1973 | Coup in Chile

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After three unsuccessful campaigns, Salvador Allende was finally elected in Chile in 1970 — the first Marxist president ever elected democratically anywhere in the world. His subsequent socialist reforms – which included nationalizing factories and agricultural estates, including mines belonging to Anaconda and Kennecott, US copper titans – put him quickly in the crosshairs of the United States.

The U.S. would intervene in Chile in many covert and overt ways to ensure that the Marxist government would fail — denying the country foreign credit, banning sales of spare parts and machinery. This led to the economy collapsing, the inflation skyrocketing and various strikes. The CIA was also backing middleclass business owners to disrupt the government’s plans – such as the October 1972 strike by trucking barons, which blocked the access to the capital Santiago.

By mid-1973, the situation was dire. Allende had survived a coup, and removed military officers from his government – an action that garnered him a censure from the parliament. Country was quickly heading into a constitutional crisis. Two military chiefs who opposed the military intervention in government had been removed (one by assassination, another via a road rage scandal) and the path was clear for the latter general’s successor, Augusto Pinochet, to stage a coup, with backing of the CIA.

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The photos in this post were taken on 11 September, the day of the coup. Allende was photographed, carrying a rifle, talking on the phone (allegedly) with Vice Admiral Patricio Carvajal Prado, one of the putschists (Carvajal would serve as Pinochet’s defense and foreign minister).  A few minutes later, at 9:10 am, Allende made his famous farewell speech on live radio, already speaking of himself in the past tense, of his love for Chile and of his deep faith in its future. 

Immediately afterwards, Allende went around La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, looking for good defense positions. As before, he was surrounded by his Group of Personal Friends (known by the Spanish acronym GAP, Grupo de Amigos Personales), informal armed guard trained and equipped by Cuba and maintained by the Socialist Party for Allende’s protection. Allende wore a metal combat helmet and carried a Soviet-made automatic rifle given to him by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Those were the last photos ever taken of Allende.

Later in the day, an official announcement was sent out that he had committed suicide with the same rifle. His supporters, as well as his widow and daughters, claimed that he was executed by the generals.

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Who took the photos above had long been disputed, and even when they were taken. It was sometimes alleged that they were from the previous coup attempt, the one that failed.

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The photos surfaced four months after the coup, on the front page of The New York Times. The paper’s Latin American correspondent, Marvine Howe, was given the photograph by an intermediary who said the photographer must remain anonymous. When they won the World Press photo award in 1973, the New York Times accepted the award on the unknown photographer’s behalf (Dane Bath of New York Times below).

The Times wrote: “Allende’s body was found in an office, but none of the photographs just obtained shows that scene. A Government spokesman in Santiago said that photographs taken later of Dr. Allende’s body were “really not suitable for publication.”

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A few names had been proposed as the photographer, including one mysterious “Davide”. In February 2007, the Chilean newspaper La Nación revealed that the photographer was Luis Orlando Lagos Vásquez, aka “Chico” Lagos, at the time La Moneda’s official photographer.  The World Press photo attributes them to Lagos, as did Iconic Photos in our previous post.

Family of Leopoldo Vargas, another photographer working under Lagos in the official photographer team, claimed that Vargas took these photos.

Vargas recounted that in the photo above of the call between Allende and Prado, the President ended the call with “Do what you want, motherfuckers,” and told Vargas as he stormed out of the room: “Comrade, instead of carrying a camera, you should better carry a machine gun.” 

With both Lagos and Vargas dead now, it is uncertain if this mystery would be resolved.

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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:

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Berlin Airlift | Henry Ries

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“We must have a bad phone connection,” asked General Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking head of Strategic Air Command. “It sounds like you are asking whether we have planes for carrying coal.”

It was June 1948, and on the other end of the call was General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany. Clay confirmed, “Yes, that’s what I said. Coal.”

LeMay, later the inspiration for the pugnacious and unreasonable Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, answered gruffly after a long pause, “The Air Force can deliver anything.”

Thus began the Berlin Airlift — two days after the Soviets had imposed a blockade on the city which was in their occupied zone to force the Allied occupying powers out.

What Clay had in mind was unthinkable — supplying 2.25 million people with food and fuel by air indefinitely. Initially, it began haphazardly. A “cowboy” operation, unauthorized by the higher-ups (President Truman only later approved the mission). The U.S. Air Force, after all, was a military organization without much experience in running transport and cargo operations. Yet, under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tunner, it became a streamlined and coordinated effort and an incredible feat of logistics.

At the peak of the airlift, cargo planes landed at Tempelhof every four minutes around the clock, and the daily tonnage of food and supplies brought into Berlin by the planes exceeded the amount of material that had been brought in by trains before the blockade. It was a defining moment that won the hearts and minds of the occupied and defeated Germans.

During a landing at Tempelhof, a pilot named Gail Halvorsen befriended the starving children who played around the airfield. Halvorsen, who had personal reservations about the airlift, grew up poor during the Great Depression and empathized with the children. He handed the children two sticks of gum and told them to come back the next day when he planned to airdrop more sweets from his plane. He would wiggle the wings of his aircraft so they would know it was him, he told the children.

Thus began the story of a man remembered in Germany as Der Schokoladen Flieger, the Chocolate Flyer. Not only did he live up to his promise, but Halvorsen also asked other pilots to donate their candy rations, and he had his flight engineer rock the airplane during the drop. More and more children showed up to catch his airdrops, and letters arrived requesting special airdrops at other points in the city.

It was against the rules, but when an Associated Press story appeared under the headline “Lollipop Bomber Flies Over Berlin,” Halvorsen’s superiors realized the PR opportunity. Candy and handkerchief donations arrived from all over America following the AP story (candy was dropped using handkerchiefs as miniature parachutes), and Halvorsen was dubbed Uncle Wiggly Wings in the press. Now officially sanctioned as ‘Operation Little Vittles’, dozens of pilots dropped more than 21 tons of candy in 250,000 small parachutes across Berlin.

The Soviets would soon recognize the futility of the airlift, but the standoff would ultimately last fifteen months. President Truman would use the crisis to his advantage and win an upset reelection victory, while his Secretary of Defense would descend into madness in the midst of an escalating crisis. All in all, when the airlift ended, the United States, Britain, and France had flown 278,228 flights altogether to supply isolated West Berlin.

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Operation Little Vittles was immortalized in a photo which had become as iconic as the candy bombers themselves — and later featured on posters and commemorative stamps.

The photo was taken by Henry Ries, a Berlin-born Jew who fled Nazi Germany and migrated to the United States before the war. He first arrived in the United States in 1937 but was sent back due to improper immigration papers. However, he was able to emigrate the following year and began selling vacuum cleaners to make a living. In 1943, he joined the U.S. Army as an aerial photographer and worked first in the Pacific theater, then in Europe. After the war, Ries returned to Germany and used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath.

Another famous Ries photo, titled ‘Germany’s future swings in front of Germany’s past,’ depicted children at an amusement park ride in Lustgarten in the shadow of the bombed-out ruin of Königliches Schloss, the seat of the last German Kaiser.

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Ries’ photos put into images the thundering words of Berlin’s Lord Mayor Ernst Reuter, the symbol of the Free Berlin. On September 1948, Reuter gave a speech in front of the burned-out Reichstag building, facing a crowd of 300,000 where he appealed to the world not to abandon Berlin — a moment also captured by Ries (above).

Reuter pled, “Ihr Völker der Welt … Schaut auf diese Stadt und erkennt, dass ihr diese Stadt und dieses Volk nicht preisgeben dürft, nicht preisgeben könnt!” (People of this world… look upon this city and see that you should not, cannot abandon this city and this people).

Ries’ photos complemented these words and shone a light on the plight of the defeated Germans, and their struggling lives: a woman ironing while her family slept in the same room; hardened black market traders; emaciated women returning from markets and rummaging in the streets for fuel; citizens planting modest vegetable gardens in the Tiergarten; ethnic Germans expelled from Silesia (surrendered to Poland after the war) and released prisoners of war. In his photo of poor market on Wittenbergplatz in front of the completely destroyed Kaufhaus des Westens, emaciated women offer pitiful bundles of herbs for sale and a man repairs a tattered shoe. 

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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:

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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

1944 | Vienne Execution

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After France was liberated from the Nazis in 1944, a wave of retributions swept through the country. Nazi collaborators and Gestapo informers were denounced; women suspected of having relationships with Germans were publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved; those engaged in the black market activities were labeled as “war profiteers” and trialed.

In the first fevered phase (remembered as épuration sauvage or wild purge, as opposed to later legal purges, épuration légale), one estimate noted that six thousand people were summarized executed for collaboration before the liberation of France, and four thousand thereafter. members and leaders of the milices. The US Army’s estimates were higher: eighty thousand, and one source even reported that the number executed was 105,000.

One such execution was well documented by Jean-Philippe Charbonnier in the village of Vienne, near Grenoble. Charbonnier spent a single roll of 35mm film to document the entire story of the public execution of a Nazi collaborator in front of a crowd of five thousand people. Each shot built up to the death by firing squad of a minor official who had possibly worked for the Gestapo with documentary and cinematic precision, beginning with the man being tied to a post, soldiers with rifles preparing for the task, then ultimately killing him.

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Charbonnier remembered the day and the legal and moral ambiguities of that day:

In October, 1944, in the small town of Vienne (Isere), France, a French collaborator named Nitard was sentenced to death.

He was no large-scale spy — just a man who had been working as a clerk in the German administration, probably for the Gestapo. But one must remember that in the early days of Liberation in France, as in any other country that had suffered four years’ occupation, feelings ran high against any collaborator, big or small. And then, of course the really dangerous collaborators were not easy to bring to justice so the small fry had to pay the price for their more fortunate partners-in-crime. More fuel to the fire had been the executions by the Germans of many great patriots both in Lyons and in Vienne.

The outcry was therefore so violent that, even though Nitard’s appeal to the Courts of Justice in Grenoble had been successful, the shooting was ordered to take place, so as not to disappoint the population of Vienne, I cannot help feeling.

So that everyone in the town should have a chance to watch the execution and share in the general revenge, it was scheduled to take place at noon. Five thousand people, children included, crowded into the square in front of the old military barracks. So intense was the excitement that one could almost smell it as one can before a bullfight or even a good football game, while in the barrack square the condemned man gulped back the traditional glass of rum and lit the traditional cigarette. He puffed at it a few times, then stubbed it out, thrust the butt into his pocket and went to face the firing-squad.

He passed through a hall where the twelve rifles, one with a blank cartridge, had been laid out ready, and walked out into the square to be met by a priest, the firing-squad, its commanding officer and the now strangely silent crowd.

This demonstration of public justice shocked me profoundly. No one deplored collaboration more than I but this punishment seemed to me to be out of all proportion to this man’s relatively small crime. My nerves were taut. This man who was about to die was so close. I don’t remember whether the crowd was silent now, or not. I only know that I set my Leica automatically, as in a dream … or rather, a nightmare. Subconscious reflexes turned my battered old Summar F2 lens to the closest possible range while I tried to fight off feelings of disgust.

Suddenly I felt very close to that man standing alone in the square. The cigarette butt. Injustice to humanity. And then the overwhelming feeling that the man was dead already, that he was like a duck with its head cut off that runs for minutes before finally falling dead. He was dead before he ever entered the “arena” — even after fifteen years I can’t stand using that word.

The “show” was reaching its climax but now the man was untied from the post. He was a traitor and traitors are not given the right to meet death facing the squad. The seconds ticked by as he was bound with his back to the rifles. And then they fired.

Nitard never saw me although I was at times no more than five feet away. The whole story took up just one 35mm roll, as you can see — the biggest, most compact story I ever covered and one I wish never to have to cover again.”

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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).

Woodstock ’69

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The whole world was there. At least it appeared to be — and later would claim to be.

From August 15th to 17th 1969, the largest rock festival in American history was undergoing at Bethel, New York. The name ‘Woodstock’ would soon enter into cultural memory, but back then, it was simply the name of a nearby town where the promoters had originally planned the festival to be. The town (where Bob Dylan then lived) had denied them a permit.

The town was right to be apprehensive — it didn’t want any gathering larger than 5,000 people, and the organizers had expected ten times that time. Actually, a hundred times that number — half a million people — showed up (publicity partly drummed up by the news that Woodstock had banned the festival).

Among the attendees was Burk Uzzle, formerly a staff photographer at Life, then freelancing for Magnum. Several papers asked him to cover the festival, but Uzzle turned them down. The photographer who would turn 31 on the weekend of Woodstock didn’t want editors dictating to him, and instead decided to visit the festival as a freelancer with his family. He carried two Leicas — one with a normal lens, the other with a medium-wide lens, and as much film as he could stuff into his pockers — 15 rolls.

He had planned for a daytrip to the festival, but was stuck there: he was told that the highway had been shut down due to crowds (At least that was what Arlo Guthrie told the crowd, “the New York State Thruway is closed man.” In fact, the state police never closed it off. It was just jammed from traffic). It was a wet muddy weekend and the family stayed in a makeshift shelter they made by attaching a poncho to a barbed-wire fence. Uzzle realized that he was better off taking photos of the audience, rather than elbow through the crowds to take pictures of musicians performing — something all of his colleagues on assignment were trying to do.

On Sunday, Uzzle woke up at 4.30 a.m and walked around. The photo he took that morning of a hippie couple wrapped in a tight embrace would become an iconic picture not only of the festival but also of a generation. Uzzle remembered:

“It was a hard decade: assassinations, riots, Washington. My archive is full of really bad stuff. And then you get to Woodstock, and here are all the hippies that everyone thought were going to ruin the world, but these people decided to look after each other.”

The bedraggled and blanketed couple would come to symbolize the entire generation known for “beads, beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans,” in the words of Time magazine, which devoted a 1967 cover story to the hippies and the “flower power”. For historian Arnold Toynbee, they presented “a red warning light for the American way of life”.

Ironically Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly, both 20, were not hippies. Bobbi was working at a bank and Nick had a construction job. Living near Bethel in Middletown, N.Y., they were aware of the Woodstock controversy — the permits, the tickets, the last minute change of venue — but only decided at the last minute to go. The couple had been dating for less than ten weeks. They would only stay for one night and never saw the stage because they were so far away (in contrast to Uzzle’s family, which arrived early and had prime spots).

Uzzle took a few frames in black and white before switching to color. He remembered:

I walk up and I know the curvature of the hill has to work with the curvature of the heads. And there’s the flag, it’s going to have to be there, and just enough of the people.”

Very slow shutter speed, almost dark, holding myself very still, maybe a 15th of a second, and I was lucky that it was still sharp. But I was not high! So I was able to make the composition and be in focus and take the picture. And then I turned around to find something else to shoot.”

Jefferson Airplane played on stage.

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The photo would be on 3-LP Woodstock album released the next year. A friend of Nick and Bobbi bought the album, and they recognized the orange and yellow butterfly. “Then we saw the blanket. Oh, my lord, that’s us!” The couple had picked it up from the street where other festival goers had abandoned their belongings.

Nick and Bobbi got married two years later and were still together until Bobbi’s death in 2023.

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The festival attracted famous names: Crosby, the Who, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin to name a few. Jimi Hendrix was the closing act (although many didn’t see it as it took on Monday morning) but Bob Dylan refused to turn up (the famously grumpy singer was living a reclusive life in Woodstock and didn’t want more people to turn up to his town; he pointedly traveled to U.K a few weeks later to headline for a festival there).

Although it took years for the organizers to profit from Woodstock, it marked the beginning of the commercialization of music on a large scale. The organizers, Woodstock Ventures Inc., was a coolly calculated operation which took care to meticulously and professionally document the festival in sound and film, ensuring a steady stream of income for the next decade with ongoing marketing (one of the editors on the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock (1970) was young Martin Scorsese) and anniversary festivals, culmulating with the disastrous Woodstock ’99. In that context, the above picture was used (in both black and white and in color), and reproduced on millions of record covers.

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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

Currently there is a poll there re: A.I. photo generation: What sort of iconic photos / images from past eras you want to see? In which photographer’s style? Please go and comment. (https://www.patreon.com/posts/poll-iconic-by-i-80820823)

Poolside Gossip | 1970

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You have probably seen it. In bars, in restaurants, on walls of hotel lobbies. The photo of two attractive women sitting in lounge chairs next to a pool and a modern house. Gray and purple mountains in the background.

Slim Aarons, a society photographer in Los Angeles, took the photo in 1970. The house in question was Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, one of the most famous examples of California modernism — the house that helped establish Palm Springs as centre for modernist architecture. Designed in 1946 by Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra, the house originally belonged to department store tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., who also commissioned Fallingwater from Frank Lloyd Wright.

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In 1970, the house belonged to Joe and Nelda Linsk, Philadelphia clothing manufacturers (Nelda, a Texan model, was a buyer for Linsk of Philadelphia, before marrying the boss). In addition to Aarons, who lived just down the street, their neighbors then included Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh and Lucy and Desi Arnaz. Mrs. Linsk remembers:

It was about 11 in the morning. Slim called us. He knew our house was a Neutra. He said: “I want to come over and do a pool shot. Call some friends over.”

It was so casual. He came with his tripod. The shoot was about an hour and a half. We had champagne and socialized for an hour or two afterward. It was a fun day. I had no idea it would become that famous. I wish I had royalties.  

There were no makeup or wardrobe people. Slim said, “Pull something out of your closet.” Our house was done in yellow: the umbrellas were yellow, the flowers yellow. So I thought I’d wear something yellow. My outfit was in yellow terry cloth. I had on palazzo pants. Helen showed up in that fabulous white lace. She looked so glamorous!

Both of our outfits were bare midriff. We both had big hair. In those days, you had big hair.

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The other women in the photo were Helen Dzo Dzo, who was then married the architect Hugh Kaptur and walking alongside the pool, Lita Baron, an actress. For the 45^th anniversary of the photo, the women returned to the Kaufmann House to restage the iconic photo.

The house sold for $13.06 million in 2022.

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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

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Hawaiian Statehood, 1959

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It was a long and arduous journey.

Following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 by American businessmen, there were several attempts to incorporate the archipelago into the United States. For a time, it was considered a republic until it became a U.S. territory in 1898.

Sanford Dole, a member of the powerful pineapple company and the island’s first (and only) president during its brief time as a republic, proposed Hawaiian statehood to Congress for the first time in 1903. Dole’s efforts were later picked up by Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole – and five bills for statehood were introduced between 1919 and 1950.

The bills faced numerous delays, stemming from the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment, and the Southern Democrats. The last group was particularly worried that Hawaii statehood would lead to the addition of two pro-civil-rights senators from a state, which would be the first with a majority non-white population. However, these obstacles were eventually overcome, with Alaska and Hawaii both admitted as states to preserve the balance of power in the Senate. On March 12, 1959, Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act, and President Eisenhower signed it into law five days later. Almost 95 percent of Hawaii residents voted to accept the statehood bill that June, and Hawaii became the 50th state two months later.

Hawaii and Alaska were the first states to be added to the United States since 1912, when Arizona and New Mexico became part of the country.

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The moment of this historic occasion was captured in an iconic photo, taken shortly after the Hawaii Admission Act was passed. The photo featured a young boy named Chester Kahapea, who was just two days shy of his thirteenth birthday and working as a paperboy in Honolulu. Kahapea recalled that he was pleased with how well the newspapers were selling that day, and he couldn’t cut the bundles open fast enough.

He was sent by his employers at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to deliver a special edition to the mayor of Honolulu, who was late for the photo op. As he waited, a press photographer, Murray Befeler, began talking to Kahapea. Befeler asked Kahapea him how normally sold his papers and asked him to pose accordingly. The photo above was widely distributed in newspapers across the country and around the world, earning Kahapea the nickname “the face of Hawaii statehood.”

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The photo also inspired another photographer, George Bacon, who was a friend of Befeler. Determined not to be outdone, Bacon headed home to take a photo of his own. “My father saw it as a challenge,” recalled Dodie Bacon Browne, then six-year old. “He called home and told my mother to put me in a muumuu. He came home with a copy of the newspaper, took my picture and rushed back to work.” The image of Dodie was also picked up by the Associated Press and widely reprinted.

On the covers of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was the fifty-star flag — designed just a year earlier by a junior at a highschool in Lancaster, Ohio.

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

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National Geographic’s Edited Covers

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The year was 1982.

That February, National Geographic’s cover showed the camel train in front of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Keen-eyed readers noticed something off about the photo: the editors have moved the pyramids to fit the original photo, which was taken in landscape onto the magazine’s vertical front cover.

The outcry was swift. The photographer, Gordon Gahan, complained that his work had been digitally altered without his knowledge. The magazine initially defended their decision, saying, “it was not a falsification, but merely the establishment of a new point of view”.

Then it turned out that Gahan paid the men on camels to ride back and forth in front of the pyramids until he achieved the perfect shot. Debates over authenticity and credibility ensued.  

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It took decades but National Geographic eventually conceded that they were wrong to alter the photo.  In July 2016 editorial, Susan Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, writes: “At National Geographic it’s never OK to alter a photo. We’ve made it part of our mission to ensure our photos are real.”

“We ask ourselves, ‘Is this photo a good representation of what the photographer saw?’”… For us as journalists, that answer always must be yes.

That stentorian pledge lasted all of five years. In January 2021, the magazine put the aftermath of Black Lives Matter protests on its cover. The cover photo was by Kris Graves, who one month after George Floyd protests, photographed the Confederate monuments around Richmond, Virginia. One night on Monument Avenue, Graves came across an art project by Dustin Klein – a series of projections of faces of black people who died due to police violence – took the photo above of Floyd looming large under the equestrian feet of Robert E. Lee.

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When the magazine used the photo, it airbrushed out or obscured ten instances of swear words visible in the photo, scrawled on the Lee’s plinth. Susan Goldberg again, now, backtracking her earlier views:  “It’s an extremely rare step for us to take. We believe that prominently sharing the photo is more important than de-emphasizing a certain swear word; the toning does not diminish its message or impact.” Even on its website, the magazine keeps an altered picture.

This time, the response was more muted – I find very little outcry over the changes. Perhaps, the general public’s apathy over what is authentic and what is fake news had grown since 1982. Yet, all the more ironic: despite Goldberg’s view that the edits didn’t diminish the message, the words “Fuck12”, “Fuck the Police”, “Fuck Pigs”, “Fuck Trump” were the message in that fissile summer of 2020.

Unaltered photo, which is hard to find these days, is below. Can you spot all the ten expletives taken out by Nat Geo editors?

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

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:

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The Coffins, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

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The Zamzam Affair

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“One of the picture scoops of World War II,” Time magazine called it.

The photos showed the sinking of Zamzam, an Egyptian vessel which departed New York in March 1941 bound for Alexandria, Egypt with approximately 200 passengers, mostly Protestant missionaries, plus two dozen volunteer ambulance drivers from the British-American Ambulance Corps bound for the British Army in the Middle East.

On April 17, 1941, the Zamzam was attacked by Atlantis, a German raider. Most of the passengers survived and were picked up by Atlantis. Among the survivors were Life magazine photographer David Scherman and Charles J. V. Murphy, an editor of Life’s sister publication, Fortune, who were on the way to South Africa to cover the war. Scherman had snapped away at the Zamzan’s fate – passengers abandoning ship, pictures of Atlantis, pictures of the sinking Zamzam — even as he was being captured. He even managed to take pictures aboard the prison ship.

He hid rolls of film in a tube of toothpaste and shaving cream and got a missionary doctor to sew the films in packages of gauze bandages which were then resealed. Before being repatriated, Scherman had to surrender his films to the Nazis “for examination.” He willingly gave up 104 rolls to the Germans but kept the four rolls that he knew to include the pictures of the sinking and some of the life aboard the German ship.

After his release, Scherman sent his photos to Life and the magazine published the story of the Zamzam’s sinking, accompanied by Murphy’s words in June 1941.  

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For a brief moment, the attention of the whole world was transfixed: America was not yet in the Second World War, and Zamzam, a neutral passenger ship carrying primarily American citizens, could have been just the spark to sway the public opinion in favor of war, just as the Lusitania did in World War I. The German propaganda ministry, realizing the danger quickly released a statement claiming that all passengers and crew had been rescued by the German warship Atlantis, captained by a devout Lutheran, and that Zamzam’s cargo of oil was contraband, and therefore legally attackable.

Those were divisive and perilous days. In “Those Angry Days,” historian Lynn Olson recalled an anti-war country in which shops and bars near army bases banned soldiers, and generals wore civilian clothes to testify to the Congress. An effigy of a senator calling for young men to receive compulsory military training was hanged from an oak outside the Senate, before being dragged around Capitol Hill behind a car, by a mob of angry ladies: members of an isolationist mothers’ movement.  Often clad in mourning black, they encircled Capitol Hill to scream and spat at politicians for plotting to kill their sons. Meanwhile, inside the building, senators denounced one another as war profiteers and even a fistfight broke out. Robert Taft, an isolationist senator and the son of a former president, declared that President Roosevelt’s policies were a “good deal” more dangerous than Nazism.

In such atmosphere, Life magazine was almost circumspect. “American people who have learned a lot since the Lusitania went down, showed few evidences of either surprise or hysteria, accepting the news rather with a hardening of spirit, a grim determination,” Life magazine wrote under the headline, “Germans sinks an American ship and dares the U.S. to make an incident of it.”

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Yet, by the time the German censors finally returned Scherman’s rolls of film, and Life magazine published a coda to the Zamzam affair, on December 15, 1941, the things had dramatically changed. Eight days earlier, the Japanese had attacked the Pearl Harbor and America was well on her way to war.

As for Scherman’s photos, those enabled the British, who would soon have the picture of the Atlantis posted aboard all their ships, to identify and then sink the raider, which was a nondescript merchantman refitted as an armed cruiser. David Scherman would went on to be an editor at LIFE for two decades, the only staff photographer ever to achieve such a switch.

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson | Shanghai, Jan 1949

On the day the Japanese Army surrendered in September 1945, the wars in Asia were far from over. As Ronald Spector notes in a recent book, “A Continent Erupts,” the peoples under the territories until recent occupied by Japan had vastly different visions about their postcolonial future which led to savage and bitter conflicts.

Nowhere was this brutal conflict more pronounced than in China were 2.5 million combatants and 16 million civilians were to perish between 1945 and 1949. The World War in Asia had practically began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and it has dragged on as the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek cut secret deals with the defeated Japanese commanders in 1945-46 to engage some Japanese troops against the Communists.  

The Nationalists nominally still controlled the cities, but the power was slowly slipping away from them. Economy, after seventeen years of war, was in a nosedive and in order to keep funding the war (now without major support from the Western Allies), the Nationalists began printing paper money in vast quantities. Technically, they were backed by gold, but amount of Chinese fabi in circulation grew from 189 billion to 4.5 trillion by 1946.

The government tried to intervene – firstly by introducing a new currency, gold yuan and then eventually by trying to return China to silver standard – but nothing would work. In a typical dictatorial fashion, the government mandated all Chinese holding gold, silver, or foreign currency were required to surrender such assets in return for “gold yuan,” under penalty of death. Chiang appointed his own son in charge of these measures who led a reign of terror, sending trucks from house to house to confiscate the assets.  In mid-1948, currency was trading at one million yuans to a US dollar. By February 1949, it was six million yuans to a dollar. Paper factories in Kwangtung found it more cost effective to pulp hundred yuan bills to making new paper.

By now, the end was drawing near. Starting in December 1948, the government had been shipping out the nation’s gold reserves to Taiwan, knowing that the Communists would soon over run the major cities. In December, 2 million taels of gold (~75 tons), nearly half of the government’s gold, carried out of the central bank in the traditional manner – by coolies, parceled up on bamboo poles – down the gangplank onto a freighter bound for Keelung in northern Taiwan.  

This action, observed by George Vine, a British journalist looking out of his fifth-floor office window one night, would prompt a nationwide bank run. That was the situation when Henri Cartier-Bresson arrived in Shanghai in January 1949. Outside four government banks on the old Bund, a vast crowd teemed. In order to prove that there was still gold in the vaults, the government started selling gold from the reserves at around half the price what the black marketers were charging. Each person was limited to forty grams of gold, and thousands had been waiting in line since eight pm the previous night, ignoring the eleven pm curfew. The police made only a token gesture toward maintaining order, resulting in ten deaths by suffocation or by being trampled, by five pm the following day.

The government gave up this scheme quickly.  Meanwhile, they were shipping off gold — another 14 tons of gold was being moved out of Bank of China’s vaults under the Bund just as Cartier-Bresson was documenting the chaos above. The gold and silver was escorted down to Taiwan by Mei Ching, a ship which would later defected to the Communists, highlighting the risks involved in such a transfer.

By the time Shanghai fell to the Communists, almost 100 tons of gold reserves were safely in Taiwan already.

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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls.

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