The 1954 Capitol Attack

As the mob of rioters barged through the Capitol building on January 6^th 2021, they must have passed through the halls marked by earlier tumults.  It seemed unimaginable in the post-9/11 world of the ever vigilant security state, but the Capitol was bombed three times (in 1914, 1971, and 1983, perpetrated to protest against the US involvement in WWI, Laos, and Grenada respectively), and the members of the Congress frequently accosted by violent constituents (a schizophrenic showed up at Ted Kennedy’s senate office wielding a knife as the senator readied for his presidential campaign).

And then there was the photo above, which looked down upon the Jan 6^th mob from the Republican and Democratic cloakrooms. It marked a moment in March 1954 when three young House Pages carried out a wounded member of Congress down the steps of the Capitol in the aftermath of a shooting by Puerto Rico secessionists.  Earlier, unfurling a Puerto Rican flag and shouting Viva Puerto Rico libre!, four of them had fired 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols onto the House floor from the visitors’ balcony, wounding five Representatives, one seriously.

(More details about the attack here)

Three teenage pages — Bill Goodwin, Bill Emerson, and Paul Kanjorski – carried out the injured Representatives on stretchers into a crowd of reporters gathering outside. Emerson pointed at the photographers and yelled “No photos!” even as the photo above was snapped. The photo was soon on the newspaper front pages all over the country and LIFE magazine called it the “Photo of the Year.”

All five wounded representatives eventually recovered. The secessionists were arrested, got lengthy prison sentences, and were eventually pardoned by President Cartier two decades later. Emerson and Kanjorski returned to the Congress as representatives, the former, Republican from Missouri and the latter, Democrat of Pennsylvania. As for official Washington, its record of poor security measures lingered on:  a little more than two years later, in April 1956, Ms Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland (who was later described as ‘disheveled, vague, and not so lucid’) slipped out of a White House public tour and wandered around the Executive Mansion for over two hours, starting fires: five in total, including one in the Red Room, while President Eisenhower worked in his office 250 feet away.

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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. 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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Lenin and Stalin

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Even today, photographers who attempt to take pictures inside the mausoleum on the Red Square where Vladimir Lenin lay in repose are stopped by the sentries. In 1955, that didn’t deter British tourist Christopher Scott, who had bought his first camera only fourteen days earlier.

Entering the tomb with his camera conspicuously hanging from his neck, Scott kept close to the person in front of him in the line, hoping to hide his camera from the guards. Reaching the bodies, he focused and took a single photo and walked out. Not only until three weeks later, when he returned from his holidays, did he discover the perfectly framed photo he took of the biers above.

All the more remarkable was that Scott captured a rare historical moment: For seven years, until his body was taken out and buried by the Kremlin Wall, Joseph Stalin’s embalmed body shared a spot next to Lenin’s. Although the photo above didn’t show it clearly, Stalin’s body was dressed in his uniform as the Marshal of the Soviet Union, decorated with golden buttons and epaulets and state orders, while Lenin was in a simple black suit, devoid of any awards. “Bathed by spotlights set in the ceiling, preserved by paints, cosmetics and all the arts of embalming science, their faces bear none of the marks of the bitter, turbulent years in which, by conspiracy, revolution and brutal dictatorship, they made modern Russia,” Life magazine wrote of their bodies.

At his death, Stalin had been the paramount leader of the Soviet Union for twenty-nine years – after years of unleashing his ire onto the peoples of Eastern Europe, he too succumbed to his own fickle terror. Having purged doctors of Jewish ancestry by accusing them of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders and having cowed his staff with orders not to disturb him during sleep under any circumstances (disobedience punishable by death), there was no one to revive him when he didn’t wake up at his usual time. Roy Medvedev, author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge, placed the number of victims killed by Stalin’s regime at forty million people.

De-Stalinization began in 1956, with gradual removal of his decrees, photos, and statues all over the USSR. His embalmed body however remained in the Mausoleum stubbornly until 1961, when Dora Lazurkina, an arch-Bolshevik who had been an apartment mate of Lenin once and was exiled by Stalin, denounced its presence. Proving that ironically in a godless Soviet Union, such views still prevailed, Lazurkina couched her words in metaphysical terms: “I consulted with Ilyich, as if he stood before me as if alive and said: it is unpleasant for me to be next to Stalin, who brought so much trouble to the party”.

The very next day, the body moved out of the mausoleum and was reburied.

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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. 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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Beirut | Don McCullin

In January 1976, Christian Falangist fighters “cleared out” Quarantina, a Muslim neighborhood in Christian-dominated East Beirut. The Minet-el-Hosn district, a seaside area of downtown Beirut known for its hotels, became one of the frontlines of the religious war that began.  The high-rise hotels offered perfect spots for fighters from both sides to launch rockets.

The image that defined that conflict was that of young Lebanese Christians, one with a machine gun and another playing on a looted mandolin serenading the body of a dead Palestinian girl in the middle of the street. The photo above taken by Don McCullin, then working for the Sunday Times, shows the grim absurdity of war and culture of fear, generational trauma, machismo, pretense, and inhumanity that envelopes it.

McCullin remembers:  

Once in Beirut, we used to cross from side to side without passports or press cards. One day I met the wrong faction and I carried the wrong card. I was told that I was going to have my throat cut. … I was held in a room for an hour, and I must confess I was never more afraid. It was an Arab left-wing group that had caught me trying to go into the Christian area, where a massacre had occurred the previous day. When I was released, instead of going back to the hotel and trying to control my shakes I crossed into the Christian sector and met some Phalange groups. I had dreaded being slowly killed by a butcher’s knife and was in a state of shock. I knew it wasn’t going to be a great day. In such a place I have a bad day every day. Inside the Christian sector I saw bodies all over the place. The clothes had been fired, so I saw a husband and wife lying side by side in flames. There were piles of burned corpses.

I saw some Christian Phalangists whom I’d been with the day before. They had an old man, a Palestinian who had come out and surrendered to them. They told him to take his trousers down. Someone pulled out a huge knife and was going to cut off his penis.

The man with the knife told him to put his camera away. “Take no photos, my friend,” he said to him, “otherwise I kill you.”

“Further down the same road, we heard strumming. A young boy was playing a mandolin ransacked from a half-burnt house. The boy was strumming it among his mates, as if they were at a picnic among almond groves.”

Ironically, one boy invited McCullin to take a picture, so he took two quick frames. He knew what he had, a photo that what “would tell the world something of the enormity of the crime that had taken place,” a carnival rejoicing in the midst of carnage, telling of what Beirut had become. McCullin notes: The irony was the association of strumming a guitar to a girl who is very much alive and with whom you’re in love. This whole situation was reversed. Instead of wooing the live and beautiful girl, this man was insulting the dead girl. He was posing.

The Falangists issued a death warrant for McCullin, who escaped Lebanon by hitching a ride with two Japanese typewriter salesmen. His photos from Beirut won him World Press Photo Award.

As for Lebanon, the country took decades to recover. Beirut was notionally divided into a Muslim-controlled western sector and a Christian-dominated eastern sector — a demarcation that eventually became the Green Line.  Before the war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Levant, and celebrities and politicians had frequented the waterfront hotels of the Minet-el-Hosn. That Beirut disappeared. Many hotels were rebuilt, but one, the Holiday Inn, remains in ruins (due to disagreement between the owners on how to rebuild) – a poignant reminder of the Battle of the Hotels.

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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. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

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Dresden, 1945

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Fire bombing of Dresden was one of the most controversial actions of the Second World War:. Between 13 February and 15 February 1945 (twelve weeks before the final capitulation of Germany), 3,900 tons of high-explosives and incendiary devices were delivered in four air raids carried out by 1,300 bombers. Thirteen square miles of the city and the estimates of civilian dead vary from 100,000 to 130,000 — twice the amount that perished during the entire London Blitz. Nearly a thousand invaluable masterpieces (mainly from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) were lost or destroyed.

After the war, it was common practice by the photographers to illustration the city’s devastation from atop the cityhall tower, Rathaustrum. The rubble-strewn landscape appeared in various photos by Ernst Schmidt, W. Hahn, Willi Rossner, Hilmar Pabel and many other photographers. What made the photo above by Richard Peter sen. unique was that other photographers shot the photos of the devastation beyond sixteen larger-than-life sandstone figures that ringed the tower. Peter, however, included one of the figures in his photo and juxtaposed it.

Peter remembered that he had to climb up the tower three times:

Rubble, ruins, burnt-out debris as far as the eye can see. To comprise the totality of this barbaric destruction in a single picture seemed at most a vague possibility. It could be done only from a bird’s eye view. But the stairs to almost all the towers were burned out or blocked. In spite of the ubiquitous signs warning ‘Danger of Collapse,’ I nonetheless ascended most of them – and finally, one afternoon, the City Hall Tower itself. But on that day, the light was from absolutely the wrong direction, thus making it impossible to take a photograph.

The next day I climbed up again, and while inspecting the tower platform, discovered an approximately ten-foot-high stone figure – which could not in any way be drawn into the picture, however. The only window which might have offered the possibility for this was located around 13 feet above the platform, reachable only from inside the tower.

Two stories down, I found a 16-foot stepladder that someone may have carried up after the fire to assess the extent of the damage. The iron stairway was still in good repair. How I managed to get that murderous ladder up the two stories remains a riddle to this day. But now I was standing high enough over the figure and the width of the window also allowed the necessary distance. The series of exposures made with a Leica, however, resulted in such plunging lines, that the photographs were almost unusable. In this case only a quadratic camera could help, but I didn’t own one.

After two days, I finally hunted one down, climbed the endless tower stairs for the third time, and thus created the photograph with the accusatory gesture of the stone figure — after a week of drudgery effort and scurrying about.”

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Commonly mistaken as an angel, the statue was actually Bonitas, a personification of Kindness. It had once overlooked a magnificent city, so-called ‘Florence-on-the-Elbe’, the former seat of the Electors of Saxony. Now beyond its outstretched arms was a sea of ruins.  Peter included the photo in his detailed record of the city’s ruins — Dresden, eine Kamera klagt an (Dresden, a camera accuses) — 50,000 copies of which was published, an astonishing large printrun for the time. For Peter, the loss was personal: the Nazis had banned him from practicing photography due to his Communist sympathies in 1933, and his pre-1933 archives were lost in the firebombing of the city.

The decision to bomb the city brimming with refuges fleeing from the advancing Red Army was approved by the very top brass and was keep so secret that the airmen were under the impression that they were bombing the army headquarters, barracks, and poison gas plants. In fact, Dresden had no war industry. The strategy too was cynical and iniquitous: since bomb shelters could provide protection for only three hours in a burning city (due to overheated grounds and walls), the second attack was launched precisely at the moment when everyone had to go back outside.

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Peter’s book also has two other photographs that were notable — of bodies unearthed from the cellars in which they had been entombed. Top right, on the left hand page, the body of long haired woman, facial features still partly discernable; opposite page, a corpse wearing a swastika armband. They were reminiscent of ancient tombs: preserved clothes, bones and hair. Top left, facing the picture of a museum skeleton, shown in silhouette against the ruins, was the photo of a wall where the living chalked their messages looking for their dead relatives. One read, “Mother, we’re trying to find you.” Peter’s book was banned by East Germany’s socialist rulers not long after it had been published, and not republished again until 1980.

Many newspapers toed the official line that Dresden was a major military target; when the AP reported, “Allied air chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombings of German population centers as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler’s doom”, the British government banned its report. It was three more weeks before the Manchester Guardian published an account revealing many civilians died in a horrifying manner.

