An Update…
On reading my latest issue of Vanity Fair, in a Post Script, I realized that the January 2001 issue of Vanity Fair included a feature called “Shooting Past 80: Photography’s Grand Masters. It profiled several photographers who are 80 years or older (Helmut Newton, 80; Phil Stern, 81; Arnold Newman, 82; Henri Cartier Bresson, 92; Yousuf Karsh, 91, Eve Arnold, 87), who were still alive back in 2000. They even got Henri Cartier Bresson to shoot some of the portraits of his peers (Newton, Arnold, Willy Ronis, 90) in HCB’s first major assignment in 29 years. Ever an artist, he shot Newton next to the statues of Chopin and his muse; when asked about these shots, Cartier Bresson insisted, “There is no need to play cello on a little tune that I just whistled. La vanite n’est pas une bonne affaire.”
Although Vanity Fair asked its readers to go online and read more about the story, the story was not on its website. I managed to find the article, sans photos, online and it is republished on Iconic Photos here. I have been tremendously busy in the past few weeks, but this weekend, I am flying back to my mother’s place (partly to see her, partly to search for a certain January issue of Vanity Fair). I might scan and upload those spreads when I have time. I might also do some profiles on the photographers.
– A. S. H. London, 27th October 2010.
Lenin in Stockholm
To the Russians, Vladimir Ulyanov was already a living symbol in 1917. Ulyanov – now better known by his revolutionary nom de guerre, Lenin — himself was in exile in Switzerland, and his Bolsheviks Party was withering when the Russian Revolution actually took place in 1917. On 15th March 1917, Lenin’s problem was to travel back from Zurich to St. Petersburg to lead his party again. Although he wanted to charter a plane and fly back, the war made it risky. He approached the German government, then fighting the Provisional Government of Russia, for a transit visa. Since he didn’t want to be seen as ‘consorting with the enemy’, Lenin also have his train granted the extra-territorial status as a foreign embassy. Both requests were readily honored by the Germans. (There were two German military escorts on the train, but they too were kept separate from Lenin’s cadre).
The party atmosphere accompanied the ‘sealed train’. Lenin had to silent his crew at times, order lights outs and rearrange sleeping arrangements to separate merrymakers. They were an unruly company; a conflict arose immediately between the smokers and non-smokers. Lenin, who despised cigarette smoke, ruled that smoking was to be allowed only in the toilet. This was immediately followed by a second argument between the smokers and those who needed to use the toilet. Another argument was between the Russians and two Germans, who protested that the former’s penchants for the French revolutionary songs were insulting to the German nation.
Above was the only one photograph of the travelers, taken in Stockholm on 13th April 1917. Above, Lenin was carrying an umbrella and wearing a hat. Behind him, with an enormous hat, was his wife, Nadezhda. Behind her was the other woman in Lenin’s life, his mistress and revolutionary Inessa Armand. At the back, holding the hand of four-year old Robert was Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin’s designated successor, later to be purged by Stalin. In Stockholm, the Swedish socialists threw a banquet in his honor and for the first time in his life, Lenin was received as a prominent statesman. The Swedes, however, didn’t fully understood his vision; they found him quaint, and even gave him some money to buy new clothes, unaware that formerly poor revolutionary was now being lavishly funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Communist history books rigorously denied this, but when Lenin arrived back to St. Petersburg, the Provisional Government – with the help of the French intelligence service – began a through investigation into the Bolshevik finances, but the 21-volume dossier was destroyed on the orders of Leo Trotsky right after the October Revolution.
Buoyed by the German money, the Bolsheviks went from strength to strength, buying out printing presses, publishing their propaganda in multiple languages, and sending them out into the battlefields. By October, train and police stations, electricity plant and telephone switchboards were firmly in the Bolsheviks’ hand that the storming of the Winter Palace – despite its prominence in subsequent Communist hagiography – was simply a walk over.
The Mayer-Pierson Case
The years from 1859 to 1862 were a key period in photography’s history; not only did those years see the denunciations of photography by many French intellectuals as fake and inferior (something I will cover in tomorrow’s post), but they also were the setting for the celebrated Mayer and Pierson case.
In 1844, Pierre-Louis Pierson began operating a studio in Paris that specialized in hand-colored daguerreotypes. In 1855, Pierson entered into a partnership with Brothers Léopold Ernest and Louis Frederic Mayer, who also ran a daguerreotype studio. The Mayers had been named “Photographers of His Majesty the Emperor” by Napoleon III the year before Pierson joined them. Although the studios remained at separate addresses, Pierson and the Mayers began to jointly distribute their images under the title “Mayer et Pierson,” and together they became the leading society photographers in Paris. Pierson’s 1861 photographs of the family and court of Napoleon III sold very well to the public, not least because they included revealing pictures of Countess Castiglione, society femme fatale, Napoleon III’s mistress and rumored Italian spy.
Through the Countess, Mayer and Pierson became acquainted with her cousin, the Italian statesman Count Camillo di Cavour, and took photos of him. It was around one of Cavour’s portraits that one of the most decisive battles in photography’s short history was fought. In January 1862, Mayer and Pierson filed a law suit against rival firms Thiebault and Betbéder for copying their carte of Cavour, and against Schwalbé for copying their portrait of Lord Palmerston. The former case was more controversial because the image of Cavour was retouched, with the figure of Cavour enlarged, his leg pose changed, and a library background scene added.
Although a lower court decided against them, Mayer and Pierson appealed. The case was argued and reargued not only in the courts, but also among the intellectuals, artists and salons. Finally, it reached France’s supreme court, the Cour de Cassation. Betbéder and Schwalbé claimed altered photos did not infringe copyrights and also produced a declaration signed by many of the leading artists of the day declaring that photography was not art. The trial was fought like a modern courtroom drama, with Mayer and Pierson’s attorney producing one photograph after another and comparing them to famous paintings and convincingly equating the camera to the brush. The Supreme Court’s decision established photography as an art under French copyright law.
However, the debate raged on. Many subsequent lower court decisions failed to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision. It would take another fifty years before photography was universally regarded as an art form.
Sarkozy at Berlin Wall
Many world leaders claimed credit for tearing down the Berlin Wall metaphorically and thus ending the Cold War. Last year, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France went a step further by suggesting that he stood shoulder to shoulder with the Mauerspechte (Wall peckers) East German citizens in bringing the Wall down literally. On his facebook, the French President posted a photograph of him, then 34, chipping away the hated symbol of Communism. The caption claimed that he, along with two other prominent French politicians, dashed to Berlin and crossed through Checkpoint Charlie as the first tremors of the earthquake that would topple the entire Communist system were felt in that divided city on November 9, 1989.
The story seemed too good to be true — and so it was. Journalists and former French officials immediately began questioning his story. The events of that November night were so unforeseen that many politicians on the both sides of the Iron Curtain were caught unaware. Nobody even in Berlin knew the wall was about to fall; President George H.W. Bush saw the wall coming down on television while Chairman Gorbachev — like many Germans and Eastern Europeans — slept through it. While Sarkozy was clearly there in the early days of the Wall’s demise, it was certain that he wasn’t there on that fateful night. Two politicians whom Sarkozy claimed were with him, Alain Juppe and Francois Fillon, the former and current prime ministers respectively, both admitted that they were unsure about the date on which they went to Berlin. (Alain Juppé – who was to Sarkozy’s left in the Facebook photograph above – did not go to Berlin until 16 November. On 9 November he was at the annual memorial service for General de Gaulle in France.)
Although Sarkozy stood by his story, and hoped it would die down, it accelerated into internet meme. His former opponent, Ségolène Royal joked that it is equally likely that he was at the Bastille in 1789. Actively encouraged by the French media, the French netizens subsequently photoshopped Sarkozy into every important event in history from the Crucifixion to the D-Day landings. See the NYTimes article here.
Yet, Sarkozy is nothing if not a political survivor: in 1995, he was cast aside by the Gaullist right because he backed a rival candidate to Jacques Chirac for the French presidency. Four years later, he again disappointed his party for securing a mere 13% of the vote in elections to the European Parliament. But he punched his way back into the government in 2002 and secured the presidency in 2007. Now, saddled with extremely low poll ratings, Sarkozy would definitely lose the election if it were to be held today. The comeback kid will probably surprise us once more.
Hyeres, Cartier-Bresson
All takes to be a photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is “one finger, one eye and two legs”. Then, Cartier-Bresson must have possessed one of the best eyes in the business. Born in 1908 in Paris into a wealthy family, Cartier-Bresson had a lusty, rebellious hunger for travel. With a head full of Rimbaud and a copy of “Ulysses” under his arm, he set off for west Africa in search of adventure. (He aspired to be a painter, but Gertrude Stein suggested he drop the brushes).
He bought his first Leica in the Côte d’Ivoire when he was 23. It fitted into his pocket, along with a few rolls of film. With this new and light equipment — it and rolls of film fitted nicely into coat pockets — Cartier-Bresson would document everyone from Balinese dancers and Mongolian wrestlers to Spanish matadors and New York bankers. When snapping a spectacle—be it a coronation, a sporting event, or a parade—he trained his camera on the unsuspecting bystanders. He would wait until that “decisive moment” when the right composition filled the frame. And it all came so naturally, too: he rarely used a light meter, checked his aperture setting, took more than a few shots of a single subject, and almost never cropped his photos.
The photo above was taken in 1932 in Hyeres, a small town on the French Riviera, and has been featured in many retrospectives on Cartier Bresson’s work. The decisive moment here nicely juxtaposes the fleeting biker with the spiral staircase; the poignancy of the moment is accentuated by the fact that although the photo seems as if it was taken accidentally or on the spot, we can also imagine Cartier-Bresson crouching over those railings in Hyeres for hours, waiting for the right instant. I choose the image here because of a funny internet-age back story. Without mentioning that it was taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, someone has posted the photo in a flickr group for public criticism. Most commentators ripped the photo apart (especially the blurry biker part) in the comments that are scathing and hilarious. De gustibus non est disputandum, indeed.
L’Affaire Dreyfus
No other issue divided France and other European countries more intensely in the last years of the 19th century than the Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was banished for allegedly spying for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that his superiors tampered with his dossier, and the military command covered the scandal up.
Possible rehabilitation was discussed intensely but it was Emile Zola who opened the public debate with his fiery article in L’Aurore, titled ‘J’Accuse!’. What is more important, he asked, the rights of individuals or the prestige of the state? This was a question that will reverberate time and again throughout the 20th century and beyond, and in 1898, when Zola first asked it, it was no less divisive. Friends, family members and literary salons were ripped apart by their differing stances; there were fights, divorces, and libel lawsuits.
A retrial was commissioned. During it (above), Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. Proust and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition for Dreyfus – an act that angered their father intensely. The petition, ‘The Manifesto of the Intellectuals’ was signed by 3,000 notables, including Anatole France, Andre Gide and Claude Monet. Anti-Dreyfusards also included equally eminent artisans, such as Renoir, Cezanne and Degas. Degas stopped speaking to Monet, Cassatt and Pissarro and disparaged his former friends’ art.
As Barbara Tuchman wrote in her monumental history of Europe before the First World War, The Proud Tower, Dreyfus affair was the death struggle of the old world. Many things we now take for granted – sensationalist press, public debates, petitions, liberal bourgeoisie class – were born out of the trial, as were impetuses that would drive many important events in the following decades. Anti-Dreyfus papers ran daily columns about a conspiracy involving Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners. The Viennese Neue Freie Presse‘s correspondent in Paris was so shocked at the anti-Semitism that he would write the first sentences of his Der Judenstaat, ‘the Jews had to be given a country of their own’ subsequently. His name was Theodor Herzl, and the first seeds of what will become the state of Israel were first sown at the Dreyfus trial.
Dreyfus himself was pardoned, rehabilitated and awarded the Legion of Honor when France finally realized that the affair was damaging its international image. Once free, Dreyfus proved himself to be less idealistic than those who had fought for him. Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – Dreyfus flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs. As Charles Péguy, one of the most fervent Dreyfusards, lamented in Notre Jeunesse: ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus, but Dreyfus himself was not’.
Maurice Broomfield (1916-2010)
Maurice Broomfield started his career documenting the devastated cities of Europe. When he returned, Imperial Chemical Industries asked him to photograph one of their factories, and this led to a new career for Broomfield. For the next three decades, he took pictures of factory workers across Britain for annual corporate reports, exhibitions and trade fairs as well as for syndicated newspaper columns documenting the progress of industrial Britain.
All his photographs of industrial life were epic and intriguing, resembling art installations more than dirty workplaces. An inverted and disembodied mannequin’s leg is set against a room of darkening shadows as the lab technician posed behind in Broomfield’s famous ‘The Nylon Stocking Test, Pontypool’ (1957). This picture was highly reminiscent of Man Ray’s avant-garde photography. Also inspired by Vermeer, Joseph Wright (18th century painter who similarly documented the advent of the Industrial Revolution), Bauhaus and choreographed theatre, Broomfield set out to create masterly compositions, sometimes surreal, sometimes terrifying, but always glamourous. A school drop-out who worked in a factory and attended art school at night, Broomfield conferred poise, humanity and dignity to industrial workers and technicians whether they were making nylon, insulation, ballbearings or ships.
By the time he retired in 1982, following the death of his wife, the industrial Britain he so adoringly depicted was slowly disappearing too. With the new millennium came a nostalgia for the promised sci-fi future and thus resurgence of interest in Broomfield’s works, which indeed looked like stills from a Fritz Lang or Stanley Kubrick movie. His works were rediscovered, and retrospective after retrospective surrounded the last years of Maurice Broomfield, who died last week at the age of 94.
See his most famous photos here.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Since 1901, there had been over a hundred winners of Nobel Prizes in literature — a literary who’s who that doesn’t include Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov, Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, Zola and Twain. Despite these sad omissions, the prize marches on, preferring traditional idealism over literacy audacity. Yet, this year’s winner of this prestigious honor — Mario Vargas Llosa — exemplified both of these values in his seminal works on culture and politics in Latin America.
Born in Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up during a tumultuous and violent time in his native country, and later used his formative experiences to write incisively about military, politics and society, not only in Peru but also in the wider Latin America. He preached the perils of utopia and extolled the virtues of resistance to tyranny in mind-bending novels that ranged from allegorical to investigative. By the early 1980s, he was perhaps the best-selling Latin American writer in the world. His aristocratic birth didn’t deter him from championing leftist causes in his writings, but it prevented the Peruvians from voting for him when he ran for President in 1990.
To me, however, Mr. Mario Vargas Llosa will always be known as the man who punched Gabriel García Márquez. They were once close friends, but had a violent falling out for some unknown reasons — something to do with Garcia Marquez’s close friendship with Vargas Llosa’s wife — in 1976. That year, in Mexico City, at the premiere for Supervivientes de los Andes (a movie about the Uruguayan rugby team that ate human flesh to survive after their plane crash) as García Márquez approached Mr. Vargas Llosa to embrace him, the Peruvian writer instead punched him in the face. García Márquez’s black eye was captured a few days later in the iconic photograph above by Rodrigo Moya. (Moya kept the photos to himself for thirty-one years, and published them only in 2007).
Accusations of betrayal, jealousy and adultery aside, this dramatic episode was also an ideological parting of the ways. Two writers have spoken to each other since the fight. García Márquez always supported Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution; Vargas Llosa broke decisively with Fidel, after the trial of the dissident poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. He slowly abandoned his leftist political leanings too by opening praising Margaret Thatcher and by running as a classical liberalist in his ill-fated presidential campaign. Some never quite forgive him for this betrayal, and for the decade, he has been a persona non grata — a figure so divisive for the Nobel Committee. Thus, yesterday’s award has not only been a culmination of a life devoted to literature but also a vindication of Vargas Llosa’s literary virtues.
See New York Times story on the fight and how the photo was eventually published.
The Inevitable Random Post
I was a little bored today, so went into my wordpress dashboard and looked at searchterms. They were quite humorous:
On the left are google search terms that led to my site. On the right are number of times that term had been searched. It is perplexing that five Brooke Shields related terms (from ‘Gary Gross’ to ‘Pretty Baby Brooke Shields’) are next to each other. Are there approx. 700 x 5 people or just 700 people trying to look for naked pictures of now 45-year old former actress? Anyhow, I find it funny that although Brooke Shields beats ‘iconic images’, it was beaten by the generic term ‘girl’. And I am pretty sure if you type ‘girl’ to google image search, my site is not on the first 20 pages, so there must be a lot of people searching for ‘girl’ on google images.
These are today’s search engine terms. ‘And fun was had by all lynching’? Seriously?
Speaking of inappropriate things, ‘naked photos 12 yo boy’? Totally uncool, guys. (But wait a sec, why does such a search lead to this site?)
Flipping the North Koreans off
Not many people visit North korea these days but if you are one of the lucky few, more likely than not you will be led through an official guided tour of USS Pueblo – an American Intelligence vessel captured in 1968 – which remains the only American vessel currently in captivity.
The seizure of USS Pueblo is now one of the forgotten episodes of the Cold War. The U.S. claimed it was in the international waters, while the D.P.R.K. insisted that it was in the North Korean waters. Diplomatic and military stand-off that followed was punctuated by a series of photos, films, and letters depicting the crew of the Pueblo enjoying their comfortable captivity.
In reality, however, the crew was being subjected to psychical and psychological abuse. From behind the bars in one of the most isolated places on the planet, the crew nonetheless delivered a master class in political subversion. To undermine the credibility of the letters written home to suggest that they had willingly defected, the crew wrote about the events that never happened. In their press conferences, they used archaic words the Koreans didn’t perfectly understand. Since none of the Koreans knew English well enough to write the confession, the vessel’s commander wrote it himself. They checked the meaning of his words with a dictionary, but failed to catch the pun: “We paean the DPRK. We paean the Korean people. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung”. (“Paean” is homophonic with “pee on”.)
And almost by accident, they came across the idea behind their greatest coup: in two propaganda movies, the crew noticed people giving the finger were not censored. The crew deduced that the North Koreans didn’t know what the finger meant. In the subsequent propaganda photos of the crew, their middle fingers were firmly extended to the cameraman. When the North Koreans questioned, the crew described it as the “Hawaiian good luck sign.” The ruse went on unnoticed until October 1968, when Time magazine explained the mysterious gesture appearing in many photos as one of “obscene derisiveness and contempt.”
This revelation infuriated the North Korean captors, bringing about a period of severe beatings and torture, and the propaganda letters, photos and videos stopped after this. Yet, it would take two more months for the U.S. to offer a perfunctory apology (retracted afterwards) to ensure the release of 82 crewmen. Diplomatic and morale victory hid the bitter reality that the loss of USS Pueblo was a significant blow to the intelligence services. It is now believed that the Soviets urged the North Koreans to seize the ship so that they can reverse engineer US equipment and codebooks.
Time Magazine never responded to the repercussions that followed its very public explanation, which in its entirely is reproduced below. For more photos, check the link here.
Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev (1937 – 2010)
Yanayev, second from right, was as dour as any Soviet apparatchik
Along with Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank, it was one of the iconic images of the dying Soviet Union’s comic opera coup in August 1991: Gennady Yanayev, the new figurehead president, facing the world’s press for the first and only time, stammering out one inept and bumbling answer after another, his voice quivering and his hands shaking from nerves and too much vodka. It was a performance that confirmed the coup was amateurish and helped undermine it.
A coup by hard-liners had been in the air since the previous December, but few would have guessed that Gennady Ivanovich Yanayev — the man described by David Remnick in his magestrial history of the end of the Soviet Union Lenin’s Tomb as “a witless apparatchik, philanderer and drunk” — would be at the helm of the USSR. Whether Yanayev ever bothered to sober up during the three-day coup is unknown. Although he was not one of the principle players in the coup, as the USSR’s vice-president, he was the palace coup’s veneer of constitutionality. On 19th August, 1991 — the day after he declared a state of emergency — Yanayev held a disastrous press conference at the Foreign Ministry, in which the ruling ‘State Committee’ projected nothing but hesitancy and weakness. Ironically, the plotters, who viewed themselves as patriots, merely quickened the demise of the Soviet Union. The coup quickly withered, and with it the Soviet Union itself.
Yanayev was initially imprisoned and charged with high treason, a crime that carried the death penalty. But as disillusion with new Russia grew — and with it nostalgia for the Soviet Union — he and other coup leaders were pardoned by the parliament in 1994. Yanayev returned to the obscurity — from which he had briefly but so dramatically been plucked — and died there last week, virtually a forgotten man trampled by a wave of history he never understood yet struggled in vain to resist.
– the obituary adapted from the Independent. See his trembling hands here. I don’t speak Russian that well but people who do should comment.
The Tale of Two Milibands
When I went away for the weekend, I was so sure that David Miliband was going to be the next Labour leader and I wrote this post. It became inappropriate as David lost to his brother in a tight election that definitely surprised me, and concerned me a little. The Labour leadership election is in fact the most inclusive leadership election in Britain: 350,000 people cast their ballots compared to 200,000 voters at Conservative Party leadership elections and 50,000 at Liberal Democrats’. David Miliband won 53% of MP/MEPs’ votes, and 54% of Labour Party Members’ votes but what carried Edward Miliband to victory was the union bloc vote. He won a decisive 60% of Union vote, which means this victory marks the return of union politics.
In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me at all: after an election defeat, political parties sometimes go for a more radical candidate: hence, in US, Goldwater in 1964, McGovern in 1974, and current movements within Republican party; in UK, Michael Foot in 1980, a succession of Tories from 1997-2005. David Miliband’s defeat was sad reminder that Labour not only lost an election but also its centre. I met Ed Miliband in Copenhagen last December; he was a tireless worker and a wonderful intellectual, but also inexperienced in statecraft and diplomacy.
David Miliband, well he was a different story. In my opinion, he got too much crap for the above banana story (I am not helping here either). He was merely holding a banana in one of one-too-many photo-ops a politician witnesses; during the 2008 Labour conference in Manchester, he walked into the conference centre clutching his banana in the fashion of a handgun, prompting one photographer to joke: “Don’t shoot.” Maybe it was David’s insistence that he be taken seriously despite his age that made this photo an instant ironic classic. In the end, this (his arrogance, not banana) and his failure to conceal his ambitions for higher office, probably did him in.
