Iconic Photos

Eugène Atget (1857-1927) who documented the Parisian street life in the 1890s and the 1900s foreshadowed many street photojournalists of the 20th century. During the sleepy hours of the morning or night, Atget portrayed cobblestone courtyards, public-squares, parks, shop-fronts and buildings with a flair and a style that would transform plain documentary photography into high art. Even though Atget’s storefront images are devoid of people, there are unmistakable human qualities about them, and they captured the very essence of the Belle Epoque.

Although he also left behind street portraits of tradesmen (whose images he took for money), Atget devoted his energies to desolate public squares and winding back alleys. He inspired many Cubist and Surrealist painters, and influenced Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl and Irving Penn. Meeting Atget shortly before his death, American photographer Berenice Abbott was so inspired that she purchased his estate and spent the next 50 years popularizing Atget’s work.

Eugene Atget’s Un Coin, Rue de Seine is one of his most reproduced images. It is thought to be made in 1924, to document the street before the building in the centre was demolished. Atget rarely dated his prints, relying on arcane, but self-evident system of numbering negatives. This led to one of the most frustrating obstacles in analyzing his work.

Above is the talk by Jonathan Klein of Getty Images at TED conference on some of the most iconic photos. I totally agree with his approach on historicity, iconicity and inspiration caused by photos and how photos are just conduits and how it is us, rather than photos which actually change the world.

For those of you who don’t know what TED talks are, they are these annual super-expensive-to-attend gatherings where famous people come to talk. They got everyone from photography to medicine, from comedians to politicians. Although the speakers are usually diverse, the attendees aren’t — usually they include those limousine liberals and Bordeaux socialists.

I absolutely refuse to pay around $5,000 to see something you can get online for free a couple of months later, but hey, I am not a millionaire. But everyone should check out TED conferences online though — they are pretty good, and they will teach you something new everytime.

The above is one in a series of pictures a Royal Canadian cameraman took during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917. The photo is regarded as one of the greatest war photos — although its origins are obscure. Some note that it was taken during “pre-battle” training behind the lines. This is not unusual. Because of the primitive photographic equipment available in the field, most photos purporting to portray actual ‘combat action’ during World War I in fact showed troops during pre-war training exercises. Some however note that the soldier going over the top was making a gesture expressing his contempt for the Germans by putting his thumb to his nose. (There is a website refuting this here).

No matter what the battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917 was considered as a pivotal moment for Canada as a nation; four Canadian Army units fought together as one for the first time. Three thousand five hundred and ninety eight Canadian soldiers were killed during the battle, and four Victoria Crosses were awarded. Indeed, the Canadians captured a strategic area, but it was a minor victory for the losing Allies that spring, and had a negligible effect. The Globe and Mail noted that “if French or British rather than Canadian troops had driven the German enemy off Vimy Ridge, history probably would have forgotten about it.”

Yet, the victory at Vimy become inseparable from the Canadian identity. When there were rumors that the Vimy memorial had been destroyed by Germans during the WWII, the Canadians were whipped fury and hatred so much so that Adolf Hitler’s advisers thought it was necessary for the Nazi leader to be photographed in Vimy at the monument to demonstrate that it was still intact.

Rarely has an advertising image been hailed as a pop culture icon. In that rarified company of Marlboro Man and Benetto Pieta belongs this 1978 photograph by Steven Steigman, which would later be known as the Blown-away Man. The ad for Hitachi Maxell, the Japanese manufacture of stereos has since been parodied from Family Guy to P.Diddy, and to this day, has been recycled and reused by Maxell is its ad campaigns.

The ads showed hair and tie of a man sitting in a Le Corbusier chair — along with the lampshade and martini glass next to him — being blown back by the tremendous sound from speakers in front of him. Who actually modeled for the ad is unclear. Steigman wanted a model with long hair (for obvious reasons), but when a model could not easily be found, Steigman used a makeup man working for his ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves. The model is identified only as Jack. To achieve the wind-blown position, Steigman put tonnes of hairspay on the model’s hair, and tied some hair strands to the ceiling with fishing lines. The lampshade, tie and martini glass were also likewise tied to fishing lines.

The photo was instantaneously a hit, a powerful statement that music has power and force to move the mind and the soul. It was so popular that it was expended into a TV ad campaign. In the television versions, either Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain was the music responsible for those powerful waves.

Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of poetry. Despite his tiny body of work–only three collections (A Season in Hell, The Drunken Boat and Illuminations), all written before he turned 20–he influenced many 20th century artists from Pablo Picasso to Robert Mapplethorpe. Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare” Rimbaud’s torrid two-year affair with another poet, Paul Verlaine (together they were V&R) culminated with Rimbaud in the hospital with a gunshot wound and Verlaine in jail, and cemented his reputation as a controversial gay icon and archetypical enfant terrible.

Seventeen-year old Rimbaud met photographer Etienne Carjat at a dinner for Les villains bonhommes, a bohemian group both Rimbaud and Verlaine were members of. In October 1871, Rimbaud set in Carjat’s Notre-Dame-de-Lorette studio for a photo session, where the above photo was taken. The iconic photo was since immortalized as the symbol of poetry, youth, rebellion and romance — the photo even put on plates and cushions in France. In fact, Carjat took many photos of Rimbaud but in January 1872, during another Les villains bonhommes dinner, two quarreled, and Rimbaud wounded Carjat with Albert Merat’s cane-sword. In response, Carjat destroyed all photographs he took of Rimbaud. Today only eight photographs of Rimbaud by Carjat which were given to friends between October ’71 and January ’72 survived.

Rimbaud gave up on poetry before his 21st birthday. He would go on to spend the rest of his short life as a soldier and (dubious) trader in exotic locales before dying from cancer at 37.

The above photo showed Adolf Hitler in the huge crowd which heard the announcement of the First World War outside Field Marshals’ Hall, Munich on 2 August 1914. After the Nazis came to power, Hitler mentioned being outside the hall when the war was declared. A German photographer went back and looked through his photos and found the above picture.

At the outbreak of war, 25-year old Adolf Hitler was an aimless drifter and failed artist in Munich and had previously failed army entry tests because he was too weak to carry weapons. Yet, during the wartime, Germany needed soldiers and Hitler was able to enlist in the Bavarian army; although he was not considered for further promotion because of ‘a lack of leadership qualities’, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, an honour rarely given to a lance corporal (which showed that he did not lack courage). The Great War ended for Hitler inside a hospital where he was being treated for temporary blindness caused by chlorine gas. There he heard the news of German surrender, deeply incredulous; he came to believe, like many other nationalists, that the army, “undefeated in the field,” had been “stabbed in the back” by civilian leaders and Marxists back home.

Hitler returned to Munich after a short failed stint as a borderguard and joined a nationalist group German Workers’ Party (DAP), which was formed by extremists and anti-Semites as a counterforce to Bolshevism. He rose quickly through its ranks and in July 1921, he took over its leadership renaming it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The rest as they say is history.

In the entire Europe there is no battlefield more blood-stained than Verdun, where in 1916 nearly 800,000 French and German soldiers were killed or wounded in an inconclusive fight over a few square miles of territory. On 22 September 1984, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl met the French president François Mitterrand at the Douaumont cemetery in Verdun. In front of the charnel house in which the remains of 150,000 French soldiers rest, two leaders stood in rain. Mitterrand extended a hand to Kohl, which the latter held in minutes-long gesture which became a symbolic gesture of reconciliation as much as Willy Brandt’s Warsaw Kneefall.

The German Press described the scene as, “A picture that will go down in history”. It was made more powerful by the fact that Kohl’s father during WWI and Mitterrand himself during WWII had fought in the surrounding hills. As Europe’s leading statesmen during the 80s, Mitterrand and Kohl forged close personal ties despite their political differences — there were even allegations that Mitterrand supported secret donations to help finance Kohl’s re-election campaign. Together, they laid the foundations for pan-European projects, such as Eurocorps, Arte, the Maastricht Treaty and the Euro.

On 11th March 1984 during the live TV show Sept sur sept, controversial French singer-songwriter and director Serge Gainsbourg outraged the entire country by setting light to a 500-franc banknote. A protest against heavy taxation on his income, the gesture was considered tasteless in such a time of high national unemployment. Although outcries followed, Gainsbourg went unpunished.

By 1984, Gainsbourg had become a regular on TV but the early promise he had shown was all but gone. He would appear drunk and unshaven to interviews (and on one occasion, passed out while telling an obscene story about Brigtte Bardot and a champagne bottle). He told “I want to fuck her,” about Whitney Houston. But by the time of his death of a heart attack in 1991, all was forgiven: President Mitterrand paid a heart-rending tribute: “He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire….He elevated the song to the level of art.”

Although he would later be feted as the father of photojournalism, Henry Cartier-Bresson was at his best when he was taking photos which didn’t ‘report’ anything — men in Parisian streets, sunbathers whether they be at Peter and Paul fortress or Coney Island. At the first glance, the above picture — one of Cartier-Bresson’s most famous — seems exactly like it: languorous workers in Juvisny spending a lazy afternoon on the bank of River Marne.

In fact, it was one of the photos Cartier-Bresson took during his first (and last) salaried job with the Parisian leftwing newspaper, Ce Soir in 1937. The assignment was for a campaign to win more vacation time for workers, and his editors hated the self-indulgent poses (picnic baskets, wines and all that) and the final spread on the story didn’t use the photo. The photo has been since been compared to paintings by Degas and Seurat. Cartier-Bresson who never named any of his photos would have been content with one title given by critics, Sunday on the Banks of Marne. Originally trained as a painter, Cartier-Bresson remained devoted to painting his entire life, and retired from photography to paint at the apex of his career.

I was pretty bored, so I played around on my own blog and came up with a map of the countries where these iconic photos hail from. At first, I thought I might also put how many iconic photos a country produces at another variable but it proved to be too complicated and hard to see. I also attempted to do the same for American states, but my interest quickly ran out — thus the U.S. is presented as a single entity — although there are areas (say Idaho or Iowa) where no iconic photos currently hail.

That being said, places like China and Russia are colored whole too, although the photos on this blog are not representative of these nations’ vast interiors and different ethnic groups. In addition, geographical maps had changed enough over years (the break-up of USSR being just one example). In coloring newer countries, judgement had been made individually. For instance, Kazakhstan is not colored because no iconic images currently come from there, but Slovekia is colored because Prague Spring applied to it as well.

And then there are events that happened in two countries: conquest of Mt. Everest in Nepal and India, Armenian Genocide in Armenia and Turkey, etc…..and there are photos that are literally out of this world. They went uncategorized, of course.

(People from the countries being left out should suggest me their countries’ iconic photos).

As photobombs go, it was a terrible one. In May 1948, Thomas Dewey went to Oregon to campaign in the state’s Republican primaries. A local organization asked his aides to let them onto the bus he was traveling on, and to escort the New York governor to their club. It would have been fine had the club not be Oregon Cavemen, a club created by group of business men who dressed up as cavemen to attract more tourism in the area.

Dewey smiled dementedly as the cavemen initiated him into their club. He went further and let another organization prick his arm so that he could sign his membership card in his own blood (things politicians will do for votes!). Dewey realized that a defeat in Oregon would end his chances at the nomination, and did everything he could. He sent his powerful political machine into the state and spent large sums of money on campaign ads in Oregon. He debated his main opponent Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen on national radio — the first-ever radio debate in electoral history.

The main issue of the debate was Communism. Dewey, who vehemently detested red-baiting famously stated that “you can’t shoot an idea with a gun” when Stassen mentioned outlawing the Communist Party of America. Dewey won the debate, state primary, and his party’s nomination, and nearly won the actual election. An ironic footnote of the above photo was that it was picked up on the wire in the Soviet Union. Pravda published the picture, and with characteristic economy for truth, noted that men dressed as cavemen were protesting against the Wall Street.

(Click to Enlarge)

Although he did not expect to win when he ran for the presidency, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran in 1972 to ‘send a message’ to Washington. To everyone’s surprise, Wallace had strong showings in state primaries, which were surprising for a candidate who only a decade earlier had vowed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” (at his gubernatorial inauguration, no less).

George Wallace had since renounced those views, but he was paranoid that he will be assassinated. He told the Detroit News. “Somebody’s going to get me one of these days,” he told “I can just see a little guy out there that nobody’s paying any attention to. He reaches into his pocket and out comes the little gun, like that Sirhan guy that got Kennedy.” Wallace stood behind an 800-pound bulletproof podium each time he delivered his stump ‘law and order’ speech.

On May 15, 1972, Wallace stood out from his podium, took off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves to shake hands with people at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland. He usually wore a bulletproof vest but that day was too hot for Wallace to wear it. Arthur Bremer, stepped out from the crowd, and fired five times. All bullets hit Wallace. Bremer was immediately arrested. Wallace’s reputation meant than many people would have expected his shooter to be black, but Bremer was a blonde 21-year old Caucasian. Bremer, according to his infamously demented diary, wanted to kill either Nixon or Wallace, not for political purposes, but to assert his virility.

Wallace survived the assassination attempt but would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life, his presidential ambitions forever eclipsed by a hostile press that preyed on his crippled ‘haplessness’. Bremer was sentenced to 53 years in prison. His diary would go on to inspire the 1976 movie Taxi Driver which in turn inspired the assassination attempt on Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr.