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Tales of photo propaganda: Manipulating emotions and perceptions with visual media



The car used in the Loyalist bombing that detonated in Dublin had been hijacked at Agnes Street, just off Crumlin Road in North Belfast. One day in 1973, photographer Colman Doyle passed by Agnes Street on his way from the Ardoyne towards the city centre: "I heard someone firing shots and then I saw this woman. She was standing behind a corner, still holding that gun but I only managed to take the photo after she had fired."




Tales of photo propaganda




In a conversation with the author for RTÉ Brainstorm, Doyle insists that he does not remember the street where the photo was taken, nor the exact date, but claims that "it was not staged". The photo shows a long-haired woman in a polka dot dress carrying an assault rifle.


Doyle, who has been described by art journalist Liam Flynn as "the doyen of photo journalists in Ireland", worked for The Irish Press. He spent one decade of his career in Northern Ireland, capturing, among other photos, the British paratroopers firing at unarmed protesters in Derry on Bloody Sunday.


Doyle asserts that the photo remained in the Irish Press archives. When the paper discontinued on May 25th 1995, the main building remained open for a month and "people were going in and out". He believes that someone must have taken control of the negatives and passed them on. However, the photo had already circulated for two decades in various forms. Among those is a hand-made Republican children's book, A Republican ABC, now held in the Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast.


The image became prominent in Provisional Republican propaganda. According to historian John O'Neill, the author of Belfast Battalion: A History of the Belfast IRA, "there are a set of those images that include the same female figures in various scenarios", suggesting that it was a propaganda shot.


Hence, these photos served to attract women into the Provisional IRA by portraying them as equal fighters to men, a role they eventually were never allowed to fulfil. Cumann na mBan reacted with their own propaganda campaign. The former General Adjutant of the organisations recounts how they produced yellow posters with the wording: "Cumann na mBan: Join the women's army."


Whatever the origins, the photo showing a woman in a green dress with white polka dots became one of the most iconic propaganda shots of the Troubles and has appeared in newspapers and on calendars, mugs and t-shirts. It captures a moment when women were on the crossroads within the Provisionals. While they had been accepted as full members of the IRA at an Army Council meeting in September 1970, it was still a long way to go until they reached leadership positions.


In recent months, the image received renewed interest on Reddit, Facebook and Snopes. In July 2006, the Evening Herald linked the photo to the abduction of mother-of-ten Jean McConville. Doyle donated the photo and other images to the National Library of Ireland.


The true story will not be told until the woman in the photo comes forward, which she is unwilling to do, according to a friend of the family who spoke to the author. Now in her 70s, the woman lives in Belfast and attended the unveiling of the mural that depicts the photo taken by Doyle. "I would like to meet her once again", he says.


But it wasn't until Mathew Brady, known as the father of photojournalism, and his employee, Andrew Gardner, began shooting pictures of dead American soldiers on Civil War battlefields that the medium transformed the way people saw war.


Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community. In creating propaganda, people will focus on a specific set of facts that will elicit an emotional reaction in a population. If angered, humans will often overlook rational information. In the history of photography, thousands of famous images have been taken. Governments have popularized many of these pictures as a form of propaganda. Photographs give the human brain an opportunity to interpret a specific environment. This article is going to examine ten famous photographs and their remarkable stories.


According to four U.S. government investigations, Lee Harvey Oswald is the sniper who killed John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. On March 31, 1963, Marina Oswald captured a collection of photographs showing Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard with a rifle in hand. Along with the gun, the photographs show Oswald holding two Marxist newspapers, The Militant and The Worker. He is wearing a .38 caliber revolver on his waist. In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) determined that the rifle in the picture was the same used to shoot Kennedy. The revolver was also determined to be the weapon used to kill Officer J. D. Tippit following the assassination. The collection of photos is widely recognized as some of the most significant evidence against Oswald.


The Invasion of Normandy began on June 6, 1944 (D-Day). It was the largest amphibious operation in history. Allied soldiers faced intense fire as they attempted to reach the shoreline and gain cover. Robert Capa is a famous Hungarian combat photographer. To escape Nazi control, Capa moved to New York during the Second World War and became a photographer for the Allies. He accompanied American troops during the Invasion of Normandy and was able to capture 106 action photographs. Capa sent his film to Life magazine in order to have it developed. After an error occurred, Life magazine destroyed the film and only 11 pictures were salvageable.


On May 25, 1954 Robert Capa was traveling with a French regiment in Vietnam when he left his jeep to take some photographs. While walking up the road he stepped on a land-mine and lost his leg. Capa was quickly rushed to a field hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival due to massive trauma and loss of blood. He died with his camera in hand.


I can think of at least four pictures that definitely should be on this list somewhere. One is the picture of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. I know this photo was staged, but it still should be on this list somewhere. Another is the picture of the naked little girl running down the streets of Vietnam after a Napalm attack. A third is a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon. Finally there should be a picture of the hijacked plane striking the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. These pictures should be on this list somewhere.


A fair criticism and unfortunately the name of the site was a limiting factor I have chosen to ignore. When writers such as the supremely talented Bryan Johnson, write lists they usually want to stay away from the lists that have been written before or lists that have the same photos or videos and such. So the authors like to compile lists that have items on it that are famous or important, but will be different from what you have seen before.


The annual World Press Photo Contest recognizes and celebrates the best and most important photojournalism and documentary photography from around the world. To offer a more global and better geographic balance of perspectives, we launched a new regional strategy in 2022, changing the set-up of the annual contest and the judging.


Both the 1770 and 1850s depictions of the Boston Massacre and Crispus Attucks were used as propaganda to sway the public towards a particular conclusion, first towards the side of independence from Britain and then later towards abolishing slavery. Neither depiction is a particularly faithful account, although both elicit strong reaction. Do the different depictions of the Boston Massacre change how you view the event?


In 1935, Hessy's mother and aunt took six-month-old Hessy to be photographed in a professional studio by Hans Ballin, a well-known German photographer in Berlin. Seven months later the Levinson family housekeeper told Polin that she saw Hessy's picture on the cover of a popular Nazi family magazine "Sonne ins Haus" (Sunshine in the House). The photograph had been selected in a contest from an assortment of a hundred pictures of babies in Germany by ten well-known German photographers. The contest had been arranged by the Nazi propaganda department headed by Joseph Goebbels in which entries for the winning picture would depict the ideal beautiful German Aryan baby that would appear on the cover of the magazine.


It turned out that the photographer, unbeknownst to the Levinson family, along with his submission of 10 other pictures, had thrown in Hessy's baby photo as well which ended up winning the contest. The irony of the fact that a Jewish baby had won a Nazi propaganda contest designed to showcase the ideal Aryan child set up by the office of Goebbels was not lost on Hessy's mother who later said: "I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of the joke." Hessy's photo was also later redistributed on postcards throughout Germany and even made it as far as present day Lithuania.


While her immediate family survived the Shoah, most of her family members in Latvia were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Upon being asked how she felt about being a Jewish poster child in a Nazi propaganda magazine she said: "I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge."


Since the beginning of this program in 2011, some 120,000 items have been brought to Yad Vashem, including photos, documents and artifacts. People who want to donate material should email collect@yadvashem.org.il or call 02 644 3888.


The image of Uncle Sam is based on a combination of two earlier American characters: Yankee Doodle and Brother Jonathan. Yankee Doodle was a derogatory term the British used for colonial Americans during the Revolutionary War. Brother Jonathan was a heroic character often featured in American folk tales and cartoons.


The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. 2ff7e9595c


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