Japan: The bombing of Nagasaki

It’s a little known fact of history that Nagasaki was not in fact the original target of the American atomic bomb strikes on Japan. The United States originally wanted to target the capital city of Kyoto, where Emperor Hirohito resided, but the idea was vetoed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson out of concern that the emperor’s death may have complicated Japan’s possible surrender. Stimson had also honeymooned in Kyoto and had a degree of affection for the city. The next top targets were then Hiroshima and Kokura, but the latter target was shifted to Nagasaki due to bad weather over Kokura.

On August 10, a day after the Nagasaki bombing, military photographer Yosuke Yamahata took dozens of photos of the devastation, a body of work that would form the ‘most extensive record of the atomic bombings.’

The photos were widely published in Japan, but the Western world would only see them in the September 9,1952 issue of Life magazine, once censorship had been lifted. This picture, showing a single arch somehow still standing erect amidst the devastation of the bombings, stands out among those photographs.

China: the Tiananmen Tank Man

He remains unknown, this man who – shopping bags in his hands - halted a column of tanks using only his frail human body.

On June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests, this man stood in the center of a wide road, placing him directly in the path of a column of approaching tanks. As the lead tank attempted to maneuver around him, he shifted his position to obstruct it. Photographer Stuart Franklin said: “As I was photographing the tank, I had very clear memories of the Prague spring of 1968, when citizens faced off with Russian tanks. The atmosphere soon became chaotic in the hotel, as people were worried about getting their stories out in the unfolding tragedy. Authorities inside the hotel confiscated footage, but I packed my film into a box of tea and gave it to a French student who was heading back to Paris. She got it to Magnum.”

The fate of the Tiananmen Tank Man, like his identity, remains unknown.

Alan Al Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, Vietnam’s Napalm Girl fleeing her bombed-out-village, a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. These are only a few of the photographs that have defined human suffering and resistance over the years

Nazi Germany: The boy in the picture

It’s hard to pick a single image out of the thousands that depict the horrors of the pogroms carried out by Nazi Germany in World War Two. This picture is from a round-up of Jews during the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The original caption, given by Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi officer who led the operation, read: ‘Pulled from the bunkers by force.’

The picture later appeared in the 75-page long Stroop report, an account of the crushing of the Uprising. Franz Konrad, the man who took the photo, had ironically been active in anti-Nazi groups in his native Austria and found himself an official Nazi photographer through a ‘fluke of circumstances. Many efforts have been made to identify the terrified boy in the photograph but none have been successfull. Indeed, the only person in the photo whose identity has been established beyond doubt is Joseph Blosche, the Nazi policeman pointing this gun at the child. Blosche, who was nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’ for his propensity for raping and then murdering Jewish women in the Ghetto, was executed July 29, 1969, after a trial in the German city of Erfurt.

Vietnam War: The Napalm Girl

It has often been argued that the United States lost the Vietnam War not so much on the battlefield but in the field of public opinion. If so, then this is one of the pictures that helped turn that opinion against the war.

In the photo, nine-year-old Kim Phúc, centre left, is seen running naked down a road near the village of Trang Bang after she was severely burnt on her back by a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack on June 8, 1972. Photographer Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer Prize for this iconic picture, took Kim Phúc and the other injured children to Barsky Hospital in Saigon, where after a 14-month hospital stay and 17 surgical procedures including skin transplantations she was able to return home. Then US president Richard Nixon, upon seeing the photograph wondered if it had been staged, to which Ut replied ‘the photo is as authentic as the Vietnam war’.

In 1992 Phúc sought political asylum in Canada and was granted Canadian citizenship in 1996. In 1997 she established the first Kim Phúc Foundation in the US, with the aim of providing medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war. After seeing the photo of Alan-al Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach like so much human driftwood, Phuc said, “I cried a lot. Why do more innocent children have to die like that … I know that picture will wake up the whole world. We have to help people.”

9/11: The dust lady

Twenty-eight-year-old Marcy Borders had been employed as a legal assistant and had worked in tower one of the World Trade Centre for only a month when the September eleven terrorist attack took place.

She fled her office just after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building she worked in, just a few stories above her place of employment. As she stumbled down the street, covered in white dust, Stan Honda, a photographer for Agence France-Presse (AFP) took her photo.

Marcy never quite recovered from the experience, later suffering from substance abuse and depression.

In a 2011 interview with the New York Post she said, “Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked. If I saw a man on a building, I was convinced he was going to shoot me.”

She eventually overcame her addiction issues, only to be diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2014, a condition that claimed her life this August. In an interview a few months after the diagnosis, Marcy said she believed that it was exposure to pollutants during the collapse of the Twin Towers that caused her cancer.

Israel: David with a broken arm

Heavily armed and with his face covered, an Israeli soldier places an 11-year-old Palestinian boy in a chokehold. The boy’s face is visibly distorted and reddened (possibly due to lack of oxygen) and his arm is in a cast.

The picture is a still from footage taken by the boy’s father, Bassem Tamimi, and was taken on August 28, 2015, when Israeli soldiers attempted to disrupt a protest by West Bank Palestinians against illegal Israeli settlement construction in the village of Nabih Saleh. The rest of the pictures in the sequence show Palestinian women trying to pull the screaming boy away from his Israeli brutaliser, albeit with little effect. While images of Israeli brutalities in occupied Palestine rarely reach iconic status in the West, this image is steeped in symbolism.

Sudan: The vulture and the child

An emaciated child, exhausted and weakened by starvation, lies on the ground as a hungry vulture waits for its chance to feast. This photo was taken in March 1993 by South African photographer Kevin Carter on a trip to southern Sudan. The girl in the picture had been struggling to reach a nearby food station before collapsing on the ground. Carter approached slowly, trying to capture both the child and the vulture in the same shot and says he waited for about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. Carter then snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. After it was published in the New York Times, the picture attracted a great deal of comment and also condemnation. Carter was targeted and accused of being a vulture himself, and repeatedly asked if he had tried to help the girl.

While Carter did eventually win the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, he also succumbed to a deep depression. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a friend. He committed suicide later the same year, and in his suicide note he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

Abu Ghraib: The ‘Iraqi Jesus’

For many in the United States, the invasion of Iraq was an antiseptic TV war of smart bombs, waged in the name of freedom and justice in a benighted country ruled by an insane dictator. On the ground in Iraq, the situation was very different. In 2003, Amnesty International alleged systematic abuse at the American-run prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. In November that year AFP published a story which also added credence to these claims. Photographs that emerged later showed stomach-turning images of torture and abuse, often sexual, of Iraqi prisoners by smiling American jailers.

One such picture was of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, a jailed Iraqi, made to stand arms outstretched on a small box with a hood over his head. There are wires attached to his hand and he was told that he would be electrocuted if he moved. Later, Qaisi would recall, “I even have recurring nightmares that I’m in my cell at Abu Ghraib, cell 49 as they called it, being tortured at the hands of the people of a great nation that carries the torch of freedom and human rights.”

While the Abu Ghraib exposé and the publication of a select few photographs did force the United States to take action against some of the identifiable abusers, most got away with slaps on the wrist. Subsequent revelations showed that the use of torture was in fact common, and condoned at the highest echelons of the US government.

Hundreds of Abu Ghraib photographs remain classified and US President Obama, who had originally promised to release the images, backtracked on his decision, saying that to do so would “inflame anti-American public opinion”.

Regret

The choice of a file photo used in the article titled Poaching the (mal) practitioners, published in the DAWN Magazine of August 30, 2015, was unintentional and in no way a reflection on the skills and reputation of the surgeon and other members of the medical staff depicted therein. DAWN apologises to the said medical team for any harm caused to their reputation.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 13th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play