Iconic Photos

Homai Vyarawalla (1913 – 2012)

thequintessential — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:43:31 +0000

Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first and greatest female photojournalist, has died, aged 98.

Awkward Trio: The Dalai Lama, Nehru and Zhou Enlai during Zhou's visit to India in Dec. 1956

For most of her photographic career, history never was more than a click away for Homai Vyarawalla. From the moment the British moved their photographic information services to Dehli after the Fall of Singapore in 1942, she was ideally positioned to capture the next turbulent three decades of the subcontinent’s history. This she did, recording such pivotal moments such as Lord Mountbatten’s arrival and departure as the Raj’s Last Viceroy, Congress Party’s affirmative vote for Indian Partition, Gandhi’s last days and funeral, the first independent India’s flag raising over the Red Fort, turmoil that followed Partition, and Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet.

She also captured photos of notable dignities who passed through Delhi, from Eisenhower to Martin Luther King, but her favorite subject was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and her favorite photo was that of Nehru hugging his sister, Vijaya, the then ambassador to the Soviet Union. It was a rare unguarded moment for the politician, who clearly aware of his charisma, “posed for pictures, as if unconsciously”. For Vyarawalla, Nehru was “the perfect figure for a photographer. A personality who electrified the entire atmosphere when he entered.”

Born to into a Parsi family (Parsis are known for their relatively liberally attitudes towards women), she was never uncomfortable at being India’s first — and for a long time, only — female photojournalist. She was close to Indira Gandhi — it was said that Indira liked Ms. Vyarawalla’s shorthair style so much that she emulated it. — but was deeply disappointed by the erosion of press freedoms during the Emergency. She retired in 1970, burning most of her negatives. For the last 40 years of her life, she lived alone in virtual anonymity, before being acknowledged with a retrospective and the Padma Vibhushan, one of India’s highest civilian honors, months before her death earlier this month. She was 98.

(For more pictures by Vyarawalla, go to Yahoo!. Vyarawalla in her own words here.)

Filed under: Politics Tagged: Homai Vyarawalla, Indian Independence, Nehru, partition of india

The Year of Contact Sheets

thequintessential — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:13:24 +0000

They are things of beauty: grids of small photos that show you exactly what’s on a roll of developed film. Intimate and revealing of the innerworkings of a photographer’s mind though they are, contact sheets were never regarded as an art form. Henri Cartier-Bresson believed they are a mess of erasures, and compared them to kitchen refuse left behind after he had prepared a great meal. But in recent years, disillusion with the click click click of the digital revolution grew — and with it nostalgia for the dark elegance of the contact sheets.

Last few years saw the publication of two monumental works: The Contact Sheet and Magnum Contact Sheets. But long before Magnum editors decided to raid their attics, William Klein – best known for his groundbreaking book New York, 1954-1955 – had the same idea. Starting in the 1980s, he asked his fellow photographers to talk about their contact sheets in a series of short vignettes made for the French television. (Klein also published a book Contacts, where he went back to his contact sheets and has re-versioned some of his original images by painting on them in bold, primary acrylics, reminiscent of a photographer’s standard chinagraph pencil.)

Those who narrated their works for Klein includes such illustrious names as Elliot Erwitt, Josef Koudelka, Sebastiao Salgado and even Mr. Cartier-Bresson himself. In all, thirty-six episodes were made, and most of them were collected in three DVDs (divided into Great Masters, Contemporary and Conceptual Photographers).

YouTube has most of the episodes; you can search for “Contacts + [name]” for any of these 36 photographers: William Klein; Raymond Depardon; Josef Koudelka; Marc Riboud; Leonard Freed; Edouard Boubat; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Don McCullin; Duane Michals; Mario Giacomelli; Eugene Richards; Nobuyoshi Araki; Thomas Ruff; Bernd and Hilla Becher; Alain Fleischer; John Hilliard; Georges Rousse; Roni Horn; Sebastiao Salgado; Robert Doisneau; Elliott Erwitt; Helmut Newton; Sarah Moon; Sophie Calle; Nan Goldin; Andreas Gursky; Lewis Baltz; Jean-Marc Bustamante; Jeff Wall; Hiroshi Sugimoto; Thomas Struth; Christian Boltanski; John Baldessari; Martin Parr; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Rineke Dijkstra.

(or alternately, you can search for these users: vgrunvald; heratus007; commonspaces).

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Contact Sheets, Magnum

Photography — In Novels

thequintessential — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:00:41 +0000

Falques' Face of Defeat

Unlike film photographers I profiled earlier, print photographers are a curious mixture of lovers, killers, cynics and sleuths. In Ronit Matalon’s Bliss, an Israeli photographer pursues a doomed affair with a Palestinian man. The protagonist of Douglas Kennedy’s The Big Picture kills his wife’s lover and assumes the latter’s identity as a lensman. Julie Hecht’s unnamed narrator, she of many short stories and the novel The Unprofessionals, explores the mundane and tawdry periphery of modern existence with her idiosyncratic photo-essays (flowers in decline, reproductive surgeons and their dogs). There is a sleuth in Kay Farrow (The Magician’s Tale by David Hunt), an achromat — someone who is completely color blind rather than the much more usual red-green variety — who is kept from the blinding daylight by her condition, and who explores the underbelly of San Francisco night life in gritty black-and-white photos.

Schemes, entanglements and women who kept getting into his bed thwart Nicholas Almaza’s bildung in The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata. Another Germanic affliction, this time that of weltschmerz, plagues glamor photographer and inveterate womanizer Carter Cox in Keith Kachtick’s Hungry Ghost. In Afterimage by Helen Humpherys, a Victorian girl (modeled on photography pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron) dreams about a creative career as a photographer.

Often a generational gap is bridged via photographic memories in novels. In Peter Henisch’s Negatives of My Father, the rocky relationship between the narrator and his well-known photographer father were explored via the photos his father took as a leading photojournalist for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front. Conor Lyons searches for his rootless photographer father across four countries and two continents via negative fragments in Collum McCann’s Songdongs. In Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hands, two self-destructive photographers, Cass Neary, who documents punk’s most squalid moments and Aphrodite Kamestos, the photographer of the ’60s counterculture fringe, find a common bond in their morbid nihilistic visions of the infamous, the damned, and the dead.

It’s the photography that got small for larger-than-life Maude Coffin Pratt, the heroine of Paul Theroux’s Picture Palace, who witnessed the history of photography unfolds itself before her lens. Pratt began her career taking photos of her brother (with whom she was incestuously obsessed) and ended up capturing the century’s greatest literary minds from e e cummings to Hemingway. In between, she also photographed black servants, blind people and a pathetic “Pig Dinner” at which circus acrobats perform in the nude (which made her famous).

While it is a study of trials, traumas and tribulations of a war photographer’s life, The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte was mainly about the fallout from an iconic photo. On one side, there is Andrés Faulques, the retired combat photographer haunted by the battles he photographed and by the girlfriend he lost. On the other side is Ivan Markovic, a young Croatian soldier whose face came to symbolize defeat after Faulques immortalized the Croatian Army’s retreat from the Serbian onslaught at Vukovar.

Another Manichean clash was at the center of Del Corso’s Gallery: the friction between the titular photographer who insouciantly photographed mangled corpses and his former mentor P. X. Dunlop who won Pulitzer for his artful portraits of dignity and sacrifice on the battlefields of Beirut and Vietnam. In the background enfolded a larger picture of photographers’ divorce from reality and atrocities by a thin layer of glass — a theme often explored in novels about war photography, such as The Lotus Eaters, of which this blog had waxed lyrical before.

Did I miss somebody fictional from either a book or a movie? Let me know here or tweet at me.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: fictional photographers

Photography — In Movies

thequintessential — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:13:52 +0000

Funny Face (advised by Avedon) practically rewrote fashion photography manuals.

For all the exciting lives they live, photographers seldom are swashbuckling heroes in films. I have always wondered why that is; after all, on Planet Hollywood, writers, professors, and lawyers — people who are so boring in real life – got thrown into a global conspiracy every week, and even archeologists lead exciting lives.

That Cursed Photo

The closest a photographer had ever come to conspiracy was in the short-lived TV series Nowhere Man. Thomas Veil took a photograph of a private military group dressed as US army soldiers secretly executing four young rebels deep in the jungles of Chile. After the photo, titled “Hidden Agenda” (left) became famous, Veil finds that his life has been erased. His wife, his dog, his mother and his friends don’t recognize him. His keys and ATM cards don’t work and there is no record that he, an award-winning photographer, has ever existed.

Robert Kincaid, also, never existed but that didn’t stop hundreds of people writing to National Geographic demanding more info about the photographer whose story on covered bridges in Iowa graced the cover of the magazine in May 1966. Kincaid was the subject of the book and the movie “The Bridges of Madison County“. The magazine was a mock up; the real edition that month had the Golden Gate Bridge on its cover.

War photographers enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1980s. Photographers in The Killing Fields, Apocalypse Now, Salvador, and Under Fire were partially based upon many real-life photographers who covered those tumultuous years in Cambodia, Vietnam, El Salvador and Nicaragua respectively. (Watchmen parodied this with fictional Alan Guillon). Linda Hunt won an Oscar for playing Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf photographer in The Year of Living Dangerously, setting against the background of a failed coup against President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1965.

Often parodied, never bested

But two most exciting films about photographers are unexpectedly centered on fashion photographers. Blowup by Michelangelo Antonioni begins with what is probably the sexiest scene sans nudity in film history, and follows Thomas Hemmings (an amalgam of the swinging London’s top photonames) as he accidentally captures a murder in one of his photos. Or did he?

Thomas’s female counterpart is, no doubt, the titular character in Eyes of Laura Mars. Mars, a glamor fashion photographer, whose images are often criticized for glorifying violence and demeaning women, was thrust into the middle of a police investigation when a series of unsolved murders closely mirror her fashion shoots.

On film, camera often is treated as a priapic instrument and photographers as fatalists and voyeurs. Nowhere is this encapsulated better than in Robert Capa-inspired L.B. Jefferies, the hero(?) of the film considered as the ultimate camera-movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In Midnight Meat Train, Femme Fatale, Closer, and even in that quirky comedy Pecker, this is proven to be true.

Laura Mars' eyes have indeed seen everything

Javier Bardem plays homage of the Master

Tomorrow, I will look into Photography and Photographers in Novels. Stay tuned in also to my twitter as aalholmes.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Blowup, Eyes of Laura Mars, Funny Face, Nowhere Man, Rear Window

What They Are Seeing In …. Russia

thequintessential — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:43:49 +0000

The original photo (top-left); the Kremlin's altered version (top-right) and a few parodies

It was much simpler in back in Uncle Joe’s days. Countless challengers to the authority of the Kremlin simply disappeared, not just from the streets but also from the photos and history books. And discrediting of opponents was as easy as removing them from pictorial records, or fabricating them. But as a newspaper distributed by the party supporting Vladimir Putin found this week, the digital age that made such fakery so common and so easy has also whittled away power of images and that age-old axiom of “Seeing is Believing.”

In Yekaterinburg, Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts), a popular federal newspaper, and the All-Russia People’s Front, a coalition of Putin supporters published a photograph purporting to show Alexei Navalny, a young Russian real estate lawyer turned blogger and campaigner against corruption, grinning alongside Boris Berezovksy, the exiled oligarch. According to the caption, Mr. Navalny had “never hidden” that Mr Berezovksy — another bete noir of the Kremlin, and a wanted man in Russia — was financing his campaign.

Within hours, the photo was exposed as a crude fake. Alexei Yushenkov, who took the original photo in May 2011 at the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station posted his picture online as well as ones taken just before and after to prove that the newspaper version was fake.

Navalny responded not with outrage but with derision. He posted several photographs on his website showing himself, in the same pose, alongside such figures as Napoleon, Stalin, Lord Voldemort, an Extra-Terrestrial, and — the most devastatingly of all — Mr. Putin. Ironically, the original photograph showed Mr. Navalny with another oligarch, the metals billionaire and New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who is also running for president against Mr. Putin.

In Mr. Putin’s Russia, journalists are silenced, and opposition leaders are targeted with dirty tricks. Boris Nemtsov’s phone was tapped, and his conversations, in which he insulted fellow anti-Kremlin activists, were published on the website of Tvoi Dhen, Russia’s most popular tabloid, which enjoys close ties to the security services. Nemtsov apologized, but claimed some of the conversations are fake. Many other prominent critics fell victim to honeytraps involving a sultry model named Katya. Among them was Viktor Shenderovich, the satirist behind a Spitting Image-style show named Kukly where puppets mocked the Kremlin strongmen until it was pulled off the air.

Filed under: Politics Tagged: Alexei Navalny, Boris Berezovksy, photoshop, Putin

IP Picture of the Year: Finding Osama

thequintessential — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 05:55:42 +0000

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.

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.

Filed under: Politics

Photography — 2011 in Review

thequintessential — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:41:22 +0000

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.

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

As usual follow me on twitter here.

Filed under: Obituary Tagged: Chris Hondros, fond farewells, Lee Harvey Oswald, leo friedman, Libya, obituary, Rashid Talukder, Tim Hetherington

American spy plane downed in hostile territory (1960)

thequintessential — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:26:50 +0000

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)

Filed under: Politics Tagged: Carl Mydans, Eisenhower, Gary Powers, Khrushchev

Elise Daniels with the Street Performers, Avedon

thequintessential — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 23:12:24 +0000

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.

Filed under: Politics Tagged: Elise Daniels, Richard Avedon

British Embassy in Iran Seized

thequintessential — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:59:46 +0000

As Iranian students storm the British embassies in Tehran, historical comparisons are made to 1979 (the seizure of the US embassy there) and to 1980 (when the Iran embassy in London was seized by Iraqi terrorists and rescued by SAS). IP takes a longer view.

Hatred of Britain in Iran has deep roots. Ever since William Knox D’Arcy was granted a concession by the Shah of Persia to search for oil in 1901, the Persians resented the fact that oil profits went only into the coffers of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the mighty conglomerate that counted among its paid lobbyists young Winston Churchill.

In April 1951, the Majlis (parliament) of Iran under the nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq nationalized the oil industry in Iran, and kicked out the then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Britain’s response was to stage a coup against Mossadeq, and that it finally achieved with the help of the CIA in August 1953.

The AIOC returned to Iran, as a plurality owner (40%) of a new international consortium involving five American companies (40%), Royal Dutch Shell and Compagnie Française des Pétroles (now Total) (20%). The AIOC became the British Petroleum in 1954 when the above picture was taken. The companies continued to operate in Iran until 1979, when the new Islamic regime again nationalized the oil industry without compensation, bringing to an end the BP’s 70-year presence in Iran.

Shortly after the U.S. embassy was seized, and its own embassy was occupied, Britain closed its embassy in Tehran in 1980 — the beginning of the eight-year diplomatic hiatus. In 1986, the relations hit nadir as Iran pointedly nominated Hussein Malouk, who took part in in the 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy as Iranian chargé d’affaires in London. HMG refused to accept Mr. Malouk. In 1989, the diplomatic relations resumed briefly before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie. In the 2000s, the terse diplomatic dance continued. In 2004 and 2007, the Islamic Republic briefly arrested groups of British soldiers for straying into its waters from Iraq. Salman Rushdie’s knighthood and the Green Revolution further exacerbated the relations.

But, no matter how unsalvageable that relationship is, this blog has always viewed the diplomatic immunity as sacrosanct and the host country as the power responsible for protection, security and well-being of envoys and diplomats. By turning the blind eye to this raid, and by tacitly condoning and perhaps even encouraging actions of this angry mob, the Islamic Republic has proven itself to be an unreliable, duplicitous, and crass entity.

Filed under: Politics, Society Tagged: British Petroleum, Iran, UK

Two Obituaries

thequintessential — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:18:28 +0000

Last few weeks saw the deaths of two people who were recently featured in Iconic Photos, first a photographer and second a general who made an iconic image possible.

Died on October 25th was Rashid Talukder, the first Bangladeshi to win Pioneer Photographer Award, aged 72. His photos of the Bangladesh Liberation war in 1971 are considered to be one of the most important photoessays of the century, and his photo of a bodiless head, featured here on IP just two months ago, was a haunting testament to the trying toll of that war.

Another of his famous photos was featured above, when Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman returned to his homeland after being released from jail in Pakistan. The photo, taken at historic speech on March 7, 1971, was later selected by the Encyclopaedia on Southeast Asia as one of the seminal moments of Bengal history.

From one successful war of independence to another less successful one: that in Biafra. In 1967, the Igbo — a Christian people in the oil-rich south east part of Nigeria — unilaterally declared their independence from Nigeria. Leading them quixotically was Col. Emeka Ojukwu, who died this week at the age of 78.

The Biafran struggle, for all its lofty goals, was a conflict which should have lasted only weeks, given the overwhelming superiority of the Nigerian federal army and the fact that international governments — seeing the rebellion as a first major challenge to post-colonial borders throughout Africa — weighed in heavily against the rebels. That it lasted for two and a half years was largely due to Ojukwu’s single-mindedness.

Before the Biafrans would capitulate, the Nigerian blockade of Biafra led to a famine and the conflict became imprinted on the international consciousness and conscience, thanks to a handful of British television reports and photographers. By October 1968 several thousand Biafrans, many of them children, were reported to be dying every day, and Don McCullin documented an extreme case of this in an iconic photo featured on this blog before.

Filed under: Obituary, Politics, War Tagged: Bangladesh, Biafra, Don McCullin, Rashid Talukder

World Press Freedom Ads

thequintessential — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:25:25 +0000

Not really iconic, and some of them don’t make sense, but they are truly funny, and make clever use of photography.

Filed under: Politics Tagged: International Service for Human Rights, World Press Freedom