As I noted before – the war in Vietnam was mostly remembered through the work of Western photographers like Robert Capa and Larry Burrows. However, in North Vietnam, the war was witnessed through the lens of guerrilla fighters who doubled as photographers.
Last time, I wrote about Tran Binh Khuol. Like him, Vo An Khanh was born in Bac Lieu province in southwestern Vietnam. After arrest of his brothers for Communism, Vo left his farming and fishing background for city life in Saigon, where he working for the ‘Viet Long’ photo lab. In 1960, he also left that work to join the Communist revolution in Ca Mau (situated on the southern Mekong delta tip of South Vietnam, a hotbed of Viet Cong activities).
Vo traveled with guerrillas and documented the front line of the Vietnamese resistance for Office of Entertainment, at times climbing trees to get a better angle on the action. Surreal nature of his guerrilla photojournalism was best captured in the photo above from U Minh Forest in 1970, depicting a mobile military medical clinic in the mangroves, doctors and nurses knee-deep in swamp water performing a makeshift shrapnel-removal surgery.
The soldier on the gurney was one of few figures in Vo’s work whose face was exposed. Others sported masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation, and in case that the photos fell into the enemies’ hands.
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Vo carried the medium-format Yashica camera whose film cartridges contained only eight exposures. He developed the negatives in situ and stored them in ammunition boxes with rice for moisture absorption. Most of his images were never published during the war due to chronic shortages of ink by local papers, but were privately distributed among the guerrillas to boost morale. A rare touring exhibition of his photos was even staged in the guerrilla hideouts from 1962 – 1975.
The photos of guerrilla photojournalists were never reprinted outside the country until the 2000s. Doug Niven, an American news photographer, spotted handmade black-and-white postcards of the war while travelling, and began to track down the surviving Vietnamese war photographers. Their photographers were finally exhibited in 2002 in ‘Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War From the Other Side’ at the International Center of Photography, in collaboration with the National Geographic Society.
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Life magazine described him as “one of the most famous men in the world, one of the most admired, quoted, photographed, consulted, glorified, well-nigh deified as the fabulous and fascinating archetype of a brand new kind of hero, the hero of science and intellect, originator and living symbol of the new atomic age.” Novelist Joseph Kanon observed that, “like many charismatic people, Oppenheimer photographed well”
Yet one of the most famous photographs of Oppenheimer does not feature him. In 1948, when the American Institute of Physics began publishing a new journal called Physics Today, its inaugural issue had on cover a porkpie hat sitting on a piece of cyclotron equipment. Sam Goudsmit, the chief editor of the magazine, recalled later: “it could symbolise to his readers only one man” and the “fact that the photograph was uncaptioned was a tribute to Oppenheimer’s international reputation”.
In 1948, J. Robert Oppenheimer was at the peak of his fame. After Einstein, Oppenheimer was undoubtedly the most famous scientist in America. He had just became the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and was chairing the influential General Advisory Committee to the newly created U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Publicly he lobbied for international control of nuclear energy and arms control treaty with the Soviet Union. The following year he would vocally oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb program – which would provoke the ire of some U.S. government and military leaders – and would eventually lead to a hearing to revoke his security clearance – an enquiry from which he never really recovered.
Those hearings were dramatized in the recent Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer, which I just saw this week, and based on the epic American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Michael Sherwin. Also included in the movie was the moment years later in 1963 when Oppenheimer was awarded the Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the leading proponent of the hydrogen bomb who had fraught relationship with Oppenheimer and denounced him to the government, was in the attendance.
Ralph Morse, then working for Time magazine photographer caught the moment when two physicists came face to face. With Kitty Oppenheimer standing stone-faced beside him, Oppenheimer grinned and shook Teller’s hand.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
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In lead up to the 1984 Summer Olympics, Life Magazine tried to put together a special issue featuring great athletes of past, present, and future. The subjects lined up included Carl Lewis, Greg Louganis, Edwin Moses, Nadia Comaneci, Jesse Owens, Mark Spitz and an upcoming basketball star who had just completed his junior year at the University of North Carolina, Michael Jordan.
Appropriately, one of the photographers chosen to undertake the project was Co Rentmeester who represented the Netherlands as a rower at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome before becoming a photojournalist for LIFE magazine; his photo from 1972 Olympics – of sharply focused head of swimmer in water while water was in motion – was World Press sports photo of the year.
Rentmeester went to Chapel Hill to photograph Jordan. Jordan was just selected by consensus to the NCAA All-American First Team and was awarded the Naismith and Wooden College Player of the Year awards. Rentmeester’s crew mowed a hillside that would give him the view of the clean skyline and set up a portable basketball hoop they bought from a toy store.
When Jordan arrived, the photographer asked Jordan to jump straight up while holding a basketball aloft. Instead doing a regular basketball jump, Rentmeester asked Jordan to splay his legs in the manner of a ballet dancer, a pose known as a “grand jetés.” “It worked beautifully,” Rentmeester remembered.
