Iconic Photos Bookshelf 2.0

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I have a version of this at the top of the blog, but with various website rehostings and reformats, I am not sure how many of my readers have seen it, so I am revamping it a little bit. These are generally great coffee table books

To write this blog, I rely on two types of books, general history books and photography books. Here are a few books in latter category that are really interesting:

Things As They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955 — the book reprints the pages of newspapers and magazines, so that you can see photographs as the public had originally experienced them.

Kiosk: A History Of Photojournalism — for earlier history of photojournalism in context, you have nothing better than this book.

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Paris Match: 60 Ans 60 Photographes — often what is considered iconic in one country, doesn’t translate to another country. Here, a collection of photos from pages of Paris Match, Life Magazine equivalent of France. Some are really unique.

Book of 101 Books: The: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century — the same premise here as Things As They Are and Kiosk, but focus is more on photobooks published from 1907 to 1996.

Underexposed: Censored Pictures and Hidden History — this books reviews images which were banned, suppressed or conveniently forgotten by politicians, despots and celebrities.

National Geographic 100 Most Important Photos and National Geographic: The Photographs — my personal preference is the latter, but the former is also very well written. About a decade ago, NatGeo had a great app on iPad covering these photos, but it has been discontinued. The lesson here — print media endures.

Decades of the 20th Century by Getty — individually or in box set format, this is worth buying. In three languages, this box-set celebrates famous, infamous and obscure moments of the last century.

The New York Times Magazine Photographs — Covering 30 years, The New York Times Magazine in four sections: reportage, portraiture, style and conceptual photography, this is a wondering, engrossing tome

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Our Century in Pictures by Life — If you are going to have one photo-related coffeetable book or gifting one, this is the one. For those who don’t have time to pore through over forty years of Life archives online, this book collects the best of the magazine.

Life 100 Photographs — Slimmer, more curated version of the above, selecting ‘100’ most iconic photos.

Great news photos and the stories behind them — Might be hard to find and writing might be dated but this book delivers exactly what the title promised: extremely interesting and little known stories behind the pictures we are intensely familiar with.

Get the picture: a personal history of photojournalism — if you have time to read only one photo-related memoir, it should be this one by John G. Morris, the first director of Magnum. Many great photographers turn up in his anecdotes.

Century: A History in Photographs by Phaidon — photos inside are superb, but captions are pithy. Personally, i think this is a better book than equally-weighty tomes Magnum produces periodically.

Taschen Icon Series — there are two books directly related to photo icons, but other books on individual photographers, and topics such as pin-ups, weird photos are interesting to read and look at.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century — photos by the greatest photojournalist of last century, from all over the world and spanning many decades

Slim Aarons: Style — from the lens of the great society photographer of his day, glamorous fashions, personalities, and places brightly and brilliantly captured.

Annie Leibovitz — Annie Leibovitz’s books are always fun (and hefty). This one comes at 13 pounds and collects her large format photos which are mesmerizing.

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some pollsEven 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:https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos

Pope John Paul in Managua

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There was the weightiness of history to the moment above. Canossa perhaps or the memories of the papacies of the Renaissance and the Inquistion perhaps. A pope wagging finger at a kneeling man on the airport tarmac.

It was 1983 and Pope John Paul II was in Managua — on his first visit to Nicaragua. The kneeling priest was Ernesto Cardenal, who was then serving as the Minister of Culture in the country’s Sandinista government.

Although the Church played a major role in the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, it was split on its successors, with Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Managua leading sharp critics of the Sandinistas, and younger liberation theology priests like Cardenal joining the Sandinistas’ Marxist-Leninist revolution. For years, there was an ongoing feud of words and sometimes physical intimidation between two factions of the church.

The pope wasn’t there for a reconciliation. Even before his visit, the pope had been publicly demanding that Father Cardenal and four other priests (including his brother Fernando Cardenal, then education minister) resign their government positions. The Sandinistas also refused the Vatican’s demand to replace them, but insisted that its invitation to the pope still stood.

The pope, as equally minted as the Sandinistas (both had come to power in that pivot year of 1979), was undaunted by this defiance. But as he walked down the receiving line at the airport, decorated with a banner that said “Welcome to Free Nicaragua – Thanks to God and the Revolution,” he was still taken aback to see the priests (the Vatican had specificed that none of the priest-ministers should appear in the welcoming party) and especially Cardenal. Unlike other priests in clerical garb, he had showed up wearing a collarless white shirt, slacks and his signature black beret over his thick white hair. When he knelt to kiss the papal ring, the pope withheld his hand and wagged his finger at him.

His subsequent scolding was not audible, but the moment was broadcast around the world and the photo above was on the frontpage of newspapers. It was later recounted that the pope told Father Cardenal, “You must regularize your position with the church. You must sort out your affairs with the church.”

It was to be a challenging visit for the pope.

Later that day Sandinista supporters heckled him at mass when he asked the citizenry to reject the “popular church” that is allied with the revolutionary government and to accept the absolute authority of the Vatican. The Sandinistas partisans who were strategically placed at the head of the crowd of about 350,000 began replied by chanting: “One church on the side of the poor!” and “We want peace!” The Pope countered combatively. “Silencio!” he commanded – and then twice more until the hecklers were cowed.  

At the end of the Mass, the Sandinistas played their anthem, after which the pope was driven back to the airport, where he was again greeted by the junta supremo Daniel Ortega (in glasses on the left in photo above), who reproached him for not praying for seventeen youths killed by the US-backed rebels, known as the Contras and defended the behavior of the Sandinistas during the Mass.

The pope left, insulted.

For the pope, brought up in Soviet Poland, Marxism was an existential evil. He returned to the Vatican in a combatively mood. On his next major trip, three motnhs after Nicaragua, he returned to Poland to denounce the government there as running “one great concentration camp”. He would also soon suspend Cardenal and other priests from the priesthood — the ban that would not be lifted until three decades later — and put the founding father of liberation theology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, under investigation by the Vatican’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“Christ led me to Marx,” Cardenal reflected in an interview in 1984. “I don’t think the pope understands Marxism. For me, the four gospels are all equally communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”

On his second trip to Nicaragua in 1996, the pope referred to the earlier visit: “I remember the celebration of 13 years ago; it took place in darkness, on a great dark night.” By then, the Sandinistas were gone. They had been subjected to the widespread violence from the Contras, and were finally thrown out in a general election in 1990, also marred by massive America interference. Cardenal left his government office in 1987, having fallen out with the junta’s head, Daniel Ortega, and when Ortega returned to power in 2007, he would condemn the government as a thieving monarchy.

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.

Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls

Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos

Coronation of George V

Ahead of Charles III’s coronation this weekend, we look back at the first time cameras were allowed inside the Westminster Abbey

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George V’s coronation in 1911 had several ‘firsts’: the first to use the newly developed processional route through the Mall and Whitehall; the first to be followed by a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral; the first with the iconic balcony appearance by the king — and most importantly, the first to be photographed from inside the abbey.

The honor fell to Sir John Benjamin Stone, a former MP and amateur photographer, who was earlier also entrusted by George V to photograph intimate portraits, such as his late father Edward VII’s coffin in the royal vault.

Despite the king’s wishes, Stone wasn’t welcomed by everybody. The illustrated news magazines of London dismissed his blurry photos of ceremony as inferior to sketches produced by their eyewitness artists, and the formidable Randall Davison, then in the seventh year of a tenure that would make him the longest serving Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation, insisted that the photographer and his camera be “in a position absolutely concealed”. As such, Stone’s photo of the king on the coronation chair (above) was almost blocked.

The royal couple both complained about the coronation. “The service in the Abbey was most beautiful, but it was a terrible ordeal,” wrote George V in his journal, while Queen Mary wrote to her aunt, “it was an awful ordeal for us both.”

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In the front row of the Royal Box behind the king, from left to right, were four of his six children (1. Princess Mary; 2. Prince Albert, the future George VI; 3. Prince Henry, the future Duke of Gloucester; 4. Prince George, the future Duke of Kent), his sister (5. the then Princess Royal, Duchess of Fife), and three of his aunts, all daughters of Queen Victoria (6. Princess Christian of Scheswig-Holstein; 7. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll; 8. Princess Henry of Battenberg). The young princes would fight on the way back to the palace: the 11-year-old Henry wrestling the 8-year-old George, nearly knocking Princess Mary’s coronet out of their carriage.

