Famous Photographs Images and Narratives Sample Response AS Media Activity 1

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1 Famous Photographs Images and Narratives Sample Response AS Media Activity 1 People talk of how we are being deluged by images, which sounds threatening - how do we deal with all these images? How do we select between them? What in fact do we manage to take in? And what, on the other hand, still has the chance of entering our collective memory? Hans-Michael Koetzle preface to Photo Icons (Taschen 2008) We live in a visual age. It may seem an obvious point, but the supremacy of images is really a very modern phenomenon. In Shakespeare s day just 400 years ago, the aural was probably uppermost. People listened to sermons and they were an audience to plays the word audience deriving from audio to hear. Of course, there were pictures but at a time when printing was still relatively cumbersome and expensive, the word, read or heard, was uppermost. This had been compounded by the Reformation. From the mid- 1530s there was a systematic campaign of destruction waged against the wall paintings, carvings, sculptures and stained glass that had filled Medieval churches and ecclesiastical buildings with images of saints, miracles and Bible scenes now condemned as papist objects of superstition. It would take the scientific revolutions of the 19 th Century leading to the invention of the camera and lithographic printing techniques able to reproduce photographic images to bring images back into ordinary people s lives in a way that we would recognize. Today we are bombarded with photography and other forms of representation such as animation from dawn to dusk. So familiar are the logos of certain corporations that children can identify them before they are able to recognize their own names. But amid these thousands of images taken over the last 160 years there are some that seem to rise up and gain special status images that because of their antiquity, their beauty, their technical superiority, the risks associated with their capture, their strength in encapsulating a moment and making it seem universal, have come to be considered enduring masterpieces. These are pictures that have become part of the fabric of society reference points with relevance often extending far beyond the original moment of their taking. These are the images that photographers measure themselves against and which continue to resonate across the mass media finding fresh life and new meaning according to the novel contexts in which they are used. Every image has a multi-faceted story. There is the image itself and the immediate context in which it was taken and then there is the story of the photographer, the person who chose to stand in a certain spot at a certain moment to take the shot and in the case of some of the war photography you have been referred to - often at considerable risk to themselves. Then there is the afterlife of the image. As with any lasting artifact, a photograph will continue to generate meanings and excite responses often far removed from those they originally provoked. 1

2 Take for example this photograph of Alice Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson in 1859 ( The significance of the shot immediately alters when you learn that Charles Dodgson wrote children s books as Lewis Carroll and that this is the child who is said to have been the inspiration for Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass. Armed with these facts the image is elevated from an anonymous survivor of early photography to a picture packed with significance and meaning. Here too is a perfect example of an image that due to the vast shifts in taste, knowledge and sensibility over the last 25 years has become extremely problematic. Dodgson s pictures of young girls often in a state of semi or complete nudity only form a small proportion of the subjects he photographed but they continue to be subject to all sorts of controversy. For some they demonstrate the unsavory preoccupations of a man famously unable to form lasting relationships with adult women. For other critics, such a reading is the result of people viewing the image with modern eyes, used to a world in which such pictures inevitably carry disturbing associations. According to this view, we need to hang onto the idea that innocence and purity expressed by a child posed in such a way was prevalent in the 19 th Century, and by recalling that we can offset some of our modern preoccupations and not jump to unpleasant conclusions. There is also evidence that Carroll was interested in adult women but the letters and diary entries that might have revealed this were, for a long time, suppressed by his own family giving birth to the myth of the child-obsessed man which has done his reputation so much damage in recent years. It is possible, via the Dodgson image, to open up a consideration of a number of recent controversies associated with photographs of children such as the images of her children that female photographer Tierney Gearon exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 2001: Also consider the more recent row about Jill Greenberg s images of crying children Commentaries suggest that they were captured at the moment the children had sweets taken off them. Interestingly, Greenberg does not mention this in her account of these pictures. 2

3 Here is another famous image: In some ways this is a photograph that helped America lose the Vietnam War. In 1968 overt US involvement in Vietnam had been going on for over a decade. Since the death of President Kennedy in 1963 just at a time he was considering stopping America s military adventure in South East Asia - the numbers of US troops in Vietnam had been escalating alarmingly. There were dissident voices but in January 1968 people in the States were on the whole still willing to believe that South Vietnam had to be defended against communism and that the war against the North Vietnamese could be won. On January 30 at the start of the Tet religious celebrations, the North Vietnamese aided by their allies in the South the Vietcong began a surprise all-out campaign attacking targets and seizing significant areas and landmarks in cities across South Vietnam including the capital Saigon. The hope was that such a show of force would lead to a general uprising of the South Vietnamese people and a speedy end to the war. American photographer Eddie Adams was covering the fighting in Saigon when he witnessed the South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily execute a prisoner in the street. Adams extraordinary shot captures the exact moment the General s bullet is entering the victim s head. Interestingly, the same incident was also caught on TV cameras by a NBC crew, but it is the Adams image that went on to become one of the iconic images of that war, indeed one of the best known war atrocity images to date. Adams is said to have been surprised by his South Vietnamese colleagues indifference when he showed them the picture only to learn from them that General Loan was always doing such things. The story becomes more complicated given the victim here was possibly responsible for killing a friend of Loan s and the friend s family. At the time the image brought home to people in America how brutal the conflict was in Vietnam and how complex. Far from being a struggle between right and wrong, here was one senior member of the friendly South Vietnamese army behaving in an unconscionably vicious manner. It did not take a huge leap of thinking for ordinary Americans to start wondering if they really should be sending their young men to die and be maimed in such a war. Although the Tet offensive was a disaster for the communists costing them thousands of dead and injured, its greatest achievement was in shifting public opinion in the US away from believing the war was justified and winnable. Tet was proof that it would be a grim slog likely to end in stalemate. Part of the reason why this image has continued to be included among the most famous war photographs is the extraordinary moment it captures the split second when a human life ends. 3

4 In this way it stands alongside Robert Capa s famous 1936 Spanish Civil War picture Death of A Loyalist Soldier. There is action in the image supplied by the grimacing helmeted soldier framing the shot on the left, but curiously the central figures appear particularly still. This is doubly emphasised by the fact it is hard to see and understand this image without knowing what will happen next the victim (Nguyen Van Lem) will crumple to the ground and blood will pour from his head wound. But at this moment the bullet has not done its damage and both executioner and victim are transfixed. It is trite but what a difference a micro-second can make and here is possibly the best example of photography s capacity to capture such an instance. This image has had a fascinating afterlife. It helped win Eddie Adams a Pulitzer prize. It has become one of the most famous images of the Vietnam War among those shots picture editors will still select when illustrating articles relating to that conflict. It has even featured in a Woody Allen film called Starlight Memories (1980) blown up to a vast size and adorning the leading character s stylish New York apartment a disturbing backdrop to the self-preoccupied ramblings of him and his friends. Stardust Memories (1980) source: This discussion of these two images are meant to showcase the sort of ways in which you are expected to attempt your own intelligent presentation and discussion of a selection of images drawn from the photograph cache sites to which you have been referred. Another one to check out, by the way is the Masters Of Photography site: You can find out more about the taking of this image at this site: 4

5 Here is a third image which draws together themes from the first two we have considered so far. It is called Napalm Girl and was taken by the South Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut in 1972: Nick Ut / The Associated Press - Background: This image was taken in Although the Vietnam War still had another three years to run, world public opinion had largely shifted against this conflict and the US Government was by now seeking the means to withdraw its troops. Given the fact the war was now regarded as unwinnable, the on-going cost in human life became ever more pointless and desperate. In a war filled with brutality this image continues to stand out as one of the most enduring images of human suffering taken during that conflict. The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut was at Trang Bang on the Vietnamese highway (Route 1) about 25 miles WNW of Saigon. He had been told that there had been fighting in and around the village for a number of days and soon after his arrival there was a bombing raid by South Vietnamese Skyraider jets during which they dropped napalm on the village. Napalm first used in 1944, is a kind of jelly which when ignited sticks to everything it falls on. When it falls on a human being it sticks and burns persistently leaving terrible second and third degree injuries on those that survive. Kim Phuc the little girl in the centre of this picture sustained third degree burns to about half her body during the attack. Nick Ut was responsible for her survival. Having taken this picture he then drove Kim to a nearby hospital and bargained with doctors there to treat her. They were convinced she would die. Ut used the fact that he was a press photographer and expected her image was going to appear around the globe to exert pressure on the medics who were eager to treat less badly injured patients. Ut told them that people worldwide would want to know what had happened to her to goad them into action. This was a bluff. The image was apparently nearly not sent back to New York. This was due to the AP deputy picture editor s desire to stick to a rule that dictated no images involving frontal nudity should be wired to the agency s headquarters. Fortunately, the editor Horst Faas, who had been on a different mission, had a habit of checking in on the AP office to see what had been taken by the AP s stable of photographers each day. It was he that spotted the quality of Ut s image and ordered its dispatch. You can read of Kim Phuc s life at 5

6 Again, as with most photo-journalistic images, the capture of this picture came down in the end to a lot of accident. I am not sure, but the man struggling to get film into his camera on the right may well be a rival photo-journalist Dave Burnett (Life Magazine) who is on record complaining of the difficulties he was having that day loading his Leica. Had he managed this feat then perhaps it would have been his picture that would have encapsulated this terrible occasion. Analysing the image - what makes it so powerful? Is it the juxtaposition of children and soldiers the adults seemingly indifferent to the children s cries? Is it the nakedness of the little girl her clothes burnt away doubly emphasised by the hardness of the road and the protected, clothed adults. Is it not the way that these children have emerged out of the smoke and dust of war? Behind them the village has been shrouded in smoke and all is indistinct, but here, having appeared out of the confusion are the fruits of war the supposed enemy. Is it the composition of the shot the children advancing out of the image, their faces registering shock and pain? Does the picture not invite us to intervene to rush forward to help them? Interestingly, the shot often appears in a cropped form see it s usage for example on this BBC site: What is your reaction to the image in this form? How does the subtraction of the photographer and some of the soldiers on the right add or detract from the image s impact? (See below) Is it the story surrounding the image that makes it so important? The fact that Ut bothered to go beyond his duties and made such efforts to save the child; the fact that this image became such an icon of the anti-war movement and also that Kim Phuc came to resent that usage all these elements add to the image s meaning and significance. Issues The idea that this image might not have been published because of the child s nudity clearly raises the issue of obscenity and brings us full circle to the Lewis Carroll image with which we began. What is more obscene that napalm is dropped on children or that, in order to safeguard people s sensibilities they should be spared a picture of an injured naked child in their newspaper at the breakfast table? This was a war, like all wars, that politicians of the day claimed was being fought in the name of the people and yet here was a picture of what that war actually amounted to. 6

7 In every conflict the issue of what can and can t be shown arises and it is a very complex issue. A more recent example of the same sort of controversy concerned Ken Jarecke s 1991 photograph of the burnt Iraqi Soldier: Asked why he took such a grim picture, Jarecke is said to have replied: If I don't make pictures like this, people like my mother will think what they see in war is what they see in movies." Back in 1991, the appallingly frightening combat scenes in Saving Private Ryan were still seven years off, and so Jarecke s point was a valid one. Of course, there is an alternative view, that such images have the effect of coarsening us ratcheting up the pressure on picture editors to demand and include ever more shocking images. This is a contentious point and deserves a detailed analysis of war-time footage over the last 15 years to be proved. Such analysis might reveal quite the opposite, that in fact since the Vietnam War when journalists and photographers had almost unlimited access to the battlefields of South East Asia and were part-blamed for losing the war by the military, that media access has been far more controlled and the photographers room to roam and seek unsanitised images has been greatly restricted. Another complicating factor is that in recent wars such as the Second Iraq War and in Afghanistan journalists and photographers are at much greater risk as being treated as legitimate targets and so this has invariably put a break on their freedom to search for subjects. Interestingly, in Iraq and Afghanistan some of the most compelling and controversial images have been the work of amateurs soldiers with access to sophisticated digital technology in the shape of camcorders and third-generation mobile phones. It is from this kind of source that the shots of the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib emerged, and which, like the Napalm Girl or the Siagon Execution images in Vietnam seemed to threaten the moral justification for America s military presence. Changing the Meaning Of an Image Bela Lugosi with Frances Dade in Dracula (1931): Courtesy of Universal Pictures; photograph, The Bettmann Archive. 7

8 It is very hard to separate what is in an image its constituents - from its meaning. The fact that, even without the benefit of the caption, it would take most people only a single glance at the image above to identify it as a still from a film; an old-fashioned film; a horror film; a film about vampires; a film about the most famous vampire of all Dracula; - is quite remarkable. Then there are the broader issues raised by such a genre-specific image such as the convention that horror often seems to rely on young women being menaced by some powerful male predator. Then there are the sexual overtones of the vampire myth and the roots this tale has in fairy tale archetypes Sleeping Beauty; Beauty and the Beast, etc; even Eve and the Apple with Dracula in role as the serpent-disguised Devil bringing forbidden knowledge and desires with his kiss. There are racial anxieties at work here too with the swarthy Eastern European Vampire the ultimate illegal immigrant threatening the pallid purity of the innocent Caucasian woman as she sleeps. In recent years the interpretation of the vampire myth has been further complicated with more recent horror films about blood-suckers and the contagion they spread being interpreted as clever metaphors for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For the last part of this exercise you were invited to take a chosen image and having prepared a talk about it, you were invited to change its meaning in as many ways as you can. In each case you would be changing both its DENOTATION what is in or around the image (caption or context) and its CONNOTATIONS what it means. Try testing out how the following alterations might change the connotations of the Dracula image and the different audiences they might address: 1. A 1931 cinema the image appears outside a cinema showing a double bill with James Whale s Frankenstein. Across the image is the promise that Medical Assistance Will Be Available In the Cinema for patrons who find the shocking combination too much to bear. 2. A 2008 cinema - the image advertises a showing of the original Dracula during a retrospective season of the Films Of Bela Lugosi or A History of the The Vampire Picture. 3. A picture on the wall of a rich sophisticated Vampire in a modern film about Dracula. 4. A still used in a Channel 5 documentary about The Vampire fact and fiction. 5. An ironic advertisement: Drink St John s Wart before bed and nothing but nothing will disturb your sleep. 6. A cropped version of the image with a toothbrush replacing the girl. 7. A birthday card with the caption Fangs For Your Friendship! 8. An enlarged image in an art gallery exhibiting Classic Cinema Images From the Golden Age of Hollywood 9. The cover illustration on a book: Women and Horror from passive victim to active protagonist from Mina Harker to Ripley. (Mina Harker is the character in Dracula you see being menaced above. Ripley is the powerful female lead played by Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies) 10. A labelled image on the wall of a media studies classroom demonstrating the constituent parts of the image that combine to tell us this is a still from a Vampire film. 8