In a twisted irony, two hideous atrocities of the Second World War met in this ‘Balcony of Europe’: the cremation of the dead in Dresden was supervised by SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Karl Streibel, the man who made his name burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp. A funeral pyre at Dresden burnt for five whole weeks.

The Marlboro Man

He was the Most Influential Man Who Never Lived.  Though there were many Marlboro Man models over time until 1999 (but only three of them succumbed to lungs cancer), the original inspiration for the Philip Morris cigarette advertising campaign came via Life magazine photographs by Leonard McCombe from 1949.

Clarence Hailey Long (above) was a 39-year-old, 150-pound foreman at the JA ranch in the Texas panhandle, a place described as “320,000 acres of nothing much.” Once a week, Long would ride into town for a store-bought shave and a milk shake. Maybe he’d take in a movie if a western was playing. He was described as “as silent man, unassuming and shy, to the point of bashfulness [with a] face sunburned to the color of saddle leather [with cowpuncher’s] wrinkles radiating from pale blue eyes.” He wore “a ten-gallon Stetson hat, a bandanna around his neck, a bag of Bull Durham tobacco with its yellow string dangling from his pocket, and blue denim, the fabric of the profession”. He said things like, “If it weren’t for a good horse, a woman would be the sweetest thing in the world.” He rolled his own smokes.

In 1954, Philip Morris, then the country’s smallest cigarette maker, decided to change the image of its Marlboro brand filter cigarettes, which was targeted primarily to women with the slogan “Mild as May”. The company wanted to sell Marlboro to men, and it asked the Chicago ad agency led by Leo Burnett to design a campaign.

Burnett sat in his Wisconsin farmhouse with his creative team and asked, “What’s the most masculine type of man?” A writer said, “Cowboy,” and Burnett recalled Long’s face and story from Life magazine. The “Marlboro Cowboy” and “Marlboro Country” campaigns based on Long boosted Marlboro to the top of the worldwide cigarette market and Long to the top of the marriage market: Long’s Marlboro photographs led to marriage proposals from across the nation, all of which he rejected.

By the time the Marlboro Man went national in 1955, sales were at $5 billion, a 3,241% jump over the previous year. Over the next decade, Burnett and Philip Morris experimented with other manly types — ball players, race car drivers and rugged guys with tattoos (often friends of the creative team, sporting fake tattoos); all worked, but the Marlboro Man worked the best.

By the time the first article linking lung cancer to smoking appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1957, the Marlboro sales were at $20 billion. Before the Marlboro Man, the brand’s U.S. share stood at less than 1%, but in 1972 (a year after the cigarette ads were banned from American televisions) it became the No. 1 tobacco brand in the world — a position it has maintained ever since. More than 43 percent of all cigarettes bought in the United States in 2018 were Marlboros.

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Douglas MacArthur and Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, 1950

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When President Obama fired General Stanley McCrystal yesterday, the Americans were reminded of another episode from their military history — the firing of General Douglas MacArthur by Harry Truman.

The slow and plodding Truman administration, then struggling with the nascent Cold War, annoyed bombastic and gung-ho MacArthur.  The general believed Truman was unfit to be his commander-in-chief while the latter thought the general was “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat”.

A bone of contention concerned Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, whom the general was specifically asked by the White House to stay clear of. Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung had taken over China, chasing Chiang’s Nationalists off to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). As the conflict in Korea grew, Truman felt that courting Chiang might prompt the entry of Red China and the Soviet Union into the Korean peninsular. MacArthur, however, believed Chiang could be a valuable ally, if not an ideal one: “If he has horns and a tail, so long as Chiang is anti-Communist, we should help him,” he declared. “We can try to reform him later,” he added.

In late July 1950, Douglas MacArthur visited Formosa under his own initiative, and was photographed (above) kissing the hand of Madame Chiang. Madame Chiang, an urbane daughter of Shanghai socialites, looked delighted, but the general public in Taiwan was shocked at the public display of affection and intimacy. Equally incensed were President Truman and the etiquettists. 

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For the latter, MacArthur was not only kissing a gloved hand, but also wearing his hat and grasping a pipe in his left hand. The question of whether this was proper for a gentleman was furiously debated, and ensared grandees around the world. Even the Duc de Levis Mirepoix, the French aristocrat and esteemed authority on manners (being the writer of La Politesse, Son Role, Ses Usages) weighed in and noted that it was okay.

Truman couldn’t care less. In September, he met the general for the first and the only time. When he decided to dismiss the hero of the Pacific Treater in April, 1951, the Army, including MacArthur was the last to know. The public outrage was unprecedented; newspapers reacted furiously, with the New York Times lamenting “Asia apparently will be surrendered to Communism.” City councils adjourned. The American Legion was outraged, and in California, Truman was hung in effigy. Truman’s approval ratings pummeled to low 20s, and he decided not to seek a second term.

MacArthur, on the other hand, returned triumphant. Half a million greeted him on his arrival in San Francisco; New York threw him the biggest ticker-tape parade ever, with five million people turning out to see MacArthur. The general gave an address to a defiant Congress; the speech which was interrupted by fifty ovations ended with the iconic line, “Old Soldiers never die, they just fade away.” In fact, that’s what happened to the general. His subsequent presidential candidacies came to nothing, and the only American who reigned as a de facto emperor fade away into oblivion. 

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Douglas MacArthur Returns to the Philippines, 1945

General Douglas MacArthur and photographer Carl Mydans both experienced tumultuous few years the Pacific Theater before arriving at this moment. MacArthur was driven from the Philippines by the Japanese in March 1942, declaring emphatically, “I shall return.” Two months earlier, Mydans, covering the war for Life magazine, was taken prisoner in Manila. He was held for nearly two years before being repatriated in a POW exchange.

In October 1944, Douglas MacArthur made good on his pledge, storming ashore at Leyte, an island in the central Philippines.

Above photo, taken three months later during the landings at Luzon-Lingayen Gulf in the north of the Philippines, was invariably used to commemorate “the return.” Many insisted that the picture was staged — an allegation Mydans disputed through his life. He would point out that Douglas MacArthur was usually uncooperative with photographers and insist that the general only did the walk once.

However, it had a complicated history. Bombastic MacArthur certainly had an idea on what sort of image he would like to be disseminated. During Leyte landings in October, Major Gaetano Faillace, an army photographer assigned to MacArthur (Faillace went on to take pictures of MacArthur’s historic meeting with the Japanese Emperor the following year) took photos of the general coming ashore.

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Douglas MacArthur was mad at the beachmaster who insisted that the landing craft be parked offshore, making the general wade through the water. Faillace’s photo reflected that anger and the general was pleased. He looked determined and heroic, in his open-necked uniform and signature dark glasses, flanked by staff officers and helmeted troops. When the next landings came, he knew precisely the sort of photos he wanted.

This time, he didn’t need to wade through the waters. The Navy had quickly built a small pontoon pier, but MacArthur ordered his boat to turn away from the pier. He knew Mydans and other photographers would be on the beach — Mydans was on a different landing craft and rushed ashore via the pontoon. When he saw MacArthur’s landing craft turn away parallel to the shore, Mydans realized something.

“Having spent a lot of time with MacArthur,” Mydans said, “it flashed on me what was happening. He was avoiding the pontoons.” The photographer ran along the sand until the craft headed inwards. “I was standing in my dry shoes waiting.”

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That day, Mydans was working as a press pool photographer, which gave any news organization free license to use the image. On January 20, 1945, a tightly cropped version of the photo, above, focusing on MacArthur and doing away with the other photographer and the shirtless soldier who had annoyed the general so much, appeared in newspapers.

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When Life magazine covered the landings a month later in an article penned by Mydans, editors used the uncropped version as well as other photos Mydans took moments before and after, including an unflattering shot of MacArthur being helped down the ramp of the landing craft.

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The Coffins, 2004

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In 1991, when his gruesome photo of a dead Iraqi soldier burnt in tank during the Gulf War was published, Ken Jarecke remarked: “If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.” For four presidential administrations — from the Gulf War until 2009 – there was a ban on the news media photographing the flag-covered caskets of American soldiers killed in war, imposed by the military, which viewed that the media had lost them the war in Vietnam.

The ban became an issue on Sunday, April 18, 2004, The Seattle Times published a large front-page photograph depicting several flag-covered coffins inside a transport plane, bound for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the largest U.S. military mortuary. The photo had arrived at a particularly fraught moment for the military, as the American occupation of Iraq bogged down and the death toll rose alarmingly. Amid a growing insurgency, widespread uprisings, and a major crisis in Fallujah, that April would turned out to be the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since the war began.

The photos came from no photojournalist, but from Tami Silicio, a 50-year old civilian cargo worker, working the night shift at Kuwait International Airport for Maytag Aircraft, a military contractor responsibility for shipping supplies (including the dead bodies) to and from Iraq.

Silicio shared the photos with a friend, a fellow military contractor with whom she had worked in Kosovo, who then forwarded it to Barry Fitzsimmons, photo editor at The Seattle Times. Fitzsimmons contacted Silicio for her permission to print the photo, which was readily granted.

Silicio maintained that she had no political objective in mind. She recalled how the aircraft interior felt like a shrine and how the staff went about their task securing the coffins with solemnity. As a mother who had lost a child herself (her oldest son died of a brain tumor, aged 19), she wanted to bring comfort to families, to “let the parents know their children weren’t thrown around like a piece of cargo, that they, instead, were treated with the utmost respect and dignity.”

Three days later after the photo ran, Silico and her husband, a co-worker who she recently married, were fired for having “violated Department of Defense and company policies.” When it appeared that she might be fired, Silicio told her friend: “I took that photo from my heart. I don’t care if they sent me home or if I have to work for $9 an hour the rest of my life to pay my mortgage.”

“I feel honored. The photo was honest. It captured the respect for the dead and that’s what it should have been about. That photo stirred up a whole lot of stuff around this nation. People’s emotions were touched.”

Silicio would prove to be prescient. Unable to get another contractor job and unable to keep up with her mortgage payments, she lost her home and struggled financially subsequently. In 2016, long after the ban was lifted, she looked back and stated that she did not regret her decision to allow publication of the photo.

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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. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos

Falun Gong

Falun Gong protests in April 1999 symbolized much that came before and much that came since – so did the repression that followed.  

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Last week, as Chinese cities erupted into anti-lockdown protests, commentators look back at the student led protests of 1989, which ended with the Massacre on the Tiananmen Square. Less remembered were the events ten years later, in 1999, when 10,000 silent protestors surrounded the Zhongnanhai, the residence of Chinese Communist Party’s governing elite in Beijing.

The protestors belonged to the Falun Gong, a spiritual movement, which began as a mixture of religious and athletic practices that the Chinese have performed for centuries. It began in 1992, when a former trumpet player and grain clerk named Li Hongzhi began preaching an amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional Qigong exercises, publishing books, selling VHS tapes and giving lectures across China to gain a followership of 60 million.

The group’s bible was Li’s rambling dissertation, Zhuan Falun, where he claimed that he could fly and heal diseases and that his followers could stop speeding cars via the their belief. Among his writings were that the Falun Gong emblem existed within the body of the practitioners, that his followers could see through the celestial eyes in their foreheads, that demons and extraterrestrials were everywhere, and that Africa contained a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor. (China was always susceptible to this sort of cultist ramblings. In addition to Mao’s Little Red Book, back in the 1850s, another village teacher who fell asleep and dreamt himself to be Jesus’s younger brother caused a religious civil war that killed 30 million people).

The protests  — the largest since 1989 – stunned the politburo on several levels. Firstly, the Falun Gong was able to amass 10,000 people on a few days’ notice. Secondly, the group’s membership was believed to include many party members, retired party grandees, and top military brass. And taking place as it did just before the People’s Republic was to celebrate its 50^th Anniversary in October 1999 (where floats would carry giant portraits of Mao, Deng, and Jiang past Tiananmen Square) was a signal embarrassment for the Party.

