The Afghan Girl 2.0

This is my 690th or so post on iconic photos, and as you might notice, most of my posts are about photos taken before the last two decades. Living in an increasingly desensitized society under a 24/7 news circle, we see a lot of images, and clips. Yet, when I saw this week’s Time magazine cover, I literally stopped walking and quipped, “Wow! This is iconic.” Personally speaking I haven’t seen a photo this shocking and powerful, so enticing yet so hard to look, in past few years.

It is a portrait of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghani girl, taken by Jodi Bieber. Aisha was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. In an editorial, Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel defends his use of the haunting image as the magazine’s cover:

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha’s safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban…. bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan…. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground.

It is highly reminiscent of the National Geographic’s cover “The Afghan Girl” 25 years ago. That Steve McCurry image brought home the Afghan conflict and the international refugee crisis.  Aisha will also bring home a message probably more powerful than any number of leaked Army documents. However, unlike the National Geographic cover (which was accompanied by pretty-much neutral title, Along Afghanistan’s Border), Time’s cover has the title “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” I think this subtext ruins the mood of the photo, since it implied that the tragedies like Aisha’s will ensue/multiply if the U.S. leave Afghanistan. In fact, that is precisely the crux of the article inside: that the rights of Afghan women would be destroyed by a potential settlement between the U.S. and the Taliban.

However, the article largely ignores that the fact that the treatment of Afghan women has not improved a lot despite increasing number of women in the legislature and rhetoric promising increased rights. Fundamentalist judiciary and radicalization of a war-torn population was palpable and in 2009 President Hamid Karzai signed a bill that was seen as legalization of rape against women.

Abdul Hamid II

Known as the ‘Red Sultan’ or ‘The Great Assassin’, Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Turkey was simultaneously intelligent and distrustful. Handsome and ingratiating when he first assumed power, Abdul Hamid II would eventually rule the Ottoman Empire with a despotic hand for over thirty years. Yet, despite his brutal suppressions of revolts in the Balkans, he witnessed the slow dismantling of his empire in southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and as a response to his repeal of constitution in 1878, the original ‘Young Turks’ as a countercultural movement was born.

The above was the first photograph of Abdul Hamid released to the public. During his thirty-three year reign, he traveled very little, fearing assassination. He sent photographers to the corners of his increasingly shrinking empire and ruled it through photographs and telegraph. Abdul Hamid maintained a spy network of 50,000 (or one in twenty) in Constantinople alone as well as 40 translators reading foreign newspapers. For most of his reign, he never left the palace grounds, except for the Friday prayers in a mosque just outside the palace gates . This Friday ritual became a well-attended event for the populace eager to know whether the Sultan was still alive (hence the enormous crowd in the above photo).

An anarchist assassination attempt in 1905 during a Friday prayer visit failed only because the Sultan arrived a few minutes later than planned. In the photo above, the last Ottoman Sultan to rule with absolute power uneasily watches the crowd in an extremely rare public appearance and even rarer photo. By this time (1908), Abdul Hamid was nearing the end of his misguided rule: that year he would have to restore the constitution when faced with pressure from his army and Young Turks. The next year, he would be deposed.

A great fan of Western arts, opera and woodcarving, Abdul Hamid was also partial to photography. He sent photographers to document his Empire’s modernization, and new institutions like schools, hospitals, military barracks, medical schools, law schools, and fire departments. Hi’s personal collection, now in the Istanbul University Library, comprised over 30,000 photographs, and Abdul Hamid presented numerous photos to Western governments as well.

The Great Ivy League Photo Scandal

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In the late 1970’s, an employee at Yale University unlocked a room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and found thousands of photographs of nude students sprawled across the floor. The subjects in the pictures were incoming freshmen that attended Yale between the 1940’s and 1970’s. (Read New York Times report here).

The photos belonged to William Herbert Sheldon, an American psychologist, and the practice didn’t stop at Yale. The practice was widespread among America’s most prestigious universities (including three Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale and Princeton), and Who’s who of Americana, George Bush, Bob Woodward, Hilary Clinton, Diane Sawyer, Meryl Streep, etc., went through this ignominy.

Although later defended as a part of the studies on the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis and lordosis, sharp metal pins were attached to each naked student’s spine in the photos suggest that it may have been conducted to support Sheldon’s Mengelian theory on the relation between body types and social hierarchy. While Yale burned and shredded most of the photographs when they discovered them, some of the pictures survived and were later transferred to the Smithsonian. Only in 2001, those final images were destroyed.

You Are What Your Profile Is

If she were still alive, this would be Mansfield's profile pic.

J. P. Morgan famously lashed out at them. J. D. Salinger was all the more famous for his aversion to them. The last moments of Bismarck and Diana were marred by them. Only last week I wrote about Jackie O.’s lifelong spat with them. Photographers, photography and privacy. They had a tormented struggle together, and there were a lot of iconic photos that came out of this.

Evidences and indiscretions were exposed. Some careers and lives were tragically destroyed. All of this happened before the arrival of the internet, but the latter greatly facilitated it. When Jayne Mansfield flashed at photographers, it was sensational, but when we see 20,345th photo of Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse doing something stupid, it is time to stop and ask ourselves, “Do we really want to see [insert a third-rate celebrity name]’s bedroom antics?”

This incoherent mess of a blog post is inspired by reading three stories in past 24-hours This weekend, New York Times Magazine published an article called The Web Means the End of Forgetting. It is extremely insightful, and forced me to reconsider what content I am putting online. The second article was on Gawker — not the apex of reporting — and describes the arrest of yet another(!) Russian spy in America, coupled with screenshots from her facebook, and notes those pictures suggest “she likes slutty Halloween costumes and pointing at the camera when she’s drunk.” Sounds typical 20-something to me, but this is apparently news. Lastly, the Independent reports that the Russian media chanced upon a photograph of the Georgian Minister Vera Kobalia in a nightclub and accused Georgia of appointing “strippers” to the cabinet. How did they chance upon this photo (which was made 10 years ago)? Of course, it was on Ms. Kobalia’s facebook. And this is just a week’s worth of ‘iconic’ happenstances on facebook. Such incidents and indiscretions galore… and there are even websites dedicated to this sort of sell-out-thy-friend cyberbullying.

Privacy remains a thorny issue; and social networking adds more complexity to it but what really was not helping here is Facebook’s privacy settings. You want to share the photos from a fun night, but can you trust all of your 2161 friends? Newsmen once used to bribe servants of celebrities to stalk them or go through their trash. Now, they just need to call someone who is friends with them on facebook. Or better yet, add him/her as a friend.

I don’t know about the age composition of this blog, but if I have to guess, I will say most readers are older than me. I don’t know whether the older generations react with amusement, consternation, or aplomb to all this. Personally, I don’t know how to react either. You can’t live without facebook, and even if you don’t post photos of yourself, you can’t prevent others from posting. No matter whether you detag or ask your friend to take them down, the photos will always be online thanks to facebook’s labyrinthine rules.

I very seriously doubt I would have gotten my current job if I apply for it today. Three-quarters of companies now do facebook checks on applicants. Once, life was not solely about accomplishments but also about potentials. Today, it is about indiscretions and what you do outside of 9-to-5. In a world where globalization has opened up new markets, careers and opportunities, we have ironically become a society that never let our pasts go.

Sorry if this post comes off as a rant, but I worry that, if this virtual scarlet letter trend continues, the next generation’s leaders will be today’s blandest, most boring people.

The First Underwater Photo

Louis Boutan was the first underwater photographer, who took pictures at a depth of 164 feet in 1893. Above — a self-portrait depicting Boutan in a full diving suit, airlines and metal helmet — was his first successful photo, and it offers us what a cumbersome chore it would have been to dive (and of course take pictures underwater) in those days.

Boutan, who was trained as a marine zoologist, conducted most of his underwater photo-experiments in 1890s at the Arago Marine Laboratory at Banyuls-sur-Mer, on France’s Mediterranean coast. He identified many problems of contemporary cameras that rendered them useless in extreme conditions. He tried encasing his cameras in strongboxes (including barrels); he tried completely flooding the interior of cameras. Lastly, he built a watertight massive equipment that was able to withstand pressure (on land, three men were needed to lift it), and battery-powered underwater arc lights, he was able to take photographie sous-marine. But still, there was no high speed film and his exposures lasted 30 minutes. Boutan had to remain underwater for sometimes as long as three hours and suffered nitrogen narcosis. Eventually, Boutan used a magnesium powder “flash” that greatly hastened phototaking.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

In 1920, three years after the Bolsheviks seized power, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells all made trips to Moscow (separately). Maxim Gorky, a personal friend of Lenin arranged a meeting between them and Lenin. Each author was shown only the selective segments of the Soviet life, and each wrote about his experiences thoroughly. (In above photo, Lenin meets with Wells on 6 October 1920 in his Kremlin office).

By 1920, 50-year old Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin was a tired old man. Years of hardship home and abroad, mental strains from chaotic revolution, government and civil war and wounds from the attempted assassinations reduced him. In May and December 1922, he suffered two strokes, which paralyzed him. The next March, he suffered the third stroke that rendered him mute and wheelchair-ridden. He retired to his country estate at Gorki, where his wife read him Jack London’s books (he was Lenin’s favorite author). “Love of Life” was left unfinished when Lenin died in January 1924.

“Come back and see what we have done in ten years,” said Lenin to Wells. But in his own megalomaniacal way, Lenin proved to be his own undoing. After his first stroke, Lenin dictated a document so harshly critical of all of his potential successors that it was in nobody’s interest to publicize it. Soon Stalin would take advantage of Lenin’s inability to speak or move; he would pay frequent visits to Lenin who was almost a vegetable, to portray a false image of him as close to Lenin.

Wells predicted that Lenin’s Bolshevism might be replaced by a new ideology and a dictatorship worse than Lenin’s that could spread outside of the Soviet Russia. In a sense he was prophetic. Yet, history would hardly be different if Lenin had lived longer. It was Lenin who created the first camps and purges; Lenin who set off artificial famine as a political weapon; Lenin who disbanded the last vestiges of democratic government, the Constituent Assembly, and devised the Communist Party as the apex of a totalitarian structure; Lenin who first waged war on the intelligentsia and on religious believers. His self-proclaimed “man of letters” paved the way not merely for his successors but for Mao, for Hitler, for Pol Pot.

Lenin’s illness was largely suppressed from the Russian people. Most of the pictures published in his final days were official-looking photos taken years before. The photo below, of Lenin with his sister and doctor, taken by his gardener was his last. It was published only after the Soviet Union collapsed in Dmitri Volkogonov’s Lenin: A New Biography.

The U-2 Incident

On May Day, 1960, Francis Gary Powers left the US base in Peshawar on a mission to photograph ICBM sites inside the Soviet Union. It would be the twenty-fourth U-2 spy mission over Soviet territory. Although it was a Soviet holiday, all units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces were on red alert as they suspected a U-2 flight and Powers was subsequently shot down.

The United States used NASA to issue a statement saying the plane was a research vessel, but soon Moscow was full of rumors of a downed American spy plane. THe American story was made up using the assumptions that the plane was fully destroyed and that Powers was dead. However, Nikita Khrushchev gave a detailed account of the American version of the U-2’s flight and then disproved it point by point to the Supreme Soviet. It was an international humiliation for Eisenhower administration.

On May 11, the Soviet government suddenly convened journalists and diplomats to the Chess Pavilion in Gorky Park. Khrushchev surveyed the big room filled with aircraft debris. LIFE photographer Carl Mydans was among those invited over, and he began taking photos as much as he could. After some time, two Soviet officers hustled me out the door for the Soviets suspected that he was a spy for he was “taking pictures too systematically.” However, they did not confiscate his film. Although Mydans was not employed by the U.S. government, it didn’t stop the Pentagon from perusing his photos. The designers of U-2 spy plane was able to learn what happened and what sort of missile hit the plane based on their analysis of Mydans’ photographs of the wreckage.

The U-2 incident marked the birthpangs of another era of Soviet-American confrontations after a few years of calm following Stalin’s death. Coming just over two weeks before the scheduled opening of an East–West summit in Paris, it poisoned the atmosphere around the meeting. An invitation to the President to visit the Soviet Union was abruptly withdrawn, and Eisenhower finished his presidency with his dreams of ending the Cold War unfulfilled. In August 1960, the need for the U2 disappeared with the use of US Discoverer spy satellites; Powers’s was the last U2 flight over Soviet territory.

Cyrille Sur L’Herbe

In 2006, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Musée d’Orsay gave carte blanche to five members of the Vu Agency to photograph the museum’s staff in front of their favorite paintings inside museum. It let the staff and the photographers to choose a painting and staging. The British photographer Rip Hopkins and the museum security employee named Cyril collaborated to pose in front of Edouard Manet’s Le dejeuner Sur l’herbe. Cyril’s naked pose was a direct response to that of the young woman in the painting.

When it went to publication, Hopkin’s other photos — including one where an employee appears in Rugby attire before Gustave Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre — were included but the above photo was conspicuously excluded. Although the museum initially defended the decision by saying it only chose photos that are unique and interesting, when a book on contemporary photography included the photo, the museum protested saying Cyril’s image “undermines the dignity of museum.”

In fact, the controversy was ironic because history did repeat itself. In Manet’s time, the portrayal of naked women of ancient history (Greco Roman goddesses) were accepted but a contemporary naked woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men was considered an affront to the propriety. In addition, the painting was hinting at rampant prostitution in Bois de Bologne. Rejected from Paris Salon, as being ‘too big to be a genre piece*, too modern to be pastoral, too mystifying to be a conversation piece’, it appeared at the Salon des Refuses instead. Yet, the controversy catapulted Manet to fame, making him a hero in the eyes of younger artists.

*Indeed, the price of large canvas being what it was (and is!), the large canvases were used mainly for the re-creation of historical, religious, and mythological events. Manet’s depiction of an everyday scene blatantly undermined this tradition.

Fall of France

Some say it was taken in Toulon as the French soldiers leave for Africa. Some say it was taken as Nazi tanks rolled into Paris. Others claim it was taken in Marseilles as historic French battle flags were taken aboard ships for protection against the conquering Nazis. No matter what incident prompted him to cry, the French civilian cries across decades from his faded photograph. He cries not only for his generation, but also for his century. The photo, one of the most heart-rending pictures of the Second World War, was possibly taken by George Mejat for Fox Movietone News/AP.

The fall of France, only six weeks after initial Nazi assault, came as a shock and surprise to many. Contrary to popular beliefs, the Maginot Line wasn’t exactly circumvented by the Nazis through Belgium. The Nazis, in fact, broke through the strongest point of the Maginot Line, Fort Eben-Emael, which connected the French and Belgian fortification systems. The fortifications were unequipped to defend against gliders, explosives and blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe simply flew over it. When the Allied forces reinvaded in June 1944, the Maginot Line, now held by German defenders, was again largely bypassed, a clear indicator that this line, designed with a WWI-like trench warfare in mind, was never actually going to work no matter where the Nazis attacked.

The fall of France was the first crisis for the new coalition government of Winston Churchill in London. For next 20 months, the Great Britain and her Empire would stand alone against the Nazi armies. Not until D-Day, 6 June 1944, would an Allied army return to Western Europe. Greatly emboldened by their success, the Germans would gamble even more heavily on their next major operation – the invasion of Russia. This time they would be less lucky.

This was published in LIFE on March 7, 1949, and didn't name the Frenchman in question

Partition of India

It was one of the most dunderheaded moves in an imperial history chockfull with them: the partition of India. Its population distribution was such that there was no line that could neatly divide up the subcontinent. Yet, a boundary commission was given mere six weeks to carve a Muslim-majority state from British India, and two Pakistans were formed. More ridiculous still, the commission was led by a British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe who had never been in the East before.

Indeed he was chosen because he knew nothing about India and therefore absolutely unbiased. Inexperienced and time-crunched, Radcliffe just drew some lines on the map without realizing that his demarcation line went straight through thickly populated areas, villages and sometimes even through a single house with some rooms in one country and others in the other. His error was pointed out by the commission but the scheduled independence day was looming and it was too late to redo the entire thing. Disgraced, Radcliffe refused his salary, quietly destroyed all his papers and left India on the Independence Day itself, before even the boundary awards were distributed. W.H. Auden later pilloried the absurdity of the way he crafted the border in Partition.

The immediate consequences of the partition were horrendous for both countries. Although in retrospect, there probably was nothing the commission could have done. Once the Moslems and the Hindus decided to part their ways, even the most carefully crafted border would have provoked the massive exoduses. But the hurried and indifferent nature of the partition meant the ethnic cleansing that followed was unavoidable.

In India during the Partition were two of the last century’s greatest photojournalists: Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson — both there to document Gandhi, Cartier-Bresson just a few hours before Gandhi assassination. Above, Bourke-White recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, and refugees with vacant eyes. The partition was “massive exercise in human misery,” later reflected Bourke-White. Self-proclaimed Indophile, Cartier-Bresson later arrived a little later, documented the new way of life, from the fattened maharajahs at the top to those in refuge camps after the partition at the bottom. (below)

The Loneliest Job

George Tames covered Washington D.C for four decades (1945-1985) and is best remembered for one, “The Loneliest Job,” a photograph of President John F. Kennedy looking out of the south window of the oval office. Tames took the photograph through the door of the Oval Office, after Kennedy thought he had left. From behind, it looks as if he is carrying the weight of the world. Kennedy – who had a bad back – simply was reading the newspapers standing up, as he often preferred to do.

Tames remembered: “President Kennedy’s back was broken during the war, when that torpedo boat of his was hit by the Japanese destroyer. As a result of that injury he wore a brace on his back most of his life. Quite a few people didn’t realize that. Also he could never sit for any length of time, more than thirty or forty minutes in a chair without having to get up and walk around. Particularly when it felt bad he had a habit, in the House, and the Senate, and into the Presidency, of carrying his weight on his shoulders, literally, by leaning over a desk, putting down his palms out flat, and leaning over and carrying the weight of his upper body by his shoulder muscles, and sort of stretching or easing his back. He would read and work that way, which was something I had seen him do many times. When I saw him doing that, I walked in, stood by his rocking chair, and then I looked down and framed him between the two windows, and I shot that picture.

Although the photo was taken on Feb. 10, 1961 — just a few months into Kennedy administration — the image would later take on a more symbolic meaning as the Kennedy presidency waded into difficult waters. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the New York Times christened the photo, “The loneliest job in the world.” The photo was a favourite of President Clinton, who hang it in the Treaty Room, the presidential private office on the second floor of the White House. The West Wing recreated it for its opening segment (below).

Windblown Jackie

Ron Galella was the first American paparazzo, and probably the most infamous paparazzo of his day. He captured Elvis Prestley, Sophia Loren, Bruce Springsteen, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Robert Redford and Frank Sinatra on his camera, although none of them have posed for him. Brigitte Bardot hosed him down. Sean Penn spat at him. Richard Burton’s thugs beat him up. But Ron Galella remained unfazed. After Marlon Brando broke his jaw, he returned to take photos of Brandon wearing a football helmet.

Galella’s favorite and long suffering target was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In the late 60s, when Jackie O. was living in New York, Galella bribed many doormen and chauffeurs to follow the former First Lady. Taken on October 7, 1971 as Jackie turned towards a taxi horn with a smile on Madison Avenue, the above photo was considered as Galella’s masterpiece. Jackie’s two high profile courtcases with Galella not only gave Galella notoriety, but also kept Jackie alive in the public eye. A retrospective film on Galella’s life was titled “Smash His Camera,” so-named for an utterance Onassis once made to a member of her Secret Service detail.

Jackie Kennedy would get into more trouble only a few months later when the pictures of her sunbathing nude and practising yoga on Onassis’s private island Skorpios. Hearing a rumour that Mrs Onassis sunbathed nude on one of the beaches, Italian paparazzo Settimio Garritano sneaked onto the beach and took the pictures. Many editors refused to publish them, but they eventually appeared in the Italian magazine Playmen in 1972. Reaction in the United States was critical, but when the pictures were eventually published in the Hustler, it became the best ever selling edition of magazine. So much for morality.

In the end it seems every one was fine with it. In his book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt referred to the snapshots as “the smartest investment of my life.” Aristotle Onassis was unperturbed: “Sometimes I take my clothes off to put on a bathing suit. So does my wife,” leading to accusations (by the AP no less) that he himself got a paparazzi to take pictures of his wife skinny-dipping. Jackie herself probably enjoyed this sort of exposure. Otherwise it was baffling as to why she would go and sunbathe nude on a beach where she had been stalked by paparazzi before. Believe it or not, her autographed nude photo was found in the archives of Andy Warhol, of all places!

I don’t want to link to the photos, but if you really must they are somewhere around here.