In the 1940s, Ladies Home Journal ran two great photo essay series.
One was “How America Lives” which looked at ‘typical’ American families in detail: from how it raised its children, participated in community activities, and voted in elections to how it budgeted its money, made ends meet, and coped with crises such as illness and financial troubles. The series ran for over 20 years.
The other was inspired by “How America Lives” but global in scope: twelve families in twelve different countries around the world, a work that would be serialized in the Journalfor a year in 1947-48.
Neither is well-remembered these days, their fame overtaken by Edward Streichen’s The Family of Men work, which was actually inspired by these two essays.
This is part of my latest focus on greatest photoessays of yesteryears. I have updated a few period posts with new contexts / photos as well.
My broad theme for next few months will be the photo-essay — not just single photos but how several photos are stringed together to create an engaging read. With print media dying, photo-essay is dying too, and I want to commemorate the big hits of the years past.
My broad roadmap of what I will try to cover is here. There will be a lot of W. Eugene Smith.
My next two posts will be about Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and how it was covered in France and Italy, in Paris-Match and in Epoca. I have previously talked about how it was covered in LIFE, so it will be good companion pieces.
I was not able to transfer subscriber list from here (some sort of error in plugin). If you are subscribed here, I would request you to go to https://iconic-photos.com/subscribe/ and put your email into “subscribe” button again.
Transferring domain from WordPress hosting has been a plain (partly because of the size of the blog, and partly because of various plugins, etc.).
As such, I was not able to transfer subscriber list from here (some sort of error in plugin). If you are subscribed here, I would request you to go to https://iconic-photos.com/ again and put your email into “subscribe” button again.
New posts will be only hosted on the new site. I have posted two new since:
This photo is presumed to illustrate Britain’s class divide — but does it really tell the whole story?
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‘Toffs And Toughs’ the picture was called.
The five boys who came to illustrate the class divide of prewar Britain were photographed by Jimmy Sime outside Lord’s Cricket Ground on the morning of Friday July 9th 1937. Presumably it showed two Etonian boys in uniform being looked upon with some bemusement by three working-class ‘toughs’.
For some, the picture exemplified the scandalous gulf between Britain’s rich and poor. The boys “have been woven into the national psyche,” wrote the Economist. Indeed, whenever a newspaper or a writer reached for an image to illustrate the class divide, they inevitably reached for the photo above, even as recently as the 2010s. (The Economist again: “In 2008 and 2009, to pick two random years, Sime’s picture accompanied a Guardian feature on modern educational inequalities, a Sunday Telegraph column headlined “That old class system is still manufacturing bourgeois guilt”, and a piece in the Daily Telegraph.”)
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The real story was more complicated.
In fact, it didn’t show Etonians but students from Harrow. Other boys in the picture were not “scruffs”, “toughs” or “urchins” but students who went to normal schools — a local Church of England school in fact. Nor the photo was taken by the celebrated photographer Bert Hardy as commonly claimed, but by Sime who worked in semi-obscurity for London’s Central Press agency from 1914 to the mid-60s.
The picture first appeared on the front page of the News Chronicle, a left-wing daily. A different photograph by Sime appeared in Life magazine, which began the error of describing two boys as “Young Etonians”, and the other three as “village boys”.
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Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson (the pair in top and tails), aged 14 and 15, were waiting for a car that was late and were dressed for a party a parent was throwing after the cricket match. It wasn’t their normal school uniforms, and neither came from families that in 1937 would have been considered the landed elite of Britain (Dyson’s father was Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Army), although both were privileged enough to attend Harrow.
As for the “toughs” — George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young — the trio of 13-year-olds lived close to Lord’s and were in the same class at a Church of England school a few minutes’ walk away. They had been to the dentist that morning and then decided to skip school and hang around outside Lord’s, where the Eton-Harrow match offered money-making opportunities to any boy willing to open taxi doors, carry bags, or to return seat cushions to their renters and claim the threepenny deposit.
Perhaps it was telling that the three toughs had longer lives than the two toffs. Tim Dyson died of diphtheria in India a year after the photo was taken, having travelled there to join his parents. Wagner entered the family stockbroking firm, married, and had three daughters; he became mentally unstable in the 1970s and died in a mental institution in 1984. Salmon died in 2000, and Catlin, who joined the civil service and rose to a senior position in the Department of Health and Social Security, died in 2011.
If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some pollsEven if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos
In 1960, justice finally caught up with one of the great criminals of the age. Adolf Eichman, the Bureaucrat of the Holocaust, was put on trial in Israel, after being abducted by the Israeli secret agents in Argentina in a covert operation. After a long televised hearing, he was found guilty on fifteen counts of crimes against humanity and for his role in coordinating the logistics of mass deportations of Jewes to concentration camps and hanged.
That story was well told, but lesser known was the story of how he was positively identified in Argentina to which he fled after the war ended. Lothar Hermann, a half-Jewish survivor of Dachau concentration camp, living as a non-Jewish German, had figured out that his daughter might be dating one of the Eichmann’s sons (The German emigre society in Buenos Aires fraternalized closely). Hermann wrore to the authorities in Germany and Israel, hoping for the $10,000 reward offered by the Haifa Documentation Center.
In January 1958, Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, sent a man named Yoel Goren to Buenos Aires to scout out the location that Hermann mentioned. Goren saw Germany migrants and swastikas painted on a few buildings, but he doubted Eichmann, a bon vivant with a taste for the high life, was living in this “wretched little house” in an area, populated by blue-collar workers who commuted to and from the city. Using a hidden camera, he took photos of the house (see above) and left.
An extract from the Eichmann Dossier kept by the Israeli Secret Service
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After a few internal debates, the Israelis sent a second mission, led by Agent Zvi Aharoni. At first, he failed to get close enough to the man suspected of being Eichmann to take good photos of him. But eventually, with the use of two volunteers posing as homebuilders interested to buy land in the neighborhood, he managed to get closer to Eichmann and his son and a volunteer managed to take some photos using a camera hidden in a briefcase.
The photos above were developed three days later and Aharoni was pleased to find that he now had focused shots of Eichmann. These photographs were used by identification experts to confirm that it was indeed Eichmann (see the photos below).
Photos taken by the briefcase camera; in addition to Eichmann, it captured his daughter-in-law Margarita and his son Dieter.
If you like what I do and the content I produce, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. Patreon will make this blog self-sustaining. Proceeds go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). Another alternative is to Buy Me a Coffee which is not a subscription plan, but a single payment of appreciation. Thanks for reading.
Even as the horrors committed by the Communist Pol Pot regime in Cambodia seeped out into the wider world, the country and its government enjoyed widespread support in Sweden, especially among the ruling Social Democrats and its supporters. The prime minister Olof Palme issued a joint statement with Fidel Castro congratulating the Khmer Rouge, and its leader Pol Pot was frequently portrayed in the Swedish media as a Robin Hood. Government ministers vigorously denied allegations of Khmer Rouge atrocities as exaggerations.
By late 1977, the regime in Phnom Penh was seeking international validation. In November of that year, Burmese dictator Ne Win became the first head of state to visit Phnom Penh since the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975, swiftly followed by Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu. Starting in early 1978, small delegations of Communist-sympathizing westerners were invited to visit Cambodia, via a weekly flight from Beijing to Phnom Penh. Due to the favorable coverage in Sweden, Swedish media and diplomats were given special guided tours and in August 1978, four members of the Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association were invited to visit Cambodia. (a member of the delegation was married to a Khmer Rouge diplomat who was stationed in East Germany before being recalled to Cambodia. She asked if she could see her husband, but her request was denied. Unbeknownst to her, her husband had been already been executed a year prior).
Workers from a mobile unit construct a dam north of Phnom Penh
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Among the delegation was Gunnar Bergström, 27, an activist against the Vietnam war. Bergström was jubilant that Cambodia had liberated itself from the capitalist Americans and founded the friendship association and a magazine Kampuchea, with the aim of helping the Khmer Rouge spread its ideals. Bergström was allowed to take photos of the curated locations that the visitors were shown.
