Top Five Friday: Five Photographs
Five photographs that may just live on forever…
Execution of a Viet Cong, 1968 - Photograph by Eddie Adams. The image shows Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief executing a prisoner who was said to be a Viet Cong captain.
Elizabeth Eckford, 1957 - Photograph by Will Counts. On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford and eight other African American students tried to enter Little Rock Central High School, which didn’t allow black students. They were stopped by the Arkansas National Guard. They tried again without success on September 23rd. September 24, President Eisenhower sent U.S. Army troops to accompany the Little Rock Nine to school for protection.
Phan Thi Kim Ph??c, 1972 - Photograph by Nick Ut. Kim Ph??c, center left, running down a road near Trang Bang after a napalm attack. A South Vietnamese VNAF pilot mistook the fleeing group as a threat and diverted to attack it. Along with other villagers two of Kim Phuc’s cousins were killed.
Kent State Shootings, 1970 - Photograph by John Filo. Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway and Vietnam War protester, screaming with anguish and kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, shot through the mouth by an unknown Ohio National Guardsman during a protest.
Thich Quang Duc, 1963 - Photograph by Malcolm W. Browne. Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963. Thich Quang Duc was protesting the persecution of Buddhism by South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem administration.
Tags: Top Five Friday
November 4th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Very moving, This shows just how wrong, for lack of a much better required word, is.
I feel that the very last image, of Thich Quang Duc, is the most profound in that he did what he did to himself, but he did it for other people. This image could be compared to thousands of the words most disgusting photographs, but the others would generate feelings of anger and revenge, this one, simply generates feelings of emotion and sadness.
November 4th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I would agree. As appalling and shocking as the image is, it is by far the most powerful and the most moving of all after the story behind it is revealed.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:25 am
.Thich Quang Duc. He is giving no protest to his painful protest.