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.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

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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.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos

Bombing of Singapore

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On 8 December 1941, seventeen Japanese bombers dropped bombs over the island of Singapore, the opening salvo in their campaign against Dutch, British, and Portuguese possessions in South East Asia. Months earlier, Japan had already taken advantage of the defeat of France and the accension of Vichy government to seize French Indochina, and it was from there that their bombers embarked for Malaya and Singapore.

From then on to the fall of Singapore in mid February 1942, the air raids were frequent. Clifford Bottomley, a photographer dispatched by Australian Department of Information, took the photo above of the aftermath of the air raid — two women grieving over a child killed outside a rickshaw station — on 3rd February. Although largely forgotten now, coming as it did in the early part of a war that would produce hundreds of equally piognant, equally heartrending images, the photo recalled an earlier Japanese air raid atrocity in Shanghai.

Bottomley, equally forgotten now, had an eventful war. He covered the Malayan campaign for two months before he was evacuated from Singapore as the colony surrendered (producing another slew of memorable images) to Batavia. The Japanese army followed him, and two weeks later, he was forced to retreat again as Japan invaded Dutch East Indies. Later, he covered the Kokoda Trail, Buna and Sanananda campaigns in New Guinea and was with General MacArthur when he landed at Leyte in the Phillippines. He had a few narrow escapes — having wounded in Sanananda and a war correspondent sitting next to him in a jeep in the Phillippines being killed by a Japanese sniper — and was awarded the Philippine Liberation Ribbon, in recognition of his work during the Leyte Campaign.

Guzmán Arrest | Peru

Crude though it was, the moment above told the Peruvians that their long national nightmare was coming to an end. As police and prosecutors showed off Abimael Guzmán as their trophy, from his cage, Guzmán ranted and swore like a wounded animal. Elsewhere, his Maoist terrorist group, Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) unraveled.

Sendero was perhaps the strangest and the most radical leftist insurgency in the Americas.  Guzmán — a philosophy professor — formed Sendero in the 1960s, as a fundamentalist Maoist party, and in 1980, as China embarked upon its capitalist reforms, lashed out by launching the “People’s War” to disrupt Peru’s first democratic elections in sixteen years.

The ensuing 12-year conflict, which brought the Peruvian state to a standstill, destroyed $22 billion worth of property and nearly 70,000 people died or “disappeared” , three quarters of them, the impoverished indigenous peoples of the high Andes. Shining Path also turned its Andean headquarters in Ayacucho and the Upper Huallaga Valley into a place of violence and cocaine production.

Three successive administrations, ending with the autocratic Alberto Fujimori responded to the rebellion with the dangerous mixture of ineptitude and violence until Guzman was captured in a bloodless raid on a modest apartment above a dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima, hidden — in a fitting touch for such a strange organization — by the prima ballerina of the national ballet.

Many photos were taken at Guzman’s perp-walk, but photographers mainly focused on the cage and Guzman. Two exceptions were Ana Cecilia Gonzales-Vigil (above) and Wesley Bocxe (below), whose photos captured the intense security  and media circus surrounding the arrest, with secret service agents, snipers, and prosecutors guarding the courtyard. Gonzales-Vigil won a mention in World Press Photo (1993) for her photo and Bocxe’s photo was chosen as one of the most iconic images of the century.

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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.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link to my Patreon:

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Rafael Wollmann | Falklands

Taking an iconic photo is sometimes about being at the right place, at the right time. No one could attest to that more than Rafael Wollmann.

The Argentine photographer had taken an assignment from a French photo agency Gamma to take a “geographical” photo-essay on a remote series of islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, about 300 miles east of Patagonia. He arrived there on his 23rd birthday, on March 23 1982 and spent the next week documenting the island life.

On the afternoon of April Fool’s Day, 1982, Wollmann was greeted by the grave voice, coming from the radio, of the island’s British governor, Sir Rex Hunt — whom he had interviewed earlier. “We have apparently reliable evidence that an Argentine task force could be assembling off Stanley at dawn tomorrow. You will wish to make your dispositions accordingly,” Hunt repeated in verbatim a telegram he received from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Wollmann stood in the middle of a pub, where everyone turned around to look at him — the only Argentinian in the pub. The Falklands War had begun.