The delegation’s requests to meet “new people” (Cambodians who had been evacuated from the cities) were denied, but they did witness children building earthworks, melting down Coca-Cola bottles to make vials for injections, and laboring on boats and was granted an interview with Pol Pot and a subsequent banquet where they dined on oysters with Pol Pot and Foreign Minister Ieng Sary. After a two-week tour, the tour group returned to Europe to contradict accounts by the refugees of overwork, starvation, torture, and mass killings. Bergström dismissed htem as “Western propaganda” and that he saw “smiling peasants” and a society on its way to “an ideal society”.
Following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, Bergström and the other members of the Swedish delegation that visited Cambodia advocated for the ouster of Hanoi’s troops and restoration of Pol Pot. But Bergström would soon disavow the Khmer Rouge and acknowledge that he had been taken on a “propaganda tour.”
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some pollsEven if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos
Khe Sanh, 1968. For war critics and news correspondents, it was a miniature microcosm for the War in Vietnam itself: 6,000 US Marines forced to defend an isolated untenable location that the top brass believed to be indispensable, only to abandon it after hundreds of Americans were sacrificed in its defense.
Khe Sanh, a remote U.S. Marine outpost located near the border with Laos was a pivotal lynchpin on the defensive line on the northern border of South Vietnam and in southeast Laos. The six-month long siege there was often compared to Battle of Dien Bien Phu, not least by President Lyndon Johnson who feared a disastrous defeat. “I don’t want any damn Dien Bien Phu,” he remarked. General William Westmoreland, the supreme American commander in Vietnam, re-assured his commander in chief, but privately, he would harbor doubts, ordering his staff to study how the French had lost at Dien Bien Phu, and mused if tactical nuclear weapons would stave off a defeat.
The photo above was taken early in the siege on Feb. 25, 1968. The Marines dragged out the body of 2nd Lt. Donald Jacques, the 20-year-old platoon commander, from the underbrush. Jacques and his 40-man platoon were on patrol outside the base when they were ambushed. Twenty-four were killed and Jacques’s body was the only one that was immediately recovered.
The photographer was Robert Ellison, 23, who took other dramatic pictures of the fighting at Khe Sanh, including that of a shell-struck ammo dump exploding in front of U.S. Marines (below). Ellison then flew to Saigon to wire his photos to Newsweek. The magazine was so impressed that they noted they would run an eight-page spread of his photographs in an upcoming issue. Instead of heading off to Bangkok or China Beach to celebrate, Ellison flew back to Khe Sanh, on the afternoon of March 6, bartering some beer, Coke, and cigars for a seat on a C-123 flying back to the base from Da Nang to bring in more Marines and equipment.
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At the east end of the airstrip at Khe Sanh was a deep drop to the Rao Quan River below. The North Vietnamese had set up anti-aircraft guns there which were deadly accurate in hitting planes approaching. Ellison’s plane, which carried more than 40 people, was hit as it approached Khe Sanh, killing everyone on board.
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His photos made the cover of Newsweek posthumously, on March 18, in “The Agony of Khe Sanh,” and won him an Overseas Press Club (slideshow above). However, contrary to popular military lore, the phrase derived from the cigarette warnings, “Being a Marine in Khe Sanh may be hazardous to your health,” did not appear in Newsweek, but it didn’t prevent soldiers in Vietnam from later sporting flak jackets with that bogus quotation attributed to the magazine.
To this day, the precise nature of Hanoi’s goal at Khe Sanh remained unclear. Even the North Vietnamese official history of the war, Victory in Vietnam, was largely silent on the issue. Some considered it as a diversion of the Tet Offensive, and others considered the Tet as a diversion for Khe Sanh. Its impact was widely debated too. Neil Sheehan wrote, “No serious attempt to seize the Marine base ever occurred. The Vietnamese purpose was to distract Westmoreland’s attention from their preparations for the real Điện Biên Phủ of the American war, the surprise nationwide offensive at Tet, the Lunar New Year Holiday, in January 1968, which broke the will of the Johnson administration and the American public to continue to prosecute the conflict. The ruse succeeded completely.”
