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.
The Oliver Sipple Case
Oliver Sipple (leftmost) lunges for the assailant
On September 25th 1975, Oliver Sipple was walking past the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco where the then President Gerald Ford was scheduled to speak. As he moved forward to get a better look at the speech, he noticed the woman standing next to him reach into her raincoat and pull out a revolver. Instinctively, Sipple grabbed for her arm and deflected it as she pulled the trigger. The bullet, intended for the president, ricocheted off the wall and wounded another man in the crowd. Sipple, a decorated Vietnam vet, tackled the assailant , prevented her from shooting again and handed her over to the Secret Service.
Oliver Sipple was immediately hailed in the national press, and received thousands of letters. However, President Ford only sent him a short note, and avoided a personal meeting. News organizations wondered why the White House was avoiding Sipple; although he was openly gay, Sipple’s sexual orientation was a secret from his family and employers; he asked the press to keep his sexuality off the record. However, news organizations refused to comply. The gay community thought it was a great opportunity too; while discussing whether Sipple’s sexuality be disclosed, Harvey Milk noted: “It’s too good an opportunity. For once we can show that gays do heroic things, not just all that caca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms.” Milk further suggested that Sipple’s sexual orientation was the reason he received only a note, rather than an invitation to the White House — something newspapers took and ran with.
Herb Caen, a columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle, finally ‘outed’ Sipple as gay. The Chicago Sun-Times called him a ‘Homosexual Hero’; The Denver Post was more pithy: ‘Gay Vet’. Back in Detroit, Sipple’s staunch Baptist family became the subject of ridicule and abuse by friends and neighbors. His mother refused to talk to him and when she died in 1979, his father told him not to come to the funeral. Sipple filed a $15 million invasion of privacy suit against seven newspapers, and various publishers, but after a long and bitter process, the courts held that Sipple himself had become news, and that his sexual orientation was part of the story. Oliver Sipple sank into a downward spiral of depression, alcoholism, obesity and drug abuse. By the time he was found dead with an empty bottle of bourbon in 1989, Oliver Sipple was already a forgotten footnote to ethics and freedom of press. His apartment was littered with press clippings from that fateful day, when he saved a man’s life and subsequently ruined his own.
(Opinions follow: This post is partially inspired by my misgivings towards DADT policy in the US. It was initially enacted without much tangible information, and nearly two decades on, seems a little dated. Over twenty countries allow gays to serve openly in their armed forces, and most of these countries are members of the coalition forces fighting together with Americans. In the British Army — which itself was largely homophobic until recently when it was forced to accommodate gays by the European Union — there had been no incidents of bullying, harassment, blackmail or erosion of unit cohesion or effectiveness because of allowing gays to serve openly. And on a personal level, I believe it is unhealthy and unproductive to keep secrets from one another in the military where camaraderie and trust are the most important values.)
Piss Christ
In the recent days, there have been a lot of back and forth over Freedom of Speech, especially in the United States. Personally speaking, a lot of these debates falls into “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” category. One of the literally shining examples of this is the above photo by the shock artist Andres Serrano. The 1987 photo shows a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of what was purportedly the artist’s urine. (Without Serrano’s insistence that it was his urine, the viewer would not probably be able to differentiate between urine and amber or polyurethane).
Although Serrano himself has not revealed a lot about the motives behind his photo series (which also included submerging various other classical statuary in various fluids — blood, milk, urine, sperm), he noted that while this work is not intended to denounce religion, it alludes to a perceived commercializing or cheapening of icons in contemporary culture. Although some praised the work as mysterious, ethereal and beautiful, all the hell broke loose when it was discovered that Serrano received a grant from taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts.
I realize this post is going to be controversial; this photo has been sitting in my draftbox for months and I know I eventually have to post it in order to be true to modi operandi of my site — which is to post any photo, famous or infamous, and frame it from a fairly objective standpoint. A photo’s inclusion does not automatically reflect its iconicity or importance. But the last straw to post this photo came when I saw a news report while vacationing in the U.S. a few weeks ago — one of the talking heads was arguing that the Muslims should not be angered at the Mohammedan cartoons in Denmark and South Park because Christians were very tolerant during Piss Christ, etcetra etcetra. I said to myself, that’s bulls**t. Not unlike those cartoonists, Andres Serrano was harassed and did receive hate mail and death threats. Even gallery owners and museum curators who displayed the work received death threats. The photo itself was vandalized several times.
Freedoms of speech and expressions are fundamental rights still alien to billions of people around the world. But it is unfortunate that those freedoms are sometimes abused by a handful, and the entire society is subsequently judged by the actions of craziest of its loons — whether they be suicide bombers, book-burning ideologues or Christ-blaspheming iconoclasts. (Serrano went on to put together another controversial exhibition, a literal shit show, which included 66 pictures of poop, generated by 66 different creatures — from jaguars to bulls to the artist himself.)
The Bang-Bang Club
Many probably have seen the above picture, emblematic of the daring lengths photographers have to go to record an important event. However, very few people would have noticed that the photographer at the centre was James Nachtwey, one of the greatest photojournalists alive, and that the photo was taken by David Turnley — another great photojournalist covering the same event: post-election violence in South Africa in 1994. Although neither Nachtwey or Turnley were the members of the Bang-Bang Club — the notorious group of four photographers (Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, Joao Silva) who covered South Africa in the last years of the Apartheid — they worked closely with the members of the Club.
Today, we mistakenly recall that South Africa’s transition from Apartheid was largely conflict-free. However, the backlash from white supremacists was not negligible in those tumultuous months leading up to the election: some whites called for a separate, whites-only homeland, while others formed neo-Nazi movements. Although the anti-election Freedom Alliance gradually lost its influence, violence persisted, abetted by the police (as it was later discovered). A state of emergency had to be declared and troops had be to deployed in some provinces to help residents to go to the voting booths undeterred. The elections took place under intense international pressure (on regional presidents) and scrutiny. The election was chaotic: there was no voter registration list, and the balloting had to be extended for three days to accommodate some 22 million voters who had newly won their right to vote.
Nachtwey would win his fourth Robert Capa medal for covering the violence that followed the election as some accused election fraud. He would also witness the clash between peacekeepers and the African National Congress that killed Ken Oosterbroek and injured Marinovich.
For more information about the Bang-Bang Club, see the movie of the same name, starring Ryan Phillippe, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year.
The Egyptian Job
Last week, Middle Eastern leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. to begin a new round of peace talks. Pessimists outweigh optimists in the policymaking circles on the prospects of the peace process, which indeed has a long insurmountable road ahead of itself. The meeting was merely a preliminary photo-op and the above photo, of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Obama, President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, and King Abdullah II of Jordan (l. to r.) walking towards the East Room of the White House was the one widely reprinted.
Except in Egypt, where they published a hilariously altered photo which placed the Egyptian president front and centre (even before President Obama). Egypt’s oldest and the most circulated newspaper, the state-run Al-Ahram altered the image and published it both online and in print. When criticized, the paper’s editor-in chief, Osama Saraya defended it, saying the paper published the original photo on the day talks began and the photoshopped version was to symbolize Egypt’s leading role in the peace process. In the editorial, Saraya wrote: ”The expressionist photo is a brief, live and true expression of the prominent stance of President Mubarak in the Palestinian issue, his unique role in leading it before Washington.” The photo is still up on its website as of this moment.
Ironically, the actual photo — with Mr. Mubarak separated from the group at the back — may have more symbolic meanings than any photomontage Al-Ahram came up with. The photo suggests Egypt’s — and her aging president’s — waning role in the Middle East peace process. Mubarak has been a staple of Middle East politics for more than 30 years, but with the presidential election coming up in 2011, and the health of her 82-year old president perilous and the presidential succession unclear, Egypt’s regional influence is dwindling.
Hosni Mubarak is the longest-serving Egyptian head of state in 150 years and he ruled Egypt with a peculiar mix of charisma and brutality. Being one of the United States’ staunchest allies in the region, Egypt has her records seldom scrutinized. Thanks to Mubarak’s Kafkasque bureaucratic machine — Egypt has been under an uninterrupted state of emergency for past 29 years — the voter turnout in 2005 was 3% and in 80% of the elections, Mubarak’s party was unopposed. Mubarak himself got 89% of the vote — and his opponent was later sentenced to five years in prison on dubious fraud charges. At least they had an election in 2005; for his four previous terms, Mubarak has been nominated by Parliament as the sole candidate, then confirmed in a referendum. Mubarak himself has never appointed a vice-president, which could lead to constitutional problems in the future as his health condition worsens.
Tono Stano “Sense”
The above photo, titled “Sense”, of a woman encased in black fabric with the exception of her face and a thin line of her naked body launched Tono Stano’s career as a photographer. Mainly known for his art photography of female nudes in black and white, the Slovakian photographer started out as an art photographer for film studios in the-then Czechoslovakia, and developed a new style of photography, deeply influenced by performance art.
