Images that haunt me all the time!

My professor of technology class posed an intriguing question and asked us to write our thoughts about images that stayed with us. There similar questions such as the “best 100 movies” or the “most influential philosopher of the millennium” on the BBC Web site some time ago, etc. Then there are pictures depicting the beauty such as Marlene Dietrich in the movie Casablanca. I have never thought of the pictures capturing my mind. Yet I did think about pictures that have had an interesting background or historical importance. For example, one of them is that Stalin is with Lenin during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Trotsky is missing on picture because Stalin had it removed to indoctrinate next generations in the Soviet Union without the memory of Trotsky. I think about these pictures in the context so that I relate them to an event or a remarkable moment.
There are images or pictures that depict beautiful moments and scenes. There are thousands of them. These moments captures by photographers have a novelty of a few second. After a few seconds, these moments are replaced by some other beautiful moments. I occasionally get pictures of beauty in attached files sent to me. The recent one was about Dubai and its booming tourism industry. For example, ski slope in a shopping mall or the $10,000 hotel suite per night. These are amazing pictures; nonetheless, they don’t stick to our minds because they are replaced second later by the pictures of the National Geographic.

What about the grim pictures then? I would like present some these grim and gruesome pictures that have haunted me all the time. They are in memory because they show the ugly side of our fellow human. It is about killing or destruction that is captured in a moment of seconds. The first picture is from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The picture is from Robert Capa and called “Moment of Death.” It is quite remarkable how R. Capa took such a picture in the death field in a few second; it is mind boggling. The photographer must have gone through a scary moment to take someone’s falling when he got shot. The victim’s position makes one think what he thought about at the moment when he was falling. His gun looks like is also being swirled away like him when he was gunned down as though he were saying to gun “To hell with you!”

(Picture taken by Robert Cappa)

The other picture that I think about all the time is from the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. On March 16 of that year Iraqi Air Force dropped chemical bombs on the town, killing thousands of people in seconds. On this picture, a father has hugged his child lying on the ground. The fatherly love could not protect that child. No matter what the father did, his effort to save his child from poison gas was in vain. He might have had protected his child from other dangers but not from air born poison agents. One would think that the father could have lived if he had escaped without his infant child. No…he tries to save the baby but stays and dies with him or her.

(Halabja: March 1988)