Ron Galella (1931 – 2022)

Ron Galella, patron saint of peeping toms, is dead, age 91.

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“My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time. That’s why my favorite photographer is Ron Galella,” Andy Warhol once said.

Ron Galella’s career was defined by taking pictures of the famous doing the routine – and his passing earlier this year recalled an earlier era where even the most public of celebrities attempted to achieve some  level of privacy. That era was over – replaced by social media and celebrities who have privatized fame, creating their own brands and personas, and wrestling back control from paparazzi such as Ron Galella.  

Times were once different. In his day, he was the tormenter of actors and actresses, singers and socialites: Elvis Prestley, Sophia Loren, Bruce Springsteen, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Sean Penn and a perennial favorite of his, Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ran close second. The pair’s relationship – from its inception on set of Cleopatra in 1962 to the infamous kiss on a yacht on the Amalfi Coast that led to a condemnation by the Vatican and eventually to their marriage – was a fodder for tabloid presses, and Galella hounded them relentlessly.

In 1966, Taylor and Burton starred together in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an adaptation of an Edward Albee play, for which Burton was nominated and Taylor won an Oscar. Their marriage was also said to mirror that of the main characters in the movie – highly strung, uneven, teetering on brink of disaster – and they followed up that performance with another adaptation, this time, that of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Taylor in a role written for a much older woman plays an aging, serial-marrying millionaire, and Burton a younger man who turns up on the Mediterranean island to which she has retired.

The film was a dramatic flop. Time magazine called it, “self-indulgent fecklessness of a couple of rich amateurs hamming it up at the country-club”. The next year, 1969, found them in London – Elizabeth Taylor was filming The Only Game in Town with Warren Beatty and Burton Anne of the Thousand Days. Ron Galella remembered:

“They had a yacht in London called the Kalizma named after their three daughters: Kate, Liza, and Maria, moored on the Thames. They went to the yacht on weekends only because they were filming. They stayed at the Dorchester Hotel; I staked them out there as well. Richard was drunk and attempted to sock me but Liz held him back. I became friends with a Portuguese sailor. He told me about a party [on the yacht]. I went to the top floor, shielded the window so they couldn’t see me, and waited. I got great pictures of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in their yacht. One of my favorite shots shows Elizabeth Taylor and Ramone, the yacht steward putting up gauze curtains. The tourist boat never saw them, but I did.”

All along the Thames, tour guides sold tickets to tourists trying to catch a glimpse of the couple. Due to the curtains she put up to block the view, “the tourist boat never saw them, but I did,” Galella proudly recalled. A double spread of the photo above later ran in The National Enquirer.

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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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Last Picture of War | Robert Capa

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His biographer called them “the most gruesome photographs of [Robert] Capa’s entire career.”

On the floor of a Leipziger apartment, 21-year old Raymod J. Bowman lay dead, a German sniper’s bullet clean through his forehead. His legs were splayed out onto the balcony from which he had been firing a machine gun, his head and arm twisted on the wooden floor of the apartment he has been knocked back into, a small puddle of blood streaming out of him.

It was April 1945. The war was coming to a close.  Bowman and another soldier, Lehmann Riggs, had set up a .30 caliber Browning machine gun on the balcony to provide cover for the 2nd US Infantry Division which was advancing across a bridge over the Elster.  Together with them was Robert Capa, who had been embedded with the troops since the Normandy Landings. He was just a few feet away when Bowman was fatally shot.

Capa almost decided not to take the photo. In a rare radio interview in 1947, the famed war photographer remembered:

“He’d just moved on to the open balcony and put up that heavy machine gun. But God, the war was over, who wanted to see one more picture of somebody shooting?

“So it made no sense whatsoever but he (Bowman) looked so clean cut and he was one of the men who looked like if it would be the first day of the war he still was earnest about it … So I said: ‘All right, this will be my last picture of war.’

And I put my camera up and took a portrait shot of him, and while I shot my portrait of him he was killed by a sniper. It was a very clean and somehow a very beautiful death.”

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The photos were published in the May 14, 1945 issue of Life magazine, under the headline “Americans Still Died,” but in Leipzig, the photo was not particularly famous.  

After a hard fought battle in April — fighting was often house-to-house and block-to-block – the Americans turned the city over to the Red Army as zones of occupation were drawn up in July 1945. The Americans’ role in liberating Leipzig was written out of official histories where it was the Red Army that had saved the city — and Germany – from Nazism.

Capa’s photos only circulated secretly. For instance, Snowboy Magazine, an underground magazine, republished them, using the copies that were photographed illegally from Deutsche Bücherei (East Germany’s national library) which kept them in a forbidden books section, called ‘Giftschrank’ (poison cabinet). Finally in 2015, the apartment building were Bowman was killed was saved from demolition and two streets abutting it were renamed Bowmanstraße and Capastraße.  The building, now called Capa House, contains a small memorial with Capa’s photographs and information about Bowman.

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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.

Thanks for your continued support!  Here is the link:

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Hu Jintao is Removed

Kremlinology, they used to call it. Analysis of an opaque obscurantist state, using indirect clues: the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, the standing positions and precedence on the parade podium on the Red Square. Even the choice of capitalization (“First Secretary”) and syntax in paper newspapers. In one of its most famous examples, Stalin looks increasingly lonely, as his comrades were airbrushed out of photographs — and past is entirely rewritten by an ahistorical regime.

This week, that absurdist spectacle was once again back to the forefront at 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. As the meeting apotheoses Xi Jingping and granted him an unprecedented third term as leader of China, his predecessor was escorted out of the meeting room, seemingly forcibly.

The fact that Hu Jintao, President of China from 2003 to 2013 and Mr. Xi’s predecessor, was taken away as foreign correspondents were ushered in and that there was a lack of one uncut video of the event fueled much speculation. Mr. Hu did appear, yet at several times during the video, he displayed feistiness and reluctance to depart — rendering Communist Party’s official line that he was taken ill doubtful.

We have two video clips of the moment. Firstly, the one from Channel News Asia:

The clip begins with Li Zhanshu, the Speaker of the National People’s Congress (and the third highest ranking member of the Politburo), taking away a piece of white paper from Mr. Hu. Mr. Li chats with the former president, puts the paper under the red folder and hands the folder back to Mr. Hu. Only seconds later (17 sec mark in video), Mr. Li takes away the folder from Mr. Hu, almost in panic. In the background, an usher is summoned to Xi.

There seems to be a lengthy conversation between Mr. Hu and Mr. Li. Finally at 56 secs mark, the usher returns, and Mr. Xi gives the usher a long set of instructions, pointing to (possibly) an agenda in front of him. Mr. Hu listens in on the conversation, his expression neutral yet concerned. Then then usher tries to show Mr. Hu something on his white piece of paper, but is prevented by Mr. Li, who once again hides it under the red folder.

Throughout this, Mr. Hu doesn’t not appear to look frail or ill.

There’s a cut to CNA’s video at this mark, so let’s move to AFP video. Please note that before the cut, there’s Mr. Hu’s signature glasses on the table, but as AFP video begins, the usher has already picked them up already. So we don’t know how long the missing footage is.

AFP video begins with usher holding Mr. Hu’s arm and the former president resisting, once again, not looking ill. The usher tries lifting him up, and 9 secs mark, Mr. Hu tries to reach for Xi’s red folder. This action hints that there might be different things printed on two presidents’ white pieces of paper, and Mr. Hu, upon realizing that, is trying to bring attention to it. Xi resists, the usher strongarms Mr. Hu, and Mr. Li hands over Mr. Hu’s red folder to the usher.

In the background approaches, Kong Shaoxun, a deputy director considered to be close to Chairman Xi.

Now, Mr. Hu is starting to look a bit discombobulated.

(From 23 secs onwards, AFP video overlaps with CNA (at 1:26 secs mark), so we can see from two angles).

At 33 secs mark, the usher almost forcibly takes Mr. Hu out of his chair. Mr. Hu nearly slips but turns to return to his seat. At 56 secs mark, Mr. Li tries to help the former president, but is dissuaded by Wang Huning on his left, the fourth highest ranking member of the Politburo, who’s often known as China’s ‘Grey Eminence’. Mr. Hu makes another attempt to take the folder and the white piece of paper back, but the usher isn’t showing it to him. Mr. Hu makes an indigant shrug of his hand, looking anything but ill.

On his way out, he exchanges brief words with Xi and patted Premier Li Keqiang, a protegee who belongs to his wing of the party, on the shoulder. As he was led away, other party grandees, including his former Premier, Wen Jiabao (white haired and sitting fifth to right of Chairman Xi) looked stonily ahead.

The whole sequence was simultaneously highly unusual given the meticulous stage management of such events and predictable – almost a ritualistic humiliation of a more conciliatory and outward-looking former regime, just for the sake of international audience. A signal of an end of an era. The footage was heavily censored internally in China.

So what was on the white piece of paper at the center of the fracas? Enlarged photos showed that they included a list of names – new members of the Central Committee. Although these names shouldn’t be a surprise to Mr. Hu (as appointments are circulated well in advance to party elders), it is possible that there were last minute changes or purges that the former president disagreed with. And there was much to be disagreeable. Mr. Xi was ‘re-elected,’ but neither Mr. Li (Li Keqiang and Li Zhanshu) were. Nor were there anyone from the Communist Youth League (tuanpai faction which was closely aligned with Mr. Hu) in the new PSC or Politburo. For the first time, it would consist of the Minister for State Security, China’s spychief, and would be all male – a first in 25 years.

Coronation of Haile Selassie, King of Kings

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Many photos featured throughout this blog were iconic, some have made or unmade careers, others have changed the course of public opinion and wars. But few have actually started a religion, except these.

In November 1930, National Geographic sent a reporter and a photographer to cover the coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Emperor of Ethiopia – or to be precise, as Haile Selassie, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God. The story, reported by Addison E. Southard, who was also the United States Consul General in Ethiopia, ran 14,000 words, sixty-eight pages, and was accompanied by with 83 images by W. Robert Moore.

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The coronation was a lavish affair, costing three million USD ($60 million in 2022 terms), not least because the emperor’s lavish gifts to the attendees. Five thousand cattle were slaughtered as Haile Selassie made his royal progress to Cathedral of St. George in Addis Ababa in a coach that once belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm II. At seven corners of the Cathedral, forty-nine bishops in groups of seven had been reciting the Psalms for seven days and seven nights without ceasing. “The studded doors of the Holy of Holies open ponderously,” wrote Southard as dignitaries paid homage to the Emperor, who allegedly traced his lineage back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Duke of Gloucester, King George V’s son, gifted him a traditional English coronation cake and a trunk of ancient manuscripts formerly stolen from the country. Italy, once and future aggressor, was represented by the Prince of Udine, a cousin of King Victor Emmanuel III, who brought an airplane. From America came President Hoover’s envoy with an electric refrigerator, five hundred rose bushes, and a complete set of National Geographic magazines.

“The centuries seemed to have slipped suddenly backward into Biblical ritual,” Moore wrote in no less purple prose. He also remembered the photos he took:

“The Emperor … kindly consented to pose in his coronation robes, as poor lighting had precluded the possibility of making the photograph on the day of the actual coronation… but to secure adequate time during the strenuous ceremonial days of His Majesty and to select the proper position and lighting for my color plates necessitated many delays. On the late afternoon before I left Addis Ababa, on a last-minute special train which would connect with my steamer at Djibouti, I made the exposures of Their Majesties in the rapidly failing light which all but made color photography impossible.”

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Moore and Southard’s story ran in National Geographic of June 1931 – and was immediately a sensation a hemisphere away in Jamaica. For the islanders languishing under abject poverty and racism, the article was a revelation – the mere fact that the princes of the earth “made obeisance on bended knee” before a black man was a revolutionary idea in Jamaica under the British rule. Telling British subjects that they were in fact Ethiopians, since King George’s own son had bowed to the black Messiah was even seditious. Yet, the preachers persisted, seizing on earlier prophecies that a black king would be crowned in Africa as the day of redemption drew near. Soon, they would coalesce around a religion, Rastafarianism – proclaiming Haile Selassie as the Supreme Being and carrying around the coronation photographs as religion icons.  

For the remainder of his tumultuous life, Haile Selassie himself would repeatedly say that he was not a god. At the invitation of Jamaica’s government, Haile Selassie visited the island in 1966 and met with the Rastafarian leaders to insist the fact, but these denials made him even more divine in their minds. Although the religion has somewhat faded from popular memory after a coup disposed Haile Selassie and with the death of its most famous convert, Bob Marley (who came to the religion via his wife) in 1981, today there are still around one million Rastas worldwide.  

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.

I’m black and I’m proud to be black

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It was a fraught game on Saturday 17 April 1993 when St Kilda faced Collingwood at Victoria Park in Melbourne, the home ground for Collingwood, the Australian Football League team affectionately known as the Magpies. The Saints had beaten the Magpies in the finals the previous year, so there was indeed bad blood – but it had been seventeen years since they last beat Collingwood at Victoria Park.  

Two of St Kilda’s Indigenous players, Gilbert McAdam and Nicky Winmar, received racial abuse not only from the crowd but also from the Collingwood cheer squad, which yelled for him to “go and sniff some petrol” and “go walkabout where you came from”.

As siren sounded at the conclusion of the game, which St Kilda won by 22 points, Winmar who was near the cheer squad raised his hands in victory, lifted up his jersey, pointed to his skin and said, “I’m black and I’m proud to be black.”

Although the television crews had missed the moment, two young photographers – Wayne Ludbey and John Feder – captured it from two different angles. Ludbey remembers:

“It was something that wasn’t normal, it was something that you weren’t used to seeing and photographing on the football field.  I knew immediately it needed to be recorded in the following day’s Sunday Age.”

Both Ludbey and Feder had to fight with their editors to get the photos the prominence they deserved, but the pictures appeared in the next day’s Sunday Age and Sunday Herald Sun respectively, and by the following week, it was the talk of the country. The Collingwood president made the matters worse by insisting on TV that the Magpies were not a racist club, and they did not have an issue with Indigenous Australians, “As long as they conduct themselves like white people, well, off the field, everyone will admire and respect … As long as they conduct themselves like human beings, they will be all right. That’s the key.”

It was a telling moment.  Australia was then on the cusp of a sea change. 1991 saw “Treaty,” a protest song by Yothu Yindi became the first song by an Aboriginal band to top the charts in Australia. The following year, the High Court would recognize the pre-colonial land interests of First Nations people within the Common Law framework in the Mabo decision, and the Prime Minister would give a speech admitting the negative impact of white settlement in Australia on its Indigenous peoples, culture and society.  

But Victoria Park incident highlighted the long road that lay ahead for a country where segregation against the indigenous peoples existed well into the sixties, and the indigenous people were out of school by age fourteen into the seventies. Such legacies endured — the first indigenous doctor only graduated in 1983, and the first indigenous judge wasn’t appointed until 1996 – three years after Winmar’s defiant stand. Even today, unemployment rates hover in high forties for the indigenous population of Australia.  

The gesture – and the photograph – would inspire a song, not to mention numerous murals and reproductions, and eventually a statue outside Perth Stadium.  As for the AFL, it established a code of conduct for players and teams by 1995, emphasizing the role of umpires in reporting racial abuse incidents and fining clubs up to $50,000, but tensions did linger on. As recently as 2020, Collingwood fans were being reprimanded for abusing an opposition player simply because he was indigenous, and a veteran AFL commentator had even claimed that Winmar’s story of racial abuse was simply not true: “Maybe Nicky’s dining out on it now about lifting his jumper … my recollection was that St Kilda won and Nicky lifted his jumper saying: ‘That was a gutsy effort. We have got heart’. Now it’s been misconstrued.”

Site – Update and Shameless Plug

Hi Readers,

I haven’t updated the blog for a while.

Well, life happens. A lot seemed to have happened in the world since my last post too. I will have longer updates and new posts on here soon enough.

But in the meantime, here is a link to a side-project I just started.

An instagram account called: South Asia and South East Asia Maps

https://www.instagram.com/southbysoutheastasia/

It is stories about historical maps of South Asia and South East Asia from Archives around the World, but will be with occassional forays into other parts of the world as well. Compared to posts I write on this blog, posts on instagram will be shorter (I am still figuring out how to run a service/history instagram, with all the geotags and hashtags etc.).

It will be great help if you guys can give a follow, or a share of my Instagram. 🙂

Akihito Wedding

April 10th 1959. There were more than 500,000 people lining up on the street of Tokyo, along the 8.8 km processional route, and although TV had only arrived in Japan six years earlier, 15 million viewers were already following the ceremony live at home. The occasion was the marriage of Crown Prince Akihito to Michiko Shoda — the first imperial wedding to be made available for public viewership in Japan.

As the newly wed left the imperial palace in a horse-drawn carriage, an angry student rushed out of the crowd toward the couple. The 19-year-old Kensetsu Nakayama threw a baseball-sized stone at the couple, tried to climb aboard the carriage and grab the bride. Footmen and police flung him to the ground before dragged him away. Upon interrogation, Nakayama noted that, “I don’t believe in the Emperor system and I never have. I was so mad I decided to drag the couple from the coach.” His fate was to be declared insane and sent to an insane asylum.

It was perhaps a fitting, if ugly, climax to a frenzy that had swept across Japan as the 1950s came to a close. The nation which had come out of the Second World War humbled and humiliated was once again on the upswing again, and the crown prince’s courtship of the commoner Michiko — against 2,000 years of imperial tradition — was the main topic of conversation.

The establishment’s opinion was divided. The prince’s mother, Empress Nagako, opposed the engagement, and the powerful palace bureaucracy, the Imperial Household Agency, hoped to select a bride from the daughters of the court nobility. Michiko’s Catholic upbringing was yet another sorepoint. But the politicians and the media, who viewed it as a step in the right direction for Japan’s modernization and democratization, were firmly behind the couple. (Strictly speaking, by then, everyone in Japan who wasn’t a member of Akihito’s family was a commoner. The post-war constitution had abolished the use of titles for everyone in the country except for the imperial family).

They had met playing in 1957, an encounter that came to be known as the “love match.” Afterwards, the photos of the future empress were everywhere; the women’s weekly magazine Josei Jishin covered her fashion choices in glossy pictorials. ‘Mitchi boom’ it would be dubbed; and her image would be compared with that of Ann, a princess played by Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ a few years earlier. There were even reports that many girls were quitting their jobs to try to coordinate their weddings to match the precise time and date of the imperial couple’s wedding.

 

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Since I am social-distancing myself due to the coronavirus, I will be posting a few posts in coming days. I have a Patreon. Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service. For last few months, I have been using Patreon to fund my continued expenses as I research and write Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining. 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

Snow Crystals | Wilson Bentley

When Wilson Bentley died in 1931, his hometown newspaper eulogized him thus: “Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius.”

A fine accolade for a photographer. Born in Vermont to a family prosperous enough to gift him a microscope at his 15th birthday, Bentley, for the next half a century, would go on to perfect a process of photographing snowflakes on black velvet before they melted away. Having grown up on a farm where the annual snowfall was 120 inches, Bentley’s obsession with precipitation began early, and sustained him throughout his life. As a young boy, Bentley would hand-draw pictures of snow crystals, and in his lifetime, Wilson made over 5,000 photographic negatives of dew frost, snowflakes, raindrops, clouds and fog. He wrote the entry on ‘snow’ in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Although he was dismissed initially as an uneducated country bumpkin by the scientific community of the day (Bentley’s notes, laced with purple prose about nature and God did not help), towards the end of his life, his work was embraced and Bentley embarked on lecture tours across the United States. In fact, today, if you have seen a picture of a snowflake in a textbook or in a store, it was likely based off a Bentley photo. His book, Snow Crystals, illustrated with 2,500 photographs was still the definitive volume on the subject matter, and he sold many of his slides to colleges and universities. Bentley even sold 200 of his negatives to Tiffany’s in New York City, which used the snow crystal patterns in its jewelry designs. Bentley was also an early proponent of the theory that no two snowflakes were exactly alike, and his method to photograph snowflakes is still followed today, despite advancements in photography.

Raymond Depardon’s France

To understand France’s political malaise, look to Raymond Depardon’s works. 

As the popular revolt paralyzed France last week in the ways unseen since the events of May 1968, one curious fact about the protesters — known as the gilets jaunes after the yellow vests they wore — was often repeated. Most of them came from the diagonale du vide, the empty sparsely populated diagonal running from the Ardennes in the northeast to the remote Nouvelle-Aquitaine in the southwest.  This was Michel Dion’s La France Profonde, rural agrarian provincial towns marked by depopulation, lack of public services and in Dion’s view, lack of strong political ideologies.

That this ‘apolitical’ France had turned against Emmanuel Macron’s reforms bode ill for the president, still only in year two of his quinquennial mandate. This is the France of “des petits, des matraques, des spolies, des lamines, des humilies” — the little men, downtrodden, trashed, ripped-off, and the humiliated, by “the vampire state” — in the words of Pierre Poujade, whose occupations as a docker, grape-picker and road-mender were testaments to the career options opened to men born in this empty France, as Poujade did in Saint-Céré in the Lot Valley. Impossibly, Poujade managed to organize a 500,000 member-strong union, took a fifth of them on an anti-tax march to Paris in January 1955, and won 12% of the vote in the following year’s elections (one of its 52 elected members was Jean-Marie Le Pen, a later demagogue).

This France was captured in the photos of Raymond Depardon, himself son of peasants, born on a farm in the Saone region. For an ambitious project launched in the 1960s to transform this agrarian arcadian France, DATAR (self-importantly named délégation interministérielle à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’attractivité régionale), Depardon returned to his family’s farm to document its gradual decline, and revisited rural France again and again in his photos and three documentaries, this was the France of 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s, conjured up in the dark grimy black-and-white, far from services, populated by dead and dying men, working for dead and dying farms, living in hardscrabble cottages alongside unkempt trees and antique appliances.