iconic photographs
Like its religious precursors, a modern, secular icon not only conveys information but is instantly recognizable and is, in Vicki Goldberg's words, ‘a representative image of profound significance to a nation or other large group’. In mass societies this presupposes not only clarity and strength of the image itself, but methods of industrial reproduction and distribution and a visually literate, culturally homogeneous audience. Non-photographic examples might include patriotic paintings like Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1850) and graphic images such as Your Country Needs You (1914) or the Leigh/Gable poster for Gone with the Wind (1939).
Photographs become icons to the extent that their perceived message (not necessarily the one intended by the photographer) encapsulates broadly prevalent concerns and aspirations. This may happen after a lengthy time-lag: Howlett's 1857 portrait of I. K. Brunel, for example, became celebrated, as a symbol of perseverance and enterprise, as British interest in ‘Victorian values’ revived in the 1950s. More often, especially during the mid-20th-century heyday of photojournalism, the process has been much more rapid. Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) was published almost at once and became an icon of suffering and resilience in the face of overwhelming crisis. (Its obvious religious overtones doubtless increased its impact.) Doisneau's Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville (1950) evidently chimed with a hunger for individual self-fulfilment after years of austerity and, for Americans perhaps especially, ideas of ‘romantic Europe’. Korda's Che Guevara (1962) inspired rebellious 1960s youth; Leibovitz's John Lennon and Yoko Ono (1980) filled them with nostalgia.
War has generated a disproportionate number of iconic images. Capa's Falling Soldier (1936) and Omaha Beach photographs (1944) rapidly transcended the events they depicted. So did Rosenthal's Raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima (1945), incorporating as it did an already powerful symbol—‘Old Glory’—and depicting the figures in a de-individualized, monumentally heroic way. Speaking of Larry Burrows's Vietnam picture of a wounded black marine reaching out to help a white fellow casualty (1966), a colleague, Wallace Terry, identified the timeless, mythic quality of the photographic icon: ‘It's almost as if Larry had captured something in biblical terms—I could see David reaching out to Jonathan in the Old Testament on those battlefields of Israel. I could see all battlefields.… That's what the best of photography catches.’
An image's potency might be measured both by its ubiquity—in schoolbooks, or on posters, T-shirts, or record sleeves—and by how often it is borrowed and adapted for new purposes, satirical, commercial, or propagandistic. This ‘play’ may change or subvert its meaning. Yet its effectiveness (sometimes registered by protests and demands for censorship) depends on the persistence of the original's core patriotic, pacifist, or other associations.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Goldberg, V., The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed our Lives (1991).
- Koetzle, H.-M., Photo Icons: The Story behind the Pictures (2 vols., 2002)