Accused by Hunt of having being ‘planted’ by the Argentine junta (two days earlier, he had sent some of his films back to Argentina with air mail), Wollmann was detained briefly in Hunt’s chauffeur’s house, from inside which he took pictures. An unknown solider shot at him, mistaking his lens with some weapon, and missed Wollmann by only a few centimeters.

After Hunt had surrendered — in the full ostrich-plumed uniform befitting a British governor — and was bundled off to exile in Uruguay, Wollmann got out into the courtyard and took the photo above of British Marines being forced to surrender. He remembered:

“They were marching towards the courtyard of the governor’s house where they were delivering arms, then they went to the garden and were seated. They were already prisoners of war. I took a lot of caution, and I did not want to be imprisoned or they taking my camera, so I shot a picture and left the scene, not knowing what I was going to find when it was revealed.”

On April 3rd, Wollmann returned to Argentina, where a bidding war for his photos ensued. “I was able to pay for my house overnight” joked Wollmann.  Editorial Atlántida, an Argentine publishing house which had fired him four months earlier, put a private jet at his disposal to return to the islands. Wollmann gave his film to Gamma, which had initially hired him, and in France, another bidding war broke out between Paris Match and VSD magazines, which the latter won. It ran the photo with a deliciously schadenfreude caption: ‘England Humiliated’. In Italy’s L’Espresso, the title was “Hands up, England!”. Some would later argue that these images and captions prompted Margaret Thatcher to act decisively in dispatching troops to retake the islands.

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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.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link to my Patreon:

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Tunisia | Dominique Berretty

After the defeat at Diên Biên Phu, France’s attention turned to its African colonies, whose soldiers had fought in Vietnam and saw the imperial power humbled and humiliated. The insurrection in Algeria began on November 1954, just fourteen weeks after France signed the Geneva Accords, ending its disastrous war in Indochina.

Rather than face a series of conflagrations throughout the Maghreb, the new Socialist government of Guy Mollet gave Tunisia and Morocco independence in March 1956. Algeria was to be held on at all costs, but Tunisia and Morocco were dispensable, and thus they became first countries in Africa to regain their independence from a colonial power.

Yet France maintained a selection of bases across Tunisia (although the Fourth Republic fell and General de Gaulle was returned to power, he evacuated five bases and 50,000 soldiers off Tunisia), most notably at Bizerte, a strategic naval base on the Mediterranean, through which France was to conduct its operations during the war in Algeria. For the Tunisians, the base was an affront to their sovereignty, and in July 1961, they surrounded and blockaded it. De Gaulle’s response was swift and decisive — a rapid strike which killed 700 Tunisians — so decisive that by October, the Bizerte town council was able to crow: “Today’s Bizerte is essentially a French creation….. France managed in less than eighty years to change the face of Bizerte more than the preceding millennium had done.”

In a little over two years, an exhausted France would return Bizerte to Tunisia, as its war in Algeria unraveled.

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The photo above is taken by Dominique Berretty who was propitiously in Tunisia as the Bizerte crisis began. Berretty took many famous war photos throughout the 1950s and the 60s, covering the border crisis between India and Pakistan, and later the war in Vietnam, where his photo taken in 1965 of an American soldier watching a burning Vietnam village became a visual shorthand for inhumanity of war.

 

 

A Kidnapping in Chad

We don’t really hear much about a lot of countries until something horrible happens there; extra attention if that catastrophe happens to westerners. Then, glaring spotlight of international media becomes focused for one brief moment, and then disappears.

In April 1974, the world’s attention briefly turned to Chad, an African country bigger in area than South Africa or France, when in the northern part of the country, at Bardaï, in the Tibesti Mountains, a group of rebels kidnapped a German doctor and two French citizens. One Frenchman managed to escape and the doctor was ransomed by the German government, but the second archaeologist — Francoise Claustre — was held hostage.

Her ordeal put the Chad rebellion on the frontpages of newspapers, as did her husband Pierre’s status as a senior development bureaucrat for the French government. The French government which had deployed a thousand French soldiers in the region at the request of the Chad government to contain the rebellion of Tibesti, was in the midst of a fraught presidential election, and responded ineptly: it sent a soldier to negotiate with the rebels (with a secret mission to sow dissent among the rebels). When this plot was revealed, he was tried by a “revolutionary tribunal”, and hanged.

Most of France simply believed she would be executed, but Pierre struggled to get his wife out. Leading the negotiations himself, he joined his wife as a hostage and brought the world’s media attention to the Toubous rebels and their leader Hissène Habré. Habré, formerly educated in France with his perfect French and denunciations of colonialism, would be affectionately nicknamed the ‘Sciences-Po Guerrilla’ in the media. Among the media who came were two prominent photojournalists Marie Laure De Decker and Raymond Depardon (photos above). After they flew back from Tibesti, they were arrested by the Niger government, which also confiscated their films, but their subsequent photos and videos — serialized on the covers of Paris Match week after week — galvanized the French government to take action.

After pressure from the rebel’s main patron, the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, the Claustres were released; Francoise spent thirty-three months in captivity. Depardon made a movie about the Claustre Affair, La Captive du désert in 1990. De Decker continued to photograph Chad and published a magisterial book “For Chad”, containing many photos of Habré and his fighters. Habré who eventually turned on Gaddafi finally seized power in 1982 and ruled for eight ruinous years. Last year, he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and murder of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison. De Decker lamented this fate of the charismatic rebel leader she fondly called “Hissène”, “When your friends of yesterday become killers, it’s hard.”

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

 

Hilmar Pabel

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Milkman

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Hungerwinter

Almost every story and discussion about the bitter Dutch Hungerwinter of 1944-45 would feature the photo above, Boy with a Pan (“Jongen met het pannetje” in Dutch) — an iconic image of life under Nazi occupation and civilian suffering during the Second World War as well as that of a famine that hit a developed country. It was instantly controversial when it was published — many Allied soldiers and generals had it in their quarters to underline the brutality of a war whose ending could not come early enough. The famed Dutch artist Piet Zwart declared it illustrates “a period of social suffering in a way that was legible for everyone of every era.”

It was brutal few months to cap a brutal war. Parts of the country had already been liberated, but in the chaos and disruption of war, agriculture and food supplies broke down. Gas and electricity supplies also ran out, ushering in a hungry and cold winter. In that sense, the Hungerwinter, the last famine to have occurred in a developed country, was a case study on how fragile our logistics and agriculture supply chains are, and how they could be easily disrupted and destroyed in chaos and hysteria.

Butter disappeared in October 1944, followed by vegetable fats, cheese, and eventually meat. Bread and potato rations were tightened again and again. Even the black market ran out of food, and people resorted to eating leaves and tulip bulbs. In some places, the weekly calorie ration fell below the daily calorie allocation recommended. Over 16,000 Dutch people died, mostly old people and children. Many others who grew up during the famine suffered other diseases such as anemia when they grew up.

The photo above encapsulated those bitter days — widely reprinted perhaps because it looked more allegorical than other more harrowing pictures that came out of this famine (of gaunt emaciated children). It could also be contrasted with how later famines in less developed parts of the world were reported and photographed. The boy in the photo was small, his legs boney, his hands clutching the pan tightly in a clawlike grip. He stood on an empty street and stared into the distance, in an image that brought to light the worst of Dickensian horrors. In May 1960, on the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation, the Dutch magazine Margriet claimed that the boy was Willem (Pim) van Schie, whose family lived in The Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam, but Pim said he could not remember it.

The photographer was Emmy Andriesse, a member of “The Underground Photographers” (De Ondergedoken Camera), a Nazi resistance group unique to the Netherlands which contributed to the war effort by taking photos of the occupation from their cameras hidden in briefcases, clothes, newspapers, and shopping baskets. For Andriesse, a Dutch woman of Jewish origin, this was a doubly dangerous job — and her photos of Hungerwinter, like others taken by De Ondergedoken Camera were smuggled out to be reprinted abroad. Andriesse developed cancer and died young in 1953, leaving behind 14,000 negatives and contact sheets which were never published until the 2000s.

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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.

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

The Curies

I was going to write about Patreon as promised, but instead thought what better way to start this new phase of Iconic Photos by talking about one of the first photographers I blogged about — all the way back in 2009: Henri Cartier-Bresson.

HCB occupied an interesting time in history where photography was still not widely appreciated as an art, but mostly considered a medium for communication. From travel to portraiture, his own work straddled both worlds. This was how he recalled the occasion in 1944 when he took the photo above:

When I went to see [Irene and Frederic] Joliot-Curie, there was a plaque by the door which said: ‘Enter without knocking.’ I went in and snapped them before even saying hello. One shouldn’t be too polite. They have a dramatic expression on their faces. They knew too much about the reality of this world. It’s a terrifying portrait – take the position of their hands . . . I can’t bear to look at it for very long.

The Joliot-Curies, the daughter and son-in-law of Pierre and Marie Curie, had a tumultuous war. Frederic, a member of the Communist resistance, used his laboratory to secretly produce molotov cocktails and radio receivers. (He would be credited as the inventor of the “Joliot-Curie” cocktail, made from materials easy to obtain during the war, and particularly effective against tanks). In 1944, when the German cracked down on the resistance activity, he went underground under an assumed name and Irene and her two children fled, first to a country hotel, and eventually to Switzerland.

When the German army finally retreated from Paris in August 1944, Irene returned. Her husband was now the director of the reorganized Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the premier research institute in France. He would soon be appointed the High Commissioner for Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA), the newly formed French nuclear energy agency and go on to oversee to the first French nuclear reactor, the Zoe pile.

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More explanation about 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) give me a marginal incentive to create more compelling and educational content. As far as this blog here is concerned, nothing will change. No paywalls. 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 experiments I will run (on iconicity of images) once we have the volume to make such experiments scientific.

As I just started on Patreon, this post above on the Curies is not ‘charged’, and also, don’t pay too much attention to rewards yet, as I am still figuring them out. They will change as we progress through this process together. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!  (Even non-patrons can vote for this one).

But beyound these tinkerings, a goal I have is sustainability and bigger outreach. 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, not to be too grabby or anything.

I also feel what I wrote was worth sharing. So I wanted to run a few facebook ad campaigns to gain a slightly wider audience. A book as I mocked up in an April Fool prank a while back, might be years away (mostly because of printing rights), but text-only e-book version (with links to photos online) might be possible.

So let’s see how Patreon goes! Patreon is definitely more useful for YouTubers and podcasters who have more engagement than us writers who are a bit reclusive in general, but here is the link: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos 

Geronimo Surrenders

During his last days at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo became one of the most photographed of all Native Americans. He became a tourist attraction, and once even photographed in a car. It was therefore fitting that his titanic struggle against the United States army created “the only known photographs of American Indians as enemy in the field”.

Born Goyathlay (The-One-Who-Yawns), the Apache Geronimo was among the fiercest opponents of Mexico and the United States. His family was killed by Mexicans, and he waged intermittent warfare in the south-west until the mid-1880s. By the time, even the clairvoyant medicine man himself knew the end was near. He sent word to General George Crook — America’s most aggressive Indian fighter — that he was ready to surrender.

He chose the site: Cañon de los Embudos in the Sierra Madre Mountains, just south of the Mexico-Arizona border. It was a shallow ravine from which he could flee easily at the first sign of trouble. Geronimo came with his remaining troops, now numbering only 115. As demanded, Crook arrived with a small group of officers, scouts, interpreters, and a photographer, Camillus Fly.

During the three days Geronimo and Crook negotiated, Fly walked around the Apache camp and took photos. Finally, Geronimo agreed to Crook’s surrender terms, with historic words: “Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”  However, later that night, camp rumours abounded that they would be murdered as they crossed the border back into Arizona, and Geronimo and 40 of his followers slipped away during the night. Five more months of fighting followed. It was the last Indian war the United States was to fight.

As for Fry, he took 15 photos at the camp, including those of Geronimo with his two sons, and of a white boy abducted from his New Mexico home previous September. Fly was just 36 when he took these photos. Seven years earlier, he had moved to silver-boom town of Tombstone, Arizona to open a “portrait-making” shop. In 1881, he was a peripheral eyewitness to a mythic event which took place in the vacant lot by his photography studio (and not in the livery stable six doors away as frequently mis-remembered): The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.