In-Humanity.net » Images

Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire 1911

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:11:32 +0000

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company always kept its doors locked to ensure that the young immigrant women stayed stooped over their machines and didn’t steal anything. When a fire broke out on Saturday, March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the New York City factory, the locks sealed the workers’ fate. In just 30 minutes, 146 were killed. Witnesses thought the owners were tossing their best fabric out the windows to save it, then realized workers were jumping, sometimes after sharing a kiss (the scene can be viewed now as an eerie precursor to the World Trade Center events of September, 11, 2001, only a mile and a half south). The Triangle disaster spurred a national crusade for workplace safety.

The Battle of Dieppe – Lest We Forget

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:52:59 +0000

The Raid on Dieppe was a test for the full-scale invasion of Western Europe by the Allies during World War II. The plan was to make a frontal assault on the town of Dieppe, across the English Channel on the coast of France. The Raid on Dieppe would give the Allies a chance to test techniques and equipment for landing troops from the sea.

And test them it did. A German ship spotted the convoy coming, and they were ready as the Allied troops, mostly Canadians, got to the beaches. Many were mowed down by machine-gun and mortar fire. Landing of the Calgary Regiment tanks met equal misfortune. The tanks slipped on the round pebbles of the beaches, and those that got past the sea-wall were blocked by concrete barriers. Intelligence reports were poor, radio communications were terrible, and air and infantry cooperation was non-existent.

The Canadians suffered 3,367 casualties at the Raid on Dieppe, with nearly 1000 Canadians killed and almost 2000 taken prisoner.

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Escaping the Berlin Wall

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:15:11 +0000

Photograph by Peter Leibing

Peter Leibing’s famous picture of the East German soldier Conrad Schumann jumping over the Berlin Wall. Leibing’s photograph of the 19-year-old East German border guard throwing away his rifle as he hurled over barbed wire on his way into West Berlin was taken on August 15, 1961, two days after East Germany sealed off its border with the wall.

Biafra 1969

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:03:27 +0000

When the Igbos of eastern Nigeria declared themselves independent in 1967, Nigeria blockaded their fledgling country-Biafra. In three years of war, more than one million people died, mainly of hunger. In famine, children who lack protein often get the disease kwashiorkor, which causes their muscles to waste away and their bellies to protrude. War photographer Don McCullin drew attention to the tragedy. “I was devastated by the sight of 900 children living in one camp in utter squalor at the point of death,” he said. “I lost all interest in photographing soldiers in action.” The world community intervened to help Biafra, and learned key lessons about dealing with massive hunger exacerbated by war-a problem that still defies simple solutions.

Clash of the Yellowhammers

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:27:07 +0000

The planning for this picture started in the summer, when Fergus collected sheaves of oats from a local farmer specifically as winter food for the yellowhammers. One evening in February, hearing that snow was forecast for the next morning, Fergus set up his hide in the garden, hung out feeders and carefully positioned a sheaf of oats. ‘I woke early and got into the hide to wait. After a few hours, the garden was full of birds. At one point I counted 32 yellowhammers feeding on the ground.’ After another couple of hours, more snow fell and the yellowhammers began jumping up and feeding on the sheaf. ‘Every so often I would see a fight between two males over ownership of the oats,’ says Fergus, ‘but the spats were incredibly fast.’ This, however, was the event he decided to concentrate on. Two days later, Fergus got his shot, capturing both the clash and the composition he’d planned.

Nikon D300 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 lens at 220mm; 1/1000 sec at f5.6; ISO 500.

Caution Urged Over Cloud Seeding Process

The Photograph That Brought the Battlefield Home

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:09:15 +0000

“Federal Dead on the Field of Battle of First Day, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania” Mathew Brady, 1863

As one of the world’s first war photographers, Mathew Brady didn’t start out having as action-packed a career as you might think. A successful daguerreotypist and a distinguished gentleman, Brady was known for his portraits of notable people such as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. In other words, he was hardly a photojournalist in the trenches.

In fact, Brady had everything to lose by making a career move – his money, his business, and quite possibly his life. Nevertheless, he decided to risk it all and follow the Union Army into battle with his camera, saying, “A spirit in my feet said, ‘Go!’” And go he did – at least until he got a good look at the pointy end of a Confederate bayonet.

After narrowly escaping capture at the first Battle of Bull Run, Brady’s chatty feet quieted down a bit, and he began sending assistants in his place. In the span of only a few years, Brady and his team shot more than 7,000 photographs – an astounding number when you consider that developing a single plate required a horse-drawn-wagon-full of cumbersome equipment and noxious chemicals. Not exactly what you’d call “point-and-shoot.”

Tethered as he was to his equine-powered darkroom and with film speeds being much slower then, Brady produced war photos that are understandably light on the action and heavy on the aftermath. Still, they mark the first time Americans were so immediately confronted with the grim realities of the battlefield.

“Tank Man” – Tiananmen Square 1989

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:37:43 +0000

Beijing, Tiananmen Square - 1989

June 5, 1989, following weeks of huge protests in Beijing and a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, a lone man stepped in front of a column of tanks rumbling past Tiananmen Square. The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses.

“It all started with a man in a white shirt who walked into the street and raised his right hand no higher than a New Yorker hailing a taxi,” James Barron wrote the following day in The New York Times. The picture appeared on the front page of this newspaper as well as in countless other publications around the world.

To this day, the identity and fate of the man in the picture remain unclear. A riveting documentary, “The Tank Man,” by PBS Frontline in 2006 explored his fate. Yet still no one knows for certain who he is or what exactly happened to him. The image is largely blocked on the Internet in China. Despite its iconic status and historical significance elsewhere, most young people there do not recognize the photograph.

There was not just one “tank man” photo. Four photographers captured the encounter that day from the Beijing Hotel, overlooking Changan Avenue (the Avenue of Eternal Peace), their lives forever linked by a single moment in time.

Lynching 1930

admin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:58:29 +0000

A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl; the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man’s innocence. Although this was Marion, Ind., most of the nearly 5,000 lynchings documented between Reconstruction and the late 1960s were perpetrated in the South. (Hangings, beatings and mutilations were called the sentence of “Judge Lynch.”) Some lynching photos were made into postcards designed to boost white supremacy, but the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up revolting as many as they scared. Today the images remind us that we have not come as far from barbarity as we’d like to think.

The Photograph That Ended a War But Ruined a Life

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:19:58 +0000

"Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief" --Eddie Adams, 1968

“Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world,” AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, but also went a long way toward souring Americans’ attitudes about the Vietnam War.

For all the image’s political impact, though, the situation wasn’t as black-and-white as it’s rendered. What Adams’ photograph doesn’t reveal is that the man being shot was the captain of a Vietcong “revenge squad” that had executed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day. Regardless, it instantly became an icon of the war’s savagery and made the official pulling the trigger – General Nguyen Ngoc Loan – its iconic villain.

Sadly, the photograph’s legacy would haunt Loan for the rest of his life. Following the war, he was reviled where ever he went. After an Australian VA hospital refused to treat him, he was transferred to the United States, where he was met with a massive (though unsuccessful) campaign to deport him. He eventually settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant but was forced to close it down as soon as his past caught up with him. Vandals scrawled “we know who you are” on his walls, and business dried up.

Adams felt so bad for Loan that he apologized for having taken the photo at all, admitting, “The general killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera.”