Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos
A good photo is always a visual feast, but it often takes a great photo to make you hear the music, smell the scents, and live the events. One such photo is featured above. Taken in 1961, Phillip Jones Griffiths’ photo draws you in, inviting you to a place where you can see the immediate… Continue reading Boy Destroying Piano | Phillip Jones Griffiths
Addison Beecher Colvin Whipple, writer and censorship fighter, died on March 17, aged 94. “Words are never enough,” wrote Life magazine in an editorial when it finally got the approval to reproduce the pictures of dead American soldiers in September 1943 (more). That permission, which came all the way from the president, would have been… Continue reading Cal Whipple (1918 – 2013)
When the North Vietnamese tank No. 843 broke down the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon on April 30 1975 — just hours after the last American helicopters had left — it signaled the end of an era, and that of a long and bitter war. Most Western journalists had been evacuated from South Vietnam… Continue reading The Fall of Saigon
2012 was not a kind year for photographers. It opened with the death of Eve Arnold, Magnum’s first woman photographer, whose work, as Robert Capa had remarked, was sandwiched between “Marlene Dietrich’s legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers”. She captured secret worlds of women: private lives of the world’s most famous women,… Continue reading A Farewell To 2012
Iconic Photos look back at the most iconic presidential photos from 1939 – 1974. You don’t need Iconic Photos to tell you that there is an election campaign going on in the United States, especially if you live in America. Despite all limitations and checks & balances on his power, the President of the United… Continue reading American Presidency, Part I.
I was supposed to publish this earlier this month but I was abroad. Also, I couldn’t find his contact sheet either (if you can send it to me). Here Bill Eppridge remembers the night of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination: I called my office in New York and asked the director of photography what he wanted. He… Continue reading Bill Eppridge on RFK Assassination
Arguably , the Founding Fathers of the American Republic aside, no other single name has affected the imagination and the parlance of the latter generations more than that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, the name today carries with it so much gravitas, symbolism and power that it’s hard to believe that when he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968,… Continue reading The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr
Here at IP, I am devoted to providing accurate and informative backstories about iconic photos, but sometimes, I simply get things wrong. Here is one of such stories: @aalholmes In 1977, J. Ross Baughman was documenting the bloody guerrilla war that broke out in Rhodesia as the minority white rule slowly disintegrates there; the attacks on anti-government guerillas… Continue reading J. Ross Baughman | Rhodesia
For all the exciting lives they live, photographers seldom are swashbuckling heroes in films. I have always wondered why that is; after all, on Planet Hollywood, writers, professors, and lawyers — people who are so boring in real life – got thrown into a global conspiracy every week, and even archeologists lead exciting lives. The… Continue reading Fictional Photographers
Unlike film photographers I profiled earlier, print photographers are a curious mixture of lovers, killers, cynics and sleuths. In Ronit Matalon’s Bliss, an Israeli photographer pursues a doomed affair with a Palestinian man. The protagonist of Douglas Kennedy’s The Big Picture kills his wife’s lover and assumes the latter’s identity as a lensman. Julie Hecht’s… Continue reading Photography — In Novels
For all the exciting lives they live, photographers seldom are swashbuckling heroes in films. I have always wondered why that is; after all, on Planet Hollywood, writers, professors, and lawyers — people who are so boring in real life – got thrown into a global conspiracy every week, and even archeologists lead exciting lives. Mike… Continue reading Photography — In Movies
Not really iconic, and some of them don’t make sense, but they are truly funny, and make clever use of photography.
Iconic Photos 