The image ran across two pages in Life. Six months later, Rentmeester was in a meeting in Chicago with a corporate client and saw an image of Jordan doing the same jump on a Nike billboard against Chicago skyline. Seeking design inspiration for its first Air Jordan sneakers, Nike did pay Rentmeester $150 for use of his photos from the Life shoot as ‘research’ copy, but Rentmeester claimed Nike not have permission to reproduce the image.
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In 1987, Nike began to use a silhouette of Jordan from the Nike Photo and began using it as a logo (later known as the “Jumpman Logo”) on all of its Michael Jordan branded merchandise. Years long legal battle between Rentmeester and Nike followed, and eventually the judges sided with Nike. Time magazine noted that Rentmeester’s photo was “a beautiful image but one unlikely to have endured had Nike not devised a logo for its young star that bore a striking resemblance to the photo.”
That was not the only trouble Nike faced in growing Air Jordans into what would eventually become to be a billion-dollar business. Jordan was an unlikely spokesperson for Nike – in college, he wore Converse and the 1984 Olympic team was sponsored by Adidas. The NBA policy also required the shoes be 51% white and in accordance with the shoes that the rest of the team wore. Nike famously paid Jordan’s fines ($5,000 fine per game) for black and red sneakers and marketed Michael Jordan’s rebellious image through a series of commercials, making sure the public knew all about the ban, and managed to keep the public interested and the sales going even when Jordan was off-court with an injury in the following years.
If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:
The military backed Senate this week blocked a popular progressive candidate from becoming Prime Minister in Thailand. We look back at a particularly troubled year in the Kingdom’s history.
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Despite its status as a mecca for tourists, Thailand always has an undercurrent of political turmoil, violence, and corruption. The country has always been run by a tight knitted group of bureaucrats, princes, generals, and businessmen, who were reactionary against any slight challenge to their power. As a result, there have been 18 coups and 18 constitutions since 1932 in Thailand, each one staged to thwart the progressive forces from coming to power.
In late 1973, a popular uprising led to the end of the military dictatorship of Field Marshall Thanom. The king invited the chancellor of Thammasat University, a leading jurist, to form an interim government. However, democracy did not take root, and three years later, when Thanom returned from his exile, further student led uprising broke out. Popular refrains still levied against students and activists — of them being communist and anti royalist — were uttered and extremely violent suppression began.
On the night of October 5th 1976, five thousand students were gathered overnight at Thammasat to protest the return of Thanom. At 5:30 AM, a bomb was fired into the Thammasat grounds and shootings began. By 7:30 AM, the campus gates are smashed open, and paramilitary groups and radicalized right-wing protestors stormed the campus. Many died from police gunshots; others were lynched by the crowd, stakes thrust through their dead bodies and women stripped naked with stakes thrust through their breast or sexual organs.
Neal Ulevich, who was covering the protests for AP remembered:
The students had surrendered — a few were able to flee. The paramilitaries made them lie down on the ground. At that point I decided it was nearly over, and to leave before someone demanded my film. I moved to the campus gate. I could see commotion there. I worked my way through it and took a few photos — one, of two policemen escorting a student off campus as he was sucker-punched in the face by a rightist.
Then I saw crowds milling about two trees in Sanam Luang. Among those in the chaos at the gate was an elderly German tourist with an 8mm movie camera, apparently from the Royal Hotel across Sanam Luang. I screamed at him to leave before he was killed. He seemed to be having a good time and ignored me. At the first of the trees, I saw the chair/hanged student. I stayed a moment to see if anyone was looking at me. Then I made a few frames and walked over to the other tree, where another student was hanged. I made a few frames. After that I walked toward the hotel and hailed a taxi. Both hanged students were dead by the time I saw them.
I returned to the AP bureau desperate to have the darkroom tech develop the film and get the first of the prints to PTT [Post and Telephone Office] for radio-photo transmission. I was quite sure all international communications would be shut down or censored within a few hours. At that time, we could not send images from the bureau. Photos had to be printed, captioned and filed like a telegram from PTT. At the bureau I gave Denis Gray a quick summary of what I had seen. He was astonished and began questioning me closely. I told him to hold off until my film was developed and printed. He could see the entire photo record at that point; it spoke louder than words, as photos often do. When the film was developed, I selected the chair image and another, captioned them and dispatched them by messenger to the PTT, hoping to beat any closure of communications. Then I went back to work printing more of my pictures and a few by Mangkorn from earlier in the day. When the messenger returned I asked him if the PTT employees had said anything to suggest censorship. He said no, they just commented on the amazing images. That day we sent — as I recall — about 17 images, 12 of mine and the rest by AP Thai photographers.
The follow-up included images of bodies being burned. All the images cleared before the communications switch was turned off. To put things in perspective, sending 17 images was nearly unheard of, for reasons of effort and cost. But this was clearly a story that deserved to have all available resources thrown at it. We sent those images to Tokyo AP, where they were automatically relayed to New York and London AP. In the evening we began to hear that police had raided Thai newspapers seizing film of the events. Foreign agencies were not visited.
The chaos was used to justify a military coup later that same day. The military would insist that the students fired first – something protesters have always denied. Official figures put the death toll at 46, with 167 wounded and more than 3,000 students arrested. Unoffiically, the death toll was over 100. Nobody was held accountable for the atrocity, and the country’s successive governments have shown that they are still highly sensitive to discussion of it.
The photo above it inspired several Thai theatre productions and movies; and has been used in countless satirical internet memes. The word kao-ee, or ‘chair’ itself became a macabre euphemism in Thailand, a warning about what can happen to those with anti-establishment thoughts. Years later, when Thammasat University Drama Club re-enacted the hanging above (with an effigy which alledgedly stood for the then crown prince, the current king) it was accused of lese majeste and even the newspaper The Bangkok Post which re-printed the re-enactment got embroiled in the controversy.
Ulevich won the Pulitzer and World Press Photo Award for the photo. He recalled the irony.
When I won the Pulitzer, the Bangkok papers noted it on page one. They were very proud that a photographer from Bangkok had won the Pulitzer. They didn’t show the pictures.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
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The relationship between Tibet and China was historically complex, and Tibet, high in the Himalayas, had enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy throughout its history — periods of closer ties to China punctuated by periods of greater independence – and the country had long maintained a unique cultural, religious, and political identity separate from the mainland China.
In the 19th century, Tibet was considered a vassal state under the suzerainty of the Qing Dynasty, which then ruled China. The dynasty’s collapse and the political instability that followed provided Tibet to assert greater independence. The 13th Dalai Lama would declare Tibet’s independence in 1913 and expel Chinese officials from the region.
That independence was short-lived. In 1950, Communist China would launch an invasion, quickly overwhelming the poorly equipped Tibetan army. The 14th Dalai Lama, who had assumed power at the age of 15, was forced to negotiate and signed an agreement that acknowledged Chinese sovereignty over Tibet but guaranteed a degree of autonomy for the region. This agreement would also prove to be short-lived, as the Communist officials gradually increased their control over Tibetan affairs and implemented policies that aimed to assimilate the country into China. Monasteries and temples were destroyed, religious observances suppressed, and the nomadic Tibetans forced into settlements, leading to widespread unrest.
In 1959, a major uprising against the Communist rule erupted in Lhasa, the capital, the Chinese government responded with a violent crackdown. The Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.
Marilyn Silverstone was the only woman photojournalist to cover the lama’s arrival. She remembered hurrying to India’s far eastern Assam to cover the event:
When I got the confirming cable from Gamma Agency, I booked myself onto the plane they were chartering to take us journalists to Tezpur and back. At Tezpur it was a madhouse — for six days, we sweated and ran around in circles – no one knew anything, and we were sure the Indian government would just sprint HIM (Dalai Lama) past us. There was nobody who would or could, tell us anything.
Finally, on Friday, the plan was made known and we got our press cards. We piled into two buses and were driven to the Foothills camp of the Assam Rifles. There we found we were expected to stand way back from the scene. But at 07.45, the gate lifted open and THEY arrived. The stampede then began. It turned into a free-for-all, with all the Indian photographers practically smashed up against HIM so that no one could get a decent unimpeded shot.
After all the suspense, it was very exciting to see them arrive in the Jeeps. HIMSELF was absolutely sweet – smiled and laughed delightedly at the photographers and stood for them to take pictures, then moved on into the house. The big moment was for Heinrich Harrer [the Austrian Alpinist who had previously been the boy lama’s teacher in Lhasa and whose 1952 memoirs Seven Years in Tibet would later be turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt], who was brought by the Daily Mail. The Dalai Lama did a “double take” when he saw him, and later kept saying: “old friend, old friend”…
Off at the crack of dawn for Siliguri, where thousands of Tibetans from the hills waited with incense, banners, white scarves and a mournful Tibetan band, for the train to arrive. He came out in front of the station and mounted the usual podium – this time an enormously high one- and raised his hands in blessing, then came down and walked around it, re-entered the train which would probably carry him away from Tibet forever.’
It was on the station platform that Silverstone took the photo above, of the Dalai Lama being greeted by Robert J. Godet, an anthropologist and scholar on Tibetan culture (who was covering the lama’s arrival for Paris-Presse).
While awaiting on the station platform, Magnum photographer Brian Brake joked that he’d give Marilyn $500 if she would sneak into the train and get shots of the Dalai Lama. Silverstone, ‘in a split-second decision’, stepped aboard, with ‘no money, no passport, and no toothbrush – nothing but cameras and film’. A security officer saw Marilyn get on and chased her through the moving train, and caught her as she was trying to hide. After six hours of intense questioning, finally convinced Marilyn posed no threat, the police brought her back to Siliguri station and left her on the platform.
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Silverstone had been in India for mere months when she covered the events in Assam. She arrived on February 22, 1959 with a four-month assignment with The Lamp magazine — and then stayed in India for a further fourteen years. Years later, in 1977, she was ordained as a Tibetan nun, at the age of forty-eight, and later helped found a nunnery near Kathmandu— one of the first Tibetan Buddhist nunneries outside of Tibet.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
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Historically, the news photography was predominantly the field of Western photographers. In this context, the Gwangju incident which I blogged about earlier was also notable. Magazines like National Geographic and Life, papers like New York Times, other news organizations like BBC sent their reports around the world.
As such the ever widening war in Vietnam was mostly seen through the eyes of photographers like Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, and Daniel Camus who parachuted into the Indochina (literally in the case of Camus, who was air dropped into the garrison at Dien Bien Phu) even on the ground in Vietnam.
However, for some Vietnamese locals, the war was seen through the lens of guerrilla fighters who doubled as photographers. One such man was Tran Binh Khuol.
Aged 23, he joined the resistance to re-impose the French rule onto Indochina after the end of the Second World War, operating in Bac Lieu province in southern tip of Vietnam. He was arrested and exiled by the French authorities but escaped and returned to work for the propaganda department for the Viet Cong.
In between the French withdrawal and the escalation of the American war, Tran Binh Khuol worked at the press agency for the government (TTXVN, Vietnam News Agency), but soon he would be called again to the frontlines.
In 1963, he took his most memorable photos, that of North Vietnamese soldiers sinking in the mud carrying mortars that weighed up to 75 kilograms to attack a fort in Ca Mau. Ca Mau, though situated on the southern Mekong delta tip of South Vietnam, was a hotbed of Viet Cong activities in those days — and virtually the end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route which ran from North Vietnam through parts of Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam.
His photos showed the stoic facial expressions of the soldiers, especially the wounded ones, who displayed courage and determination akin to the spirit shown at Dien Bien Phu, where equally heavy artillery was hand carried up the bamboo forests, ravines, and rocky climbs to surprise and encircle the French garrison. Some were half-naked, wearing only shorts, and all of them were covered in black mud.
In 2007, Tran Binh Khuol’s photos from Ca Mau campaign were honored with the State Prize, the Vietnamese state’s award for literary and artistic works of merit. Tran Binh Khuol himself however had perished years earlier in the jungles. Having retreated into U Minh forest as the US Army began carpet-bombing the area, he died there in late 1968.
A century after its sinking, Titanic still fascinates and lures explorers to their doom. We look back at the week in 1985 when the wreck of the oceanliner was found:
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It was “the Mount Everest of wrecks.” Both its distance from land and depth – under 12,000 feet of waters roughly 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland in international waters – made the wreck of RMS Titanic difficult to access.
In fact the location was so remote that it was not found for over seven decades. Unlike today, where the name Titanic was well-known thanks to the movie and glossy magazines it inspired, back in the 1980s, it was just a distant history and obsession among groups of oceanographers. The general public were aware of the ship through two sources: Walter Lord’s famous book about the sinking A Night to Remember and the film Raise the Titanic, which made people believe that the ship was raised already and was now sitting in a dock in New York.
Oceanographer Robert Ballard approached the U.S Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic. The navy was interested because it would prove useful for investigating submarine wrecks.
Those were heady ways for sub-nautical adventures. Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October was released in October 1984 to critical acclaim (including praise from President Reagan). Earlier that summer, Ballard had begun his expedition, photographing USS Thresher, sank in 1963 off Cape Cod.
Realizing that his navy missions would give him not much time to hunt down the wreck of Titanic, Ballard sought a partnership with the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER) the following year. In July 1985, IFREMER’s Jean-Louis Michel had started exploring the area where Titanic was believed to have sunk using a technique known as “mowing the lawn” – towing a sonar back and forth across the search zone to brute force detection.
Ballard and Michel refined their efforts together.
After wrapping up his navy-funded mission — tracking down USS Scorpion off the coast of the Azores – Ballard had just 12 days to look for Titanic. The Scorpion mission also gave him an idea – at both Thresher and Scorpion, the current dispersed small bits of wreckage, creating a debris chain. Ballard decided to search for this debris trail instead, which could stretch as far as a mile.
On September 1, 1985, Ballard and Michel found the wreck. They passed over a boiler (photo above) of the vessel which was split in two and was covered with a light layer of sediment. Ballard would immediately seized his ship’s navigation charts to keep the location of the Titanic a secret. For next four days, the crew circled around the wreck site, exploring and photographing using Ballard’s underwater video sled, the Argo, until the supplies and the contract for the ship’s time ran out.
The crew arrived back to Cape Cod to cannon fire and marine bands. TV vans waited and there were so many photographers that it looked “like a Nikon convention on the dock,” recalled Ralph Bradshaw White, one of the photographers on the expedition.
Titanic’s forecastle, from 1985 expedition
It was footage by White and another photographer Emory Kristof that would provide the world with its first look at the Titanic’s wreck. The initial photos from the Argo were poor quality and often forgotten now (see the coverage in the world’s papers below), but better photos were produced when Ballard returned the following summer to catch a firsthand glimpse of the wreck from inside a manned submersible. Both White and Kristof would also return more than dozens of times to film the wreckage, with White boasting that he spent more time on the Titanic than the captain had.
Time Magazine, September 16, 1985
New York Times, September 6, 1985
Daily Mail, September 6, 1985
Denver Post, September 12, 1985
The 1991 footage by Kristof would result in IMAX film Titanica, which went on to inspire James Cameron to make his own movie about the ocean liner, the film where both White and Kristof’s footage were used, with Kristof advising on the videography and lighting.
Titanic’s bow, from 1986 expedition
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
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There is a reason this blog is called Iconic Photos, not Iconic Images or Iconic Moments. I believe that a single well-placed photograph can be better and impactful than a video clip. In its simplicity and focus, in its emotional intensity, and in its ability to leave before and after of a captured frozen moment to the viewer’s imagination makes the photograph a powerful tool.
It is the perfect medium to communicate horrors of a moment without visceral blood and gore. For instance, two traumatic moments from Vietnam War: immolation of Quang Duc and Execution of a Viet Cong guerilla were captured on film, but those film clips are rarely reproduced these days, whereas the photos became the moment that epitomized the war in Indochina. There are exceptions of course. Michael Buerk’s apocalyptic tones over the Ethopian famine; Brian Hanrahan counting the fighter jets out and counting them back in, Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s monarchial farewell and his successor’s equally grandiose inaugaration day were film moments that were historic.
What follows is a similar case.
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It was 1980 and it had been turbulent few months in South Korea.
In October 1979, there were pro-democracy protests in Busan and President Park Chung Hee, who had been the country’s dictatorial supremo for 18 years, was assassinated by his own security chief. In December, Major General Chun Doo-hwan staged a coup d’etat, arresting the army chief of staff on allegations of involvement in the assassination. In May 1980, another coup followed, once again led by General Chun, who forced the Cabinet to extend martial law, shut down parliament and the universities, ban political parties, further curtail the press, and arrest student leaders and politicians.
The next day — May 18 — students and residents rose up in Gwangju, a midsize city in the south of the country.
Hearing news of the unrest, Jurgen Hinzpeter, a reporter based in Tokyo for the German broadcaster ARD, and his sound technician Henning Rumohr, flew to Seoul. Using a driver arranged by an acquaintance, they headed south, ignoring ‘closed’ and detour signs at the expressway entrance, bypassing military checkpoints via through rural village roads, and finally making up a story that Hinzpeter’s boss was stranded in Gwangju and needed a taxi pick-up.
Hinzpeter was among the first foreign reporters to reach Gwangju. The New York Times remembered: “After the troops started killing protesters, residents had begun to arm themselves. A ‘citizens’ army’ sped through the streets in commandeered military jeeps and trucks, carrying weapons and munitions stolen from police stations, as people on the sidewalks chanted against the dictatorship.”
With local news censored by the government, Hinzpeter and the handful of other foreign correspondents were the main reporters covering the uprising. As telephone lines had been cut, some reporters walked miles to nearby villages where phones were still working to file their stories. As for Hinzpeter, he wrapped his exposed film in its original packaging to ensure that soldiers at the checkpoints think it had not been used.
Before flying out to handdeliver the footage in Tokyo, he hid it in a large can of cookies, which was gift-wrapped and ribboned to disguise as a wedding present. On May 22, the footage was handed in Tokyo and Hinzpeter flew back to South Korea on the same day. By now, things were escalating. The army has withdrawn to the rural outskirts of Gwangju, but only to wait for reinforcements. The final assault, which came on May 27 was bloody — officially, 200 people were killed; unofficially, it was ten times higher. The junta blamed “vicious rioters” and “communist agitators”.
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I considered myself well-read, but I haven’t heard about Gwangju Massacre until I watched a movie last month (more about that later). Gwangju was an important moment, but in the words of British historian G. M. Trevelyan, writing about 1848, it was a turning point where history refused to turn.
Hinzpeter’s footage, viewed outside the country, was a revealation, but in Korea, Gwangju marked a different shift. The Korean troops sent to Gwangju were at least nominally under American command (South Korean forces remained under the United Nations Command set up for the Korean war until 1978 and then replaced by a Combined Forces Command, led jointly by Americans and South Koreans. Even today, South Korea only has control of its military during peacetime, and the United States would take over in wartime), and the massacre ignited anti-American feelings previously unknown in a place where fifty thousand Americans died fighting the Communist North, and those feelings never really went away.
As for General Chun, his rule continued for seven more years, buffeted by periodic student demonstrations and bursts of repression. In 1988, with Seoul Olympics looming and South Korea’s international reputation on line, he finally relented to free elections – knowing that his deputy, a man also stained with the blood of Gwangju killings, would handily win, as the opposition vote would be split between two dissident candidates who despised each other as much as they disliked military rule. That prediction came to pass, but by the end of South Korea’s long democratic overhaul, in the late 1990s, both Chun and his deputy were convicted for their roles in the coup and the Gwangju massacre. Both were pardoned and released from prison less than a few months.
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Now onto the movie I mentioned earlier. In 2017, a movie was made about Hinzpeter ‘s trip to Gwangju but focusing on the taxi driver who took him there. He had given his name to Hinzpeter as Kim Sa-bok (a fairly uncommon name) but Hinzpeter failed to locate him subsequently. For “A Taxi Driver,” the filmmakers tried to contact every older South Korean named Kim Sa-bok but that none turned out to be the driver. Following the film’s critical success, the driver’s identity was confirmed by his son, who revealed that his father died of cancer in 1984.
In its wake as the most devastating Atlantic hurricane to date, Katrina exposed the failures of the government response, and the socio-economic disparities that existed in the Gulf Coast. With sustained winds of 175 mph (280 km/h), it was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded, and quickly overwhelmed the levee system in New Orleans, resulting in catastrophic flooding throughout the city.
The previous record holder at that time, Hurricane Andrew in 1992 hit primarily middle-class neighborhoods in Florida and the response to it was generally seen as more effective and coordinated compared — with the federal, state, and local authorities mobilizing resources quickly. The response to Katrina was slow — the delayed evacuations and shortages of supplies followed by insufficient coordination between various agencies. Katrina also disproportionately impacted low-income and minority populations, who lacked the means to evacuate and whose neighborhoods were first to be impacted when the levee system failed. Andrew resulted in 26 deaths, whereas more than 1,200 people lost their lives in Katrina.
In the days following the landfall, New Orleans city authorites told evacuees to gather at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center — the Superdome, the other gathering spot, was already overcrowded. Up to 25,000 people were huddled inside the convention center, waiting for buses to evacuate them, which never came. NPR recalled that conditions there were “worse than those inside a third-world refugee camp.”
An iconic image from those chaotic days came from the evacuation of the convention center: a weak and bruised elderly woman being wheeled away from the scene in her wheelchair, clutching the hand of a 5-year-old girl.
Nita LaGarde was 89, not 105, as the initial reports noted — and still claimed by some websites to this day. She had lived in the Ninth Ward, an area of New Orleans which was among the worst affected, and was accompanied by her longtime neighbors: Earnestine Dangerfield, 60, and Tanisha Belvin, Ms. Dangerfield’s 5-year-old granddaughter, who has lived with her all her life.
Ms. LaGarde had refused to leave New Orleans as the hurricane approached because she was injured during a previous evacuation. The three instead took refuge in a nearby two-story house, and eventually the roof, where Ms. Dangerfield tied herself to the others with an orange extension cord to keep them from falling off, from which they were rescued to the convention center. On 3rd September 2005 — four days after Katrina made landfall — they were evacuated from the Convention Center, the moment captured by Eric Gay above.
Gay arrived in New Orleans from San Antonio while it was still considered a category 3 hurricane. He stayed at a hotel in the French Quarter, asking for a room on a higher floor in the event of flooding, taking photos of businesses boarding up their windows, and evacuees at the Superdome. He recalled his photo above as, “It was a sweet moment. Kind of uplifting despite the whole ordeal” and the struggle of getting his photos transmitted to New York for distribution from a city where land phones were down and cell phones did not work.
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After three unsuccessful campaigns, Salvador Allende was finally elected in Chile in 1970 — the first Marxist president ever elected democratically anywhere in the world. His subsequent socialist reforms – which included nationalizing factories and agricultural estates, including mines belonging to Anaconda and Kennecott, US copper titans – put him quickly in the crosshairs of the United States.
The U.S. would intervene in Chile in many covert and overt ways to ensure that the Marxist government would fail — denying the country foreign credit, banning sales of spare parts and machinery. This led to the economy collapsing, the inflation skyrocketing and various strikes. The CIA was also backing middleclass business owners to disrupt the government’s plans – such as the October 1972 strike by trucking barons, which blocked the access to the capital Santiago.
By mid-1973, the situation was dire. Allende had survived a coup, and removed military officers from his government – an action that garnered him a censure from the parliament. Country was quickly heading into a constitutional crisis. Two military chiefs who opposed the military intervention in government had been removed (one by assassination, another via a road rage scandal) and the path was clear for the latter general’s successor, Augusto Pinochet, to stage a coup, with backing of the CIA.
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The photos in this post were taken on 11 September, the day of the coup. Allende was photographed, carrying a rifle, talking on the phone (allegedly) with Vice Admiral Patricio Carvajal Prado, one of the putschists (Carvajal would serve as Pinochet’s defense and foreign minister). A few minutes later, at 9:10 am, Allende made his famous farewell speech on live radio, already speaking of himself in the past tense, of his love for Chile and of his deep faith in its future.
Immediately afterwards, Allende went around La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, looking for good defense positions. As before, he was surrounded by his Group of Personal Friends (known by the Spanish acronym GAP, Grupo de Amigos Personales), informal armed guard trained and equipped by Cuba and maintained by the Socialist Party for Allende’s protection. Allende wore a metal combat helmet and carried a Soviet-made automatic rifle given to him by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Those were the last photos ever taken of Allende.
Later in the day, an official announcement was sent out that he had committed suicide with the same rifle. His supporters, as well as his widow and daughters, claimed that he was executed by the generals.
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Who took the photos above had long been disputed, and even when they were taken. It was sometimes alleged that they were from the previous coup attempt, the one that failed.
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The photos surfaced four months after the coup, on the front page of The New York Times. The paper’s Latin American correspondent, Marvine Howe, was given the photograph by an intermediary who said the photographer must remain anonymous. When they won the World Press photo award in 1973, the New York Times accepted the award on the unknown photographer’s behalf (Dane Bath of New York Times below).
The Times wrote: “Allende’s body was found in an office, but none of the photographs just obtained shows that scene. A Government spokesman in Santiago said that photographs taken later of Dr. Allende’s body were “really not suitable for publication.”
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A few names had been proposed as the photographer, including one mysterious “Davide”. In February 2007, the Chilean newspaper La Nación revealed that the photographer was Luis Orlando Lagos Vásquez, aka “Chico” Lagos, at the time La Moneda’s official photographer. The World Press photo attributes them to Lagos, as did Iconic Photos in our previous post.
Family of Leopoldo Vargas, another photographer working under Lagos in the official photographer team, claimed that Vargas took these photos.
Vargas recounted that in the photo above of the call between Allende and Prado, the President ended the call with “Do what you want, motherfuckers,” and told Vargas as he stormed out of the room: “Comrade, instead of carrying a camera, you should better carry a machine gun.”
With both Lagos and Vargas dead now, it is uncertain if this mystery would be resolved.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
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“We must have a bad phone connection,” asked General Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking head of Strategic Air Command. “It sounds like you are asking whether we have planes for carrying coal.”
It was June 1948, and on the other end of the call was General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany. Clay confirmed, “Yes, that’s what I said. Coal.”
LeMay, later the inspiration for the pugnacious and unreasonable Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, answered gruffly after a long pause, “The Air Force can deliver anything.”
Thus began the Berlin Airlift — two days after the Soviets had imposed a blockade on the city which was in their occupied zone to force the Allied occupying powers out.
What Clay had in mind was unthinkable — supplying 2.25 million people with food and fuel by air indefinitely. Initially, it began haphazardly. A “cowboy” operation, unauthorized by the higher-ups (President Truman only later approved the mission). The U.S. Air Force, after all, was a military organization without much experience in running transport and cargo operations. Yet, under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tunner, it became a streamlined and coordinated effort and an incredible feat of logistics.
At the peak of the airlift, cargo planes landed at Tempelhof every four minutes around the clock, and the daily tonnage of food and supplies brought into Berlin by the planes exceeded the amount of material that had been brought in by trains before the blockade. It was a defining moment that won the hearts and minds of the occupied and defeated Germans.
During a landing at Tempelhof, a pilot named Gail Halvorsen befriended the starving children who played around the airfield. Halvorsen, who had personal reservations about the airlift, grew up poor during the Great Depression and empathized with the children. He handed the children two sticks of gum and told them to come back the next day when he planned to airdrop more sweets from his plane. He would wiggle the wings of his aircraft so they would know it was him, he told the children.
Thus began the story of a man remembered in Germany as Der Schokoladen Flieger, the Chocolate Flyer. Not only did he live up to his promise, but Halvorsen also asked other pilots to donate their candy rations, and he had his flight engineer rock the airplane during the drop. More and more children showed up to catch his airdrops, and letters arrived requesting special airdrops at other points in the city.
It was against the rules, but when an Associated Press story appeared under the headline “Lollipop Bomber Flies Over Berlin,” Halvorsen’s superiors realized the PR opportunity. Candy and handkerchief donations arrived from all over America following the AP story (candy was dropped using handkerchiefs as miniature parachutes), and Halvorsen was dubbed Uncle Wiggly Wings in the press. Now officially sanctioned as ‘Operation Little Vittles’, dozens of pilots dropped more than 21 tons of candy in 250,000 small parachutes across Berlin.
The Soviets would soon recognize the futility of the airlift, but the standoff would ultimately last fifteen months. President Truman would use the crisis to his advantage and win an upset reelection victory, while his Secretary of Defense would descend into madness in the midst of an escalating crisis. All in all, when the airlift ended, the United States, Britain, and France had flown 278,228 flights altogether to supply isolated West Berlin.
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Operation Little Vittles was immortalized in a photo which had become as iconic as the candy bombers themselves — and later featured on posters and commemorative stamps.
The photo was taken by Henry Ries, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Nazi Germany and migrated to the United States before the war. He first arrived in the United States in 1937 but was sent back due to improper immigration papers. However, he was able to emigrate the following year and began selling vacuum cleaners to make a living. In 1943, he joined the U.S. Army as an aerial photographer and worked first in the Pacific theater, then in Europe. After the war, Ries returned to Germany and used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath.
Another famous Ries photo, titled ‘Germany’s future swings in front of Germany’s past,’ depicted children at an amusement park ride in Lustgarten in the shadow of the bombed-out ruin of Königliches Schloss, the seat of the last German Kaiser.
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Ries’ photos put into images the thundering words of Berlin’s Lord Mayor Ernst Reuter, the symbol of the Free Berlin. On September 1948, Reuter gave a speech in front of the burned-out Reichstag building, facing a crowd of 300,000 where he appealed to the world not to abandon Berlin — a moment also captured by Ries (above).
Reuter pled, “Ihr Völker der Welt … Schaut auf diese Stadt und erkennt, dass ihr diese Stadt und dieses Volk nicht preisgeben dürft, nicht preisgeben könnt!” (People of this world… look upon this city and see that you should not, cannot abandon this city and this people).
Ries’ photos complemented these words and shone a light on the plight of the defeated Germans, and their struggling lives: a woman ironing while her family slept in the same room; hardened black market traders; emaciated women returning from markets and rummaging in the streets for fuel; citizens planting modest vegetable gardens in the Tiergarten; ethnic Germans expelled from Silesia (surrendered to Poland after the war) and released prisoners of war. In his photo of poor market on Wittenbergplatz in front of the completely destroyed Kaufhaus des Westens, emaciated women offer pitiful bundles of herbs for sale and a man repairs a tattered shoe.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:
There was the weightiness of history to the moment above. Canossa perhaps or the memories of the papacies of the Renaissance and the Inquistion perhaps. A pope wagging finger at a kneeling man on the airport tarmac.
It was 1983 and Pope John Paul II was in Managua — on his first visit to Nicaragua. The kneeling priest was Ernesto Cardenal, who was then serving as the Minister of Culture in the country’s Sandinista government.
Although the Church played a major role in the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, it was split on its successors, with Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Managua leading sharp critics of the Sandinistas, and younger liberation theology priests like Cardenal joining the Sandinistas’ Marxist-Leninist revolution. For years, there was an ongoing feud of words and sometimes physical intimidation between two factions of the church.
The pope wasn’t there for a reconciliation. Even before his visit, the pope had been publicly demanding that Father Cardenal and four other priests (including his brother Fernando Cardenal, then education minister) resign their government positions. The Sandinistas also refused the Vatican’s demand to replace them, but insisted that its invitation to the pope still stood.
The pope, as equally minted as the Sandinistas (both had come to power in that pivot year of 1979), was undaunted by this defiance. But as he walked down the receiving line at the airport, decorated with a banner that said “Welcome to Free Nicaragua – Thanks to God and the Revolution,” he was still taken aback to see the priests (the Vatican had specificed that none of the priest-ministers should appear in the welcoming party) and especially Cardenal. Unlike other priests in clerical garb, he had showed up wearing a collarless white shirt, slacks and his signature black beret over his thick white hair. When he knelt to kiss the papal ring, the pope withheld his hand and wagged his finger at him.
His subsequent scolding was not audible, but the moment was broadcast around the world and the photo above was on the frontpage of newspapers. It was later recounted that the pope told Father Cardenal, “You must regularize your position with the church. You must sort out your affairs with the church.”
It was to be a challenging visit for the pope.
Later that day Sandinista supporters heckled him at mass when he asked the citizenry to reject the “popular church” that is allied with the revolutionary government and to accept the absolute authority of the Vatican. The Sandinistas partisans who were strategically placed at the head of the crowd of about 350,000 began replied by chanting: “One church on the side of the poor!” and “We want peace!” The Pope countered combatively. “Silencio!” he commanded – and then twice more until the hecklers were cowed.
At the end of the Mass, the Sandinistas played their anthem, after which the pope was driven back to the airport, where he was again greeted by the junta supremo Daniel Ortega (in glasses on the left in photo above), who reproached him for not praying for seventeen youths killed by the US-backed rebels, known as the Contras and defended the behavior of the Sandinistas during the Mass.
The pope left, insulted.
For the pope, brought up in Soviet Poland, Marxism was an existential evil. He returned to the Vatican in a combatively mood. On his next major trip, three motnhs after Nicaragua, he returned to Poland to denounce the government there as running “one great concentration camp”. He would also soon suspend Cardenal and other priests from the priesthood — the ban that would not be lifted until three decades later — and put the founding father of liberation theology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, under investigation by the Vatican’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
“Christ led me to Marx,” Cardenal reflected in an interview in 1984. “I don’t think the pope understands Marxism. For me, the four gospels are all equally communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”
On his second trip to Nicaragua in 1996, the pope referred to the earlier visit: “I remember the celebration of 13 years ago; it took place in darkness, on a great dark night.” By then, the Sandinistas were gone. They had been subjected to the widespread violence from the Contras, and were finally thrown out in a general election in 1990, also marred by massive America interference. Cardenal left his government office in 1987, having fallen out with the junta’s head, Daniel Ortega, and when Ortega returned to power in 2007, he would condemn the government as a thieving monarchy.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:
Iconic Photos 