Thursday, May 21, 2015

FAMOUS AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS


This is the last post about American photography and, as it could not be otherwise, we are going to write about some of the most famous photographs of the United States of America. Those we have chosen are all related with a specific moment or situation of the U.S. history that we have seen in class.
 
 

1. Lunch atop a skyscraper

In this photograph you can see eleven laborers taking their lunch on a beam at 256 meters of altitude without any safety harness. They were working on the construction of the RCA Building (now called GE), one of the Rockefeller Center group of buildings in Manhattan, New York City, on September 20, 1932.
 
Three years ago, a DOC NYC movie about the secrets of the photograph was released. One of the mystery is the author of the picture because, even if it has been credited to Charles C. Ebbets, there is no evidence of it. Besides, the identities of the men in the image are still an enigma, even if the movie directors believed to have found the identities of two of them. Here you have the trailer of the movie:

Recently, it has been said that the photograph was in fact a publicity stunt made to promote the building that was almost finished. With or without secrets, the picture will always be one of the world’s most reproduced and a piece of American history.

Lunch atop a skyscraper
 

  
2. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is an historic photograph taken on 1945, by Joe Rosenthal, in which you can see five United States Marines and a United States Navy corpsman raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jimain (World War II).

After four days of fights between U.S. and Japanese soldiers on this Pacific island, the fifth morning, February 23, these six soldiers decided to raised the American flag on the highest point of the island. At that moment, the photographer Joe Rosenthal was on the mountain taking photos for American newspapers and he quickly immortalize this moment without knowing that the picture would inspire a whole nation: the flag was a symbol of their fighting spirit.

Even if Rosenthal's photograph won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography (the only photograph to win the prize in the same year it was taken) it has been many time said that it was actually staged. Firstly because it was not the first flag raising on the island and secondly because he added to the confusion when he said that "some of the Marines staged for the picture", but he was talking about another picture. To defend himself, Rosenthal said that “I did not select this spot for the second flag. I did not select the men for the picture. I did not in any way signal for it to happen, but it was aware that it was going to happen”.
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima
 
 
3. V-J Day in Times Square
The photograph known as V-J Day in Times Square, V-Day (that is, Victory over Japan Day), and The Kissing Sailor is an image that captured an epic moment in U.S. history - a sailor locked in a passionate kiss with a nurse in New York City's Times Square at the end of World War II. It was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt on August 14, 1954, the day U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced the end of the war on Japan. It was published a week later in Life magazine with the following caption: In New York's Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.
V-J Day in Times Square
 
Regarding the protagonists identity, after decades of dispute because the photograph does not clearly show the faces of them and several people have claimed to be the subjects, the couple was revealed to be George Mendonsa and Greta Zimmer Friedman.



4. The 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute
On the morning of 16 October 1968, Two black American athletes have made history at the Mexico Olympics by staging a silent protest against racial discrimination of black people in the United States. Tommie Smith, the gold medalist, and John Carlos, the bronze medalist, bowed their head and raised a fist while the U.S. national anthem played.
 
As we have seen in class, it was the moment in which many blacks turned to the Black Power movement, after the Martin Luther King murder. They thought the only way for blacks to get justice was to fight for it. It was also the decade in which black Americans began taking new pride in their African ancestry and to be proud of being black (remember the “Black is beautiful” slogan). Smith and Carlos were also part of the generation of black Americans who, for the first time, were proudly identifying themselves as black men.
 
Even if Carlos and Smith saw their action as a moment of hope for all people and not as an act of political separatism, the International Olympic Committee ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic Village.


The 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute
 
As we have said in the introduction, all these pictures illustrate a specific situation, era or movement of the United States: the Great Depression, the Second World Wide, the end of this War and, finally, the Black Power movement. Their authors and protagonists could not even imagine that their acts would be part of their nation and world history forever. That is one of the reasons why we like these pictures: because they all come from the hearth; those who appears on them could have planned their acts but they are not acting or posing.
 
We hope you have enjoy this section of our blog and that it will be useful for you to illustrate all this moment of the American history that we have seen in class.
 
Eventually, always remember this saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words”.
 
 
Bibliography:
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● Pictures:
 
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