Iconic Photos

In the Nazi-occupied Europe, the Sonderkommando were special groups of Jews (and sometimes Russian prisoners of war) who were isolated from their fellows, and forced to carry out the atrocities: they emptied the gas chambers of bodies; they cremated, buried or ground the bodies. Since the Nazis did not wish the Sonderkommandos’ knowledge to reach the outside world, they regularly gassed the Sonderkommandos too and replacing them with new arrivals; the first task of the new Sonderkommandos would be to dispose of their predecessors’ corpses. Conscious of their fate, Sonderkommandos sometimes rebelled, but their most significant act of defiance came in the form of four photographs that came out of Auschwitz in August 1944.

In 1943, the commander at Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss forbade the photography inside the camp; signs were posted outside warned ‘Fotografieren verboten! No Entry! You will be shot without prior warning!’ However, two photographic laboratories operated inside Auschwitz for archival reasons: photographs recorded torture, executions, and experiments, and Hoss was even able to present the minister of justice with an album of Auschwitz pictures. However, of one and a half million surviving photographs related to the concentration camps, only these four depicted the Nazis’ assembly line Holocaust in action. It was unclear how the Sonderkommandos smuggled a camera in (there were competing stories, but generally thought to be smuggled in with food);  the film was known to be smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste to the Polish Resistance. The pictures were sent to Krakow, but not to the Polish government-in-exile in London. They were, however, used in the Krakow trials for Nazi Crimes in Poland.

Frequently cropped and altered to highlight their content, it is possible to identify and precisely locate the scenes in the photos; the photographer apparently hid inside a crematorium doorway (Krema V) and took the photos secretly from the hip area. Only first two frames showed open-air incineration pits; the third is largely comprised of branches, except for group of women prisoners who appear in various states of undress at the bottom corner (zoom). The remaining image – also ill-composed – shows only sunlight and trees.

In 2008, 270 photos Andre Zucca took during the Nazi Occupation of Paris was shown collectively to the public for the first time. They were deliberately pedestrian: velo-taxis waiting for customers, bicyclists, well-dressed citizens strolling along the boulevards and in the parks, commuters in the Metro, crowed cafes, nightclubs and swimming pools full of young fashionable people. But all these photos challenged the collective memory reinforced by movies and books: the Paris under the Nazi Occupation was a dreary place, black-and-white hell of hunger, of Nazi round-ups, of torture, humiliation and resistance. Zucca, on the other hand, showed a Paris that got on with life and without great hardship.

But that Paris was a myth. Andre Zucca — respected prewar photographer for Paris-Soir and Paris-Match — was working for the German propagandists under the Occupation. Zucca himself was not a Nazi, but he felt no hostility towards the Germans either. But his previous employers shut down, Zucca took a job with the German propaganda magazine Signal, which provided him extremely rare and valuable rolls of Agfacolor film. His assignments were narrowly-defined and difficult but Zucca didn’t stage any of his photos — his casual, carefree, and nonchalant Paris existed:Joseph Goebbels wanted Paris to be “animated and gay” to show off the “new Europe”. Coco Chanel entertained the Nazis; Serge Lifar, Edith Piaf and Herbert von Karajan performed. Theatres, opera houses, nightclubs, cinemas and brothels were kept busy. (Orgy-like parties flourished, right next to the Louvre, and included champagne baths in an era where the most of the world was on food rations).

Yet, in Zucca’s photos, the absent traffic, swastikas, Nazi uniforms and yellow Stars of David — the insignia that Jews were forced to wear — subtlety suggest everything was not well in the Occupied Europe. The film itself — uniquely in color in a time when no one but the Nazis could get color film — tells another tale: the photos were sunny and cheerful because every films required bright sunlight. No matter what inferences you draw from these photos, this much is certain: while they may not lie, photographs never tell the whole story.

Zucca was arrested after the 1944 liberation but never prosecuted. He worked until his death in 1973 under an assumed name as a wedding photographer in a small town of Paris.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some say it was taken in Toulon as the French soldiers leave for Africa. Some say it was taken as Nazi tanks rolled into Paris. Others claim it was taken in Marseilles as historic French battle flags were taken aboard ships for protection against the conquering Nazis. No matter what incident prompted him to cry, the French civilian cries across decades from his faded photograph. He cries not only for his generation, but also for his century. The photo, one of the most heart-rending pictures of the Second World War, was possibly taken by George Mejat for Fox Movietone News/AP.

The fall of France, only six weeks after initial Nazi assault, came as a shock and surprise to many. Contrary to popular beliefs, the Maginot Line wasn’t exactly circumvented by the Nazis through Belgium. The Nazis, in fact, broke through the strongest point of the Maginot Line, Fort Eben-Emael, which connected the French and Belgian fortification systems. The fortifications were unequipped to defend against gliders, explosives and blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe simply flew over it. When the Allied forces reinvaded in June 1944, the Maginot Line, now held by German defenders, was again largely bypassed, a clear indicator that this line, designed with a WWI-like trench warfare in mind, was never actually going to work no matter where the Nazis attacked.

The fall of France was the first crisis for the new coalition government of Winston Churchill in London. For next 20 months, the Great Britain and her Empire would stand alone against the Nazi armies. Not until D-Day, 6 June 1944, would an Allied army return to Western Europe. Greatly emboldened by their success, the Germans would gamble even more heavily on their next major operation – the invasion of Russia. This time they would be less lucky.

This was published in LIFE on March 7, 1949, and didn't name the Frenchman in question

For more than 10 years, Horst Faas covered the Vietnam war for the AP. Travelling alone, he jumped out of helicopters, tramped through villages, rice paddies and jungles, and took photos of street fights, interrogations and executions. One day in January 1964, Faas and the South Vietnamese Unit he was travelling with came across a suspected collaborator. A South Vietnamese ranger uses the end of a dagger to threaten punishment to the farmer for allegedly supplying government troops with wrong information on Communist guerrillas. Faas recalled, “If the prisoner didn’t talk, they would be hurt and even if they did talk they would be hurt or killed. In this case, the knife was a threat — and I think he used it. The photo won a Pulitzer.

Faas came to develop his own code to decide whether his war photos were too graphic. “If it was a really exception event, one crazy man, then we wouldn’t use it. But this event was not a singular event, not even occasional. It was a routine event. That’s the story that pictures like this told newspaper-reading people during the weary days of the war.”

In 1950, editor of Picture Post Tom Hopkinson sent reporter James Cameron and photographer Bert Hardy to cover the Korean War. While in Korea the two men produced three illustrated stories for Picture Post, including General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon. But the photos Hardy took outside Pusan Station were the memorable images that eventually ripped Britain’s premier picture magazine apart.

In early September 1950, Pusan was the only Korean city held by U.N. Forces. There outside the train station were about sixty political prisoners, aged 14 to 70, suspected of opposing South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee. They were tied up, and wore almost no clothes; when they tried to scoop a drink from the puddles of rain that they were squatting in, South Korean guards beat them with rifle butts. When Hardy took the photos, they were about to be taken off and shot. Their fate reminded Hardy and Cameron of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. Cameron wrote a story harshly critical of the Allies, the UN and the Red Cross for giving Rhee a free rein.

In London, Tom Hopkinson admitted that Hardy’s photos were the best he ever received. But Hopkinson was constantly conflict with Picture Post’s owner Edward G. Hulton. In August 1945, Hulton wrote to Hopkinson whom he suspected was a socialist: “I cannot permit editors of my newspapers to become organs of Communist propaganda. Still less to make the great newspaper which I built up a laughing-stock.” Cameron’s story was the last straw: Hulton — who was then on the verge of receiving a knighthood — stopped the presses, fearing that coverage would “give aid and comfort to the enemy”. When Hopkinson persisted, Hulton sacked him.

Hulton sent Cameron and Hardy into the Himalayas on a wild goose chase for the Dalai Lama. Their “Inchon” story touting Gen. MacArthur covered nine pages of the Oct. 7, 1950 Picture Post. After Hopkinson, Post was led by a revolving door of incompetent editors until it finally closed shop in 1957. Syngman Rhee’s authoritarian presidency lasted ten more years until 1960, when following popular protests against a disputed election, he resigned. More than 200,000 perished under his reign of terror.

In France, the documentary Nuit et Brouillard faced censorship twice in a period of only few months in 1955. The first time was about the above image. It showed the camp of Pithiviers, a camp in the Loiret departement which is one of two main concentration camps for foreign-born Jews in France. At the foreground, a French gendarme was guarding the camp. This image perfectly encapsulated the responsibility of the Vichy Government in the persecution of French Jews . Anonymously taken image was an unequivocal denunciation of French collaboration. Coming after many long and arduous years when numerous ministers and prominent citizens are judged for possible collaboration, the photo was an unwelcome sight.

The official commission of censorship required that the telltale kepi of the gendarme be cut. Director Alain Resnais first refused, but finally relented and decided to put a beam across the kepi to hide it.  The narrative that mentioned Pithiviers remained unaltered.Thus, the first censorship attempt passed and a few months later, the German embassy in France asked the film to be withdrawn from the Cannes Film Festival. Both the German and the French governments viewed the film as divisive since it came immediately before the signing of the Treaties of Rome in 1957. However, unlike the censorship of the kepi which went virtually unnoticed and mentioned only once in press, the French press reacted unanimously against the proposed withdrawal noting that the filmmakers were very cautious in defining the difference between the Nazi criminals and the German people.

In retaliation, the predominantly French selection committee asked Germany’s own submission Himmel ohne sterne to be withdraw and the Germans left Cannes in protest. Widespread protests from deportees’ associations, members of the Résistance and the Communist Party as well as the threat from the Festival organizers to resign finally forced the government to give in. The film was staged ‘outside the programme’ in the main Festival Hall auditorium, where it received a standing ovation. In a way, the controversy over Nuit et Brouillard altered Cannes’ history forever. In that monumental year for self-inflicted censorship, films from Britain, Finland, Poland, Norway and Yugoslavia were also excluded. This debacle encouraged the organizers to reshape the Festival in accordance with cinematographic quality rather than diplomatic niceties.

Jack Sharpe was sent to Singapore just a few days before the Japanese invasion there, and captured by the Japanese. He was sent to Thailand to work on the notorious Burma Railway and was nearly executed over an attempted escape. Before his court martial for escape, Sharpe defiantly proclaimed that he would live to see all of Japan surrender and that he would walk out of the prison on his own two feet.

Sharpe was sent back to the Outram jail in Singapore; almost no one survived it for two years, and it was from this infamous prison that Sharpe was liberated in August 1945 with the dubious distinction of being its longest survivor. True to his words, he walked out of the gates on his own two feet, and collapsed immediately afterwards. During his captivity, plagued by scurvy, dysentery and scabs, Sharpe saw his weight decreased from 70 kilograms to less than 25 kilograms. In September 1945, the world was stunned by the publication of Sharpe’s skeletal figure cheerfully smiling from the end of his bed. The photo told the story of appalling Japanese treatment of their prisoners, and also the indomitable spirit of Jack Sharpe, who eventually lived to be 88.

One in three POWs under the Japanese during the war perished — seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians. In fact, around 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied POWs died on the Burma Railroad alone. The Japanese, coming from a shame culture which would rather commit suicide, never understood the concept of surrendering, and treated their prisoners with the greatest of contempt.