Sitting behind the king’s children were the Connaughts and the Albanys — the wives and daughters of the king’s uncles. From left to right, 1. The Duchess of Connaught; 2. The Duchess of Albany; 3. Princess Patricia (a daughter of Duke of Connaught); and 4. Princess Alexander of Teck (a daughter of Duke of Albany and married to the Queen’s brother).

On the king’s right, four men carrying swords of state were visible. They were, left to right, 1. Field Marshal Lord Kitchner of Khartoum, carrying the sword of temporal justice; 2. Duke of Beaufort, bearing curtana (also known as the Sword of Mercy); 3. Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, carrying the sword of spiritual justice; and bearing the unwieldy Sword of State, William Lygon, Lord Beauchamp (often thought to be the model for the character Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited).

Visible behind Beauchamp in his military dress was Captain Charles Cust, equerry to the king, who would be a confidante of three kings.

Between the king and the queen were the other officials who held ceremonial roles. From left to right, 1. the Viscount Churchill, one of the bearers of the king’s train; 2. the Bishop of Bath and Wells; 3. the Earl of Carrington; and 4. the Bishop of Durham. On the other side of the queen was the Bishop of Petersborough. Behind the queen were the bearers of her six-yard long train, led by Evelyn Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire and Mistress of the Robes — the senior lady in the Royal Household.

Lord Carrington, the future Marquess of Lincolnshire, bore St Edward’s Staff and held the role of Lord Great Chamberlain. The role rotates with every change of reign between three families: the others being the Cholmondeleys and the Willoughby de Eresbys (the Earls of Ancaster). For Charles III’s coronation, it will be turn of another Carrington.

Bishops of Durham and Bath and Wells acted as Bishops Assistant to the King — a role that existed since the coronation of Edgar in 973, and had been carried out by the holders of those two bishoprics since the coronation of Richard I in 1189.

(You can compare Stone’s photos to the almost identical coronation painting by John Henry Frederick Bacon. Bacon was placed hidden from view behind the tombs of Aymer de Valence and Aveline of Lancaster, directly facing the Royal Box, and he used artistic licence to produce a clear view of the king in profile and the queen facing the viewer).

Pedro Luis Raota

When he died early at the age of 52 in 1986, Pedro Luis Raota was already a celebrated photographer, both in his native Argentina and outside. The “Ansel Adams of Argentina”, he was dubbed, and his photos routinely won awards on international competitions. He cofounded and then served as the first director of The Instituto Superior de Arte Fotográfico and was also controversially a favored photographer of the Argentine military junta which loved his photos which sentimentalized and lionized the country’s working class poor.

Born in Chaco, one of the poorest provinces of Argentina, Raota himself had humble origins making passport pictures in rural areas. His first major success came when he was 32 years old when he won the first Prize in a photographic contest organized by Mundo Hispánico, a magazine in Madrid with his work on lives of the gaucho and their descendants. His lens focused on the dark wrinkles of the gaucho families, marking their hard lives, and unbridled horses of the Pampa Húmeda. (The gaucho — the nomadic horsemen who defined the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century — enjoyed heroic status similar to that of the cowboys in the United States).

Like Adams, Raota was a master of the darkroom; his images are always dramatic, with an exaggerated use of chiaroscuro. His original signed prints, each one hand printed by himself on Chlorobromide paper, are extremely rare and command high prices. It was widely rumored that Raota was engaged by the junta to produce propaganda, but the details were murky. When the Argentine junta collapsed, many people who wished to hide their close relationship with the regime destroyed many junta-era documents, complicating any investigation into the matter.

What was undeniable was that Raota’s photographic books were distributed in many countries though embassies throughout the junta years in a PR campaign. Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, the national oil company, also used Raota’s photos in its calendars and promotional materials during the junta years. His photos represented a sanitized Argentina, wished and willed by the junta: an Argentina of romance, loyalty and community, depicted in period or regional costumes; a nation and a people untroubled by wars or economic ruination; wholesome, rural, pristine, conservative.

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Nelly | Greece

How do you memorialize someone like Nelly? On one hand, she was a pioneering woman photographer and her photos of Greek temples and columns set against sea and sky shaped – and it can be argued, still shape – our imagination of Greek culture and its visual image. On the other hand, she was a propagandist and she closely associated with Nazis and fascists.

Born Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari near Smyrna in Asia Minor, she studied photography in Germany. The expulsions of ethnic Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turks following the Greco-Turkish war was to shape her views for decades to come – she would adopt nationalist approach to her work, working for the Greek royal family and the Greek state, which was then trying to reproduce an idealized view of their country for both internal propaganda as well as external tourism.  Her photos of the Parthenon, Athens, and Santorini, as well as the locals in ethnic dresses, are to shape the Western imaginations of Greek culture.

Under the pre-war dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, she worked for the regime’s youth organization EON, producing photos and photomontages of fascistic grandeur. Through Metaxas’ regime, she became acquainted with the Nazi establishment, photographing Hitcher and Mussolini at close quarters, and becoming close to the Goebbels. She requests that Goebbels recommend her to UFA, the German film academy, to be trained in shooting documentaries – due to her admiration of Leni Riefenstahl, that other female propagandist, with whom she was later compared.

When the war broke out, she was in the United States; with the Italian invasion of Greece looming, her nationalism turned anti-Axis and she spent the war years fundraising for the Allied cause by selling the photos of her idealized Greece. A photo of hers – of a soldier sounding his trumpet to call the Greeks to fight off Italy – was on the cover of Life magazine in December 1940.  After Greece finally returned to democracy in 1974, her associations with the Metaxas regime was downplayed by a new Greek government which recast her as the ‘photographer of the nation’: a cultural ambassador of “the ‘Greece’ we all carry inwardly, the ‘Greece’ to which we all return to, the ‘Greece’ we cannot easily overcome’, as one pundit put it.

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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. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!

Here is the link to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

The Flood | Giorgio Lotti

In November 1966, when the River Arno broke and flooded Florence, it was undeniably one of the most damaging natural disasters in Western Europe. Over a hundred-people died – and millions of masterpieces were destroyed. “The world nearly lost the Renaissance city,” the Guardian wrote somberly.

The Tuscan capital was the city of the Medicis, Machiavelli, and Savonarola, where Michelangelo, Leonardo and Botticelli lived and worked. In this wet autumn, it was to welcome a third of its annual rainfall in just two days. The waters reached over 6.7 metres around the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Giotto had painted frescos; inside Cimabue’s crucifix from 13^th century was destroyed. Completely flooded was the Biblioteca Nazionale, on low ground facing the Arno, where eight million documents, books, and manuscripts had been deposited, many of them for safety since the Second World War. In Piazza del Duomo, baptistery doors by Ghiberti, the ironically named “Gates of Paradise”, were flung open by the floodwaters, which also ripped off its bronze panels off their frames and carried them 500 meters.

The efforts to restore Florence began almost immediately. The so-called angeli del fango, the mud angels – many of them young artists and students – came to the mud-soaked city to carry out the flood damaged masterpieces. Picasso donated a painting to raise funds, and a short film by Franco Zeffirelli and narrated by Richard Burton raise $20 million. But the amount of works affected was so staggering, the restorations so time-consuming, and the Italian bureaucracy so glacial that a significant portion remains unrestored. Giorgio Vasari’s five-panel “Last Supper” which was underwater for more than 12 hours was restored fully only in 2016, and a great number of books and art remain locked in warehouses waiting to be repaired.

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The photo above — taken by Giorgio Lotti, a photojournalist with the notable Italian illustrated news magazine Epoca – shows the Florentine city transformed into Venice. Lotti would later be more famous as the man who took one of the most widely reprinted photos in the world – a snap which was used by Zhou Enlai as one of his official portraits. Lotti was in Beijing for an event with the Italian embassy to which he brought a camera despite being told not to do so. While Zhou was greeting the visitors, he asked the Chinese premier (in French) to pose for a photo. Lotti was not impressed by the first photo but he took another as Zhou’s assistant informed Zhou that they were waiting for him in the room and he looked away from the camera to look into the room. Later, the Chinese ambassador would ask Lotti for a copy of this second shot at Zhou’s explicit request.

 

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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. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!

Here is the link to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

Ernest Cole

When it was first published in the United States in 1967 and in Britain a year later, House of Bondage was the most comprehensive document of apartheid. Sure, there had been photojournalists from Life or Magnum who visited South Africa and came back with absurd and hallowing photos of segregation, but here was a book, by a black South Africa who lived through its incipient days.

Born in 1940, Ernest Cole was ten when a series of laws — on population registration, on miscegenation, on mixed race settlements — codified Apartheid. In 1953, when bantu education act racially separated educational facilities from missionary schools to universities, Cole left school — his education forever pigeonholing him as an “unskilled labourer” who could only work as in low-paid jobs.

In a time when a black man holding a camera was viewed with great suspicion, he became a photographer for Drum, documenting the pantomime life in segregated South Africa — poverty, binge drinking, overcrowded and dirty black townships, syncretic religion, and bantustans. This was a time of inhumanities. Benches read “Europeans Only”, and there were no benches for “Blacks” as they were supposed to sit on the ground. Trains and train platforms were divided in two — only a small section for “Non-Europeans”. Black hospitals were understaffed.

Absurdities permeated throughout. At drive-in theaters, wooden walls cut through the middle of the field, separating the blacks from the whites. Since non-whites are not allowed to see some films restricted to whites only, the ushers — who were predominantly black — were asked to avert their eyes and watch the floor while ushering in patrons. Shakespeare’s Othello — subtitled The Moor of Venice — was not allowed to be played by a black actor. Black Beauty, a novel about a horse in Victorian England, which didn’t even include any black people, was banned because the censors read the title and assumed that it was a black rights novel.

But the worst conditions were in the mines — in whose strict patriarchal divide between white overseers and black laborers began the seeds of Apartheid. Cole sneaked his camera into these mines in his lunchbox, and took pictures. In his book, Cole wrote, “twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, half a million Africans are at work in the earth.” The pay was low, and the condition dire (the mines were not unionized until 1982) but the lure of riches was to draw other Africans into the miasma of apartheid. They came from all over South Africa and from Zambia, Mozambique, Angola and several other neighboring states.

Soon his work and connections became too controversial even for trailblazing Drum. After he was asked, and re- fused, to become a police informer, he left for exile in the West. When his book was published, he became an instant persona non grata and his book joined Black Beauty on the banned list (but was secretly circulated). He never returned to South Africa, and died penurious in Manhatten in 1990, even as the Apartheid regime was crumbling.

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A word about 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. But that research does come with a price tag — in web hosting, books, library subscriptions, and copious coffee.

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. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!

Here is the link: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

 

 

Monument Valley, Josef Muench

Largely forgotten now, there was a time when the name Josef Muench was as much associated with Monument Valley as Ansel Adams was with Yosemite. Born in Germany in 1908, Muench was later to be celebrated for making the picture-heavy Arizona Highways one of the premier photo magazines in the country. Bulk of his work, however, documented the harsh landscape surrounding 30,000 acres of Navajo tribal park starting in 1935.

Also present around the park were the Gouldings who purchased 640 acres of land next to the valley and began trading with the Navajo in the preceding decade. The times were bad for both the Gouldings and the Navajo – the effects of the Great Depression were particularly harsh on this stretch of Arizona-Utah border – but Harry Goulding had an idea. He had heard that United Artists was looking to film a Western nearby.

Goulding commissioned from Muench an album of 8-by-10 scenes of the Valley. Legend had it that he drove off to Hollywood, and insisted on camping out in United Artists’ reception area until he ran into the location manager of the film. The manager was suitably impressed by Muench’s pictures – as was the director, John Ford.

The film they were to make together in the valley was Stagecoach, one of the most influential Westerns ever made – the movie that turned westerns from cheap cinematic fares into sprawling epics; the movie that made a star out of John Wayne. Essential to the movie was the Monument Valley’s mythic landscape — “its prehistoric rock pillars framing the smallness of men” in the words of critic Roger Ebert – a place to which Ford was to return for no less than nine subsequent movies. The film transformed the Monument Valley into a tourist attraction – further movie crews came to the Goulding’s homestead, which grew and grew into a ranch, a lodge, and eventually a hotel. By the time Harry Goulding retired in 1962, the valley had been a protected area for four years.

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A word about Patreon, a fundraising platform. 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. But that research does come with a price tag — in web hosting, books, library subscriptions, and copious coffee. So this Patreon is just to fray some of those costs.

As you may notice in last few years, I have been posting very infrequently. But I want IP to go on for a long time and be sustainable. Linking a monetary value to a new post (not a ‘monthly salary’ — which is another way of doing Patreon) give me a marginal incentive to create more compelling and educational content. 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. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!

Here is the link: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

Also, many protected areas in the United States are currently under review and might become unprotected due to the ongoing National Monuments review. The American West has always been at the forefront of the struggle between development and conservation, so please do make your voice heard during the public comment period, here.

 

Fairchildern

Most people would not recognize anyone in the photo above. They have no reasons to. Yet, the eight sitting darksuited computer scientists who posed together for Wayne Miller of Magnum were responsible for fundamentally reshaping the modern life.

There was a happier photo four years earlier when some of them were toasting their then-boss William Shockley for the Nobel prize. But that was 1956. Merely a year later, they would have a fallout with Shockley — a brilliant scientist but paranoid and domineering boss (who would later become an eugenicist) — and went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, named after an East Coast company that provided the initial funding.

In many ways, it was the prototypical start-up, avant l’heure.  There were eight of them (in the photo, from left to right): Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last.  They were a diverse crew, having majored in everything from metallurgy to optics. Although Miller’s photo suggested otherwise, the dress-code was relaxed, and there were no assigned parking spaces, fixed office hours, or closed office doors.

They ran their start-up out of a 14,000 square foot building at 844 Charleston Road, between Palo Alto and Mountain View, which initially lacked plumbing and electricity. It was located in an area then known as Valley of Heart’s Delight (a place then known for being the largest fruit production region in the world) but their work in semiconductors there was so groundbreaking that they managed to change the place’s toponym into Silicon Valley.

From this ramshackle office, they managed to mass-produce silicon transistors for IBM; Noyce’s design for ‘microchip’ — essentially transforming bulky circuit boards into layers of silicon and germanium — was so transformational that by the mid-1960s, thirty percent of all integrated circuits in America were Fairchild-made. This chip made NASA’s manned mission to the Moon possible later in the decade.

By 1969, however, the group — then already dubbed Traitorous Eight by Shockley — had disbanded. In another pioneering tradition of the Valley, they would go on to found their own startups, which included National Semiconductor, Amelco/Teledyne, LSI, and Intel. Moore was immortalized by the computing law that bears his name, and Eugene Kleiner by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — an early investor in everything from Amazon to Google. Noyce, who co-founded Intel with Moore, mentored Steve Jobs. Other early Fairchild employees included Intel’s Andrew Grove, and Don Valentine, founder of another VC titan, Sequoia Capital, which had invested in Atari, Cisco, and LinkedIn. A 2014 study suggests that 92 public companies could be traced back to Fairchild, totally market capitalization of $2.1 trillion.

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A word about Patreon, a fundraising platform. 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. But that research does come with a price tag — in web hosting, books, library subscriptions, and copious coffee. So this Patreon is just to fray some of those costs.

 

As you may notice in last few years, I have been posting very infrequently. But I want IP to go on for a long time and be sustainable. Linking a monetary value to a new post (not a ‘monthly salary’ — which is another way of doing Patreon) give me a marginal incentive to create more compelling and educational content. 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. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!

 

Here is the link: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

 

J.R. Eyerman at Drive-In

If you own any photography books, chances are that you have seen the photo above.

Charlton Heston as Moses in Ten Commandments, towering over a neat assemblage of cars.  Taken by J.R. Eyerman at a drive-in theatre in Utah, this photo was published in Life magazine’s special issue on U.S. Entertainment.

According to Eyerman’s family [on Reddit], he sat down with Cecil B. deMille, the director of Ten Commandments to choose the best single frame from the movie. He decided to take the photo in Utah — after all the film was previewed here before its national release, and was helped by the Mormon Church making it a required viewing. (This boon was not because the film was particularly theological, but because deMille enjoyed close friendships with the church elders, and even spoke at Brigham Young University’s commencement the preceding year).

After Eyerman found a drive-in with scenic background, he enticed college students from Brigham Young University with a free movie showing. It was a double exposure shot: he took the first exposure at the sunset, and the second (of the frame deMille chose) after the students had left. (Ten Commandments wasn’t screened for the students; the risque Roger Vadim film “And God Created Woman” featuring Brigitte Bardot was).

Beyond Eyerman’s technical prowess, the photo marked a subtle commentary on America of 1958 when it was published in Life magazine towards the end of the year. Suddenly, it was looking back at the year the post-war baby boom ended, the year Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to West Coast; the year Alaska was granted statehood; the year Nabokov published his controversial Lolita; the year hula-hoop craze swept the nation. But no fad proved as enduring as America’s infatuation with automobile; by 1958 there were more than 50 million cars in America, and the year marked the 2nd anniversary of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, a massive infrastructure project that was reshaping the way Americans traveled.

Suburbs flourished. Gasoline was cheap. This was the decade of motels and carhops; if places and businesses weren’t drive-ins, they were drive-thrus — banks, restaurants, grocery stores. Even Charlton Heston seemingly proselytizing to “a congregation of rapt, immobile automobiles at prayer” as Time magazine put it, didn’t seem too far-fetched. Starting in 1949, a Lutheran priest in North Hollywood just did that with the first drive-in church service.

But even in times of such excitement, drive-in theatres proved to be a foolhardy exercise. Kerry Segrave reflects in Drive-in Theaters that television wasn’t a factor, but it didn’t help either. Even as the number of drive-in theatres grew to over 4,000 in 1958 (up from around 1,000 in 1950), television was becoming more and more prevalent.  By 1958, 83% of American households had a television set in their homes, up from 9% in 1950. Segrave instead blames the decline of drive-in theatres on quality issues — poor equipment, sound, and maintenance. Economically, they were constrained by space and time of the day. With post-war baby boom ending, there were fewer and fewer needs for movie theatres where a family could bring a infant. By 1963, the number of drive-in theatres was down to 3,500 — a decline that would prove to be irreversible.

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I am doing something crassly commercial here: I just signed up for Patreon. Patreon is a fundraising platform. In their words, “Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service.”

As you may notice in last few years, I have been posting very infrequently. But I want IP to go on for a long time and be sustainable. Linking a monetary value to a new post (not a ‘monthly salary’ — which is another way of doing Patreon) should give me a marginal incentive to write more. As far as the blog is concerned, nothing will change. No paywalls.

I will write a longer post about Patreon next week. A goal I have is bigger outreach. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos. I also feel what I wrote was worth sharing. So I wanted to run a few facebook ad campaigns, and eventually a short book — educating people history using photographs. This will be similar to this book I mocked up for an April Fool a few years ago. I am hoping Patreon can help. Patreon is more useful for YouTubers and podcasters, but let’s see how it goes for me:

https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

Female Genital Mutilation, Stephanie Welsh

Today is International Women’s Day; to mark this, we should look back at groundbreaking photojournalism done by female photographers, here, here, and here. We should also look at this upsetting body of work by Stephanie Welsh.

In 1995, 21-year old Stephanie Welsh landed in Kenya to begin a yearlong internship (which paid $100 per month) with the Daily Nation, a Nairobi newspaper. On her planeride, she read Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, where the female protagonist who submits to female circumcision out of tribal loyalty, and decided the pursue the story.

In Kenya, the practice, now commonly called female genital mutilation (FGM), was illegal but still widespread. FGM involves cutting or removing part or all of a female’s external genitalia, usually when she is just a child or entering puberty. Unlike male circumcision, which at least curbs the transmission of HIV, FGM brings no medical benefit whatsoever.

Welsh traveled to rural Kenya, taught herself Swahili, spent two weeks living with the family of a 16-year-old girl about to undergo the ritual, in a hut of cow dung and straw, drinking goat milk laced with cow blood. Her story of the ritual was heartbreaking — the girl shouted out “Why are you trying to kill me?” and  “I’m dying. I’m going to die,” even as blood ran and curdled on the red mud. Although the Nation published only a watered-down version, they were picked up by in 12 U.S. newspapers. Welsh won a second-place prize in the World Press Photo and a Pulitzer.

The photo raised awareness of FGM; the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that genital mutilation is a form of persecution. Yet the practice persisted; annually around two million girls undergo the procedure even today, oftentimes done crudely with a razor or a glass shard. It was linked to honor, chastity and access to favorable marriages and social networks, and widely supported by women. A recent study showed that the daughters of a mother belonging to an ethnic group where FGM is widespread are more likely to undergo the practice it than those of a mother not belonging to such a group.

Welsh’s photos also became the centerpiece of one such debate, with many anthropologists and African commentators denouncing appropriation of women’s bodies as exhibits (the girl in the photo had not given permission for the images to be taken) and Western ‘cultural and ideological colonialism’. Welsh herself hang up her Nikon in 1999 to devote to anti-FGM causes and become a midwife.

(Due to the upsetting nature of the images, we are posting only one photo, which was the most widely published photo because it was the least violent. In the photo, the mutilated girl examines her excised pudenda. The rest, you can see here; in a blog post, Stephanie Welsh remembers that sweltering April day). 

The North American Indian, 1907

Seven riders from the Navajo Nation and their dog trek against background of Canyon de Chelley, in an image widely copied in Westerns (1904).

“The most gigantic undertaking since the making of the King James edition of the Bible”, The New York Herald gushed when the first volume of The North American Indian appeared in 1907. Its foreword was written by Teddy Roosevelt and the book was funded by J.P. Morgan. When its last volume appeared, however, its author was broke and his work had been largely forgotten.

Edward Curtis was one of those large-than-life figures — less of a photographer than an explorer. Abandoning his lucrative society photography, he spent three decades photographing and documenting lives and traditions of eighty North American tribes, a monumental task which took him from the Mexican border to Bering Strait.

Curtis felt that he was racing against time; the 1900 census put the Native American population at 237,000, compared to approximately 600,000 a century earlier. Many of their rituals and traditions had been banned to encourage ‘assimilation’. When he documented  a Piegan Sun Dance in Montana in 1900, Curtis realized it might be the last of its kind.

He was relentless, working 16-hour days, seven days a week, against considerable odds. It took up to six years to persuade Sikyaletstewa, the Hopi Snake Chief, to allow him to participate in a ceremonial snake hunt. He bribed the Navajos to reenact a Yei be Chei healing dance, but the dancers performed the ceremony backwards in order not reveal its most sacred parts. Due to his travels, he was largely absent from domestic life, and his wife left him in 1916.

Curtis compiled over 40,000 large format photos of Native Americans, recorded 10,000 Indian songs on wax cylinders, and collected vocabularies, pronunciation guides, and myths in 75 languages. He became the first person to conduct a thorough historical autopsy of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, from both the Indians side and that of the cavalry.

For a documentary on the Kwakiutl in the Pacific Northwest, who had a reputation as headhunters and cannibals, he participated in the native rituals, bedecking his boat with a human mummy and skulls. Rumors swirled that he participated in a secret cannibalism ceremony — something Curtis mischievously refused to admit or deny.

In other ways too, Curtis was an unreliable narrator. At Piegan lodge, he airbrushed out an alarm clock present in a native tent — a technique he practiced on modern clothes and other signs of contemporary life. He staged a Crow war party on horses, even though there had been no Crow war parties for years. Of the Hopi Snake Dance, he wrote, “Dressed in a G-string and snake dance costume and with the regulation-snake in my mouth I went through [the ceremony] while spectators witnessed the dance and did not know that a white man was one of the wild dancers.” It is now believed that this claim may have been exaggerated or untrue.

An Oasis in the Badlands. Chief Red Hawk pose atop a white horse at a watering hole.