IP Picture of the Year: Finding Osama
Iconic Photos’ Picture of the Year goes to the photo taken during forty most intense minutes of the Obama White House. Due to the lack of images of bin Laden’s graphic death, the above photo of President Obama and his National Security Team inside the Situation Room, taken during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, immediately became a photographic “icon”. It drew 1.6 million views in 38 hours on Flickr — making it one of the website’s most popular photos ever.
(1) deeply Catholic Vice President Biden is fiddling with rosary beads (hidden by the laptop); Biden previously urged the president to focus more on Pakistan and use more drone attacks there.
(2) When Osama bin Laden is killed, President Obama solemnly broke the silence: “We got him.” Those may perhaps be the defining words of his presidency. Yet, here in the photo, his crouching position and grave expression reveal the deep anxieties of a man who had wagered everything in.
(3) Brigadier General Marshall ‘Brad’ Webb is Assistant Commanding General of Joint Special Operations Command. He is the only uniformed aide in the room.
(4) Admiral Mike Mullen, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the president’s top military advisor. Mullen, who had never seen eye to eye with the president over the Afghan policy, was no doubt glad that the United States got bin Laden before Mullen’s own term expired in September.
(5) National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is a Washington grandee. His brother Mike and his wife Catherine are both aides to Biden. He was one of Obama’s aides once derided as the “Politburo” by the Pentagon. Two days before, he signed the authorization order to the CIA to go forward with the execution.
(6) Bill Daley is the scion of Chicago’s legendary Daley Family and the son and brother of Chicago mayors. A lawyer and former banker, he is White House Chief of Staff.
(7) Tony Blinken worked as Biden’s National Security Advisor for the last ten years, nearly the entire post 9/11 period. His influence on Biden’s worldview is immense, and his worried glance over Daley’s shoulder suggests that the photo was taken at a key moment. I have met Blinken before, making the photo more personal.
(8) As director of counterterrorism working on bin Laden file, Audrey Tomason is the youngest and the most junior official in the room. There are suggestions that her clandestine cover had inadvertently been blown by the photo. (See here for another agent whose identity might have been compromised by this photo.)
(9) Officially, John Brennan was Obama’s Homeland Security Assistant; unofficially, Brennan was the administration’s bin-Laden-hunter-in-chief. He joined the CIA after answering a newspaper ad and was the agency’s station chief in Saudi Arabia. He is the only one in the room who speaks fluent Arabic. He described the operation as “minutes passed like days.”
(10) As Director of National Intelligence, it was James Clapper’s job to coordinate rival intelligence bureaus.
(11) Denis McDonough, Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor was also one of his closest aides, a status reflected by his ringside seat despite his youth and low seniority. He played a key role in pushing the president to honor his campaign pledge of pursuing bin Laden into Pakistan with or without Pakistani government’s approval and to authorize an Afghani surge.
(12) At the focus of the photo was the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose shocked expression lent deep meaning to the picture. While she insisted that she was probably trying to stifle a cough caused by her spring allergies, it was a 3-am-call moment for Clinton.
(13) Robert Gates, the departing Secretary of Defense gives a determined stare that suggests that he was unperturbed by what he is watching; his face showed that he didn’t harbor a trace of doubt that the mission would be a success. Nonetheless, he was a leading skeptic of the raid, and advocated for an airstrike.
N.B. A classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured.
*
Internet age meant that it took less than a day for the above photo to become a meme; everything and everyone from joysticks to the Situation was introduced into the room. A lego version was also created.
Some argue that presence of Clinton and Tomason marks a giant leap after decades of all-male line-ups at the crucial moments of national crisis, but the Hasidic Jewish newspaper Der Tzitung begged to differ. Citing an ultra-Orthodox Jewish laws banning ‘sexually suggestive images’, it erased Clinton and Tomason from the photo. It later apologized for its attempt to alter history.
Photography — 2011 in Review
Iconic Photos bid fond farewells to those we lost in 2011.
The big photography news of the year was deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros during a mortar attack in Misrata, but among the Arab Spring’s other unfortunate victims were a few photographers: Lucas Dolega, who died from injuries sustained on day of Ben Ali’s departure from Tunisia; Ali Hassan al-Jaber, the Qatari photojournalist who had the dubious honor of being the first foreign journalist to be killed during the Libyan war, and Anton Hammerl, who was abducted and executed by pro-Qaddafi forces.
But those who want some reminding that the world has already been an inhospitable place to journalists and photographers need only to look at the lives of those old masters who died this year. As Rashid Talukder was documenting the birthpangs of Bangladesh, the retreating Pakistani army was massacred thousands of his compatriots. Guy Crowder, that acclaimed chronicler of black LA for five decades, and Shel Hershorn, who captured iconic images of the civil rights movement and retired traumatized after photographing a fatally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, both lived and knew that era of inequality and segregation.
The Golden Age of black-and-white photography once again flashed in front of our eyes with the depatures of many master lensmen of that era. There was Leo Friedman, who captured many of the iconic images of the golden age of Broadway. There was T. Lux Feininger, the younger brother of the great Andreas Feininger, who documented the artistic avant-garde in interbellum Germany. There was Richard Steinheimer, known as Ansel Adams of railroad photography.
And then there was Goksin Sipahioglu, the Turkish photographer who covered the Cuban missile crisis, the Prague Spring and the Munich Olympics attacks, and who more famously founded the renowned Paris-based photo agency Sipa. Most singularly, Miroslav Tichy, the Czech voyeur who died this year, took surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials.
On popculture side, two great music photographers who were known for their bold album covers died: Barry Feinstein, whose close partnership with Bob Dylan produced the singer’s most iconic photos and Robert Whitaker, who shot The Beatles’ butcher album cover. Gunther Sachs, bon vivant, playboy, and photographer, committed suicide.
Also dimmed are lens and flashes of Ken Russell, Deano Risley, Gautam Rajadhyaksha, Jerome Liebling, Lázaro Blanco, Milton Rogovin, Brian Lanker, Pete Carmichael, Steve Gladstone, M. Y. Ghorpade, Heiko Wittenborn and Franke Keating. Michael Abramson, who took photographs of patrons at nightclubs on the south side of Chicago during the mid-seventies and LeRoy Grannis, the godfather of surfphotography, are also no more.
.
(To be concluded tomorrow, other photography stories of 2011 and my picking of the Best Photojournalism Apps).
.
As usual follow me on twitter here.
American spy plane downed in hostile territory (1960)
Downing on an American unmanned drone over Iran recalls a bitter Cold War episode, writes IP.
On May Day 1960, a U2 flight left the US base in Pakistan to photograph ICBM sites inside the Soviet Union; the flight was supposed to take advantage of the Soviet holiday, but all units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces were on red alert and the plane was subsequently shot down.
As the rumors spread that Moscow shot down an American spy plane, the US government believed that the plane was fully destroyed and its pilot dead, and declared that it was a research vessel. On May 7, however, Soviet Premier Khrushchev angrily revealed that the pilot was alive and had the wreckage of the plane exhibited in the Chess Pavilion in Moscow’s Gorky Park Moscow – where captured German military equipment was put on display during the war.
To the invited diplomats and journalists, Khrushchev told that he does not intend to bring up the plane incident at the impending summit meeting with President Eisenhower, but his glee was palpable. Life photographer Carl Mydans, who took the picture above, was soon hustled out of the building by two Soviet officers who thought he was a spy because he was “taking pictures too systematically.” However, they did not confiscate his film.
Although Mydans was not employed by the U.S. government, it didn’t stop the Pentagon from using his photos. The designers of U-2 spy plane was able to learn what happened and what sort of missile hit the plane based on their analysis of Mydans’ photographs of the wreckage. How the plane was brought down was never fully explained, but his pictures and the intactness of the wreckage casts doubt on Khurschev’s claims that a SAM2 missile downed the plane at high attitude.
The U-2 incident marked the birthpangs of another era of Soviet-American confrontations after a few years of calm following Stalin’s death. Coming just over two weeks before the scheduled opening of an East–West summit in Paris, it poisoned the atmosphere around the meeting. An invitation for the President to visit the Soviet Union was abruptly withdrawn, and Eisenhower left office without fulfilling his dreams of ending the Cold War.
Ironically, for all the trouble it caused, the U2 was already outdated by the time the Soviets shot it down. Three months later, it was quietly replaced by the Discoverer spy satellite; The doomed flight was in fact the last U2 flight over Soviet territory.
(See the wreakage here)
Elise Daniels with the Street Performers, Avedon
For all his subsequent role in elevating it to a sublime art form not withstanding, Richard Avedon was never comfortable with fashion photography. He wanted to be remembered as a great artist or portraitist, even if that involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job.
The above photo, Elise Daniels with the Street Performers, was one of his earlier works. Avedon interestingly fuses street photography with fashion in this photo, which shows he was influenced by the great Parisian street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai.
Whether you see the model or the contortionist first in the photo is perhaps debatable, but it is undeniable that this photo exists in the realm between the artificial and the everyday. Wearing a broad “picture” hat and a Balenciaga suit, Elise stands akimbo by a table comandeered as a stage by a contortionist while a weight lifter and a horn player do their things. Her beauty was as huge an aberration of nature as their freakishness to Avedon, who portrayed the model as an alien among aliens, ogled at by normal Parisians.
A rarely seen alternate shot (below) has two acrobats, one doing a handstand on the other’s hand, rounding out the group. I have posted this photo before on IP, but I saw the second photo in a dentistry recently and thought I should repost it.
British Embassy in Iran Seized
As Iranian students storm the British embassies in Tehran, historical comparisons are made to 1979 (the seizure of the US embassy there) and to 1980 (when the Iran embassy in London was seized by Iraqi terrorists and rescued by SAS). IP takes a longer view.
Hatred of Britain in Iran has deep roots. Ever since William Knox D’Arcy was granted a concession by the Shah of Persia to search for oil in 1901, the Persians resented the fact that oil profits went only into the coffers of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the mighty conglomerate that counted among its paid lobbyists young Winston Churchill.
In April 1951, the Majlis (parliament) of Iran under the nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq nationalized the oil industry in Iran, and kicked out the then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Britain’s response was to stage a coup against Mossadeq, and that it finally achieved with the help of the CIA in August 1953.
The AIOC returned to Iran, as a plurality owner (40%) of a new international consortium involving five American companies (40%), Royal Dutch Shell and Compagnie Française des Pétroles (now Total) (20%). The AIOC became the British Petroleum in 1954 when the above picture was taken. The companies continued to operate in Iran until 1979, when the new Islamic regime again nationalized the oil industry without compensation, bringing to an end the BP’s 70-year presence in Iran.
Shortly after the U.S. embassy was seized, and its own embassy was occupied, Britain closed its embassy in Tehran in 1980 — the beginning of the eight-year diplomatic hiatus. In 1986, the relations hit nadir as Iran pointedly nominated Hussein Malouk, who took part in in the 1979 student takeover of the U.S. embassy as Iranian chargé d’affaires in London. HMG refused to accept Mr. Malouk. In 1989, the diplomatic relations resumed briefly before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie. In the 2000s, the terse diplomatic dance continued. In 2004 and 2007, the Islamic Republic briefly arrested groups of British soldiers for straying into its waters from Iraq. Salman Rushdie’s knighthood and the Green Revolution further exacerbated the relations.
But, no matter how unsalvageable that relationship is, this blog has always viewed the diplomatic immunity as sacrosanct and the host country as the power responsible for protection, security and well-being of envoys and diplomats. By turning the blind eye to this raid, and by tacitly condoning and perhaps even encouraging actions of this angry mob, the Islamic Republic has proven itself to be an unreliable, duplicitous, and crass entity.
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 to be one of the most important photoessays of 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 that war.
Another of his famous photos was featured above, when Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman 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 seminal moments of Bengal history.
From one successful war of independence to another less successful one: that in 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 lofty goals, 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 against the rebels. That it lasted for two and a half years was largely due to Ojukwu’s single-mindedness.
Before the Biafrans would capitulate, the Nigerian blockade of Biafra led to a famine and the conflict became imprinted on the international consciousness and conscience, thanks to a handful of British television reports and photographers. 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