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President Jiang remarked that he wanted to see Falun Gong “defeated”; in a brief echo of the rifts between reformists and reactionaries during the 1989 Protests, Jiang would also criticize his Premier Zhu, a reformist technocrat, for being “too soft” in his handling of the Falun Gong. Jiang’s own response was swift and unrelenting, in a campaign that resembled the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Within three months, the practice of Falun Gong had been banned, and the government denounced it as a cult trying to undermine the state, on behalf of the Western Powers (Li had moved to the United States a few years prior).

In a template that would be later followed in Xinjiang, more than 10,000 Falun Gong followers were sent to labor and re-education camps. Many died. A nationwide “responsibility system” (a precursor to the current “social credit” system) was introduced. This system deemed that each protestor symbolized a failure to take action as all levels  –  local leaders, police, neighborhood cadres, employers, and family members – and all would be collectively punished. This enabled the Party to use ordinary people to rat out Falun Gong practitioners and discipline them. Both local and foreign companies and factories drew up lists of Falun Gong practitioners and fired them.

The photo above, which encapsulated the Orwellian maxim of “If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever”, was by AP photographer Chien-min Chung, who was nominated for a World Press Photo Award for his coverage.

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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. 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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Jiang Zemin (1926 – 2022)

Jiang Zemin, a president and a meme, died this week, aged 96.

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On “60 Minutes” in 2000, he was asked whether he was running China as a ‘developmental dictatorship’. Jiang Zemin was defiant. “Of course not,” he answered, capping an interview where he quoted from the Gettysburg address.

He was colorful, even eccentric, compared to grey apparatchiks who made up the Chinese Communist Party. A showman (playing public games of ping pong, showing off his Hawaiian guitar skills, crooning the Chinese community of L.A. with a selection from “Beijing Opera”), a boor (combing his hair in front of the Spanish king [above], publicly berating Hong Kong journalists with his thickly-accented English, applauding enthusiastically at his own portrait during a Communist Party parade), a charmer. He gave bear hug to a stunned President Yeltsin at a press conference in Beijing as their countries settled their border issues. He sang a karaoke version of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” at the Asia-Pacific summit in 1996 with Fidel Ramos of the Philippines [below], and often broke out into “O Sole Mio” at banquets (once with Pavarotti). He asked Condoleezza Rice to dance with him, and at another press conference, this time with Bill Clinton, there was much debate and light-hearted banter – a turn of events which would be quite unimaginable nowadays.

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He had to be a charmer, as he travelled far and wide to build support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. That same visit to America had included a stop at Harvard where he joked that even at his age (71), his hearing is still sharp enough to hear the demonstrators outside, and that he would simply have to speak louder. He also appeared to have admitted a certain responsibility for the Tiananmen massacre:  “It goes without saying that, naturally, we may have shortcomings and even make some mistakes in our work.”

Those were the days. No Chinese leader before or since had been or would ever be that candid, that ingratiating again. But Jiang had made a career out of being agreeable: first as one of the “flower-vases” – a term for low-level technocrats who were all decoration, no action; then as an unassuming and peripheral Politburo member; and finally as a compromise candidate between the warring hardliners and reformists in the wake of Tiananmen, and an agreeable front man for the grey eminence of Deng Xiaoping. 

His rule domestically was a time of quiescence bliss – but not for the Tibetans or Falun Gong supporters that he persecuted, nor for state-owned employees who lost their jobs as China privatized – but Jiang encapsulated China’s peaceful rise in many ways. He stood for a time where it seemed possible that China could still be a normal pluralistic society. His 1997 Politburo standing committee was the first time in Chinese history that the state had not had a soldier at the core of its power (perhaps first time since the days of Dowager Empress Cixi) and his retirement, albeit protracted, was the only time in the Chinese Communist Party’s history that a peaceful handover of power took place.

