The whole Pepsi commercial thing reminded me that people always mis-remember the famous flower in the gun barrel photo as being a young woman. It wasn’t. The photo, taken by Bernie Boston, is of George Edgerly Harris III better known by his stage name Hibiscus. He was a member of the San Francisco based radical gay liberation theater troupe the Cockettes. He died of AIDS in 1982 at the time AIDS was still referred to by the name GRID which stood for Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. The photo was taken at a protest at the Pentagon.
I had no idea who he was, thank you.
This is one example of the Mandela Effect phenomena, where an iconic moment is reenacted with a hippy woman so many times that people think that’s the story and thus another gay man is written out of history. Thanks for the photo.
I had no idea. Wow.
This photo was taken by Bernie Boston, a black/native man who willingly stood up to a chapter of the KKK and earned their respect among other things
I get the subject is important, but please dont erase Bernie. I knew him personally and he deserves to be remembered and by only remembering the subject, a white man, you erase a black man.
@vaspider could you reblog this version too, please? I am deeply upset by Bernie’s erasure from his own work.
Reblogging for credit to the photographer, and so I can look up his work on desktop later.
*facepalm*
People remember a woman in the photo because there WAS a woman, in ANOTHER
(and also iconic)
“Which one people remember” depends on which people we’re talking about, exactly. In the history of photography, they are both considered LEGENDARY. For a broader audience, Riboud’s photograph with the woman (her name was
Jan Rose Kasmir,
and she was 17 years old at the time) is generally more known, for the following mundane and boring reasons:
Visually, it’s a lot more striking and memorable. It’s got a narrow depth of field, intense bokeh and soft focus. The composition juxtaposes very clearly the two sides of the conflict, each covering a third of the image, with another third in the middle as “no man’s land”. You know the Rule of Thirds, yes? It’s just more pleasing to the eye. Put all that together, and it doesn’t just record what happened, it paints a picture. If it weren’t 100% real and candid, you’d accuse Riboud of being too fucking obvious and heavy-handed with the symbolism. But it was 100% real.
Riboud was a prominent member of Magnum Photos, an agency which at the time had SUPERB talent, was very well (and internationally) connected, and therefore got a lot of (absolutely deserved) press.
Personally, I prefer Boston’s photo, exactly because it’s more raw and less… symbolic. But that’s subjective, and among other things it depends on our exposure and experience. If you’d asked me when I was a teenager, I’d probably fawn over Riboud’s take.
tl, dr; There’s no conspiracy here, and no Mandela Effect. There are just two different photos.
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