Images change public opinion| Three Pictures

Images can change public opinion – images such as this by Nic Ut of nine-year-old Kim Phuc.

 

South Vietnamese forces follow after terrified children, including 9-year-old  Kim Phuc, center, as they run down Route 1 near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places, June 8, 1972.  A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. The terrified girl had ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing. The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim's cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting.  Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

On 8 June 1972 a South Vietnamese aircraft accidentally dropped its napalm payload on the village of Trang Bang. With her clothes on fire, Kim Phuc ran out of the village with her family to be airlifted to hospital.

Now all the key players were interviewed…the little girl-Kim Phuc, the photographer-NIck Ut, the reporter-Christopher Wain and Vietnam vets.

Four decades later, the photo and the girl are as powerful as ever.

 

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“Saigon Execution” is one of the most recognizable photographs in military history, and it played a contributing role in turning public opinion against the Vietnam War.

The image—by combat photographer Eddie Adams—captures the moment a uniformed South Vietnamese officer fires a bullet into the head of a man who appears to be a civilian.

 

 

Taken out of context, the photo seems to evince a senseless act of brutality, which explains why it was later used in support of the moral argument that protestors made against the war. But the reality is that the shooter (General Nguyen Ngoc Loan), was executing a ruthless Viet Cong assassin (Nguyen Van Lem, aka Bay Lop), who was leading a team that had targeted the general himself.

 

 

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Tiananmen Square and ‘tank man’

 

On the way to Beijing in late May of 1989, Stuart Franklin bought a long mirror lens in the Dubai airport. He had been called in a hurry by his agency, Magnum, to cover the growing student protests in Tiananmen Square. Several days later, on June 5, this lens came in handy as Franklin was photographing from the balcony of the Beijing Hotel with fellow magazine photographer Charlie Cole, capturing what would become the visual emblem of thelargest political protest in communist Chinese history: a lone man squaring off in the face of an oncoming column of tanks.

 

 

 

Photographer Norman Parkinson| called Duffy, Bailey and Donovan the “black trinity”, the men who shot the 60s.

Brian Duffy | Photographer 1933 – 2010

 

Duffy, together with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, was part of trio of photographers known as the “Black Trinity”, who defined the swinging Sixties with their portraits of actors, models and musicians.

The three photographers became as famous as the celebrities they photographed.

Notorious for his bad temper, Duffy once attempted to destroy all of his work on a bonfire after being angered by a question from a member of his staff about where he kept his spare loo-rolls.

In an interview last year, he recalled the incident in 1979: “I realised I was chairman, CEO and senior stockholder in my business, and now I was responsible for the toilet paper.”

 

 

 

 

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 David Bailey |Photographer, StarDust

 

David Bailey has made an outstanding contribution to photography and the visual arts, creating consistently imaginative and thought-provoking portraits. As well as new work, this landmark exhibition includes a wide variety of Bailey’s photographs from a career that has spanned more than half a century.

 

 

 

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 Terry Donovan| Photographer 1936-1996

 

Terence Donovan (1936-1996) came to prominence in London in the 1960s as part of a post-war renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography. The energy of his fashion photographs and portraits, and the force of his personality, have assumed in the intervening years an almost folkloric significance.

With David Bailey and Brian Duffy, photographers of a similar background and outlook, Donovan was perceived as a new force in British fashion photography. The three comprised a Black Trinity’, according to Norman Parkinson, who found their methodology crude and their pictures at best unpolished’. Donovan was 23 when he opened his studio,