Flower Power Photographs

Boston, Bernie. Flower Power. 21 October 1967. Gelatin Silver Print. Washington D.C.

     “Flower power” illustrates the movement that shook the sixties with young political activists protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Advocating for peace, love, and passive resistance, people joined the movement to express their public opinion of anti-war, anti-military industrial complex, and anti-violence. On October 21, 1967, people demonstrated around the Pentagon in Washington DC to protest the Vietnam War and were faced with opposition from the American National Guard. The following photographs taken at this event by Bernie Boston, Marc Riboud, and Staff Sergeant Albert Simpson reinforce the ideals of the Flower Power movement through their documentation, composition, symbolism, and contextual relevance, conveying an iconic status that transcends generations.

     An iconic photograph is “a ‘defining image’ or icon that will become the primary marker of that event in public memory [and] display considerable artistic value, [be] reproduced for mass distribution in various media, elicit strong emotional responses from people who view them; and provide contexts through which the events being depicted are viewed by society in general.”[1] Iconic photographs are images captured in the philosophy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” as he claims, “photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”[2] When an image becomes iconic, it is the representative document of that moment in time.

     A photograph is a document that provides evidentiary information. An iconic photograph is the “primary marker” of such documentation.¹ Bernie Boston, a photojournalist for the Washington Star, captured the moment a young man placed carnations in a soldier’s gun barrel at the march on Washington. The photograph became known as “Flower Power,” an image that would be referred to as quintessential, a signature image of this photographer’s work, a representation of the decade, and the primary visual document of the Flower Power movement. Initially, the photograph did not receive instant acclaim, as “Boston's editors apparently didn't think much of the photo, running it on Page A12 the next day.”[3] However, the popularity of the image grew over time. The “Flower Power” photograph “sums up that period, how a lot of people feel about the '60s,” making it an iconic document of collective memory.[4]

Riboud, Marc. La fille a la Fleur. 21 October 1967. Gelatin Silver Print. Washington D.C.

Riboud, Marc. G.B. ENGLAND. London. Anti-war protest through the streets. Jan Rose Kasmir... 15 February 2003. Photograph. London.

Riboud, Marc. October 21, 1967 Contact Sheet. 1967. Washington DC.

     Beyond the decisive moment and the documentation it provides, a photograph can also offer artistic value through composition. The making of a photograph, partly due to its composition, displays artistic value, which can considerably impact a viewer’s response. Magnum Photographer Marc Riboud captured an iconic image, “La Jeune Fille a la Fleur,” depicting similar documentation to Boston’s “Flower Power” photograph at the anti-war protest on October 21, 1967. "La Jeune Fille a la Fleur," translating from French to English as “The Young Flower Girl,” is an iconic photograph of a young activist, Jan Rose Kasmir, holding a flower in front of a soldier's bayonet. Guarding the Pentagon, 2,500 soldiers stood against a crowd of 100,000 people gathered to protest, but Kasmir boldly motioned a sign of peace. The photograph documents this moment successfully through the lens of the photographer. Organized evenly, Riboud assembles the photographic frame on the collective row of uniformed soldiers at the left and Kasmir as a lone subject at the right, “a gauzy juxtaposition of armed forces and flower child innocence,” ultimately portraying the concept of “war versus peace.”[5] Although these soldiers were rightfully protecting a government building, the close proximity of the photographer to the subjects unveils a different perspective suggesting a broader conception. Prior to the selection of the iconic photograph, the contact sheet offers information regarding the photographic judgment, as Riboud inched closer within six frames to capture what became an icon. Following the iconography of the photograph, Jan Rose Kasmir was deemed a flower child, an icon of anti-war, and was re-photographed by Riboud during a protest of the Iraq war in 2003 holding a poster-sized copy of the original photograph.[5] The composition of these iconic photographs visually depicts the divide between soldiers and activists while signifying an active motion with an exemplary symbol: the flower.

Simpson, S.Sgt. Albert R. A female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. October, 1967. Color Photograph of Signal Corps Activity, 1944-1981. Arlington, Virginia.
National Archives.

     Within a photograph, the viewer interprets messages and meanings. An iconic photograph will depict a literal meaning but often relates a greater symbolic message recognized by a collective opinion. Sergeant Albert Simpson also took an iconic photograph entitled, “Photograph of a Female Demonstrator Offering a Flower to a Military Officer, 10/21/67” This image, like the previous photographs, documents the Vietnam war era with specific intent to symbolize a peace movement. It is the act of offering of the flower and the symbol of the flower itself that prompts the iconography of the photographs. “The effectiveness of the flower in the protest of war relies on its morphology: a fragile body with human-like head. It is easily broken, and in addition it is soft and yielding, qualities that place it in binary opposition to war machinery.”[6] The flower symbolizes peace, contrary to a gun, an object representing power, violence, war, and death. It was not the first, the last, or the largest protest of the war, but the rally prompted violent opposition from governmental forces. The Flower Power movement benefitted from the photographic evidence displaying symbolic meaning in a larger cultural context.

     The aforementioned iconic photographs are contextualized representations of the Flower Power movement in regards to cultural opinion. These artifacts, as with iconic images, are promoted with specific intention and propaganda efforts. Especially with war related material, certain political groups desire to convey ideas utilizing images as a quick and effective resource, such as the World War I and II industrial posters, front cover photographs on newspapers, and current event images found on the web. These iconic photographs have deliberately defined a movement and will forever stand as representations of that moment in time. As Susan Sontag explains, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”[7] The Flower Power photographs “testify to time’s relentless melt,” because of their iconic status, which continues to the present day in new cultural contexts.

Keystone USA-Zuma. A Tunisian soldier carries a gun decorated with a flower during a protest in Tunisia. 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/21/tunisia-mourning-protest-victims

A protester giving flowers to the anti-riot policemen in Kiev, Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. 2004. http://www.hscentre.org/policy-unit/ukraine-regional-crisis-global-impact/

Mizdan, Hadi. "An Iraqi man places flowers in the barrel of a soldier's gun moments before a suicide attack on a celebration marking Army Day in the Karradah neighborhood of central Baghdad, on January 6, 2008." http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/03/iraq-wars-10th-anniversary-occupation-and-insurgency/100476/

     Iconic photographs are the esteemed photographs representing a collective memory. When one thinks of, speaks of, or searches for images of the “Flower Power” movement, the photographs by Boston, Riboud, and Sergeant Simpson appear. The Flower Power photographs are pinnacle images documenting the symbolic dichotomy between war and peace utilizing the flower as a motif. It is evident that a picture can represent more than 1,000 words as it can document a moment in time, shape the public opinion, and become an iconic symbol of a larger cultural meaning.

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[1] Lindquist, D. H. (2012). The images of our time: using iconic photographs in developing a modern American history course. The Social Studies, (5), 192.

[2] Bresson, H., & Matisse, H. (1952). The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon and Schuster. Éditions Verve of Paris.

[3] Isserman, M. (2007). The Flower in the Gun Barrel. Chronicle Of Higher Education, 54(8), B14-B15.

[4] Stewart, J. (2008, January 24). Photographer chronicled a tumultuous era. Retrieved December 7, 2015, from http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/24/local/me-boston24

[5] Curry, A. (2004). Flower child: a Vietnam War protester recalls a seminal '60s image, part of a new book celebrating French photographer Marc Riboud's 50-year career. Smithsonian, (1).

[6] Elias, A. (2008). War and the visual language of flowers: an antipodean perspective.War, Literature & The Arts, (1-2), 234.

[7] Sontag, Susan. (1997) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.