For years it has been in development, but in recent months, there has been remarkable breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — especially in the field of generative AI, that enables machines to create text and images.
The operative word is create. AI creates. It doesn’t provide facts, will lie with brazeness of a politician, and doubledown on mistakes (e.g. 1+1 = 3). But its artistic abilities are great. You can ask AI to write a James Bond script, paint Spongebob in style of Van Gogh, or compose an ode to Einstein in iambic pentameter.
So it can paint. Can it take photos in a style of a particular photographer. This is a tricky terrain since AI-generated images can still look surreal, dreamlike, and artificially lit — not a bad thing for paintings but can be tricky for photos, where you can end up with uncanny valley.
I set out to explore.
I use Henri Cartier-Bresson — partly because he was arguably the most famous and accessible photojournalist of last century (meaning there’s a lot of photos by him as reference material) and he has a distinctive style and visual elements that AI can learn to recognize. (Midjourney maintains a training set of photographers).
[February 2022] China. AI cannot generate legible text. I think lower righthand corner is supposed to be an eunuch, common in many of HCB’s China photos, but the figure is contorted. Faces are also contorted.
[March 2022] Tokyo Market. Composition here is reminiscent of some of his photos but figures are definitely surreal
[October 2022] Train Station, Europe. This one is saved by the fact that faces are not shown. The rundown train station and the crowd is more reminiscent of Yevgeny Khadei. Feet, perspective, and some of the details are wrong.
[March 2023] Woman at Computer. This looks like a photo spread you probably could have seen in LIFE magazine back in the day. Significant improvement from a year ago.
[March 2023] Woman at Computer. Likewise here. See details on the ground and the dust in the foreground, although background renders are a bit wonky.
[March 2023] Africa, 1960. These last photos are probably the best renderings of faces. Once again, more James Natchway than Bresson, but impressive.
[March 2023] Japanese sea food market, redux. Significant improvement against September results. Faces still not optimum.
[March 2023] Paris Street. Great photos. Reminded me of Robert Doiseau.
.
So what’s the verdict?
Even the current photos don’t look that realistic, but it has made huge improvements in last 4-6 months. I cannot imagine what it can do in 2-3 months’ time.
Copying the style of one photographer seems to be the more challenging part. Unlike van Gogh or Leonardo or Turner, the style of a photographer can be hard to pin down, when many photographers may use similar framings, similar cameras and settings, and the same photographer will use different cameras and settings.
For me, I have tried to generate some of the photos above using these settings: “Leica M10 Monochrom. ISO 400, f/4, 1/125s, 35mm”.
You have probably seen it. In bars, in restaurants, on walls of hotel lobbies. The photo of two attractive women sitting in lounge chairs next to a pool and a modern house. Gray and purple mountains in the background.
Slim Aarons, a society photographer in Los Angeles, took the photo in 1970. The house in question was Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, one of the most famous examples of California modernism — the house that helped establish Palm Springs as centre for modernist architecture. Designed in 1946 by Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra, the house originally belonged to department store tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., who also commissioned Fallingwater from Frank Lloyd Wright.
.
In 1970, the house belonged to Joe and Nelda Linsk, Philadelphia clothing manufacturers (Nelda, a Texan model, was a buyer for Linsk of Philadelphia, before marrying the boss). In addition to Aarons, who lived just down the street, their neighbors then included Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh and Lucy and Desi Arnaz. Mrs. Linsk remembers:
It was about 11 in the morning. Slim called us. He knew our house was a Neutra. He said: “I want to come over and do a pool shot. Call some friends over.”
It was so casual. He came with his tripod. The shoot was about an hour and a half. We had champagne and socialized for an hour or two afterward. It was a fun day. I had no idea it would become that famous. I wish I had royalties.
There were no makeup or wardrobe people. Slim said, “Pull something out of your closet.” Our house was done in yellow: the umbrellas were yellow, the flowers yellow. So I thought I’d wear something yellow. My outfit was in yellow terry cloth. I had on palazzo pants. Helen showed up in that fabulous white lace. She looked so glamorous!
Both of our outfits were bare midriff. We both had big hair. In those days, you had big hair.
.
The other women in the photo were Helen Dzo Dzo, who was then married the architect Hugh Kaptur and walking alongside the pool, Lita Baron, an actress. For the 45th anniversary of the photo, the women returned to the Kaufmann House to restage the iconic photo.
The house sold for $13.06 million in 2022.
.
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:
Normally Iconic Photos don’t reveal talk about current affairs photos.
But on Patreon, I will start sharing short pieces, about photos that are currently in the news. Minimum once a month. Maybe once or twice a month.
I started with this week with a Addenda post about India, and a photo making rounds there currently.
For Access to monthly Addenda post on Patreon, you have to be a Patreon member. Patreon helps creators and writers run a subscription service and earn supplementary income. 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 addenda posts, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Our posts on Iconic Photos will remain free, for everyone. But if you can support us, please do.
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:
Following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 by American businessmen, there were several attempts to incorporate the archipelago into the United States. For a time, it was considered a republic until it became a U.S. territory in 1898.
Sanford Dole, a member of the powerful pineapple company and the island’s first (and only) president during its brief time as a republic, proposed Hawaiian statehood to Congress for the first time in 1903. Dole’s efforts were later picked up by Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole – and five bills for statehood were introduced between 1919 and 1950.
The bills faced numerous delays, stemming from the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the Southern Democrats. The last group was particularly worried that Hawaii statehood would lead to the addition of two pro-civil-rights senators from a state, which would be the first with a majority non-white population. However, these obstacles were eventually overcome, with Alaska and Hawaii both admitted as states to preserve the balance of power in the Senate. On March 12, 1959, Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act, and President Eisenhower signed it into law five days later. Almost 95 percent of Hawaii residents voted to accept the statehood bill that June, and Hawaii became the 50th state two months later.
Hawaii and Alaska were the first states to be added to the United States since 1912, when Arizona and New Mexico became part of the country.
.
The moment of this historic occasion was captured in an iconic photo, taken shortly after the Hawaii Admission Act was passed. The photo featured a young boy named Chester Kahapea, who was just two days shy of his thirteenth birthday and working as a paperboy in Honolulu. Kahapea recalled that he was pleased with how well the newspapers were selling that day, and he couldn’t cut the bundles open fast enough.
He was sent by his employers at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to deliver a special edition to the mayor of Honolulu, who was late for the photo op. As he waited, a press photographer, Murray Befeler, began talking to Kahapea. Befeler asked Kahapea him how normally sold his papers and asked him to pose accordingly. The photo above was widely distributed in newspapers across the country and around the world, earning Kahapea the nickname “the face of Hawaii statehood.”
.
The photo also inspired another photographer, George Bacon, who was a friend of Befeler. Determined not to be outdone, Bacon headed home to take a photo of his own. “My father saw it as a challenge,” recalled Dodie Bacon Browne, then six-year old. “He called home and told my mother to put me in a muumuu. He came home with a copy of the newspaper, took my picture and rushed back to work.” The image of Dodie was also picked up by the Associated Press and widely reprinted.
On the covers of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was the fifty-star flag — designed just a year earlier by a junior at a highschool in Lancaster, Ohio.
.
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.
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:
In the final days of 1989, as communism faltered throughout Eastern Europe, Albania was facing upheavals too. The country had been isolated for decades, maintaining an antagonistic stance not only with the West but also against the fellow travelers in Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.
The collapse of the communist regime there would trigger the largest population movement seen in Europe since the Second World War. In 1990, hundreds of men, women, and children sought asylum in Western embassies in Tirana, and many were resettled through a UN-brokered plan. However, what began as a trickle soon became a flood. By early 1991, tens of thousands of people were converging on the Albanian Adriatic littoral, hijacking boats and vessels to cross to southern Italy.
Amidst this febrile environment, Albania held its first free elections in 46 years in March 1991. However, many doubted that the new democractic government would bring any meaningful change. More maritime exoduses followed, culminating in the voyage of the Vlora in August 1991.
The Vlora had recently returned from a trip to Cuba, carrying a cargo of sugar. Crowds broke into the dock and forced the captain to sail to Italy. Fearing for his life, he complied, setting out with only the boat’s supplementary motor (Vlora was in docks to repair its primary motor), and without radar. The boat had a capacity of around 3,000, but it carried nearly 20,000 people on that voyage. Its destination was the port of Brindisi, where thousands of Albanian refugees had successfully disembarked in March. This time, however, the Italian authorities ordered the ship to turn away and set course for Bari.
In her biting memoir of the end of communism in Albania, “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” Lea Ypi remembers:
“On the screen of the small colour television we had recently bought, I saw the dozens of men who had managed to climb to the tops of the masts, half naked, with sweat dripping down their necks, their faces dirty and badly shaven, their hair grown long at the back, in mullet fashion. Standing there precariously, struggling to hold on, they looked like the self-proclaimed generals of an army that had lost its morale before the battle had even started. They waved their arms senselessly at the television cameras, shouting, “Amico, let us exit!,” “Let us disembark!,” “We are hungry, amico!,” “We need water!” Above them hovered two or three helicopters. Under them, on the deck, swayed a sea of people: thousands of men, women, and children, scorched from the heat, injured from waiting in close quarters, pushing one another, wailing, desperately attempting to leave the boat. Squeezed inside the cabins, other passengers perched on the windows, gestured or shouted instructions to those on the deck, encouraging them to dive into the water. Some followed the advice and were arrested. Others managed to escape. The rest continued to scream: that they had consumed the last lumps of sugar from the cargo hold several hours before, that many people were severely dehydrated and were drinking sea water, that there were pregnant women on board.
…. A journey of about seven hours lasted thirty-six. When the disembarkation orders finally arrived, the crowds were forced into buses and locked in a disused stadium, guarded by police. Those who tried to leave were arrested and beaten. Packaged food and bottles of water were dropped by helicopter. Inside, men, women, and children fought to reach the supplies. Some people had brought knives with them and started to use them to stab other people to get their way.”
.
The Italian government’s policy was deportation by all means. It argued that since Albania was no longer a communist state, the arrivals were economic migrants rather than asylum seekers. It requisitioned private ferries to transport them back to Albania.
The entire saga, dubbed the “Albanian Invasion” by the Italian press, was vividly chronicled in photo accounts of the day, reflecting changing attitudes in Italy.
A day before the first wave of immigrants arrived on March 6, 1991, the Milanese paper Il Giorno featured a picture of an Albanian couple in Brindisi celebrating their son’s first birthday. In the photo, the family was smiling, composed, and well-dressed – just like any ordinary Italian family, a picture of seamless integration. Yet, the accompanying headlines warned, “The Albanian Wave Does Not Stop, as Thousands of Refugees Wait in the Ports of Durres and Vlore.”
Two days later, Il Giorno would carry a photo by AP photographer Massimo Sambucetti of Albanians jumping ashore from a ship that reached Brindisi after running a blockade. That picture would be on the front page of almost every Italian daily, as well as many international papers.
Then came the Vlora, with its overloaded crowd of migrants. “Invasion,” thundered many papers, reaching for Dante’s Divine Comedy and its images of damnation and Charon’s ferries teeming with condemned souls in a boat to Hell. The photo (first photo, topmost) by Luca Turi was one among many that underscored those allusions.
The day after the Vlora arrived in Bari, Sambucetti would capture an iconic image of an Italian policeman in riot gear standing guard over an exhausted, half-naked Albanian lying at his feet. Sambucetti recalled that day:
I was in my hotel room, transmitting the pictures of the Vlora, which had just been brought to me by our Bari stringer Luca Turi, and that showed thousands of refugees just disembarked and waiting on the quays of the harbor. All of a sudden, a rattle coming from upstairs shook the building. I rushed out of my room to check what was causing all that noise and saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of policemen in anti-riot gear running down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I shout. “There is a revolt in the stadium!” A policeman answered me. I just had the time to grab my cameras, queue a couple of pictures in the Leafax and run to the stadium
[Leafax enabled Sambucetti to transmit around a dozen pictures over analog telephone lines — a black-and-white image taking 10 minutes and a color one about 30 minutes].
Sambucetti’s picture (above) would be featured around the world. British newspaper Independent’s headlineabove it read: “Incompetence and Brutality.” Italy’s president, Francesco Cossiga, denounced it, arguing that the photo misrepresented Italy as an unwelcoming country. The AP photos would be the finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage and Sambucetti won the 1992 Baia Chia Photojournalism Award.
.
The crisis dragged on, with Italy pressuring the Albanian government to put its ports under military control and halting passenger trains to stop the flow of emigrants. Italy also offered financial aid to Albania to take back the immigrants. Undocumented immigration continued on a smaller scale, using the cover of night and speedboats organized by criminal gangs. Approximately 800,000 people are estimated to have left Albania between 1989 and 2001, which was twenty percent of the population, and about half went to Italy.
Over time, the immigrants assimilated well into Italian society. However, as debates over African and Levantine migration into Europe grew, the Albanian integration was held up as an exception rather than the rule. Justifications followed on how the Albanians already knew Italian as a second or third language, as they intercepted Italian TV channels even during the Cold War, and how even though they were Muslim, they were not very attached to religion.
The images of that “invasion” summer were largely forgotten. “In March, they said we were all victims. They accepted us. In August, they looked at us as if we were some kind of menace, like we were about to eat their children, one neighbor told Lea Ypi.
As for Luca Turi’s photos, during later bouts of migrantion crises, they were reused to accompany various fake news stories about contemporary refugee populations (Africans, Muslims, Syrians), shared not only by fringe groups but also by far-right parties and politicians.
For Ypi, integration was inevitable:
“The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated like criminals.
Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to “protect our way of life.” And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.
.
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.
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:
That February, National Geographic’s cover showed the camel train in front of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Keen-eyed readers noticed something off about the photo: the editors have moved the pyramids to fit the original photo, which was taken in landscape onto the magazine’s vertical front cover.
The outcry was swift. The photographer, Gordon Gahan, complained that his work had been digitally altered without his knowledge. The magazine initially defended their decision, saying, “it was not a falsification, but merely the establishment of a new point of view”.
Then it turned out that Gahan paid the men on camels to ride back and forth in front of the pyramids until he achieved the perfect shot. Debates over authenticity and credibility ensued.
.
It took decades but National Geographic eventually conceded that they were wrong to alter the photo. In July 2016 editorial, Susan Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, writes: “At National Geographic it’s never OK to alter a photo. We’ve made it part of our mission to ensure our photos are real.”
“We ask ourselves, ‘Is this photo a good representation of what the photographer saw?’”… For us as journalists, that answer always must be yes.
That stentorian pledge lasted all of five years. In January 2021, the magazine put the aftermath of Black Lives Matter protests on its cover. The cover photo was by Kris Graves, who one month after George Floyd protests, photographed the Confederate monuments around Richmond, Virginia. One night on Monument Avenue, Graves came across an art project by Dustin Klein – a series of projections of faces of black people who died due to police violence – took the photo above of Floyd looming large under the equestrian feet of Robert E. Lee.
.
When the magazine used the photo, it airbrushed out or obscured ten instances of swear words visible in the photo, scrawled on the Lee’s plinth. Susan Goldberg again, now, backtracking her earlier views: “It’s an extremely rare step for us to take. We believe that prominently sharing the photo is more important than de-emphasizing a certain swear word; the toning does not diminish its message or impact.” Even on its website, the magazine keeps an altered picture.
This time, the response was more muted – I find very little outcry over the changes. Perhaps, the general public’s apathy over what is authentic and what is fake news had grown since 1982. Yet, all the more ironic: despite Goldberg’s view that the edits didn’t diminish the message, the words “Fuck12”, “Fuck the Police”, “Fuck Pigs”, “Fuck Trump” were the message in that fissile summer of 2020.
Unaltered photo, which is hard to find these days, is below. Can you spot all the ten expletives taken out by Nat Geo editors?
.
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.
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:
As the mob of rioters barged through the Capitol building on January 6th 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 6th 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.
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.
.
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.
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:
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.
.
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:
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.
.
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:
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.
.
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:
Falun Gong protests in April 1999 symbolized much that came before and much that came since – so did the repression that followed.
.
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 50th 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.
.
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.
.
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:
Jiang Zemin, a president and a meme, died this week, aged 96.
.
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.
.
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”.
.
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).
.
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:
Iconic Photos 