After his retirement, Jiang’s images have become gifs and emojis on Chinese social media. It was with a mixture of affection and hilarity that he was often portrayed him as a toad, alluding to his wide mouth, portly physique, square spectacles, and often high-waisted trousers. The unlikely new fans who came of age and prosperity during Jiang’s presidency called themselves “toad-worshippers”.

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Most memorable images of Jiang were of his public swims: at Waikiki Beach in Hawaii with black googles and a pinkish-purple swimhat, and floating languidly on the Dead Sea during a state visit to Israel – first by a Chinese president.  Rumors about his health had persisted throughout his presidency – at Hong Kong handover in 1997, Jiang looked unhealthy leading to rumors that he had suffered a heart attack. These swims were his attempts to prove otherwise, but they were unfavourably compared with Mao’s Great Swim across the Yangzi. No Chinese leader since had conducted such performative acts of athleticism, even though the elite still trundle down annually for a leadership conference at Beidaihe, a beach resort on the Bohai Sea where Mao loved to swim. (Despite Chairman Xi’s assertion to the Washington Post that, “I like sports, and swimming is my favorite,” there’s no photo of his swimming).  

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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. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

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East Germany | 1953

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Earlier this year, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Yuval Noah Harari wrote a punchy editorial in the Guardian. One line stood out: “In the long run, stories count for more than tanks,” and reminded me of this photo.

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Unrest had been brewing in East Germany for a while. Uncle Joe had died a few months earlier, in March 1953, but his paranoid policies to tighten Communist rule over the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany were leading to unrest, disquiet, and economic turmoil. In his last year, Stalin had been rebuffed in his attempt to create a neutral, reunified Germany, and reacted to it by collectivization of agriculture, nationalization of private enterprises, and attacks on the middle class and the Evangelical Church. Half a million Germans fled to the West in 1952 alone.

On June 16, 1953, construction workers marched down Stalinallee to the seat of the Communist power to demand that it rescind a diktat increasing work hours.  The workers also called for a general strike for the very next day: a call that was picked up by RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) and broadcast throughout East Germany.

On June 17, more than one million people across 700 cities, towns and villages answered the call. The revolt — the first such uprising against the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe — presaged the more famous revolts: in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1980. Vladimir Semyonov, the Soviet military administrator of East Germany, practically wrote the playbook for the future Soviet responses to such unrests, when he declared a state of emergency and sent tanks into the streets.

Estimates of people killed varied: official East German accounts at twenty, Western accounts at 500, and Semyonov himself put it at around 200 in his memoirs. More than 1,000 were convicted of having taking part in an “attempted fascist coup”. The photo above, of two young men throwing cobblestones at Soviet tanks in a David versus Goliath encounter on Leipziger Straße was reprinted in the LIFE magazine and later featured on a stamp after the German Reunification.

The West German government declared June 17 to be a public holiday (Day of German Unity, Tag der deutschen Einheit) – a commemoration they celebrated in the West until 1990 when after the Reunification, it was capitalized to be Tag der Deutschen Einheit and moved to October 3rd.

Little remembered today, the uprising was seminal moment, which made two things clear. Firstly, it revealed the Western powers’s reluctance to get involved in a land war in Eastern Europe, no matter how poignant and heartrending images were (Life ran a four page spread), after a costly and bitter ‘police action’ in Korea. More importantly, as the Soviets turned their weapons against the very workers in whose name they were justifying their tyranny, the Communism’s allure looked that much dimmer – especially in France and Italy where communist sympathies ran high in those post-War years.

Tony Judt writes about Prague Spring: “the illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected, that the core ideals of democratic pluralism might somehow still be compatible with the structures of Marxist collectivism; that illusion was crushed under the tanks … and it never recovered … Communism in Eastern Europe staggered on, sustained by an unlikely alliance of foreign loans and Russian bayonets: the rotting carcass was finally carried away only in 1989. But the soul of Communism had died years before.” Even before Prague, that lesson was clear on the streets of East Germany in 1953.

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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. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos