Pinatubo Erupts

In March 1991, when a series of earthquakes hit the western side of the island of Luzon along the Zambales Mountains, locals awoke to the reality that in the middle of the Zambales range, there might be a dormant volcano. Pinatubo — quiet since before the lands under it were named the Philippines — erupted a few months later, in June.

The explosion was to be the second largest of the 20th century (second only to that of Novarupta in Alaska in 1912). Unlike the Alaskan volcano, half a million people lived next to Pinatubo and several important river systems stem from its peak. A logistical and environmental nightmare loomed. Adding to the woes, a typhoon was ripped through the island, mixing Pinatubo’s ash with rains, which created concrete-like mud that collapsed roofs and buildings miles away.

Many photojournalists came to the area, and the most iconic shot of the explosion — and perhaps of any volcanic eruption — was that of a Ford Fierra fleeing a gargantuan cloud of pyroclastic flows, a fast-moving current of hot gas up to 450 mph and 1,000 °C strong.  [See a pyroclastic flow in action on video here.] The photo was taken by Alberto Garcia,  chief photographer of Tempo, a tabloid affiliated with the Manila Bulletin, who remembers taking the photo about 20-30 km away from the caldera:

“It took me 30 minutes to prepare my things and headed back to Zambales where the [volcanologists] were stationed. … So everybody jumped into our vehicles and I was trying to put on my gas masked when I saw a blue pick-up ahead of that beautiful wall of gray. I opened the door and tried shooting the picture with my 50mm lens but it was too tight, so I decided to change the lens and used the 24mm instead and made sure my setting was correct and shot eight frames. Although I had only eight shots, I rewound the entire roll of film, keeping it safe in my pocket.”

Garcia won the World Press Photo, in the nature and environment category. The photo was included in Time’s “Greatest Images of the 20th Century” (2001) and National Geographic’s “100 Best Pictures” (2001).

*

Patreon Ad: Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service. You can subscribe to my channel there for as little as $1 and get some extra comments and commentary. It has been a few months since I started Patreon, and it has given me a few creative ideas,  encouragements, and good interactions with readers. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be more sustainable and growth-focused. Here is the link to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos.

 

Hilmar Pabel

The year 1968 began uneasily in Czechoslovakia. The previous October, a group of students in Prague’s Technical University staged a demonstration to protest electricity cuts at their dormitories; their shouts of “More light!” were a pointed rebuke towards the stifling rule by the Communist party. So, when the new year came, the party yielded by electing a new First Secretary, Alexander Dubček.

The 47-year old was a compromise candidate — Dubček had carefully cultivated his bland and ambiguous personality for years. Now, finally with power, he changed positions. A reform program — timid by international standards, but ambitious in the eyes of Communist cadres — was launched to create ‘‘Communism with a human face.’’ The flowering of freedom of speech and press, freedom to travel abroad, and relaxation of secret police activities followed, but it was brief. A worried Soviet Union rolled its tanks into Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

On the first day of invasion, German photographer Hilmar Pabel took the photo above of a distraught woman carrying a photo of Dubcek and Czechoslovak President Ludvík Svoboda. Pabel was a man whose stature as a humanist photographer would have been greater had he not been a propagandist for Nazism during the Second World War. In a photoessay for Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Pabel documented Jews living in the Lublin Ghetto as shifty and avaricious: living in dirt and hiding consumer goods and foods in the cellars.

After the war, Pabel was briefly imprisoned for his work, but got out to work with Red Cross to photograph children displaced by war to help them reunite with their parents and family. By the 50s and 60s, his reputation has recovered, and his works were published by Life, Paris Match, and Stern.  In 1961, he was the recipient of the Cultural Prize of the German Society for Photography, followed by two World Press Photo awards. Two photoessays he filed from Vietnam (Story of the Little Orchid, 1964 and Thuan Lives Again, 1968) were widely praised, although some critics scoffed that he was reaching back into his propagandist past to portray American army hospital staff as Good Samaritans.

*

Patreon Ad: Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service. You can subscribe to my channel there for as little as $1 and get some extra comments and commentary. It has been a few months since I started Patreon, and it has given me a few creative ideas,  encouragements, and good interactions with readers. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be more sustainable and growth-focused. Here is the link to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos.

 

 

The Tale of Two Photos

Disclaimer: some opinions which follow may be upsetting to some readers. Sections IV to VI are my own personal opinions/rants. 

 

I.

Trafalgar Square. March 1990.

London erupts in a frenzy of riots, protesting poll taxes — an unpopular tax reform that would mark the beginning of the end for Margaret Thatcher’s eleven-year premiership.

A photo is published, with the caption “A West End shopper argues with a protester”. The contrast is sharp: the well-dress lady, her gold watch glinting is across the barricades from a leather-jacketed punk, his hair tightly shaved, a half lit cigarette in hand. Except that by her own admission, the woman is shouting not at the man, but at the police restraining him. “I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day,” she wrote to the Guardian.

II.

Birmingham, Alabama. May 1963.

Martin Luther King Jnr is in the middle of a series of protests, boycotts, and marches in the southern city, which he has called the most segregated city in America.

A German shepherd lunges at a young Black teen. A white officer behind the dog looms large in his dark sunglasses. A photographer takes the photo. The New York Times publishes it across three columns on the front page, above the fold. The president notes he is appalled, and the Secretary of State Dean Rusk intones that the photo will, “embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.”

Except that the photo probably didn’t capture a moment of police brutality nor was it clear that a confrontation between the teen and the officer followed. There are three of them: the police officer Dick Middleton of the city’s K9 Unit; Walter Gadsden, the black teen; and Leo, the German shepherd. I will let Malcolm Gladwell take it from here:

“Gadsden and Middleton just look startled — the way people do if they unexpectedly bump into each other. Gadsden has his knee up as a reflex, and his hand on Middleton as if to steady himself. Middleton has one hand on Gadsden and his other arm is flexed. He’s yanking back on the leash. Leo has freaked out and he’s trying to restrain him….. Middleton’s not letting Leo loose on Gadsden; quite the opposite.” 

III.

I have written about both photos before. The reactions to London photo are muted; the comments under the Alabama photo were virulent. It touched a nerve: some accused me of rewriting a crucial piece of American history. Others demanded ‘citations’ (not something I am often asked on this blog). One commenter accused me of rehashing an unsubstantiated claim from a racist website, mainly because that’s the only other mention of the story online.

I wrote about the Alabama photo in 2010 (most likely using hard-copy library books, I don’t remember). Since then, I was glad to see the story confirmed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘David and Goliath’ (2013), and mentioned again in his excellent Revisionist History: this summer. There were a few small pieces of discrepancies between Gladwell’s sources and mine: for instance, Gladwell mentioned Gadsden broke the dog’s jaw.  I wrote down that Gadsden attacked the dog (after being already bitten in his stomach). Did the photo show the moment the dog attacked Gadsden or the moment a few seconds later when Gadsden fought back? His hand clutching Middleton who was most likely separating the two was another mystery.

I remember the only other item in my library’s index cards system on Gadsden was an interview, conducted on May 25, 1996 at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. As Gladwell would note in his podcast, this is a troubling interview, in which Gadsden noted that neither he nor his family benefited from the Civil Rights Movement, that he preferred the term “colored”. You should just go and check out the whole podcast here.

IV.

This is a lengthy blog post. This post is as much about the history of the Alabama photo (and photos in general) as about people who use them, and build their narratives on them.

The men in front and behind the lenses are just small bit players in a lengthy process which involved editors, article writers, and publishers. Last month, I had a lunch with a reporter friend. His editor had cut a few paragraphs of an article he wrote, citing lack of column spaces, thus resulting in a piece which was more one-sided than he intended. This sort of things happen all the time — sometimes by accident, sometimes because writers and editors have their own agenda, sometimes because it fits the prevailing attitudes, prejudices, or narratives.

Photography is an exceptionally tricky medium because of this. On one hand, many insists that ‘seeing is believing’. More realistically, it is still manipulated. Photography in its short existence has tread a fine line between information and art.

But art is interpretive. Art has the artists’ views, feelings, and emotions embedded in it. That’s why we debate about its parameters and intent: is an art piece ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’? Is it currying favor with the elite or defending the downtrodden with its message. That’s why a photoessay like Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (seemingly mocking the vacation habits of British lower classes) was so controversial artistically.

V.

A recent comic gives a powerful discourse on our visceral reactions when our beliefs are challenged: sometimes we accept them easily. Sometimes, we fight back. When I told you the story about London photo, did you accept it easily? When the Alabama photo is discussed, did your mind fight back?

Let’s step back. When you hear phrases like ‘globalization’, ‘single-payer healthcare system’, ‘net neutrality’, ‘gun rights’, ‘late-term abortions’, or ‘#blacklivesmatter’, what do you do? Do you read beyond headlines, beyond captions, and listen to the other side’s concerns and grievances? or do you just stick to your own pre-formed notions?

You might struggle to remain fair or neutral.

Remember that reporters, photographers, and editors are people like you too.

VI.

Gladwell and I are not impartial either. We have our own biases and blindspots. Neither of us are Americans; we write about American politics in a detached way. Many a commenter has noted that I am unqualified to write about race or racial politics. Maybe I am.

What we — and all of us — are: sum totals of our upbringings, families, surroundings. We inevitably view the world through these experiences. There is nothing wrong with that. We just need to know everyone is looking through different lenses.

I finished university just a few years before ‘trigger warnings’ became a thing. When a controversial speaker came to the campus, we protested but then we sat down and listened. We didn’t disinvite them. Modern world is a messy clash of ideas, and of narratives. We shouldn’t stifle them. We should debate them, with facts and actions. Even when the ideas are disagreeable and dangerous, we should listen to them, and understand where they come from, and what sort of environments and societies enabled them. Otherwise, we would end up teaching and learning sanitized versions of ideas and information — history with its rough edges sanded off.

VII.

I wrote this because of a conversation I had with someone on my Patreon. In their words, “Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service.”

It has been a few months since I started Patreon, and it has given me a few creative ideas and encouragements. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be more sustainable and growth-focused. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request this topic or that topic; or to participate in some polls. Here is the link to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos.

David Douglas Duncan | Korean War

On the morning of 25 June 1950, when the North Korean tanks rolled across the 38th parallel into South Korea, they found the latter’s troops completely unprepared. There were miscalculations from all sides. America’s supremo in the east, General MacArthur, dismissed CIA warnings that the North Koreans would attack in June. Stalin, emboldened by the American apathy towards the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, insisted to Mao that Americans were too afraid to fight another war. As for President Truman, he had been roundly criticized by the Congress for the Communist takeover of China the previous year. With mid-term elections just a few months away, and he himself still intending to run for a second term, he wasn’t going to appear soft. “By God I’m going to let them have it,” he remarked on the evening of the attack.

Others have won Pulitzers for covering the war, but the greatest collection of pictures about the Korean War was produced by David Douglas Duncan (still alive as of mid-2017 at age of 101!). On September 4th, Duncan joined the men of Baker Company across the Naktong river — one of his images was later chosen for a commemorative stamp. He remembered:

“I cabled LIFE’s editors in August from Tokyo and I told them I was heading back to Korea to try and get what I called ‘a wordless story’ that conveyed the message, simply, ‘This is war.’ Not long after that I was covering the fighting near the Naktong River, and I made the picture of Marines running past a dead enemy soldier, their fatigues absolutely soaked to the chest with mud and muck and god knows what else. And this ended up as the cover image for the book, This Is War!, when it came out a year later.”

His photos which appeared in LIFE on September 18th underlined the struggles of fighting men at front. One of the most memorable was that of corporal machine gunner Leonard Hayworth, was crying at the loss of all but two of his squad (above). Another much-reproduced photo captured Ike Fenton, commanding officer of Baker Company receiving the news that his forces are nearly out of ammos and that he could expect no supplies or troops to secure this ‘no-name’ ridge. (below) If another attack came, they (and Duncan) stood to be wiped out.

Now known as a ‘forgotten war’ — commemorated by a TV series that lasted longer than the war itself — the Korean War cemented the American hegemony in the Pacific. After much dawdling, Truman had now drawn a ‘line-in-the-sand’. Some historians note that not much South Korea, but also Japan and Taiwan were saved by the war.

 

Time Magazine in Movies (contd.)

I have been watching a lot of movies lately, and noticed that a lot of movies incorporate magazine covers into the storyline to make the fiction less fictitious.

All major American publications’ frontpages are subjected to this ‘fair use’, but the magazine that is seemingly hijacked the most is TIME. With 3,400,000 weekly circulation within America alone, and with its bold stentorian masthead, the magazine is a visual cue that many people identify with, and it lends a certain gravitas and pedigree to the characters.

.

Bob Roberts (1992) depicts a fictional senatorial race between the titular conservative folk singer (and anti-Bob Dylan), Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins) and the incumbent Democrat Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal). Roberts was shot by a would-be assassin and paralyzed from the waist down, but he eventually won. Although TIME had covered Huey Long and George Wallace quite extensively, after the 80s, its coverage of regional elections waned, until the advent of Tea Party in the 2010s. 

.

The movie Lions for Lambs features Tom Cruise as the potential presidential candidate Senator Jasper Irving (Republican of Illinois). This is also in keeping with Time magazine’s tradition of covering presidential hopefuls (even if it turns out to be premature, as in the case of freshman senator Marco Rubio).

.

Another political cover, from In the Line of Fire. The crossfire on the forehead of the unnamed president was the handiwork of John Malkovich’s would-be assassin, who modelling himself after John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, plans to kill the President.

.

Another killer on the cover in 1992 — a busy year for fictional time covers (Bob Roberts came out the same year). Here in Seinfeld, Time itself is a minor plot point. George Costanza buys the last copy of Time at an airport magazine, believing that he is mentioned in Jerry’s magazine interview (He is not), and fights with another customer (who is in handcuffs) who argues he has more right to the magazine since he is the cover feature. The inspiration here was probably the arrest of David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, which appeared on the magazine’s cover.

.

A few more lighter covers, both animated, both from post-war era. In 2004, Pixar joined the TIME magazine bandwagon in The Incredibles. The cover was a tribute to the mastheads Time used in the 40s and the 50s, but the magazine itself never really used the exact same format as featured in the film, and the phrase ‘The Weekly Magazine’ was retired in the 50s. 

. 

A few years earlier, the same combo of Time + Life was in another Pixar animated film. In Toy Story 2 (1999) Sheriff Woody reminisces about his heyday as the matinee TV idol through these magazines’ covers — a revealing look at how much of our cultural memory of the 50s and 60s was indeed shaped by these two magazines. Toy Story 2 propelled Woody and Buzz Lightyear onto an actual Time cover, alongside Pixar’s backer Steve Jobs.    

(Life magazine, dated January 12th, 1957, carries the cover story about Sputnik, the satellite which caused a sea change in toy market, by making the kids favor space toys and leading to the cancellation of Woody’s Roundup.  However, the Soviet Union won’t be launching Sputnik until October 1957).  

. 

Tom Hanks is probably the only person who had been on the Time cover twice fictitiously. Firstly when as Zeligian Forrest Gump, he ran across America, and then as the Castaway Chuck Noland.

.

In Ocean’s movies, Reuben Tishkoff is a flamboyant casino tycoon who gets muscled out of his Vegas hotels (twice!), first in Ocean’s Eleven and then in Ocean’s Thirteen. His cover, seen briefly behind him, is reminiscent of the hand drawn covers by Bernard Safran and Barron Storey did for the magazine from the 50s until the 80s, but largely moved away from since.

.

Time’s flagship weekly is of course, Man of the Year. In my fellow Americans, one-term president Russell P. Kramer boasts to his fellow one-termer, the Democrat Matt Douglas that he was Time’s Man of the Year twice. Douglas, who presumably had never been honored thus, grumbles that Time has made questionable choices before, like Hitler.

.

Time later rebranded Man of the Year as more egalitarian Person of the Year. In 2010, that honor fictionally went to Iron Man.

.

In Legally Blonde 2, Elle Woods goes to Washington D.C. to pass Bruiser’s Bill — trying to put an end to animal testing — after she finds out that her dog’s mother is used for testing at a cosmetic company. Whoever made the mock cover had a lot of fun with the headline “Will our ‘Person of the Year’ be a dog?” Time has last selected a non-human in 1988 (The Endangered Earth), and computer as Machine of the Year in 1982, but never had an animal been selected. (Dumbo was nearly Mammal of the Year in 1941, but Pearl Harbor intervened).

The Milkman

Keep Calm and Carry On, proclaimed the poster which is now overused and overparodied. Ironically, the poster was never used — the campaign was abandoned just as the Second World War began. Instead, various photos taken during the war, of ordinary people ‘carrying on’ conveyed the same message.

Most famous of these photos was Fred Morley’s milkman, who was seen doing his rounds, even as the Blitz reduced the apartments of his erstwhile customers into rubble. The day was October 9th 1940 — the 32nd straight day of bombing raids on Britain. The Nazi invasion plans had been thwarted, as the weather conditions deteriorated into winter conditions, making massive aerial campaigns harder to sustain. The Luftwaffe had just switched its main effort into night-time attacks, which became their official policy just two days prior on 7th October. Although not as serious as in a raid two months later,  St Paul’s Cathedral was hit on the early hours of October 9th, but the bomb failed to detonate.

A sea of destruction awaited Morley the next morning. Working for Fox Photos, he knew that if he took the pictures of the destroyed homes, his photos would not be published. A lot of his earlier work had been censored. In front of a back drop of firefighters struggling to contain a fire, he had an idea. He borrowed the coat and milk carrier from a milkman and asked his assistant to walk across the bombed moonscape. London carries on, the stage photo proclaimed, and the censor waved the picture through.

For the capital, tougher days were still ahead. On 14th and 15th October, the heaviest attack saw hundreds of German bombers dotting the skies above London. In ‘Second Great Fire of London’ on the night of 29th December 1940, nineteen churches, thirty-one guild halls and all of Paternoster Row, including five million books went up in flames. But the capital did carry on remarkably: the approval for the government’s conduct of the war nor the percentage of people believing Britain would win it barely dipped even during those dark days. A survey in December, after three months of air-raids, showed that in that surly British way, weather was a bigger worry for Londoners than the Blitz. In The Blitz: The British Under Attack, Julian Gardiner noted that Londoners seeking shelter in a tube station had a weekly discussion group at which the topics included travel, unemployment and “Should women have equal pay for equal work?” Lord Woolton, the popular Minister for Food, quipped, “egg rationing produced more emotion than the blitz.”

*

I have started a Patreon. In their words, “Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service.” I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be more sustainable and growth-focused. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request this topic or that topic; or to participate in some polls. Here is the link to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos.