Historical Photos (Part 3)

Posted on 13. Nov, 2009 in People

Color photos of German surrender
These two photos are the only colour photos of the German suurender in World War Two. They were made by General Bernard Montgomery’s clerk, Ronald Playforth in May, 1945. German High command arrived at Montgomery’s HQ at Luneburg Heath, near Hamburg to sign the papers for the surrender of the German armies. Ronald was of too low rank to be present there, so he hid in the bushes and made these photos using colour slides.

Cold War on the Court
Since 1936 United States basketball team won all olympic games. Until 1972. In 1972 Munich games they were overtaken by USSR team.
When six seconds (with USSR leading at one point) american player Doug Collins was deliberately fouled.
Collins sank both of his free throws, giving the US. its first lead, 50-49, with three seconds left.
The Soviets failed to score, time ran out and the Americans erupted in celebration.
But Soviet coach Vladimir Kondrashkin claimed he had called a time-out that was ignored, and Britain’s R. Williams Jones, the Secretary-General of the International Amateur Basketball Federation, ordered the clock set back by three seconds.
When play resumed, Soviet star Sasha Belov pushed past two U.S. defenders to sink the winning basket.

Oscar Streaker
One of the most infamous moments in Academy Awards’ history took place on the Oscar night for 1973 [April 2, 1974].
As the host David Niven was introducing the night’s final presenter, Elizabeth Taylor, a nude streaker came running across Oscar’s stage flashing a peace sign.
Robert Opel got backstage by posing as a journalist in one of the most embarrassing security breaches. The audience roared and laughed as Opel streaked his way on.
David Niven, always a quick wit, quipped: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was bound to happen. But isn’t it fascinating to think that the only laugh that man will probably ever get in his life was when he stripped off to show his shortcomings.” The audience roared with even more laughter.

The Falling Man
“The Falling Man” is a photograph taken by Richard Drew at 9 : 41 : 15 a.m., on September 11, 2001 of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York City.
The man in the photohraph remains unknown. The picture is deceptive, however, as it suggest that man was falling straight down, however, this is just one of many photographs of his fall.
It is evident from these other pictures that he tumbling out of control.
Many people find the image disturbing because it is a horrific image of what people had to resort to during the attacks.
The subject was one of some 200 people (called “jumpers” by the press) trapped on the upper floors of the skyscraper that apparently resorted to jump rather than die from the fire and smoke.
In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the 9/11 records.
Newspaper stories commenting on the image have attracted a barrage of criticism from readers.
In most American newspapers, the photograph ran once and never again. However, as Esquire wrote, the story behind it and the search for the man pictured in it, may be our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.
The photo has become a digitalized “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” not only for the jumpers but also for everyone who perished that day.

Poland invaded by Germany
The photo of German troops parading through Warsaw after the surrender of Poland probably taken as late as September 30th, 1939.
The invasion won’t end until early October 1939, shortly after the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east and subsumed the Baltic States.
The devil’s pact between Hitler and Stalin (Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) enabled these cataclysmic events to unfold and pushed the world into another world war.

Elvis meets Nixon
Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other.
It was neither the Bill of Rights or the Constitution of the United States, but the above photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley’s visit to the White House.
Although Richard Nixon abhorred modern art, and even forbade its presence in the White House, his advisors told him that publicly supporting the arts would boost his image.
As a result, Nixon oversaw a six-fold increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). [To Nixon’s horror, these funds went to Erica Jong’s novel of sexual liberation, Fear of Flying.]
Nixon was also known for his star-filled parties at his “Western White House” in San Clemente, California, and for his association with glamorous personalities like the Reagans and Frank Sinatra. However, it was not Nixon who initiated this meeting.
On the morning of December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley paid a visit to the White House, with a six-page letter of introduction written by himself.
In the letter, he requested a meeting with the President and asked that he be made a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Presley also brought some gifts–a Colt 45 pistol and family photos. He was received at 12:30 pm, and received a thank-you note from the president, but the fictitious position of ‘Federal Agent-at-Large’ was not created for Presley, who himself would succumb to the influence of drugs less than seven years later.

Josef Stalin
Above, a candid picture of Josef Stalin, captured by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Vlasik, the dictator’s bodyguard.
Vlaski, Stalin’s erstwhile confidante, co-conspirator and son-in-law, was purged by his master in 1952. After Stalin died in 1953, he was released from a gulag.
Vlasik’s off-the-record photos of Stalin caused a sensation in the early 1960s when an enterprising Soviet journalist spirited some out, selling them to newspapers and magazines worldwide.

Liston vs. Ali
The first Sonny Liston-Cassius Clay fight in 1964 when Liston was the world heavyweight champion ended in controversy: during the fourth round, Clay started complaining that there was something burning in his eyes and that he could not see. It has been theorized that a substance used to stop Liston’s cuts from bleeding caused the irritation. Clay won the match on a TKO.
A rematch was set in May 25th 1965, this time with Liston as challenger; Clay was now Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam the previous year. Due to the fightt being staged in a small auditorium in remote Lewiston, Maine, only 2,500 fans were present, setting the all-time record for the lowest attendance for a heavyweight championship fight. (It remains the only heavyweight title fight held in the state of Maine.)
Midway through the first round, Liston fell to the canvas; Ali refused to retreat to a neutral corner, standing over his fallen opponent, gesturing and yelling at him, “Get up and fight, sucker!” Neil Leifer, a 5′6″ reporter who covered many boxing matches, struggled to capture this moment, which has since become one of the iconic images in sports history. Sports Illustrated used the photo to cover their “The Century’s Greatest Sports Photos” special issue. Leifer thinks it is both the triumph of the powerful man and the vulnerability of the fallen that combined to make this photo a lingering masterpiece.

Johnny Cash’s Finger
As he grew old, Johnny Cash came to resent the Nashville country-music establishment, which all but abandoned him and the other aging “country” artists who had defined the genre to embrace new pop-oriented country artists like Garth Brooks. His late album Unchained (1996) was virtually ignored by the establishment.
However, the album won a Grammy for Best Country Album. Cash and his producers American Recordings posted an advertisement in Billboard Magazine with the above image as a ”thank you” to the Nashville country music industry after winning the award. The infamous photo of Cash giving the middle finger to the camera was taken back in 1969 during his San Quentin prison performance.

Stop-action photography
An inventor and an artist, Dr. Harold Edgerton, a professor at MIT, pioneered the strobe flash, stop-action photography and a method of taking super-fast images called Rapatronic.
These images allowed very early times in a nuclear explosion’s fireball growth to be recorded on film. The exposures were often as short as 10 nanoseconds, and each Rapatronic camera would take exactly one photograph.
Harold Edgerton’s most famous picture was that of a bullet going through an apple. Taken in 1964 with flash duration of about a millionth of a second using a specially built strobe, it became a very famous image.
The .30 bullet, traveling at 2,800 feet per second, pierced right through the apple, disintegrating the latter completely. Edgerton used this image in his MIT lecture, “How to make applesauce,” to illustrate that the entry of the supersonic bullet is as visually explosive as the exit.

Concorde Crash
An investigation into the infamous Concorde disaster of 2000 concluded that a burst tyre caused by a metal strip on the runway was the cause of the disaster.
Debris from the puncture pierced the under-wing fuel tanks and started the fire that brought the plane down.
An similar accident had been identified since 1979, but the investigators had ruled out the speculations that poor maintenance had contributed to the tragedy which killed all 109 people.
On 25 July 2000, as Air France Flight 4590 burst into flames shortly after take-off from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport.
The flight was chartered by a German cruise-line and all passengers were en route to board a cruise ship in New York City for a 16-day cruise to South America.
A few days after the crash, all Concordes were grounded. Although the Concorde had been the safest working passenger airliner, the high-profile crash spelt the beginning of the end of the aircraft’s career.
Increasing fuel prices, 9/11 terrorist attacks and expensive fares led to the Concorde’s permanent retirement in 2003.

Vulture Stalking a Child
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. 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,” read one editorial.
Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it.
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.

Lynching of Young Blacks
Lawrence Beitler took this iconic photograph on August 7, 1930, showing the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two young black men accused of raping a white girl.
A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get these men; the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man’s innocence.
Lynching photos were made into postcards designed to boost white supremacy, but the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up angering and revolting as many as they scared.
The photo sold thousands of copies, which Beitler stayed up for 10 days and nights printing them.

Hitler in Paris
Upon the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, Adolf Hitler posed in front of the Eiffel Tower with his architect Albert Speer (left) and his favorite sculptor Arno Breker. Breker’s monumental neo-Classical figures vividly expressed Nazi racial ideology.

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