Two Obituaries
Last few weeks saw the deaths of two people who were recently featured in Iconic Photos, first a photographer and second a general who made an iconic image possible.
Died on October 25th was Rashid Talukder, the first Bangladeshi to win Pioneer Photographer Award, aged 72. His photos of the Bangladesh Liberation war in 1971 are considered one of the most important photoessays on the century, and his photo of a bodiless head, featured here on IP just two months ago, was a haunting testament to the trying toll of war.
Another of his famous photos was the above photo of Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who returned to his homeland after being released from jail in Pakistan. The photo, taken at historic speech on March 7, 1971, was later selected by the Encyclopaedia on Southeast Asia as one of the iconic moments of Bangladeshi history.
From one successful war of independence to another less successful one: that of Biafra. In 1967, the Igbo — a Christian people in the oil-rich south east part of Nigeria — unilaterally declared their independence from Nigeria. Leading them quixotically was Col. Emeka Ojukwu, who died this week at the age of 78.
The Biafran struggle, for all its high and mighty ideals, was a conflict which should have lasted only weeks, given the overwhelming superiority of the Nigerian federal army and the fact that international governments — seeing the rebellion as a first major challenge to post-colonial borders throughout Africa — weighed in heavily on the central government’s side. That it lasted for two and a half years was largely due to Ojukwu’s single-mindedness.
Before the Biafrans would capitulate, the Nigerian military blockade of Biafra led to a famine and the conflict had become imprinted on the international consciousness and conscience, thanks to a handful of British television stations and photographers documenting the blight. By October 1968 several thousand Biafrans, many of them children, were reported to be dying every day, and Don McCullin documented an extreme case of this in an iconic photo featured on this blog before.
World Press Freedom Ads
Not really iconic, and some of them don’t make sense, but they are truly funny, and make clever use of photography.
What They Are Reading in Greece
Editorial: Iconic Photos has been first and foremost a history blog and here it looks back at millennia of messy defaults.
The EU was supposed to heal scars from the last continental war. It is a wonder how fast the Euro undid all that comity.
History of sovereign defaults tends to begin with Dionysius, the ruler of Syracuse in Greece during the fourth century B.C., who had an entertaining habit of stamping two-drachma mark on one-drachma coins to pay of his debts. Around the same time, thirteen Greek city states defaulted on their loans from the Temple of Delos — the first recorded default in history. In the modern era too, Greece never enjoyed sound finances; it defaulted at least five times (1826, 1843, 1860, 1894 and 1932), and the messiest default in 1826 shut it out of international capital markets for 53 years.
However, it’s a more recent nightmare that haunts the Greek psyche today — that of German domination. The country which suffered mightily under the Nazi rule seems to be invoking those painful memories this November as northern european countries demand austerity measures from their floundering government. A giant swastika looms over the Acropolis on the cover of fittingly-named Crash magazine. Horst Reichenbech, the German head of the European Task Force on Greece, has been portrayed as a Wehrmacht officer on the cover of another, and called a gauleiter, a Nazi term for a regional governor. On my last visit to Athens, a favored phrase there seems to be “The Germans are coming” a title of an influential post-war Greek film, where a former partisan often wakes up from his nightmares uttering just that.
Despite deep positive relations over the last five decades — which included the German government shielding political dissidents from the Greek junta — the Second World War casts a long and grim shadow over the Greek psyche. The German tabloid Bild’s pointed suggestion that the Greeks sell the islands and the Acropolis did not help assuage the rumors that German banks are waiting to liquidate the Greek state’s assets.
Their fears may be irrational, but are not without precedents. Newfoundland lost nothing less than its sovereignty in 1936 when it messily defaulted after falling fish prices. The oldest parliament in the British Empire after Westminster was quietly abolished and a trusteeship was imposed on 280,000 people who had known 78 years of direct democracy. A la Occupy Wall Street, the islanders stormed their defunct parliament and tried to lynch their prime minister, who only narrowly escaped this fate by running down an alleyway ignominiously.
Although not quite to the same extreme as Newfoundland, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey sacrificed partial sovereignty as regards government finance to England following their nineteenth century defaults. The United States established a fiscal protectorate in the dominican republic in 1907 in order to control the customs house, before occupying the entire country in 1917. The US also intervened in Haiti and Nicaragua to control the customs houses and obtain revenue for debt servicing. Such were the halcyon days of gunboat diplomacy.
This blog believes that Germany and her investors has profited deeply from the euro at the expense of their Mediterranean neighbors. Without the euro, Italy and Greece could have indulged their workers with higher and higher bonuses while sporadically devaluing their currencies and making their countries more competitive. The euro prevented that. The only benefits from the euro went to Germany, where a low performing periphery weakened the currency, which made German exports extremely attractive abroad. Like China, Germany’s competitive edge had currency manipulation at its heart. Therefore, it is both hypocritical and pusillanimous for the Bundesbank and the German Chancellery to shriek their responsibilities now. After all, they partially concocted this ungodly brew and time has come for Berlin to taste its own medicine.
“Monkey Business”
As the American Presidential race heats up and rumors and allegations swirl, Iconic Photos look back at a scandal from the not-so-distant-past.
Never dare the media. That was the career-ending lesson Gary Hart learnt in 1987 when he challenged the newspapers to find proof of his alleged womanizing. Back in early 1987, the former senator from Colorado was the frontrunner for the democratic presidential nomination. Although the election was still 18 months away, Hart’s position as a “New” Democrat — a fiscal conservative and social liberal –appealed to many democratic insiders, especially after the values of the “old style” New Deal Democratism were resounding rejected by Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984.
Hart, who almost was the democratic nominee in 1984, was obviously the heir apparent in 1987. Only one problem existed. The senator was plagued by his troubled 28-year marriage and rumors of infidelity. The candidate challenged the media to surveil him, and claimed that anybody who did so would “be very bored.”
However, even before his dare appeared in the New York Times, the Miami Herald already had anonymous tips regarding the senator’s affairs. On the day his editorial appeared, the Herald published a photo of a young woman leaving Hart’s residence. The woman was a 29-year-old model named Donna Rice whom the senator had first met in 1983 during a New Year’s Day party at the Aspen vacation home of rock singer Don Henley. While Hart argued that the reporters could have no knowledge of exactly when Rice arrived or why she was there, his poll ratings suffered a major blow.
However, a coup de grace came two days later, when the Herald published a photograph of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap in Bimini. The photo which made the cover of National Enquirer was all the more hilarious for Hart’s T-shirt which had the inappropriate name of the yacht that ferried Hart and Rice to Bimini from Miami: “Monkey Business”.
A Washington Post reporter pointedly asked Hart, “Have you ever committed adultery?” Hart refused to answer the question and the Post identified yet another woman with whom Hart had had a long-standing relationship. Less than a week later, in a bitter press conference, Hart announced he was dropping out of the race. He would later re-enter the race, but his moment had passed. He continued to rail against those who had all condemned him, and wrote in his autobiography that if the press and nation would have a “small margin of tolerance” for messy relationships, then maybe we’d get better leaders.
Barry Feinstein (1931-2011)
Barry Feinstein, the crafter of iconic pop culture images in the 1960s, is dead, aged 80.
The serendipitous meeting that transformed Barry Feinstein’s career took place in the early 1960s at the office of a longtime friend. That friend, Albert Grossman was then the manager of Bob Dylan, and thus began Mr. Feinstein’s close and enduring association with the legendary singer. Just before Dylan achieved his greatest fame, the duo travelled across America in a Rolls-Royce Grossman had bought in California and needed it driven east. Later, Feinstein would accompany Dylan on the European portion of a 1966 world tour and the 1974 Dylan and the Band tour.
It was during the former tour that he took the photo above; the iconic photo, taken in London in 1966, shows the singer in the back of a limousine smoking a cigarette and gazing straight ahead through dark sunglasses, seemingly oblivious to the imploring fans and the intrusive flashbulbs pressed against the window. In other unforgettable images from that tour, the singer was shown huddled in a seat in an otherwise empty Royal Albert Hall, playing with children in Liverpool and standing on a ferry dock in Australia, a photo later used as the cover for Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home.
“Just in their stark atmosphere, I liked the angles Barry used,” Dylan noted, no doubt thinking about the foreboding photo taken from below that graced the cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” — a portrait that recalled an earlier era of dustbowl hobo troubadours.
Barry Feinstein shot more than 500 album covers, and three established him as one of rock’s premier chroniclers. On the cover of Janis Joplin’s posthumous and final album was Feinstein’s photo of the troubled singer, taken the day before she died. For the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet, he used the image of a dirty toilet in a graffiti covered bathroom taken at a bathroom at a Porsche repair shop in Los Angeles. The distributors believed it was too explicit for release and replaced it with a sparse white cover. And for “All Things Must Pass,” his first album after the breakup of the Beatles, George Harrison portentously posed for Feinstein amidst a pile of four toppled, garden gnomes. Mr. Feinstein recalled that for this album, he photographed George Harrison for days outside the singer’s home at Friar Park:
“Then someone called and told [Harrison] that the gnomes that were stolen from Friar Park in about 1871 could be bought back. They asked him if he wanted to buy them back. He said, ‘Sure.’ They brought them back and laid them on the lawn. We went out and looked at them. I said, ‘There’s the cover.’ We didn’t move a thing. In about two minutes, we had the cover. It was spontaneous.”
Most of his best work was shot in black-and-white, using high contrast film and no flash; he preferred natural light, just like that other giant of American photography, Robert Frank, to whom he was oft-compared to. He had no formal photography training and began his career as a photographer for Columbia Pictures, taking memorable images of Steve McQueen on set of his most famous film, Bullitt. He captured a heartbroken Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper’s funeral and a feisty Marlon Brando at a civil rights march facing counterdemonstrators taunting him with racist signs. He was called to Marilyn Monore’s home after she had been found dead; among the shots he took was one of the bottle of pills on her bedside table, “a chilling image of the reality behind the glittering facade of her celebrity” The Times commented.
And fittingly for someone, who more than any one else, has captured those realities, angst and hippiness of that 60s generation, Mr. Feinstein died last week at his longtime abode in Woodstock. He was 80.
James Nachtway on His Work
James Nachtwey is perhaps the greatest war photographer alive. Adapting Raleigh’s famous judgment on Henry VIII, one might even say that “if all the patterns and pictures of war photographers were lost to the world, they might be painted to the life from James Nachtway.”
He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries. Here, he talks about all the conflicts and tragedies he covered in last four decades.
Behind the Images: Gaddafi is Dead
Ironically for a man who had claimed that the revolutionaries trying to topple him were rats and cockroaches, Moammur el-Gaddafi took his final refuge in a drainpipe. A French Mirage jet which had attacked and scattered the convoy in which he was trying to flee was responsible for the dictator taking such an ignominious abode, but it was in the hands of the angry mob of fighters who recorded his last moments on video that Colonel Gaddafi met his bloody end.
Desmazes' Screenshot
A variant of lead photograph, featured in many of today’s newspapers will bear the name of Philippe Desmazes, an Agence France-Presse photographer. He was the only photographer in the area, when a rebel fighter pointed to where the deposed Libyan dictator had been captured, and another showed him mobile phone footage of a body, the one first broadcast by Al-Jazeera (below). “Are you sure it’s Gaddafi?” asked Mr. Desmazes, who subsequently made a grab from the footage and wired it.
In the coming days and weeks, there will no doubt be questions about who took the original footage, and whether we should credit photos to Mr. Desmazes only. The Times credited the photos to Mr. Desmazes and published them with an apologetic note: “It is an image of a man dead, or close to death, so harrowing that The Times would not normally publish it. But it records an historic moment — the end of the era of Muammar Gaddafi.”
The transitional Libyan government claims that Gaddafi was caught in crossfire, although the footage showed the badly injured, but undoubtedly conscious, former dictator being bundled on to the bonnet of a pick-up truck, his shirt being stripped from his torso and his body being dragged along the ground.
The photos of his body taken later, after it was driven to the neighboring city of Misrata, appeared to show bullet wounds to his head. The government maintains that the medical examiner could not say whether the bullet came from the revolutionary forces and the Gaddafi loyalists, but multiple sources claim that a New-York-Yankees-cap wearing twenty-year-old was responsible for Gaddafi’s demise. Mohammed El-Bibi later appeared brandishing Gadhafi’s gold 9mm gun in celebration, and told the BBC that he was the one who had found and captured Gadhafi and, as the dictator lie wounded, that he had snatched Gadhafi’s prized gun from him.
Later, fighters in Misurata surrounded the corpse, flashing the victory sign; Kareem Fahim’s photo for the New York Times (ab0ve) is eerily reminiscent of Che Guevera’s exit half-a-century earlier, but we can perhaps take solace in the fact that when the dust settles and the mystery surrounding his death clears, no one will be making a martyr out of Moammur el-Gaddafi.
Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters
Tom Stoddart, Sarajevo
History of the Balkans is closely intertwined with violence. “From the ghastly massacres of Muslims committed by the Greek freedom fighters in 1821 down to Srebrenica and Kosovo in our own day, the savageries form an unbroken red stripe,” wrote Neal Acherson.
Recording these atrocities was the British photographer Tom Stoddart, whose black-and-white images sang the region’s elegiacs. Stoddart would be wounded in Sarajevo in 1992, but fell in love with the place, and returned to shoot the often. Among his photos, that of Sarajevo’s burnt out towers seen through the shattered windows of the Holiday Inn stood out.
On October 3rd 1992 — a day after some 100,000 people marched through the streets of Sarajevo to demonstrate for peace — the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army shelled the city from the hills surrounding it. For the next 1,200 days, the siege continued and as the world looked on, 12,000 people perished. They had to dig up football pitches to find room to bury the dead.
Today, it is easy to remember that Sarajevo in 1992 was a prosperous metropolis. Yugoslavia was not poor; it was one of the richest of the Eastern Bloc states and Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. The Holiday Inn, which would be the headquarters of the international media during the siege, was built in 1983. The UNIS Twin Towers of the above photo were built in 1986. Their destruction — and subsequent rebuilding — was symbolic because they were called Momo (Serbian name) and Uzeir (Bosniak name). No one knew which tower carried which name, and this ambiguity accentuated deep cultural unity between the peoples who lived side by side during those troubled times.
Muybridge’s Motion Studies
In 1872, on the very same year that he was commissioned by the railroad baron Leland Stanford to photograph Occident – one of Stanford’s prized race horses — in action, Eadweard J. Muybridge married a divorcé named Flora Stone. Muybridge was forty-three and Flora, twenty-one. They were happily married and when Flora became pregnant, Muybridge had no reason to suspect the child was anyone’s but his. But when he discovered a photograph of the child, with an annotation on the back reading “Little Harry,” Muybridge suddenly realized that Flora’s suspected affair with a dandy named Major Harry Larkyns had gone further than he had suspected.
Flying into a rage, he travelled roughly eighty miles to the city of Calistoga in northern Napa County, where Larkyns was staying. Witnesses record him as saying, “Good evening, Major. My name is Muybridge. Here is the answer to the message you sent my wife.” He then shot Larkyns once near the heart. Larkyns died instantly. Muybridge was arrested and tried, but acquitted on grounds that the killing was a justified defense of his family.
Needless to say, his high profile trial delayed his work with Leland Stanford somewhat, but in 1878, he finally succeeded in fulfilling his commission, and became one of the founding fathers of animation. Using a battery of 12 cameras he established, among other things, that a galloping horse does life all four feet off the ground — tucked underneath and not stretched out fore and aft like a running rabbit. Artists had mistakenly depicted otherwise for centuries; George Stubbs, that most famous painter of horses, had guessed that in each stride horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once, but until Muybridge, that had never been proven.
In between his trial and Stanford commission, Muybridge also found time to take photos up and down the Pacific coast for the national body in charge of lighthouses, including a sequence of unusual large-format seascapes completed in the 1870s, at precisely the time that Thomas Stevenson (father of Robert Louis) was designing his lighthouses around the coasts of Scotland. He also took large scale images of Yosemite and San Francisco. Later, Muybridge went on to made other motion studies, including beautiful cyanotype series on people and on animals borrowed from the Philadelphia Zoo for a project titled “Animal Locomotion”.
Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)
In 1982, at his minimalist “office”, Diana Walker captured Jobs, who remembered, “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”
Steve Jobs, the heir to P.T. Barnum and Henry Ford, is dead, aged 56.
While many decry him for putting form over function, Steven Paul Jobs came closer than any other entrepreneur in modern history in understanding the power of ease and aesthetics. While it was an uninspiring beige box, his first Apple Macintosh had proportionally spaced fonts. The latest MacBook deploys a sleep indicator that is timed to the human breathing rhythm.
Like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, he didn’t personally invent the products he came to symbolize, and like those industry titans, he died in a world largely of his making. A charismatic showman, Jobs understood the visual power of images. Apple’s 1984 ad was perhaps one of the most memorable commercials in history. And after leading Pixar to its early successes, Jobs triumphantly returned to Apple in 1997 with a hugely popular advertising campaign, “Think Different”, featuring many inspirational and influential icons of the last century. When iPod was released, the silhouetted models whose only identifiable features were white headphones became instantly-recognizable, and oft-parodied, icons.
But the ur-icon of Apple was Mr. Jobs himself, in his signature turtleneck jumper, jeans and trainers. His presentations at Apple expos were passionate and captivating; his slides visually simple, yet striking. Altogether, he managed to whip up a quasi-religious fervour for his company and its products. To some, he was an iGod; to others, he was an iCon.
But history will not downplay Jobs’ idiosyncrasies, paternalist outbursts, and irascible rule at Apple. As Auden wrote of tyrants,
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.
A Walk To The Paradise Garden
W. Eugene Smith was no doubt one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century. As the photographer for Life, he followed the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, from Saipan to Guam, from Iwo Jima to Okinawa, where he was hit by mortar fire, and invalided back.
His war wounds cost him two painful years of hospitalization and plastic surgery. During those years he took no photos, and it was doubtful whether he would ever be able to return to photography. Then one day in 1946, he took a walk with his two children towards a sun-bathed clearing:
While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it….
Pat saw something in the clearing, he grasped Juanita by the hand and they hurried forward. I dropped a little farther behind the engrossed children, then stopped. Painfully I struggled — almost into panic — with the mechanical iniquities of the camera….
I tried to, and ignore the sudden violence of pain that real effort shot again and again through my hand, up my hand, and into my spine … swallowing, sucking, gagging, trying to pull the ugly tasting serum inside, into my mouth and throat, and away from dripping down on the camera….
I knew the photograph, though not perfect, and however unimportant to the world, had been held…. I was aware that mentally, spiritually, even physically, I had taken a first good stride away from those past two wasted and stifled years. (See original text)
While he was right about his stride towards recovery, Smith miscalculated the photo’s importance. In 1955, a heavily indebted Smith decided to submit the photo to Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man exhibit at the MOMA. There, it became a finalist, thus cementing its position as the ur-icon of all family photographs.
Robert Whitaker (1939 – 2011)
Robert Whitaker, the inadvertent father of one of the most sought-after Beatles memorabilia, is dead, aged 71.
From his very first photo of The Beatles — that of McCartney and Harrison holding boomerangs — Robert Whitaker proved to be an abnormal photographer. With his unerring eye for the weird, Whitaker went on to craft many surreal images of the band at the height of their fame in the 1960s. Handpicked by the band’s manager Brian Epstein, Whitaker was reluctant to photograph the band until he saw it in concert and being ‘overwhelmed’ by the screaming fans of Beatlemania.
In three short years he covered the band, from 1964 to 1966, he complied a remarkable dossier, shooting the band at home, in recording studio, during private moments and in formal photo-sessions, often involving unusual props. In one session, he had the group holding a car spring, a sun parasol, a broom, and an umbrella to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter. And the Fab Four enjoyed his company and his creative mind, mainly because they were fed up with taking market-friendly publicity pictures.
But the most notorious use of props came in March 1966. Inspired by the German surrealist Hans Bellmer, Whitaker created the infamous butcher cover, which featured the group with slabs of raw meat and the dismembered body parts of children’s dolls. He called it “Somnambulant Adventure” and conceived it as a triptych in which he would present The Beatles as religious icons, adding halos to the picture and referencing the story of Moses and the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. He wanted it to be a cynical commentary on adulation and stardom:
All over the world, I’d watched people worshipping them like idols, like gods. I was trying to show that The Beatles were flesh and blood”.
The photos were used in Britain without controversy, but when they were sent to America to be used at Capitol Records, the distributors refused to handle the record. While it was not the case, the fans viewed the cover as a commentary on Capitol Records’ periodic “butchering” and rearranging of The Beatles records. The retailers denounced the cover as “sick”. The band also was divided; Lennon and McCartney defended the cover, while vegetarian Harrison thought the whole idea was gross and stupid. Still concerned by the commercial backlash following John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment, Capitol Records withdrew the cover and apologized. The rare original covers went on to become one of the most sought-after Beatles memorabilia.
Whitaker’s association with The Beatles ended soon afterwards. He never had the chance to finish his triptych, but he went on to become a key figure in London’s emerging counterculture, to create Cream’s seminal 1967 album Disraeli Gears, and to take a series of famous pictures of Salvador Dali, his lifelong idol.
