What if … Atom Bombs Weren’t Used
(This is an opinion piece. You might want to skip this post if such things offend you).
It is interesting to see that sixty-five years from the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the issue is still controversial. It is not extremely surprising to me at least because I belong to that small minority who believed the surrender of Japan would have arrived even without the use of the atom bombs. Holding this view point as I do, I had a few debates back in college, beyond college, and in workforce. And writing this post flared up the debate again … this time with my girlfriend. She wrote this beautiful piece below to help ‘elucidate’ a few points. I guess it elucidates me not to date history majors (:P love you). Anyhow, two of us went over the piece, abridged it, and I suggested we put a few photo-related themes in. And here it is:
These days, we often forget that the atomic bombs were nearly used on Japan during the Second World War. With the anniversary of the Soviet declaration of war on Imperial Japan (or as they call it in Orwellian jargon of Socialist Democratic Republic of Japan, “Fraternal Help for Pacification”) looming, it is hard to remember another more obscure non-event that would have also happened sixty-five years ago today, had it not been for President Truman’s decision two weeks prior. The bible-quoting haberdasher from Missouri wrote in his diary on July 25th 1945 that with an atomic bomb, military objectives and soldiers and sailors will be targets indiscrimately along with women and children. He overruled the Department of War which was advocating its use, by writing: “It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, and it should not be made useful.”
X-Day, November 1st 1945
The Battle of Okinawa and its devastating aftermath prompted the United States to look for alternatives to subdue mainland Japan. But with Truman vehemently against the atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion of Japan imminent, the United States had no choice but to go forward with the plans for Operation Olympic. In the ensuing decades, much had been made of heroism on the beaches of Miyazake, from Carl Mydans’ photos of X-Day landings to Clint Eastwood’s box-office hit Our Boys of Kyushu, but it was tragic and demoralizing that Japan’s strategic geography, its awaiting guerillas and kamikaze troops meant the Allies casulties were high. Despite these setbacks, the war in the Pacific was over in eighteen months. With the Soviets invading from the north, and the Americans blockading the ports, the Japanese morale was soon cracking. That winter, Emperor Hirohito sat in pallor as his youngest brother denounced him in the privy council. But the martial law imposed to quell riots in Tokyo and Yokohama was the signal to the wider world that Japan would fight to the bitter end. That end arrived on 24th January 1947, with Emperor Hirohito signing the instrument of surrender inside the war-ravished Imperial Palace in front of General MacArthur and Marshal Vasilevsky.
MacArthur, Hirohito and Vasilevsky after Japanese surrender
The next day, the flag used by Commodore Perry when he entered Tokyo Bay in 1853, was flown atop the Imperial Palace. Hidden behind that iconic W. Eugene Smith photo of flag rising — which now graces the National Pacific War Memorial in Chesapeake, Virginia — were deeper discomforts that there might be an ‘influence gap’ between the U.S. and the Soviets. With the war for mainland Japan consuming most of American manpower, Truman failed to prevent Turkey, Iran, Greece, Italy and Korea from falling into the communist camp. Churchill bemoaned this failure in his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Westminster College, London. Encroaching Soviet sphere withered away America’s last remaining shreds of isolationism, but like Wilson before him, Truman was too occupied by a single issue to fully grasp America’s place on the world’s stage. In his magisterial book “Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire”, Niall Ferguson wrote, “Truman’s moral decision not to use the Atom Bomb — which rehabilitated his posthumous reputation — was revealed only after his presidency, the end of which was prematurely facilitated by hesitance and spinelessness he displayed towards the blockaded citizens of West Berlin.” That November, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York — an isolationist who reverted his stance to vehemently urge America to join Britain in her courageous but eventually doomed Berlin Airlift — had all the good reasons to be smiling manaically from ear to ear when he held up a newspaper predicting his victory four hours before the polled closed.
- Dewey campaigned as a decisive leader and won
In 1950, Japan was divided into North and South Japans with Tokyo itself jointly administered between the Soviet Union, China and the United States. In 1955, the Chiyoda Wall dissecting the Imperial Palace went up; in the years that followed, its importance was underlined in two famous presidential speeches made in front of it: Adlai Stevenson’s “Today we are all Japanese,” and Ronald Reagen’s “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall”, but back in 1955, so palpable were the fears that the Soviet Union would drive 20 miles down the 36th parallel delimitation line to invade Tokyo that the wall came as a relief.
The idea of using the atomic weapons seems ridiculous now, knowing as we do the atom’s perverse effects. But back in the 1950s, everyone entertained those ideas; Generals MacArthur and Le May nearly prevailed upon President Dewey to use them when the Soviets invaded Korea and Hungary and squashed revolts there. There were proposals to use nuclear weapons to shot down Russian satellites, to quell insurgants against American-supported dictators in South America, and to control weather. Senator Joseph MacCarthy of Wisconsin denounced Dewey as a red agent for his refusal to use them against the Russian fleet. Only with President Steveson’s gentle explanation after the Cuban Missile Crisis, did we finally come to terms with the dangers of what Oppenheimer called, “Destoryer of Worlds”. Even then, we didn’t fully understand the true horror of nuclear weapons until Richard Nixon annihilated North Vietnam.
To yearn nostalgically for the destruction of multiple Japanese cities is definitely a taboo, but it is always tempting to indulge in some alternative history. Atom bombs would undoubtably have ended the war before the Soviets joined it, and would have led to the American occupation of entire Japan, not just its southern parts. And without the constant anxieties about the Soviet presence in the Far East, America would not have gone into Vietnam. Without the costly war for Japan, American would have prevented the communist encroachments in China and East Europe. On the other hand, a Japan devastated by nuclear bombs and its population alienated by such inhumanity would not have warmed up to Americans occupiers who dropped the bombs. It is equally hard to imagine a modern futuristic Japan without the industrial centers in the south. But all these counterfactuals aside, this much is certain: despite its high human costs and less-than-satisfactory outcome, Operation Olympic was America’s finest hour.
Nagasaki, August 9th 1945
Interestingly enough, when Hiroshima was atom-bombed, the Tokyo government radio told the people that a “new type of bomb” had been used. The real horrors in Hiroshima were unknown to the wider populace; since the city was utterly destroyed and communications were hard, even the imperial government was not totally of what happened there. Two days would pass before the government met to discuss the new developments. In the wider world, the situation was quickly changing too; the Soviet Union’s declaration on war on Japan threw a wrench into both American and Japanese strategies.
On the American side, the decisions to use two nuclear bombs — to show than American has more than enough supply of such weapons — had been agreed upon since April 1945. Only the potential targets were debated upon, so that the U.S. could ban conventional attacks on those cities — in part so it would be easier to measure the destruction from the atomic bomb. The top choice was the emperor’s place in Kyoto, but the decision was vetoed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who spent his honeymoon there and enjoyed the city. (Another thing Stimson considered was that if the emperor were to perish, it would have hardened the Japanese resolve and precluded a surrender.) Top targets became Hiroshima and Kokura. However, August 9th 1945 was a particularly cloudy day in Kokura. The bombing carrying the bomb gave up on Kokura and went on to its secondary target, Nagasaki.
The Japanese Supreme Council received the news that Nagasaki had been destroyed while they were just debating the terms of surrender. Now, surrender was not only inevitable, but also the only route for survival. On August 15th,the Emperor’s surrender speech was broadcast over the radio — this was the first time an Emperor of Japan had deigned to speak through a radio.
On the day after the Nagaski Bombing,a military photographer Yosuke Yamahata took over a hundred photographs of the devastated city. His photographs, taken in an interval of twelve hours in the afternoon of August 10th, were the most extensive record of the atomic bombings. In between Japan’s surrender and arrival of the American Occupation Forces, these photos were widely circulated; for instance, the 21 August issue of Mainichi Shinbun printed them. The Western audience would, however, have to wait further seven years before the censorship was lifted and they appeared in the 29 September 1952 issue of Life, together with Yoshito Matsushige’s photos of Hiroshima. The same year they also appeared in the book form.
Jerry Garcia
Fifteen years ago today died one of the most intriguing characters of 20th century music — Jerome John Garcia, who as Jerry Garcia, led the band the Grateful Dead for exactly three decades. Like the title of his band, Jerry Garcia was no stranger to death. Both his parents perished gruesomely: his dad by drowning, and his mom by driving off a cliff. An accident when he was four took two-thirds of a finger (it being right middle finger, it didn’t prevent Garcia from becoming an accomplished guitarist). At the age of 19, he survived a car accident that claimed his best friend. His recovery from diabetic coma was equally miraculous. But on August 9th, 1995, the 1960s counterculture icon finally lost his lifelong fight with diabetes.
Maybe it was just a reflection of their times, maybe it was something their eclectic music style represented, but in their day, the Grateful Dead acquired a phenomenal following. These so-called Deadheads — who even invented their own language — were the music industry’s first (and only) cult. The dedicated fan base which was started in San Francisco and which soon followed the band from concert to concert presented an atmosphere any corporate executive would kill for: it gave the band the bargaining power with the best venues/clubs which were enticed by the potential of sold-out tickets. And the business savvy band knew this and used their broad musical base to their advantage: by creating a rotation of songs that repeated only every 4 or 5 shows, they managed to keep Deadheads on their toes. By the time Jerry Garcia died, the Grateful Dead — for all the counterculture it represented — was already a prominent and profitable enterprise in California.
As for Jerry Garcia, his name-recognition was so indelible that 15 years after his death, his namesake ice cream, Cherry Garcia, remains the best-selling flavor for the Ben & Jerry’s brand.
Above, Garcia backstage at Woodstock, 1969. The photo was taken by the legendary photographer of American music scene, Jim Marshall. Marshall says Garcia just happened to be coincidentally sitting near a Dead End sign.
de Gaulle in USSR
Elliot Erwitt was the only American photographer covering de Gaulle’s state visit to Russia in July 1966. “I was there at the French Embassy with all the other dozens of photographers taking the usual handshaking pictures and when it was all over I went back to my hotel and took my shoes off and suddenly thought I should not have left. So I put my shoes on again and went back to the Embassy. There were only a few people still there, the event was over, so I just walked in and opened a few doors and then opened one door and there was the entire Soviet government sitting down with de Gaulle and chatting. Nobody looked up so I just walked in with my camera and started taking pictures. They didn’t question my presence because I acted natural. Noboday said anything and after a while I got up and left. It is very important to know when to leave. No one took any notice. I went back to my hotel and called Paris Match, who could hardly believe it. They broke their cover waiting for my pictures.” Erwitt’s photo of de Gaulle, Brezhnev, Kosygin (among others) in the most casual of settings indeed made the cover of Paris Match and was run worldwide.
The year 1966 was an extraordinarily busy year for Charles de Gaulle. Re-elected the previous year, Charles de Gaulle set out to create a strong France acting as a balancing force in the dangerous rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. He moved away from the American sphere of influence into more neutral waters by withdrawing the French commitments from NATO and demanding that all foreign bases be removed from French soil. In July, De Gaulle made an 11-day trip to Russia, which ended with a joint call for an end to foreign intervention in Vietnam, a proclamation de Gaulle would echo in a famous speech in Phnom Penh in September.
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin reciprocated the visit with a grand 9-day visit to France. De Gaulle capped the year of diplomatic frenzy with an emotional, yet controversial state visit to Poland. The first non-Communist European leader to visit Poland since the Second World War, de Gaulle was enthusiastically received. There were hails of Duzy Karolek (Long Charlie) from the youth who wore copies of the képi military cap he wore during the war. (To this day the cap is known in Poland as Degolówka). But de Gaulle angered the West Germans by visiting the once-German town of Hindenburg, which had become Zabrze, and said it was la ville la plus polonaise de la Pologne (the most Polish town in Poland).
Photographing Hiroshima
Yesterday’s post on the Atom bombing of Hiroshima seems to have implied that Mr. Yoshito Matsushige — 32 year old cameraman for the Chugoku Newspaper – is the only person who photographed Hiroshima that day. Although Mr. Matsushige was the only one who documented the carnage around the epicenter, two other photographers, Seizo Yamada and Toshio Fukada photographed the mushroom cloud emanating from Hiroshima from safe(r) distances. Mr. Yamada took the above ground level photo from approximately a little over four miles northeast of Hiroshima, and Mr. Fukada’s four photos were taken from approximately the same distance as Mr. Matsushige’s about 20 minutes after the blast, and 20 minutes before Mr. Matsushige. Another photographer, Mitsugi Kishida travelled to the citycenter next morning to photograph the devastation. We are sorry for the errors.
Here is Mr. Matsushige’s account:
I had finished breakfast and was getting ready to go to the newspaper when it happened. There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightening had struck. I didn’t hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white. And I was momentarily blinded as if a magnesium light had lit up in front of my eyes. Immediately after that, the blast came. I was bare from the waist up, and the blast was so intense, it felt like hundreds of needles were stabling me all at once. The blast grew large holes in the walls of the first and second floor. I could barely see the room because of all the dirt. I pulled my camera and the clothes issued by the military headquarters out from under the mound of the debris, and I got dressed. I thought I would go to either either the newspaper or to the headquarters.
That was about 40 minutes after the blast. Near the Miyuki Bridge, there was a police box. Most of the victims who had gathered there were junior high school girls from the Hiroshima Girls Business School and the Hiroshima Junior High School No.1. they had been mobilized to evacuate buildings and they were outside when the bomb fell. Having been directly exposed to the heat rays, they were covered with blisters, the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms. The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs. Some of the children even have burns on the soles of their feet. They’d lost their shoes and run barefoot through the burning fire. When I saw this, I thought I would take a picture and I picked up my camera. But I couldn’t push the shutter because the sight was so pathetic. Even though I too was a victim of the same bomb, I only had minor injuries from glass fragments, whereas these people were dying. It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter.
Perhaps I hesitated there for about 20 minutes, but I finally summoned up the courage to take one picture. Then, I moved 4 or 5 meters forward to take the second picture. Even today, I clearly remember how the view finder was clouded over with my tears. I felt that everyone was looking at me and thinking angrily, “He’s taking our picture and will bring us no help at all.” Still, I had to press the shutter, so I harden my heart and finally I took the second shot. Those people must have thought me duly cold-hearted. Then, I saw a burnt streetcar which had just turned the corner at Kamiya-cho. There were passengers still in the car. I put my foot onto the steps of the car and I looked inside. There were perhaps 15 or 16 people in front of the car. They laid dead one on top of another. Kamiya-cho was very close to the hypocenter, about 200 meters away. The passengers had stripped them of all their clothes. They say that when you are terrified, you tremble and your hair stands on end. And I felt just this tremble when I saw this scene. I stepped down to take a picture and I put my hand on my camera. But I felt so sorry for these dead and naked people whose photo would be left to posterity that I couldn’t take the shot. Also, in those days we weren’t allowed to publish the photographs of corpses in the newspapers. After that, I walked around, I walked through the section of town which had been hit hardest. I walked for close to three hours. But I couldn’t take even one picture of that central area. There were other cameramen in the army shipping group and also at the newspaper as well. But the fact that not a single one of them was able to take pictures seems to indicate just how brutal the bombing actually was. I don’t pride myself on it, but it’s a small consolation that I was able to take at least five pictures. During the war, air-raids took place practically every night. And after the war began, there were many foods shortages. Those of us who experienced all these hardships, we hope that such suffering will never be experienced again by our children and our grandchildren. Not only our children and grandchildren, but all future generations should not have to go through this tragedy. That is why I want young people to listen to our testimonies and to choose the right path, the path which leads to peace.
Hiroshima, 6th August 1945
This was what Matsushige saw through his window
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima. Whether you agree with the decision or not, the facts were there: Hiroshima was an important army and navy base. Of about 350,000 people living there on that fateful day, the majority were women and children, since most adult men were fighting at the front.
Nuclear blast and wind destroyed buildings within its 1.5-mile radius. Yoshito Matsushige was barely out of this radius at a little over 1.6-miles from the ground zero. Heading out to the citycentre, Matsushige took the only photographs taken of Hiroshima on that calamitous day. Matsushige himself was not seriously injured by the blast, but the scenes of carnage and dying people prevented him from taking further pictures. (He had 24 possible exposures, in the 10 hours he spent wandering the devastated city, but only seven came out right).
The importance of scenes that Mr. Matsushige documented were not immediately realized in the outside world. Another bomb would follow a few days later, and the war in Far East was finally over. The tone of the Western Press, from the New York Times to Life, was almost triumphal. They would not receive the photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki under months later, and even then, only the heavily censored ones. In addition, the radiation sickness was dismissed as a Japanese effort to undermine American morale, and the stories to that effect were frequently killed. This type of censorship was so prevalent that when MGM had a scene casting doubts on whether an atomic weapon should have been used, the White House called the studio to change the script.
In Japan, the censorship was more draconian. It was not just buildings that were annihilated in Hiroshima; an entire collective memory too was erased. For many years the sole images of the bombings in Japan were sketches and paintings by survivors. General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits from the foreign press. Wilfred Burchett — who secretively sneaked on a train — had his camera stolen, photos confiscated and was expelled and banned from Japan. Live footage taken by Akira Iwasaki was seized and taken to the United States, and was not returned until 1968. For Matsushige himself, his films were so toxic that he was unable to develop them for twenty days, and even then had to do so at night and in the open, rinsing it in a stream. When he tried to publish them, they were confiscated. Under the blanket rule that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility,” graphic photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not printed until the U.S. occupation ended in Japan in April 1952. The magazine Asahi Gurafu opened the floodgates by publishing them in August 1952.
From top to bottom: first two photos showed people who escaped serious injury applying cooking oil to their burns near Miyuki bridge; in the third photo, a policeman, his head bandaged, issues certificates to civilians. The next photo shows shows the shadow of a person who was disintegrated at the moment of the blast. (These steps were cut out and now inside the Hiroshima Peace Park museum.) The last photo shows the damage to Matsushige family’s barbershop.
Numbing Transition from Life to Death
After Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, the nation’s 4 million Sunni Muslim Kurds rejected his rules and his religious beliefs and demended independence. Khomeini sent in his Revolutionary Guards, who slaughtered thousands of Kurds using mock trials.
On August 27th, 1979, in Sanadaj, nine Kurdish rebels and two former police officers were tried and sentenced to death. Their execution by firing squad was documented in startling detail by the above photograph, published in Ettela’at, a Tehran newspaper. A United Press International staffer in Tehran saw the photo and went to Ettela’at to obtain the photo. He then transmitted it via wire to UPI’s European office. On August 29th, various international newspapers including the New York Times put the photo on their frontpages. For security reasons, the name of the staffer was never revealed.
The photographer’s name had also remained unknown. The editor of the Ettela’at was afraid of government reprisals and didn’t mention the name of the photographer. Predictably enough, the Revolutionary Guards later invaded the newspaper’s office and confiscated the photos. They didn’t shut the newspaper because it was the oldest paper in the country, and damage done by such a shut-down would’ve been much worse.
The photo, named Firing Squad in Iran or more poetically, “the Numbing Transition from Life to Death” was the only anonymous winner of a Pulitzer Prize in the 90-year history of the award. In 2006, an Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi revealed that he was the photographer and claimed the award. The irony was that Razmi had been the official photographer of Iranian Presidents since 1997. See all the photos he took that fateful day here.
Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika
“Think while you shoot”, wrote Martin Munkacsi in Harper’s Bazaar. From his early years as a sports photographer for the Hungarian newspaper Az Est to his formative years as a news photographer in German weeklies, to his revolutionary career as a fashion photographer in New York, Munkacsi practiced this cerebral approach to grace and glamour. He revolutionized his art with a combination of extreme angles, unusual situations, and surprising locations. His photo of Lucile Brokaw running on the beach featured in Harper’s Bazaar (December 1933) and his photos of Leni Riefenstahl on ski-slopes, which appeared in Vanity Fair on January 1934, cemented his reputation as the “kinetic man” of photography. When he signed $100,000 contract (equivalent to $1.5 million today) with Bazaar, he is one of the highest paid photographers in 1940.
His work with what was then a new invention—the 35mm camera—inspired some of the great names in photo history, including Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The above photo, of Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika , was credited by Cartier-Bresson as “the only photograph to have influenced me.” On seeing these boys in a moment of freedom, spontaneity and joy, Cartier-Bresson commented: “In 1932, I saw a photograph by Martin Munkácsi of three black children running into the sea and I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks. I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment …. [it] made me suddenly realise that photography could reach eternity through the moment. I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.’”
But Cartier-Bresson who abhorred darkroom manipulations – but whose iconic photo was ironically one of only two images he cropped – probably didn’t know the story behind Munkacsi’s photo. Not only how much the framing was altered in the darkroom was unclear, but where it was taken was also uncertain. Munkácsi supposedly photographed the scene at Lake Tanganyika in 1930, while on assignment in Africa for German magazine BIZ. However, his assignment was to document Liberia – 2,000 miles away from Lake Tanganyika. To add to the confusion, the above picture was sometimes simply titled ‘Liberia, 1930′. The photograph did not fit in with Munkácsi’s other images of Liberia, and was not published until the following year, in the French arts magazine Arts et Métiers Graphiques.
Brokaw on the left and Riefenstahl on the right epitomized Munckacsi Method
Adolph de Meyer
The first fashion photographer of note was Baron Adolph de Meyer, who also helped elevate photography to the realms of fine art. His title was suspect, and so was his marriage to a lesbian aristocrat who happened to be natural daughter of King Edward VII (de Meyer was ‘so queer’ as one contemporary unflatteringly put it). but they were both helpful in acquiring him social connections. De Meyer was the archetype of the social photographer, the inside man who not only knew about haute couture, but knew also of women who could afford it. In fact, he was both a photographer and layout editor for Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar.
Cecil Beaton called him “the Debussy of photography”. Appropriately enough, de Meyer’s most famous works came when he photographed the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and other members of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when L’après-midi d’un faun opened in Paris in 1912. Diaghilev never allowed the Ballets Russes to be filmed, feeling that the film could not capture the artistry of his dancers. Of many photographers who covered the Ballets Russes, de Meyer came the closest in covering this artistry. In his numerous images of Nijinsky, de Meyer captured not only the likeness and adeptness of the Russian danseur noble, but also transported the viewer into Nijinsky’s world of fantasy and grace. Three years after de Meyer’s iconic portrait of him as the ‘Favorite Slave in Scheherazade’ appeared in Vogue (May 15th, 1916), Nijinsky’s career ended due to insanity.
The above photo, showing one member of the Ballets Russes in a mysterious costume is de Meyer’s only known nude. Most of his prints didn’t survive the Second World War, and when an exhibition of his life’s work was being put together in 1940, de Meyer had to call Alfred Steiglitz to find out what Stieglitz had.
The Fraternal Kiss
In 1979, Régis Bossu, a freelance photographer for European Stars and Stripes, Stern, Spiegel, and Sygma, went East Berlin to photograph the festivities of the 30th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik — East Germany. The celebrations’ guest of honor was the aging Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
When Brezhnev finished his speech, East German President Erich Honecker opened his arms to congratulate him with a big kiss, a normal ritual for socialist comrades. (But both Honecker and Brezhnev were a little more enthusiastic than your average Communist dictator in kissing. A contemporary joke runs such: Brezhnev was commenting about a foreign leader, “As a politician, rubbish… but what a good kisser!”) A dozen photographers were there to capture this moment, but it was Régis who captured two men at the decisive moment. Many magazines used it immediately, and Paris Match devoted double pages to it, with a caption “The Kiss”.
In the euphoric weeks following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, artists from all over the world gathered flocked to Ostbahnhof to paint on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. In a lampoon of Socialist Realism, a Soviet artist, Dmitri Vrubel, painted the kiss there with a caption: “God help me to survive this deadly love affair.” (Vrubel saw the photo in an old Paris Match). It became one of the most famous pictures on Berlin’s East Side Gallery as that long stretch of wall is now called, and when it was erased by the government in 2009, the public uproar led to Vrubel being invited to repaint it.
Bossu’s and Vrubel’s image was repeatedly copied, re-photographed and re-published, and printed on T-shirts, towels and other memorabilia. A Berlin hotel took it as its logo. According to Bossu, “The Kiss,” has been re-published more than 500 times. See Bossu and Vrubel posing with their respective images in front of the erased section of the Wall here.
Russo-Japanese War
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a conflict that formed out of the rival imperialist ambitions. Although the Russians recovered from initial setbacks to hold off the Japanese armies in Manchuria and along the Yalu River in Korea, the Japanese mastery of the seas proved to be decisive. The Russian fleet took eight months to sail from the Baltic Sea to relieve the besieged Russian forces at Port Arthur, the warm water port on the Pacific Ocean the Russians had so desired. The formidable Russian fleet is destoryed on arrival by the Japanese in a devastating battle at Tsushima Straits on 27th May 1905. (Above, a Chinese man unperturbedly rakes in front of a destroyed Russian warship at Port Arthur).
This and increasing political unrest at home forced the Russians to the peace table. The Russian defeat broke a chain of victories by Christians over non-Christian nations, that stretched back to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In a sense, the Russo-Japanese War was a pivotal moment. The Japanese victory tipped the scale in the struggle between Japanese democrats and militarists in favor of the latter and broke the confidence in Russia’s tsarist rulers. This lead to the revolution of 1905—the dress rehearsal for 1917. From the fall of Port Arthur one line led straight to Pearl Harbor; another to Lenin. (For negotiating between Russia and Japan, Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American to do so).
On the photojournalism front, the war was a grand exotic picnic for many military attaches, propagandists, photographers, and journalists (including Jack London). In an action that would presage a century of technological savviness, the Japanese used postcards, etchings and (extremely popular) stereoscope photos as propaganda pieces. The war was therefore an extremely well-documented (albeit almost one-sided). Photos showed victorious Japanese commanders, Japanese medics tending wounded Russians, Japanese Nurses posing with their Russian patients, captured Russians learning Japanese calligraphy, and celebrating a Russian holiday together with their captors.
The Afghan Girl 2.0
This is my 690th or so post on iconic photos, and as you might notice, most of my posts are about photos taken before the last two decades. Living in an increasingly desensitized society under a 24/7 news circle, we see a lot of images, and clips. Yet, when I saw this week’s Time magazine cover, I literally stopped walking and quipped, “Wow! This is iconic.” Personally speaking I haven’t seen a photo this shocking and powerful, so enticing yet so hard to look, in past few years.
It is a portrait of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghani girl, taken by Jodi Bieber. Aisha was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. In an editorial, Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel defends his use of the haunting image as the magazine’s cover:
I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha’s safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban…. bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan…. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground.
It is highly reminiscent of the National Geographic’s cover “The Afghan Girl” 25 years ago. That Steve McCurry image brought home the Afghan conflict and the international refugee crisis. Aisha will also bring home a message probably more powerful than any number of leaked Army documents. However, unlike the National Geographic cover (which was accompanied by pretty-much neutral title, Along Afghanistan’s Border), Time’s cover has the title “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” I think this subtext ruins the mood of the photo, since it implied that the tragedies like Aisha’s will ensue/multiply if the U.S. leave Afghanistan. In fact, that is precisely the crux of the article inside: that the rights of Afghan women would be destroyed by a potential settlement between the U.S. and the Taliban.
However, the article largely ignores that the fact that the treatment of Afghan women has not improved a lot despite increasing number of women in the legislature and rhetoric promising increased rights. Fundamentalist judiciary and radicalization of a war-torn population was palpable and in 2009 President Hamid Karzai signed a bill that was seen as legalization of rape against women.
