Images That Shook the World
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Migrant Mother
[1936]
Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Information
For many, this picture of Florence Owens Thompson (age 32) represents the Great Depression. She was the mother of 7 and she struggled to survive with her kids catching birds and picking fruits. Dorothea Lange took the picture after Florence sold her tent to buy food for her children. She made the first page of major newspapers all over the country and changed people's conception about migrants.
Thich Quang Duc
[11th June,1963]
Photographer: Malcolm Browne
Actual photo
Information
In 1963, after suppressing internal revolts, President of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem was widely seen as a totalitarian. Though he depended largely on US aid, Diem refused to be counselled by them on his handling of the war, which was leading to genocide. In June, Buddhists revolted at Hué and Saigon, which Roman Catholic Diem used military force to disperse.
On the 21st, the monks showed their anger by a rally in Saigon. A 73-year old Thich Quang Duc sat crossed legged in the centre of a human circle. A monk poured gasoline on him. With a look of serenity, Quang Duc struck a match at 9:22 AM. As flames engulfed his body, he made not a single cry or a muscle. In his will he wrote to President asking him to be kind and tolerant towards his people. After his death, his body was re-cremated, but his heart remained intact. This was interpreted as a symbol of compassion and led Buddhists to revere him as a bodhisattva, heightening the impact of his death on the public psyche.”
Journalist Malcolm Browne’s photographs of his self-immolation were seen on the front pages of newspapers worldwide — except on the New York Times, whose editors deemed the photos too graphic to be put on the front page. John F. Kennedy noted that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”. One won the 1963 World Press Photo of the Year. Although Diem’s decline and downfall had already begun, the self-immolation is widely seen as the pivotal point. Diem was later assassinated. After Diem’s death, America tried to influence their puppet leaders entirely – they could not risk another Diem – thus plunging the entire region into disaster.
Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo of the monk’s death, as did David Halberstam for his written account.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy
[1984]
Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew
Information
Pablo Bartholomew is an acclaimed Indian photojournalist who captured the Bhopal Gas Tragedy into his lens. The tragedy was India’s worst industrial catastrophe which injured 558,125 people and killed as many as 15,000. Because safety standards and maintenance procedures had been ignored at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, a leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals triggered a massive environmental and human disaster. Photographer Pablo Bartholomew rushed to document the catastrophe. He came across a man who was burying a child. This scene was photographed by both Pablo Bartholomew and Raghu Rai, another renowned Indian photojournalist. “This expression was so moving and so powerful to tell the whole story of the tragedy”, said Raghu Rai.
From 1976, there were harbingers–excess pollution and toxic attacks on workers were occurring on a regular basis at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. On the midnight of December 2nd-3rd, 1984–exactly 25 years ago today–gas leaked from the factory and unleashed menthyl-iso-cyanate poison into air and water in an industrial diasater that would eventually kill over 30,000 people and maim hundreds of thousands more.
It was estimated within the first 24 hours, some 3,000 people were killed. Hospitals could barely cope with the survivors. Gravediggers had to work through the night and multiple people were buried to a grave. Twenty-five years on, Bhopal’s population has tripled to 1 million people but scars remained. In the world’s largest democracy, the government is holding most of the money, half a billion dollars paid in compensation is still sitting in the bank. This paternalism and notions that state should take control of industrial activity and its redistributive force worsened the disaster. Not a single person has been held criminally liable for the disaster.*
Following the vehicles that were taking the dead to be cremated and buried, Pablo Bartholomew of Gamma saw the body of a child, with eyes glazed, milky-white and staring up at him. His subsequent image became an icon of grief and greed in the face of industrial disaster, winning the World Press Photo of the Year for 1984.
[*Dow Chemical, the current owner of Union Carbide, refuses to accept any liability for the incident: "it is important to note that Dow never owned or operated the plant, which today is under the control of the Madhya Pradesh state government. Dow acquired the shares of Union Carbide Corporation more than 16 years after the tragedy, and 10 years after the $470 million settlement agreement — paid by Union Carbide Corporation and Union Carbide India, Limited — was approved by the Indian Supreme Court."]
A vulture watches a starving child
[1993]
Photographer: Kevin Carter
Information
In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan, where he took now iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod. Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. (The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same UN plane Carter took to Ayod).
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as ‘metaphor for Africa’s despair’. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run an unusual special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Journalists in the Sudan were told not to touch the famine victims, because of the risk of transmitting disease, but Carter came under criticism for not helping the girl. ”The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”
Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a friend. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s fate, he committed suicide three months later.
The Falling Man
[2001]
Photographer: Richard Drew
Information
The powerful and controversial photograph provoked feelings of anger, particularly in the United States, in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The photo ran only once in many American newspapers because they received critical and angry letters from readers who felt the photo was exploitative, voyeuristic, and disrespectful of the dead. This led to the media's self-censorship of the photograph, preferring instead to print photos of acts of heroism and sacrifice.
Drew commented about the varying reactions, saying, "This is how it affected people's lives at that time, and I think that is why it's an important picture. I didn't capture this person's death. I captured part of his life. This is what he decided to do, and I think I preserved that."9/11: The Falling Man ends suggesting that this picture was not a matter of the identity behind the man, but how he symbolized the events of 9/11.
Nagasaki
[1945]
Photographer: The picture was taken from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack.
Information
This is the picture of the "mushroom cloud" showing the enormous quantity of energy pelted out by the atomic bomb "Fat Man" dropped over Nagasaki (detonated from over 469 meters or 1,540 ft above ground level) on 9th August, 1945.
Subject
On the morning of August 9, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, flown by the crew of 393rd Squadron commander Major Charles W. Sweeney, carried the nuclear bomb code-named "Fat Man", with Kokura as the primary target and Nagasaki the secondary target. The mission plan for the second attack was nearly identical to that of the Hiroshima mission, with two B-29s flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and two additional B-29s in Sweeney's flight for instrumentation and photographic support of the mission. Sweeney took off with his weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged.
Observers aboard the weather planes reported both targets clear. When Sweeney's aircraft arrived at the assembly point for his flight off the coast of Japan, the third plane, Big Stink, flown by the group's Operations Officer, Lt. Col. James I. Hopkins, Jr. failed to make the rendezvous. Bockscar and the instrumentation plane circled for 40 minutes without locating Hopkins. Already 30 minutes behind schedule, Sweeney decided to fly on without Hopkins.
By the time they reached Kokura a half hour later, a 70% cloud cover had obscured the city, prohibiting the visual attack required by orders. After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low because a transfer pump on a reserve tank had failed before take-off, they headed for their secondary target, Nagasaki. Fuel consumption calculations made en route indicated that Bockscar had insufficient fuel to reach Iwo Jima and would be forced to divert to Okinawa. After initially deciding that if Nagasaki were obscured on their arrival the crew would carry the bomb to Okinawa and dispose of it in the ocean if necessary, the weaponeer Navy Commander Frederick Ashworth decided that a radar approach would be used if the target was obscured.
At about 07:50 Japanese time, an air raid alert was sounded in Nagasaki, but the "all clear" signal was given at 08:30. When only two B-29 Superfortresses were sighted at 10:53, the Japanese apparently assumed that the planes were only on reconnaissance and no further alarm was given.
A few minutes later at 11:00, The Great Artiste, the support B-29 flown by Captain Frederick C. Bock, dropped instruments attached to three parachutes. These instruments also contained an unsigned letter to Professor Ryokichi Sagane, a nuclear physicist at the University of Tokyo who studied with three of the scientists responsible for the atomic bomb at the University of California, Berkeley, urging him to tell the public about the danger involved with these weapons of mass destruction. The messages were found by military authorities but not turned over to Sagane until a month later. In 1949, one of the authors of the letter, Luis Alvarez, met with Sagane and signed the document.
At 11:01, a last minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The "Fat Man" weapon, containing a core of ~6.4 kg (14.1 lbs.) of plutonium-239, was dropped over the city's industrial valley. It exploded 43 seconds later at 469 meters (1,540 ft) above the ground exactly halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 kilometers (2 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills. The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT (88 TJ). The explosion generated heat estimated at 3,900 degrees Celsius (4,200 K, 7,000 °F) and winds that were estimated at 1005 km/h (624 mph).
Casualty estimates for immediate deaths range from 40,000 to 75,000. Total deaths by the end of 1945 may have reached 80,000.
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