Note: This has become part of a series on the politics of iconic photographs. Part 2 is here. I'll post Part 3 later this week.
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What makes a photograph iconic? Why do some stick in our minds and represent for us a powerful historical memory, while others fade away? If you're an American of a certain age, you can probably summon a dozen to mind without much effort -- John John Kennedy saluting his father's casket as it passes by on a horse-drawn carriage, Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, Neil Armstrong saluting the flag on the moon, the little Vietnamese girl (Phan Thị Kim Phúc) fleeing an American napalm bombing -- and so many more.
It's no accident that all of my examples come from the '60s and early '70s. It was a tumultuous time in America, and it was the era that made me who I am. To put it another way, iconic photos are both communal and personal. They reflect important events that a community shares at the same time that they touch the emotions of individuals.
Of course, this leaves several questions hanging. Most importantly, which events? what community? and what about the photos themselves? In many ways, oddly enough, the photos themselves are the least important part of the story.
Gaza, Occupied Palestine, 16 July 2014: REUTERS/Mohammed Talatene
Photos that Reuter's Mohammad Talatene made during yesterday's terrible events on a beach in Gaza -- the Israeli air strike that killed four boys, the oldest of whom was 11 -- have me thinking along these lines. [Update: The boys may have been killed by an Israeli naval bombardment, not an air strike.]
The photos (above and below) are clearly record an event that's both tragic and important, and that reflects a larger reality that affects virtually the entire world. Talatene's photos are also powerful visual images in technical as well as emotional terms.
I'm particularly struck by the way that they echo a image that's almost universally recognized as an icon of the South African freedom struggle -- Sam Nzima's photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson.
So will one of Talatene's photos become iconic in the same way as Nzima's? No, I don't think so -- not, at least, in America. Not now.
The dying Hector Pieterson, 16 June 1976: Sam Nzima
As powerful as Talatene's photos undoubtedly are, they reflect a reality that most Americans aren't prepared to accept. The American public overwhelming sees Israelis as the good guys and are deeply skeptical about Palestinians. In much the same way, it thinks Jews are cool, while Muslims are emphatically not.
I'm not saying that Americans aren't outraged by the killings and touched deeply by Talatene's photos. Many, in fact, are. But the images can't embody for them how they feel about the current assault on Gaza or the Israeli-Palestinian crisis as a whole. That is, for American, they can't be iconic.
Gaza, Occupied Palestine, 16 July 2014: REUTERS/Mohammed Talatene
But wait a minute, I hear you saying. Some of the photos that I mentioned earlier -- Martin Luther King at the March on Washington and Phan Thị Kim Phúc fleeing that napalm attack -- reflected people and events that were deeply controversial at the time. A very large number of white Americans despised King in 1963, and many still supported the Vietnam War in 1972. If you tell me that these photos couldn't have been instantly iconic in the same way as, say, the photo of John John Kennedy, I'll admit that you're right.
You could say much the same thing for Sam Nzima's photo of Hector Pieterson. There's no doubt at all that a majority of Americans and the American government supported the apartheid regime in 1976, even though they may have deplored some of its actions. Nzima's photo was not iconic in 1976, not in the Unite States.
Time had to catch up with the photographs. More correctly, attitudes had to change, and change they did. But they didn't change without struggle.
The civil rights movement, the American anti-apartheid movement, and, of course, South Africans, at home and in exile, created movements that convinced the vast majority of Americans that segregation and apartheid were wrong. The anti-Vietnam War movement (and the utter futility of the war itself) led a majority of Americans to support its end.
The photos of King and those of Phan Thị Kim Phúc became icons retrospectively. They don't reflect the past, they reflect what we now think about the past.
So will Talatene's photos become iconic? In Palestine and in places where support for Palestinians is strong, they might be already.
Will they become iconic in America? Only when and if American attitudes toward the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land undergoes a radical change.
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For an almost overwhelming first-person account of the attack that killed the four boys, read this interview with photographer Tyler Hicks in yesterday's New York Times.
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Unfortunately, at least one Twitter feed has highlighted only the statement "...there's no doubt at all that a majority of Americans and the American government supported the apartheid regime in 1976..." without providing any context. My own recollection is that the majority of Americans had no opinion about South Africa in 1976. Among those who "supported" the apartheid regime, the concern was that an important area of Africa might be overrun by a gang of communists who perpetrated terrorist acts (the ANC). In most cases, racism wasn't the motivating factor. Fortunately, the carefully-orchestrated actual outcome, a couple of decades later, proved both that the fears of the "apartheid supporters" were unjustified and that patience is a virtue.
Posted by: MSOLDN | 18 July 2014 at 09:05 AM
At this point, I'm thinking if this shouldn't be the "iconic" photo...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html?_r=0
Posted by: Stan B. | 19 July 2014 at 08:16 PM
@Stan
It's a hell of a photo. And it speaks volumes. Historians will love it.
Posted by: John | 19 July 2014 at 08:52 PM
@MSOLDN
In fact, this history is well known. The research has been done; the books and articles have been written.
Most Americans supported the apartheid regime, until the mid- to late 1980s. The perception that the ANC was controlled by communists played a role.
But racism -- or tribalism, as I'd call it -- was a strong factor. White Americans might not have known much about South Africa, but they knew that they were on the side of the whites. The belief that Africans couldn't be trusted to run their own affairs reinforced this attitude.
Posted by: John | 19 July 2014 at 08:59 PM
Another strong an thought provoking post John. I was still mulling over your previous post on Gaza, and thinking about your "what makes a photo iconic" question. I guess, as your later post exploring the Fallow's comment elaborates, there's often another dimension, an additional 'layer' of 'something', often intangible but powerful when present in combination with the visual - be it political, emotional, or something simply 'of that moment' in some way.
But let me take a big leap sideways here and mention something that struck me about many of the examples you showed and also mentioned, and I'm thinking specifically about the conflict images, such as the UT image, the pics from Gaza etc, and something they all have (to some degree) in common. It's an aesthetic thing but not (particularly) a compositional thing.
It's something I explored in my final year when I was doing my Social Work (Disability Services) training, and has to do with (for want of a better description) 'the aesthetic of the broken body'. My research on it was pre-internet so was very very limited, but from my best efforts (a lot!) it seemed there was not much research material to be easily found. But what I was exploring was whether the ways we respond to asymmetrical bodies is different from the ways we respond to more symmetrical ones.
My interest was particularly concerned with the visually 'unbalanced' nature of the bodies of many people with disabilities, and whether this had any effect on the ways people related to them. Basically, were people prejudiced before they even spoke to a person with a disability because of the often significant asymmetry. I found some material that suggested it did (related to hand and arm injuries and people's responses to them), (and some that it may not) but there was a lot of related stuff to do with the (human) ability to recognise faces (and shapes), and the ways we respond to them (such as this more recent study: http://dwz.psych.ucla.edu/ZaidelHessamianSymmetryJournal.pdf ). I wasn't anywhere near Phd territory in my studies so really only scratching the surface of a personal interest, but it was quite intriguing all the same.
One of the things I've noticed in many images from conflict zones, such as the ones mentioned, is the 'odd' shape of the bodies, they're held awkwardly by the individual eg because of the burning in the Ut photo from Vietnam, or because they're seriously wounded such in the recent Gaza images where broken bodies are carried by others.
Personally, I think we have a visceral (often perhaps unconscious) response to this bodily aesthetic, and that it adds yet another layer to our already complex response to what we're witnessing through these images. I think we all instinctively know from the subtle 'bodily' clues we see that this is unnatural - the odd bend of an arm, the way a head is held, the sag of a leg, all visual indicators to this subject being 'not right'.
I guess when all of this, plus politics, personal feelings about right and wrong, and plain old aesthetics are layered together some conflict images just pack a huge punch that just keeps on hurting year after year after year.
Many of these images, compositionally, share a central location of the main subject, unsubtle, in-your-face and hard to ignore. Which quality I suspect makes them (to continue with your spoken argument comparison) no more powerful a persuader (ref your comment "Photography is powerful. It can pack a tremendous emotional wallop. But it's not good a persuading. It's not an argument." ) ……but it certainly provides the swinging needle of the moral compass with an incontrovertible 'north' that we all will recognise.
The polite and subtly persuasive IDF spokesman I listened to on BBC radio yesterday can rail all he likes about 'terrorists', and the Hamas spokesman can draw from his extensive lexicon of "oppressor" or "occupying forces" or "enemies" etc but when the accompanying contemporary mental images that are conjured up in my mind are of small children the age of my son with crumpled, awkward limbs, being carried lifeless in outstretched arms, borne palms up no less, the ultimate gesture of defencelessness, their respective arguments are lost*.
*remove the dead child and see the gesture of piousness familiar in many religious images, familiar to me from many stained glass windows - another interest of mine as a 'maker' of sg windows, but also interested in the visual iconography of them which I think is hugely influential in our visual lexicography, but often overlooked. (See examples here: http://www.gardencitycob.org/?subpages/you.shtml at page bottom and a casual search of google will reveal plenty more.) It's like the 'pieta' in many ways, but with the figures standing. It's evident in the Ut photo, the Pietersen photo and in the Talatene images from this week. It signifies both futility and is at the same time imploring, begging a witness.
And if photography can do that, at least that, maybe even only that: to bear witness to the loss, then it's worthwhile.
My bottom line: that we cannot predict what will make an image 'iconic' is as it should be. The confluence of politics, public sentiment, current technology, the prevailing aesthetic, and subtle cultural conditioning of each of us, when combined with plain old luck, needs to be able to work its magic unhindered by the narrow-minded outlook of we image makers.
Sorry for the ramble not really sure if much of this makes sense or adds anything useful to the discussion.
Posted by: john macpherson | 22 July 2014 at 02:08 AM