For a long time the American presidential race felt dull to much of the rest of the world. As a friend said it was A fight between two grumpy old men for the leader of the free world.
Joe Biden’s exit from the race was a political bombshell, something almost unthinkable, but coming as it did as a statement on Twitter, it will not give the 2024 campaign its iconic image.
That already happened when the assassin’s bullet missed Donald Trump thanks to AP photographer Evan Vucci’s photograph moments after the assassination attempt.
Trump’s face looking up while the secret service looks down. The American flag, Trump’s upraised fist, the blue sky all work together seamlessly.
That image showed up all over the world, in Indian papers as well.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Barely hours after the failed assassination attempt on U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the image of the former president, bloodied but defiant, was on t-shirts. And tattoos.
Republican delegates at the party’s convention showed their support by bandaging their ears in solidarity.
Vucci said he was just doing his job
EV1: I knew that this was a moment in American history that had to be documented. I mean, it's our job as journalists to do this work.
Vucci’s instincts served him well. And Trump’s instincts, honed from years of television, served him well too. Instead of just being bundled off stage, he insisted on pumping his fist, exhorting his followers to “Fight” while they roared “USA! USA!”.
EV2: And then as he's, uh, walking down the ramp, he starts fist bumping to the crowd and waving, um, and I did notice he had blood coming down his face, as you can see in the photos.
When we think of iconic photographs we tend to gravitate towards ones that defined historic events - the little girl running naked after a napalm attack in My Lai, the well-dressed little Syrian refugee boy lying face down on a beach in Turkey, the unknown lonely protester facing off the tanks of Tiananmen Square.
Those images somehow managed to humanise tragedies that otherwise become a fog of numbers and headlines. The Trump photograph was a different kind of picture. It didn’t humanise a great tragedy and catapult an ordinary person centre-stage. Instead it might well imbue a controversial human being with some superhuman lustre.
Perhaps it should rather be compared to other images of its ilk - Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of blood on a concrete floor while a shell-shocked busboy holds his hand, civil rights leaders standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis all pointing in the direction of the assassin while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies dying at their feet, serious little John F. Kennedy Jr saluting his father’s casket.
The key difference here is those were all successful assassination attempts which made the pictures poignant. This one is triumphant. Trump survived the assassination which adds to the myth of indestructibility he wants to project.
New York Post emphasised that with a headline that described Trump as “bloodied but unbowed.”
The other difference between this image and the pictures of Kennedy and King is we live in an age oversaturated with images. Everything exists on video. Smartphones are capturing every moment of every public event whether it’s a political rally or the big fat Indian wedding. At the time of some of these other iconic photographs that was not true. Joseph Lou was in fact the only photographer around when Dr. King was shot.
Now everyone is a photographer. My phone constantly pops up Instagram advertisements telling me to shell out money for a course that will turn me into an ace phone photographer. “The great thing about photography is that it’s an easily learnable skill,” it promises.
But Vucci’s photograph demonstrates that it’s not exactly “easily learnable” either from an online photo academy. He didn’t just get the photograph by luck. He knew what was going on because of years of experience.
EV3: It was a normal rally. I’ve done it hundreds of times. And, uh, over my left shoulder, I heard several, several pops, and I knew immediately it was gunfire.
He knew where to position himself. He knew the cloudless blue sky and the flag had to be part of the composition. He was both quick and patient.
And he proved that in this frenzied world of moving images, a still image still matters. The shooter missed but the photographer’s shot was heard around the world.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW