajadhyaksha, Jerome Liebling, Lázaro Blanco, Milton Rogovin, Brian Lanker, Pete Carmichael, Steve Gladstone, M. Y. Ghorpade, Heiko Wittenborn and Franke Keating. Michael Abramson, who took photographs of patrons at nightclubs on the south side of Chicago during the mid-seventies and LeRoy Grannis, the godfather of surfphotography, are also no more.

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(To be concluded tomorrow, other photography stories of 2011 and my picking of the Best Photojournalism Apps). 

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Downing on an American unmanned drone over Iran recalls a bitter Cold War episode, writes IP.  

On May Day 1960, a U2 flight left the US base in Pakistan to photograph ICBM sites inside the Soviet Union; the flight was supposed to take advantage of the Soviet holiday, but all units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces were on red alert and the plane was subsequently shot down.

As the rumors spread that Moscow shot down an American spy plane, the US government believed that the plane was fully destroyed and its pilot dead, and declared that it was a research vessel. On May 7, however, Soviet Premier Khrushchev angrily revealed that the pilot was alive and had the wreckage of the plane exhibited in the Chess Pavilion in Moscow’s Gorky Park Moscow – where captured German military equipment was put on display during the war.

To the invited diplomats and journalists, Khrushchev told that he does not intend to bring up the plane incident at the impending summit meeting with President Eisenhower, but his glee was palpable. Life photographer Carl Mydans, who took the picture above, was soon hustled out of the building by two Soviet officers who thought he was a spy because he was “taking pictures too systematically.” However, they did not confiscate his film.

Although Mydans was not employed by the U.S. government, it didn’t stop the Pentagon from using his photos. The designers of U-2 spy plane was able to learn what happened and what sort of missile hit the plane based on their analysis of Mydans’ photographs of the wreckage. How the plane was brought down was never fully explained, but his pictures and the intactness of the wreckage casts doubt on Khurschev’s claims that a SAM2 missile downed the plane at high attitude.

The U-2 incident marked the birthpangs of another era of Soviet-American confrontations after a few years of calm following Stalin’s death. Coming just over two weeks before the scheduled opening of an East–West summit in Paris, it poisoned the atmosphere around the meeting. An invitation for the President to visit the Soviet Union was abruptly withdrawn, and Eisenhower left office without fulfilling his dreams of ending the Cold War.

Ironically, for all the trouble it caused, the U2 was already outdated by the time the Soviets shot it down. Three months later, it was quietly replaced by the Discoverer spy satellite; The doomed flight was in fact the last U2 flight over Soviet territory.

(See the wreakage here)

For all his subsequent role in elevating it to a sublime art form not withstanding, Richard Avedon was never comfortable with fashion photography. He wanted to be remembered as a great artist or portraitist, even if that involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job.

The above photo, Elise Daniels with the Street Performers, was one of his earlier works. Avedon interestingly fuses street photography with fashion in this photo, which shows he was influenced by the great Parisian street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai.

Whether you see the model or the contortionist first in the photo is perhaps debatable, but it is undeniable that this photo exists in the realm between the artificial and the everyday. Wearing a broad “picture” hat and a Balenciaga suit, Elise stands akimbo by a table comandeered as a stage by a contortionist while a weight lifter and a horn player do their things. Her beauty was as huge an aberration of nature as their freakishness to Avedon, who portrayed the model as an alien among aliens, ogled at by normal Parisians.

A rarely seen alternate shot (below) has two acrobats, one doing a handstand on the other’s hand, rounding out the group. I have posted this photo before on IP, but I saw the second photo in a dentistry recently and thought I should repost it.