As for Time magazine, which wrote after the Marines had abandoned the base and destroyed the countryside surrounding it by dropping more than 100,000 tons of explosives (about one-sixth the total used during all of the Korean War): “The evidence on the battlefield was even more persuasive testimony of the extent of the U.S. victory. The North Vietnamese are normally an extremely frugal foe that never leaves even a rifle bullet behind. In their haste to get away from Khe Sanh, they left piles of valuable matériel… The idea that the North Vietnamese pulled out as a voluntary gesture of de-escalation is thus contradicted by all the facts. The biggest fact is that at Khe Sanh they were badly whipped by U.S. airpower.”
In late June 2003, in Wuhan in central China, women on the death row prepared for death.
Guards gave a prisoner her execution outfit; others were being fed fresh fruit, dumplings, and in one case, a special last meal: hot pies from McDonalds. The prisoners play cards, wrote their writing final letters and wept on the morning of their executions. They would soon be dispatched in the traditional way, with a bullet to the back of the head.
These intimate photos showed a rare glimpse into the Chinese prison system. Four condemned women laughed and joked with their guards in the photos, which were censored in China since they were taken, lest there be sympathy for the prisoners, all convicted of drug trafficking.
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Particularly evocative were images of one inmate – 25-year-old He Xiuling, who was the youngest prisoner – who veered from joviality to despair. She worried that wearing a white T-shirt made her looks unflattering, and a prison guard found a black T-shirt for her (above). To her last day, she believed that her sentence would be commuted to 15 years in prison, telling others that she would still only be 40 when she got out.
He was a young woman from the countryside who migrated to Wuhan and got caught up in the heroin trade via her boyfriend. She was advised by police to confess in hope of a lighter sentence, which never came. With no wealth or political connections to save her, it took just 15 months from the day of her arrest to her execution – which was timed to coincide with a United Nations anti-drugs day and show that China was tough on drug trade. (The boyfriend, who had used a false name, was never traced and arrested).
A Wuhan paper also wanted to put together a photoessay for the anti-drugs day and a photographer, Yan Yuhong, pitched the story to the prison officials who agreed. Yan remembered:
I was there from 9pm the night before the execution until the moment they were led away to their deaths [which took place at 9am]. The women were a bit surprised when they saw a photographer, but after a while we communicated and they accepted me.
I couldn’t believe [He] was worried about her appearance. It didn’t seem as if it could be important to me. But she wanted to look her best, even though she was going to die. She put on a white shirt at first but then she said to the police officer, ‘It makes me look fat.’ So they got a black top for her instead.
Throughout the night, the prisoners and the warders were joking with each other. They had a good relationship. They were like sisters. They were telling jokes to each other and telling each other about their families.
‘On the morning of the execution, one of the other condemned prisoners asked for her clothes to be given to a friend in the prison, who is poor and didn’t have any decent clothes of her own. What surprised me was that the prisoners had such a good relationship with each other. You might expect it of students at college or soldiers serving in the army together, but not among condemned prisoners. They had a real camaraderie and I hadn’t expected that. They looked after each other, they fed each other and they cared for each other.
What I saw changed the way I thought about these people. I pitied them and I felt very sorry for them. They didn’t do anything violent. They were just ordinary people. They are criminals, but they are human, too. They have feelings, and they have a good side as well as a bad side.
Yan’s paper actually did not publish the photos, deeming them politically sensitive. They were published Southern Weekend a few days later without much fanfare. In 2011, Phoenix Television, a private broadcaster based in Hong Kong, featured them in a documentary – and the photos became widely circulated on social media.
The photos were a rare glimpse into capital punishment in China, the country which accounts for 50%-60% of global executions (estimates of death sentences in China carried out vary from 2,000 to 4,000 sentences annually; in comparison, the United States executes around 20-50 people annually). The support of death penalty in China always enjoyed high public support – 95% in 1995 – but has been slowly coming down to ~80% in early 2000s and ~70% in 2020. Yan also notes that he too supports the death penalty.
If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some pollsEven if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos
I have a version of this at the top of the blog, but with various website rehostings and reformats, I am not sure how many of my readers have seen it, so I am revamping it a little bit. These are generally great coffee table books
To write this blog, I rely on two types of books, general history books and photography books. Here are a few books in latter category that are really interesting:
Paris Match: 60 Ans 60 Photographes — often what is considered iconic in one country, doesn’t translate to another country. Here, a collection of photos from pages of Paris Match, Life Magazine equivalent of France. Some are really unique.
Decades of the 20th Century by Getty — individually or in box set format, this is worth buying. In three languages, this box-set celebrates famous, infamous and obscure moments of the last century.
The New York Times Magazine Photographs — Covering 30 years, The New York Times Magazine in four sections: reportage, portraiture, style and conceptual photography, this is a wondering, engrossing tome
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Our Century in Pictures by Life— If you are going to have one photo-related coffeetable book or gifting one, this is the one. For those who don’t have time to pore through over forty years of Life archives online, this book collects the best of the magazine.
Life 100 Photographs— Slimmer, more curated version of the above, selecting ‘100’ most iconic photos.
Great news photos and the stories behind them — Might be hard to find and writing might be dated but this book delivers exactly what the title promised: extremely interesting and little known stories behind the pictures we are intensely familiar with.
Get the picture: a personal history of photojournalism — if you have time to read only one photo-related memoir, it should be this one by John G. Morris, the first director of Magnum. Many great photographers turn up in his anecdotes.
Century: A History in Photographs by Phaidon — photos inside are superb, but captions are pithy. Personally, i think this is a better book than equally-weighty tomes Magnum produces periodically.
Taschen Icon Series — there are two books directly related to photo icons, but other books on individual photographers, and topics such as pin-ups, weird photos are interesting to read and look at.
Slim Aarons: Style — from the lens of the great society photographer of his day, glamorous fashions, personalities, and places brightly and brilliantly captured.
Annie Leibovitz — Annie Leibovitz’s books are always fun (and hefty). This one comes at 13 pounds and collects her large format photos which are mesmerizing.
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some pollsEven if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.
Thus notes the TV show Chernobyl (2019). What happened at Chernobyl 33 years earlier was a deadly combination of flawed designs, poorly trained staff, disregard for safety and culture of secrecy and bureacracy. The Soviet Union did reject many offers of assistance from foreign governments, but it did welcome Dr. Robert Gale, a bone-marrow transplant expert from Bel Air, California.
The first Western physician to be invited by the Soviet Union to help since World War II, Gale coordinated shipment of medical equipment and perform bone-marrow transplants on 13 patients, five of whom survived (including the firefighter on the magazine cover above).
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The Soviet Union barred the local doctors from speaking to the press, leaving only Gale and his American colleagues to become the faces of the medical response to the diaster. Soviet doctors would later note that some of the crucial transplant operations were before Gale and his team even arrived, but the doctor quickly became a hero in the Soviet Union. General Secretary Gorbachev personally thanked Gale and Pravda wrote hagiographic poems to him: “God is in Dr Gale, born the year of Hiroshima.” He was considered for a Lenin Prize and the Nobel.
For the Soviets, Gale, a colorful publicity seeking surgeon, became a source to manipulate the Western media. Gale was given access to various secured facilities and visit restricted areas (while being shadowed by the KGB), but was only fed information that the Soviets wanted to be released, which served to divert the media attention away from other stories that they wanted to conceal.
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Yet Gale managed to take some photos of the patients and the medical facilities, and sold his story to Life magazine. (He flew over Chernobyl in a helicopter as well, but the Soviets did not allow him to take photos). He also went on to write a few books on the disaster and generally made a career out of Chernobyl — appearances on Barbara Walters, Donahue and Larry King shows, features in Time, Life, Vanity Fair — leading the satirical Spy magazine to quip: “Before, Gale was just a smart, maverick UCLA bone-marrow-transplant specialist who had briefly been in trouble with the National Institutes of Health for allegedly using experimental treatments on patients without proper authority. Today he’s a best-selling author (of an account of Chernobyl), frequent lecturer ($5,000 per) and extremely visible doctor-about-the-planet.”
It also later came out in a Los Angeles Times investigation that Gale designed and helped carry out experimental treatments on at least three Soviet citizens with a genetically engineered drug that had never before been tried on human subjects, nor approved for human testing.
Caption in French: Inert, almost mummified, they hope like so many others irradiated people a miracle of science
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:
Peoples Temple Agricultural Project it was called.
In the ’60s, Jim Jones was a respected Pentecostal reverend, who preached a gospel of social justice and inclusion to integrate churches, hospitals, restaurants and theaters and attract followers to his San Francisco-based congregation, the People’s Temple. By 1977, however, with a damning article about abuses within his church about to break, Jones and nearly a thousand of his followers fled into the jungles of Guyana, onto the land the Temple had previously purchased.
White, black, and Latino members of his religious movement wanted to found a utopia of racial harmony and equality rooted in communism, but Jones’ egomania and paranoia grew, as did his dependency on pills. Jones staged faith healings, consolidated his power within only a small circle of trusted faithful, and began referring to himself as God.
Life in Jonestown was harsh, with members subjected to strict discipline, isolation, and indoctrination. Family members and former members contacted authorities, prompting Congressman Leo Ryan to visit the place in November 1978 to investigate and bring out several members who expressed their desire to leave.
On November 18, as Ryan and his delegation attempted to leave, they were ambushed by armed members of the Peoples Temple, resulting in the deaths of Ryan and others. Back in Jonestown, Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit an act of “revolutionary suicide,” and drink cyanide-laced fruit punch (despite later associations with Kool-Aid, the actual drink used was a generic fruit-flavoured drink mix, not Kool-Aid). Over 300 children were made to drink it by their parents, poisoned syringes being emptied into infants’ mouths. Some were forcibly injected, and others tried to run for the surrounding jungle were by Jones’ armed guards. All told, 918 people died that day — the largest loss of civilian American lives pre-9/11.
Jones shot himself. The only living thing left in Jonestown after the suicides were two parrots.
David Hume Kennerly, one of the first photographers to arrive on the scene (and also photograph Jim Jones’s autopsied body on boardwalk) remembers:
Time Magazine’s New York bureau chief Don Neff and I were in Miami, working on a Colombia-related drug story for the magazine that day, and word hadn’t yet reached the outside world about what happened in Guyana. Sunday morning’s edition of the Miami Herald changed all of that…
Neff and I immediately decided to head down there. Having an American Express card proved valuable, we chartered a jet, put the charge on my card, and off we went…
As we winged toward the scene, the pilot said he would fly over Jonestown. We were still at a distance, but it appeared to me that there were scores of people alive and gathered around a big tin-roofed structure in the middle of what appeared to be a small village or compound. As we drew closer it turned out I was wrong.
I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life, more than two years in Vietnam covering the war guaranteed that, but nothing prepared me for the shock of what I witnessed that day. The people who I thought were gathered around the pavilion were dead. They looked like colorfully dressed but lifeless dolls strewn along the ground, most of them facedown, many of them huddled together in groups. There were hundreds of them. I don’t wish that sight on anyone….
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Kennerly’s photo of giant vat filled with a purple liquid, where people lined up to fill their cups made the cover of Time magazine. Time also published the photo of the body of Jim Jones inside the magazine, but cropped and slightly darkened it from the original to make it appear more ready for general audience. (And on the cover, Time hid Jim Jones’ body under the masthead letter “E.” – his bloated stomach was visible — see the original photo used for cover here.)
[Notes: Other photos of the vat and the area did not feature Jim Jones’ body. Presumably, they were taken by other photographers arrived after Jone’s body was taken away by authorities. Kennerly’s photo of Jim Jones’ body, the cropped version of which appeared inside Time magazine: link]
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If you like what I do and what I write, or simply wants me to write more, you can support me via Patreon. I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos, and the Patreon is a way for this blog to be self-sustaining.
Proceeds mainly go to buying photography reference books and support me on my research (re: paywalled articles, trips to various archives). In addition to monthly addenda posts on Patreon, readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request topics or to participate in some polls
Even if Patreon isn’t your thing, you can support by re-sharing, or tweeting about the blog or the specific posts on here. Thanks for your continued support! Here is the link:
Iconic Photos 